We live in time

We’ve long been expecting a really good romantic comedy with a few drops of tears. That could be it. Screenwriter Nick Payne and director John Crowley give us a non-smooth love story in a non-linear form in which Florence Pugh’s chef Almut and Andrew Garfield’s breakfast cereal manager Tobias meet cute when Almut runs over Tobias in her car on the day of his divorce.
January 1st

Nosferatu

It’s the great cinephile passion project remake – most recently made by Werner Herzog with Klaus Kinski in the title role. Now Robert Eggers has revived FW Murnau’s 1922 silent horror classic as a major cinematic event. This time it’s Bill Skarsgård as the creepy, emulsion-white Count Orlok – the vampire (based on Dracula) who preys on a delicate Englishwoman, played by Lily-Rose Depp.
January 1st

Nickel Boys

This astonishingly moving and sometimes scary film, adapted from Colson Whitehead’s novel, is about two black American boys sent to a racist and abusive segregated reform school (and based on a real institution) during the Jim Crow ’60s. The intense and immersive film is shot from a first-person perspective and its tragedy is at odds with these ecstatic images.
January 3rd

A real pain

Follow-up fans looking for a new fix for Kieran Culkin will want to see this smart, funny film in which he stars alongside writer-director Jesse Eisenberg. They play Benji and David, two American Jewish men who take a trip to Poland, their ancestral homeland, and visit the dark sites of the Holocaust – while their relationship comes under increasing strain.
January 8th

Baby girl

Nicole Kidman has form when it comes to portraying transgressive age gap relationships. Here she plays a high-profile CEO who has an exciting affair with a much younger male intern, played by Harris Dickinson. The drama promises to provoke progressive assumptions and challenge ideas about corporate power dynamics and sexual politics.

January 10th

Mary

Screenwriter Steven Knight and director Pablo Larraín have put together this intense biopic about the final years of the original diva Maria Callas, played by Angelina Jolie. We begin with her haughty and reclusive retired life in Paris, a ghostly figure in dark glasses, before flashing back to a childhood in Nazi-occupied Athens and her relationship with Aristotle Onassis
January 10th

A complete unknown

A biopic about Bob Dylan won’t necessarily please all purists, vinyl connoisseurs and super fans – and certainly not the great Nobel Prize winner himself. But Timothée Chalamet brings such incredible chutzpah, liveliness, endurance and fun to this role – he sings all the tracks himself – and there’s great stuff from Edward Norton as Pete Seeger.
January 17th

Vermiglio

A beautiful Italian film in the style of Ermanno Olmi or the Taviani brothers, set in a remote wartime village – rich, compassionate, detailed. In the Alpine community of Vermiglio, a teacher must decide how to react when his eldest daughter falls in love with an army deserter whom the villagers are protecting. A beautiful film.
January 17th

Emmanuelle

This is a risky reboot of a film brand, and Audrey Diwan is the impressive director who has taken on the task, co-writing the script with Rebecca Zlotowski. It’s a remake of the once-controversial ’70s softcore erotic classic Emmanuelle, reinvented for a sex-positive age. Noémie Merlant plays the title character, who goes on an erotic journey of discovery in Hong Kong.
January 17th

Here

Richard McGuire’s groundbreaking graphic novel Here was adapted by Robert Zemeckis and co-author Eric Roth. We see the family history of Richard and Margaret (played by Tom Hanks and Robin Wright) in a non-linear style, as the film covers everything that happened in the part of America where they live – starting with the dinosaurs.
January 17th

The brutalist

Brady Corbet’s stunning new film is a brilliant, mysterious epic with a bit of Orson Welles, Paul Thomas Anderson and Ayn Rand. An architect and Hungarian Holocaust survivor, played by Adrien Brody, arrives in the United States penniless after the war and is taken under the wing by an impulsive plutocrat, played by Guy Pearce, who asks him to build a huge modernist in honor of his late mother to design buildings.
January 24th

Present

Remarkable and restless film creator Steven Soderbergh returns with a lo-fi psycho-supernatural thriller shot in a single location: a haunted house where we see things from the ghost’s point of view. A family moves into a recently renovated house (Chris Sullivan and Lucy Liu play mom and dad) and we look at their problems from this eerie perspective.
January 24th

Hard truths

Mike Leigh gives us an uncompromising late-career classic: a fierce study of depression by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who last worked with Leigh in 1996’s Secrets and Lies. She plays Pansy, a middle-aged woman whose melancholy manifests itself in a nonstop aria of rage – an uncompromising torrent of rage against everyone and everything and everyone. It’s a fascinating achievement.
January 31st

The seed of the holy fig

Fugitive Iranian director and pro-democracy activist Mohammad Rasoulof (who is wanted by police in his home country) was unlucky not to win a major prize at Cannes for this film – a drama about a lost gun that reflects reality of reality connects surreal. It’s about the suffering of its dissident citizens in a country where women can face legal beatings and harassment for not wearing hijab in public.
February 7th

Bridget Jones: Crazy about the boy

She’s back. Bridge returns for a fourth film in the so-called “Bridget Jones series,” which also follows on from the current film craze for toyboy shenanigans. Renée Zellweger is once again Bridget, whose circumstances change and she has a new love: a perky young man played by Leo “One Day” Woodall. Excitingly, Hugh Grant returns in the role of super cad Daniel Cleaver.
February 13th

When falling

This outstanding debut film from Scottish-based Portuguese filmmaker Laura Carreira takes a close look at something that hasn’t really been adequately addressed in any art form: the human cost of the online shopping revolution. Joana Santos gives a great performance as a woman working in a massive logistics center in Scotland, a job that undermines her sanity and humanity.
March 7th

Julie is silent

Debut film director Leonardo Van Dijl caused a stir at Cannes with this deeply disturbing drama about abuse. Tessa Van den Broeck plays Julie, a young tennis player who is on her way to becoming a star. But she and all her contemporaries are stunned by the news that their coach is being investigated for something unknown and that a former student has taken her own life. Should Julie remain silent?
March 7th

Sister Midnight

Bollywood star Radhika Apte is turning heads with her deadpan comic performance in Karan Kandhari’s much-admired film. She plays Uma, a young woman from the provinces who comes to Mumbai to get married but finds that her husband is a drunken hopeless and their home is a chaotic mess.
March 14th

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

Can it really be true that this is the final Mission: Impossible film? Well, the pressure will be on to go out with a real bang, considering that Tom Cruise as IMF agent Ethan Hunt has consistently delivered action thrills of the highest order with his own astonishing stunts – all while being an Anglophile supporter of The British film industry.
May 21st

The Battle of the Baktan Cross