One Battle After Another

Paul Thomas Anderson crafts his most dynamically entertaining offering since Boogie Nights with this film that boasts both visual grandeur and epic storytelling. Piercing the zeitgeist, One Battle After Another is a telling tale of the tenuous times we live in and combines sardonic humour, buoyancy and provocative urgency. An as-good-as-it-gets ensemble cast, led by a brilliant Leonardo DiCaprio, propels this kinetic cinematic adventure, with Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro rising to the occasion. The film does feel a little rough around the edges, but makes up for it with its big and bold heart, marking a stunning entry into Anderson’s already dazzling filmography. Explosive and incisive.

Marty Supreme

The energy is palpable in every frame of Josh Safdie’s first solo feature in 17 years. In Marty Supreme, Safdie bands together a vibrant gallery of ‘New York characters’, with Timothee Chalamet serving up charisma, chaos and chutzpah as an amoral table tennis player on the make. The film is a heady ride from start to finish, with the cast — Chalamet is propped up by an ace of a supporting ensemble comprising Gwyneth Paltrow, Odessa A’zion and Tyler, The Creator — delivering an exhilarating experience that feels raw, urgent and visceral and cuts a deeply dark portrait of the American Dream.

Sentimental Value

Fractured family dynamics are looked at with maturity and elegance in Danish-Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s film that brings the messiness of relationships to the fore and the blurry boundaries between art and life. In a career-best act, Stellan Skarsgard plays Gustav, an egotistical, once-celebrated filmmaker attempting a comeback in which he hopes to persuade his estranged actress daughter Nora (Renate Reinsve, a notch above the rest) to star. Gustav’s return to the lives of volatile Nora and her more grounded academically-inclined sister Agnes rekindles their resentment towards each other and also sparks new complications. Elle Fanning is luminous in her part of a young Hollywood actor, with the film emerging as a compelling portrait of a family in turmoil and art’s usefulness in helping people work through their problems.

The Secret Agent

The ability to tackle a deadly serious subject with a dose of wry playfulness immediately sets The Secret Agent apart, as does its too-close-to-home paranoia of what it feels like to live in a fascist state.

Set in 1977 during the height of Brazil’s long military dictatorship, Kleber Mendonca Filho’s spin on the political thriller genre casts the redoubtable Wagner Moura as technology expert Armando who returns to his hometown of Recife after a clash with a corrupt federal official. Armando holes up in a leftist safe house, making plans to whisk his young son out of the country as hitmen close in.

Marching to its own beat throughout its 158-minute runtime, The Secret Agent takes wild swings between suspenseful drama and surreal comedy, but hardly misses a beat. Laced with absurdist humour and unsettling reflections on history and memory, the film is also a profound ode to the love for cinema.

Sinners

Director Ryan Coogler conjures one of the year’s most exciting outings on the big screen with this intoxicating cocktail of horror and history, music and the macabre. The blood-soaked ride stars Michael B. Jordan in the dual role of identical twins who return to their hometown from World War I, only to find an unspeakable danger awaiting them. Visually sumptuous and thematically rich, Sinners has Coogler stirring up a genre mashup in the way few others can, resulting in a film that embraces the historical, the mythic and the monstrous in equal measure. This is a diabolically entertaining film that melds together joy and pain, elegance and grindhouse, precision and chaos....

Train of Dreams

Denis Johnson’s elegiac 2002 novella finds expression on screen in this Clint Bentley-directed film that is anchored by a superlative central performance from Joel Edgerton. The Australian actor stars as stoic logger Robert Grainier, with the film chronicling his life in early 20th century America — building railroads and logging in the Pacific Northwest, his tender family life with his wife and daughter, and his profound grief after losing them in a wildfire.

Both intimate and epic, Train of Dreams manages to capture the beauty of the ordinary without betraying its harshness. Bentley makes a large part of his film a transcendental experience and a haunting meditation on life, grief and living with authenticity, shown through the eyes of one simple man. One of its biggest highlights is Adolpho Veloso’s evocative cinematography, with the film being shot in 99 per cent natural light.

Nouvelle Vague

Richard Linklater casts Guillaume Marbeck as Jean-Luc Godard, Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg and Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo in a film that follows the shooting of Breathless, one of the first feature films of the French New Wave of cinema. The time-capsule drama once again reinforces the Boyhood director’s uncanny ability to glide effortlessly through time and space. As much a love letter to cinema (and the making of it) as it is a personal character study, Nouvelle Vague is a triumphant recreation of a defining moment in movie history. The film portrays both the power of collaboration and the singularity of a cinematic voice. It evokes a time defined by freedom of expression, liberty of love and the pursuit of great art, where money was merely an obstacle

Nouvelle Vague — in the making of which Linklater embraces the art and heart of French New Wave — is also a reminder that great art takes risks, which is something many present-day filmmakers could well have forgotten.

It Was Just an Accident

Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s latest marks an unequivocal response to his oppressors — a warning to those in power that those they torture will eventually turn the tables on them. But Panahi does something surprising with this premise — in which former prisoners recognise and capture their sadistic interrogator — questioning whether revenge is the appropriate response to such treatment. Shooting in secret under the most restrictive conditions, the filmmaker delivers a work of moral complexity, one that is fast, rhythmic and strikingly authentic, thanks to his masterful direction and the cast’s excellent performances.

It Was Just Accident has Panahi written all over it — absurdly funny, powerfully dramatic and delightfully rebellious, with revenge rarely ever feeling as searingly political and ethically complex as it does in this film. The gripping tale of collective trauma culminates in a breathtaking final shot that shows us once again why Panahi is counted among the best.

Black Bag

Steven Soderbergh returns to tried-and-tested territory with this spy thriller about NCSC agents George (Michael Fassbender) and Kathryn Woodhouse (Cate Blanchett) whose marriage is tested when a dangerous cyber-weapon is leaked, and Kathryn becomes a prime suspect. Like he has done several times before, Soderbergh delivers an elegantly crafted, impeccably tailored, cleverly calculating film. Black Bag is a hypnotic piece of cinema, powered no less by the dynamic that Fassbender and Blanchett bring to the table. Just don’t go in expecting this one to be all guns blazing — Black Bag is, to quote a number of critics, “a grown-up spy film”.

Hamnet

Chloe Zhao, a Best Director Oscar winner for Nomadland a few years ago, crafts a largely fictional story that dramatises the marriage between Anne Hathaway (Agnes Hathaway in the film) and William Shakespeare, and the impact of the death of their 11-year-old son Hamnet on their relationship, a tragedy that also inspired Shakespeare to pen Hamlet.

Spellbinding in many ways, Hamnet is a moving and meditative exploration of grief, with Paul Mescal as Shakespeare and Jessie Buckley as Agnes, creating an equation on screen that feels lived-in and real. Grand and ambitious, Hamnet may feel performative in parts, but few will disagree with the fact that this is a technical, artistic, intellectual and emotional feast.