Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos)
Yorgos Lanthimos’s absurd, psychedelic riff on the Frankenstein story features Emma Stone playing a mutant being, assembled from the body of a woman who recently threw herself into a river and the brain of her own unborn baby. Stone’s terrific, fearless performance as Bella sees the character progress from an overgrown toddler into a self-confident, witty woman with an endless appetite for oysters, champagne, pastéis de nata and “furious jumping”. Grotesque, exhilarating, and the director’s best film yet.
All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh)
A deeply sad story of love, family and identity, starring Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal. This is the fifth feature from Andrew Haigh, who shows, our critic writes, “a kind of genius for English humdrum understatement about the most wrenching matters” in this, the film of his life. It’s certainly the only film this year to set one of its most heartbreaking sequences in Croydon’s Whitgift shopping centre.
The Taste of Things (Tran Anh Hung)
This French film about a great tastemaker and his chef wife was roundly dismissed in its native country as food porn blended with rancid conservatism: like the rare songbirds gobbled up in the film as an elite (now illegal) culinary delicacy, it was derided as an outdated heritage product for those who fetishise a long-dead version of France. Though it is undeniably retrograde and slow, our critic celebrated it as “just lovely”.
The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer)
To call Jonathan Glazer’s unflinching examination of the lives of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family a disturbing watch is to understate its existential brutality. With hidden cameras and minimal plot, Glazer documents the family’s semi-utopian existence beyond the camp wall, only allowing the horror of what is happening on the other side to intrude through sound and dreamlike night-vision sequences. By forcing the audience to adopt the perspective of the perpetrators – and confront ordinary complicity – this is a Holocaust film like no other.
Civil War (Alex Garland)
Alex Garland’s fourth film imagines a dystopian future in which the USA has become ravaged by internal conflict. A tyrannical president fraudulently extends his power, boasting of his greatness and his ability to always “win”. The White House is assaulted. So far, so familiar. Our reviewer, though, writes that the film is “not quite the premonition of a Trumpian apocalypse that it is advertised to be… but it is Garland’s sharpest, most visionary rendering yet of the world gone wrong.”
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About Dry Grasses (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
This Turkish film is over three hours long, set in one of “the bleakest places ever”, full of protracted, naturalistic scenes so slow they are sometimes boring, and is “deeply challenging to the viewer’s own sense of self and purpose”. Our critic declared it a “masterpiece”. Say it’s your film of the year and everyone will think you’re better than them.
The Substance (Coralie Fargeat)
This satire of the beauty industry, featuring Demi Moore as an ageing actress who goes to extreme lengths to maintain her youth and relevancy, is not subtle or subversive. It’s so grotesque that at times it aspires to the camp. But it is extremely entertaining. The final, gory fight sequence sent our reviewer into hysterics.
The Apprentice (Ali Abbasi)
Donald Trump called this biopic of his early years in Manhattan as “a cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job, put out… to try and hurt the greatest political movement in the history of our country”. Which surely means the filmmakers and actor Sebastian Stan got something right.
Anora (Sean Baker)
Both darker and zanier than your stereotypical Pretty Woman narrative, this story of sex worker meets oligarch’s heir involves lap dances, car chases and a Vegas wedding, and is almost certainly the first feature-length film to open with a club remix of a Take That song. Director Sean Baker cements his status as a depicter of chaotic, funny and deeply human stories from the margins of society.
Conclave (Edward Berger)
Mean Girls in cassocks. This adaptation of Robert Harris’s religious thriller, starring Ralph Fiennes, follows sequestered cardinals as they elect the new Pope. There’s bitchiness, backstabbing, vaping and the most calculated act of photocopying since Regina George’s “Burn Book”. What larks.
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