“Soft and frayed as a hand-me-down jumper, comfortingly bleary as a mulled-wine buzz, it’s a film by someone who’s evidently at least as much of a Christmas person as I am: attentive and attached to holiday traditions that mostly aren’t mine, or probably yours, but are snugly relatable in their longstanding specificity.”

“It’s a hard, heady tale, though Baker’s storytelling is so swift and lithe, his ear for comedy within tragedy so bright and wicked, that the film never feels like a parable or a social tract.”

“The best anthology films exceed the sum of their parts, fusing their separate tales into a larger mood, or vision, or line of inquiry; you feel immersed in one multifaceted imagination, not buffeted between disparate ones. Kinds of Kindness qualifies as such.”

“There’s an earthy quality to Rohrwacher’s filmmaking here, which is entirely appropriate, since this loose, deliciously textured movie, set near Rome in the 1980s, is at least partly about grave-robbing.”

“Most films that go this hard this fast run out of gas; this one somehow keeps finding a new maximum volume, a new shot of energy, from scene to scene, stretching the bounds of gravity and reality if that’s what it takes.”

“Who would do such a thing, we think, and why? And yet, via Catherine Breillat’s muted yet sensually heightened direction, and Lea Drucker’s immaculately controlled yet internally free-falling performance, we buy it.”

“A story of gentrification, though not one burdened with clumpy, topical messaging. Frequently, Hamaguchi reverts to silence to make his point, or to let us arrive at one for ourselves. ”

“A riotous, escalatingly dark French comic thriller that got too little attention at the 2022 Venice festival, it’s arch, knottily plotted and gilt-edged with camp, but there’s bitter truth in it too.”

“Sydney Sweeney grounds the escalating fire-and-brimstone daftness of Immaculate in something like emotional credibility — just enough to keep us gripped, but never so earnestly as to spoil the bloody, blasphemous fun.”

“It’s Kore-eda’s first film in nearly 30 years that he hasn’t written, and a new voice in his work isn’t unwelcome: Yuji Sakamoto’s script is just tender enough but still impressively tough-minded, wary of the sentimentality that this director sometimes can’t resist.”

“Ten months after I saw it, images from Pham’s film (some misted, some bejewelled, all exquisite) reel through my brain when I least expect them; its characters’ stories and explorations continue to nag at me.”

“The stakes might sound low, but that’s Reichardt’s way: her films tend to be about the small moments and gestures that pave the way for greater revelations.”

“I expected The Iron Claw to go full American gothic in its horrific exploration of violent patriarchy and clotted, red-blooded masculinity — a mythos that curdles into an apparent curse. What Durkin gives us is more earnest, at times even more sentimental, than that.”

“The Zone of Interest doesn’t have to humanise the Nazis at its centre — they’re already human. It’s easier and more comforting to believe that they weren’t; faced with any easy or comforting option, Glazer’s film firmly takes the opposite one.”

“All of Us Strangers is a special kind of ghost story: one less interested in the supernatural considerations of life after death than in how the uncanny puts the everyday in focus.”

“What it does capture, with a simplicity and emotional directness that gradually made me shiver, is the individual’s sense of abandonment and desolation amid a global disaster with little room for small-scale grief and grievances.”

“A 19th-century culture shock is very much present and correct in Lanthimos’ vision for Poor Things. Emma Stone’s Bella analyses, makes decisions, has agency, imagination, desire, willpower, and, above all, perspective.”

“Coppola’s adaptation of Priscilla Presley’s marriage memoir emerges not as a standard biopic, but as a kind of Gothic fairy tale, with Priscilla as a Vegas-Victorian child bride, hunched and chilly in a pastel castle of rhinestones and deep-pile carpeting.”

“Triet’s script keeps challenging the character, piling on complications and absurdities with loose abandon, but never humiliates her in the way Hollywood tends to trip up its klutzy romcom heroines.”

“In shooting Kiefer’s imposing, landscape-like canvases of mixed organic media, Wenders and his regular cinematographer Franz Lustig aim to shrink the equivalent distance between seeing a painting in a gallery and buying a print of it in the gift shop.”