Joseph Kosinski swaps jets for race cars in F1’s thrilling sports drama, stylishly redressing familiar tropes with sleek technical mastery, and turning its predictable rivalry into an electrifying, finely choreographed dance of collaboration.
Amid The Phoenician Scheme’s epic entanglements of assassins, terrorists, and bureaucrats, it is within a dysfunctional family reunion where Wes Anderson unravels an unlikely spiritual redemption, mending broken bonds through one wealthy industrialist’s mission to execute his most ambitious project yet.
What Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning lacks in deftness it makes up for in raw impact, unleashing a heart-pounding conclusion to the nuclear threat posed by a rogue AI parasite, and standing as an overstuffed, operatic monument to what practical filmmaking can still achieve when pushed to its edge.
In Philip Barantini’s refusal to cut away from his camera’s long, uncomfortable takes, Adolescence pushes a quiet form of insistence, bearing witness to the raw, fragmented, and unresolved mess left in the wake of one teenager’s horrifying crime.
The face of human evil is insidiously disguised in The Girl with the Needle, though Magnus van Horn’s monochrome cinematography offers a disturbing glimpse behind its warm, maternal mask, adapting a chilling piece of Danish history which once shook the post-war nation to its core.
When a man serving on a jury recognises his own unexpected culpability in Juror #2, moral turmoil begins to stir his conscience, offering a rich subject for Clint Eastwood’s study of stifled, agonising guilt.
Music is a supernatural force that can pierce the veil between life and death in Sinners, and it is through its bluesy harmonies that Ryan Coogler resonates a timeless riff between warring cultural ideals, setting one 1930s African American juke joint against an insidious band of vampires.
Through the colourful, layered motifs that Luca Guadagnino weaves through the life of American expat William Lee, Queer delivers an unflinching fever dream that denies easy answers to his internal contradictions, constantly unravelling his capacity for love by his fear of being seen.
There is a strange comfort in the grieving process that We Live in Time’s non-linear narrative prematurely initiates, looming the threat of terminal illness over a pair of devoted lovers, while savouring every celebration, argument, and tender reconciliation which ever defined their relationship.
Through Sing Sing prison’s rehabilitative theatre program, Divine G and his fellow inmates find realer versions of themselves beyond guilt and anger, as Greg Kwedar’s casting of the real men that this story is based on uncovers a raw, vulnerable authenticity.
