To work as both a conductor and composer is to live two separate lives, Leonard Bernstein ruminates in Maestro, and it is this duality which Bradley Cooper reverberates all through his biopic of the great musician, revealing with sweeping passion and subdued restraint the contradictions that lie at the heart of genius.
It is almost impossible not to give into the retro, festive charm of The Holdovers, as through its unlikely pairing of a troubled student and his cantankerous history teacher over the Christmas break, Alexander Payne transforms the loneliest holiday of the year into a season warmly dedicated to its most distant outcasts.
Andrew Haigh commands his magical realism with subdued wonder in All of Us Strangers, entering the dreams of a lonely queer Londoner grieving the decades-old tragedy that left him an orphan, yet still finding solace in the ghosts of childhood memories and alternate lives he might have led.
As countless heartbreaking tragedies are visited upon the Von Erich dynasty of wrestlers, Sean Durkin reveals the true nature of The Iron Claw – not as a conventional sports biopic, but a psychological drama keenly interested in destiny, chance, and the rumoured family curse that haunts its descendants.
With Nyad’s basis in the true story of one 64-year-old woman’s marathon swimming achievement, this underdog tale is a natural leap into narrative filmmaking for documentarians Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, proving that destiny is little more than a matter of persistence and patience for those pushing their bodies to exhausting physical limits.
For all Ferrari’s narrative unevenness, the god of car racing and conquest at the centre of Michael Mann’s modern mythologising makes for a compellingly thorny subject, leaving behind a trail of bodies in his blood-stained ascent to cultural immortality, while hiding his pride, shame, and sorrow behind tinted sunglasses.
The nature of celebrity is a fickle thing for the insecure, unremarkable Paul Matthews in Dream Scenario, as unpredictable as those strangers’ dreams across the world that star him as the main character, forming a darkly comic allegory for fame’s nightmarishly dangerous sting.
Born into the body of her deceased mother and setting off on a coming-of-age odyssey across the ocean, Bella Baxter’s existence is a wondrous paradox of surreal impossibilities in Poor Things, forming the centrepiece of Yorgos Lanthimos’ eccentric black comedy that draws an immense appreciation of life from its wickedly offbeat satire.
For what is essentially a prequel covering the origins of Roald Dahl’s famous candy man, the stakes are comically high in Wonka, tying Paul King’s eccentric wit, gentle slapstick, and charming sincerity into a tidy bow around a whimsical world where chocolate rules.
If The Boy and the Heron truly is Hayao Miyazaki’s last film, then it is poetic that such a grand adventure into surreal fantasy and back again should be the one to conclude his decades of animated world building, contemplating the power of fiction to mould trauma into fiery strength and maturity.
