The film-maker’s latest is a three and-a-half-hour epic about the building of a modernist masterpiece, and the toll its creation takes on its architect. The film’s making was almost as gruelling. ‘People told me I’d never make another movie’, Corbet says

The Brutalist is a big, muscular American epic that pits the individual against the machine; the artist against the cogs and wheels of commerce. It spins the tale of László Tóth, a Hungarian-born architect who’s beset on all sides, by capricious patrons, unreliable partners, mutinous contractors and an outraged general public. László is determined to make his masterpiece. His wife, though, is spooked by the psychological cost. “Promise you won’t let it drive you mad,� she says.

Architecture isn’t so different from independent film-making, says the film’s writer-director, Brady Corbet. It follows the same basic principles, throws up the same problems and provides similar levels of agony and ecstasy, and always more of the former. Corbet is now 36 years old and three movies into a gilded career. That makes him a success, a 21st-century Orson Welles. It’s just that each project takes its toll and, financially speaking, artists rarely if ever break even. “Eventually you start doing the math,� he explains. “And with every film it’s the same result. There are so many sacrifices you have to make along the way. And I can’t say for certain that it ever feels worth it.�

The Globes’ gift bags are worth $1m – but hopefuls such as Ralph Fiennes, Cate Blanchett and Daniel Craig are advised to read the first come, first served small print

More than a fortnight before the ceremony, the big winner at this year’s Golden Globe awards may have already have been decided – although their identity remains a mystery.

All 100 eligible recipients, including Timothée Chalamet, Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant, can claim nine of the 25 items on offer in this year’s official gift bag – including Scottish gin, five nights on a yacht in Indonesia and a “cutting edge� LED face mask session. But the majority of top-drawer freebies are, it turns out, being distributed on a first-come, first-served basis.

The co-star of the Guardian’s film of 2024 talks about director Andrew Haigh’s ‘unabashedly romantic’ love story, loneliness – and the idea of seeing your parents as your peers

• The Guardian’s No 1 film of the year: All of Us Strangers
• The full countdown

How does it feel to have been the star of the Guardian’s film of the year?
You know what, it’s really wonderful. Thank you so much to the discerning people at the Guardian.

What are your main memories of making All of Us Strangers?
They’re extraordinarily positive. It doesn’t necessarily always happen that the process equals the product, but this was a really heartfelt process and a really special film that came as a result.

Andrew Haigh’s devastating metaphysical drama follows a lonely gay writer as he interacts with the ghosts of his parents

• Andrew Scott on starring in All of Strangers
• The best films of 2024 in the UK

Underneath the radical swoon of Andrew Haigh’s ground-shifting gay drama Weekend was a swell of sadness. Clearer in the film’s more universal right-people-wrong-time romance but also in the more specific, and knottier, queerness. It was a rare, giddy uplift to see young gay men fall headfirst for each other with such believable and unfettered intimacy but their affection existed in a world full of caveats – where to kiss, how to act, who to be – and it was only in privacy that they could really be themselves. “When I’m at home I’m absolutely fine,� Tom Cullen’s Russell says. “I’m happy being gay … It’s when I go outside …�

Twelve years later in All of Us Strangers, Haigh’s first film about gay characters since, what lies outside has dramatically changed. Same-sex marriage has been legalised. Gay culture at large has been more widely embraced, from Heartstopper to Queer Eye to Drag Race. It has, allegedly, got better. But for Andrew Scott’s lonely gay writer, Adam, things remain troubled on the inside, a fix to the political not enough to mend the personal, living like Cullen’s Weekend protagonist before him, in a high-rise far away from everyone and everything else. This time it’s not just on the edge of a city but on the edge of the world, eerily close to that of another, on the precipice between the living and the dead.

After the recent release of his misbegotten saga Megalopolis, the anniversary of his crime drama sequel serves as a perfect reminder of the director’s abilities

Creatively speaking, 2024 was Francis Ford Coppola’s biggest year in ages. Not only did it see the release of his first movie in 13 years, that film was Megalopolis, a dream project that had been kicking around in his head for upwards of four decades. It made a particularly auspicious year for the emergence of Coppola’s potentially career-capping achievement, because it also marked the 50th anniversary of perhaps his greatest sustained professional triumph: the year he released both The Conversation and The Godfather Part II within months of each other in 1974. (For good measure, that year also saw the release of a lavish, misbegotten adaptation of The Great Gatsby, his screenplay for which had become legendary, even if the movie didn’t live up to it.) With the sprawling (and loopy) ambition of Megalopolis still fresh in mind, the 50th anniversary of The Godfather Part II seems particularly notable in Coppola’s evolution as a film-maker.

The very idea of a prestige sequel was a strange ambition in 1974, when follow-ups were certainly common – especially to hits as smashing as The Godfather – but not particularly respected. Prequels were even less fashionable. After going smaller with the masterful surveillance thriller The Conversation, Coppola went all out for his next movie, merging a sequel story following the further corruption of a new mafia family head, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), with a flashback prequel following the arrival of Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro, playing the young version of Marlon Brando’s indelible character from the first film) in America and his introduction into a life of crime. In doing so, he brought together Pacino and De Niro, both still young actors at the time; the fact that their characters cannot meet in these forms on screen, only co-feature in a handful of dissolves, helped burnish both actors’ legends as they worked their way across a stunning array of subsequent 70s films. (They would, of course, eventually share the screen properly in several films, two of them notable: briefly but brilliantly in 1995’s Heat, and more substantially in 2019’s The Irishman.)

Some in the industry have been calling for recognition for years, but motion-capture performances by the likes of Zoe Saldana have been ignored. Now, though, the Academy must look to the future

Picture the future: it’s the Oscars 2034, and the best actor prizes are no longer split into male and female categories. Instead, there is an award for best performer in a live action role, and another for best actor in a performance capture role. Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks can finally go head-to-head for their epic turns in Sophie’s Choice II and Even Bigger respectively, while Zoe Saldana and Andy Serkis are up for the latter for their startling performances in Avatar 6 and The Lord of the Rings: What Gollum Did Last Summer.

Some might suggest this is a tantalising vision of a world where the Academy has finally caught up with the realities of modern acting. Others would no doubt point out that the Oscars has been rewarding work where the actor’s real face is obscured by makeup, prosthetics, masks, or other transformations for decades, ever since John Hurt received a best actor nod for The Elephant Man in 1980. The difference is that while Robert Downey Jr somehow managed to snag a nomination for playing an Australian method actor donning blackface in the biting 2008 satirical comedy Tropic Thunder, the likes of Avatar’s Saldana and Lord of the Rings’ Serkis seem doomed to Oscars limbo, as they pour their hearts repeatedly into roles only to watch awards season roll by like an indifferent Na’vi riding a banshee past a crying Jake Sully.

This heartfelt prequel to the 1994 classic recounts the dramatic backstory of King Mufasa but is scarred by a forgettable musical score

How did Scar, the wicked uncle from The Lion King voiced by Jeremy Irons, get to be so … well … wicked? How is it that he was only ever known by that cruel and callous nickname, while everyone else got noble-sounding multisyllabic names ending in vowels? Was he once nice, even misunderstood? And, in providing the answers, will the prequel give a clear rebuke to the now rather discredited facial-scarring-equals-evil equation? Well, the answers will show that this movie musical, like the original, is still a rather old-fashioned Kiplingesque creation at heart.

It is certainly Scar who has the important character arc and narrative journey here, so it should perhaps be his name in the title. Mufasa, originally voiced by the legendary James Earl Jones, here turns out to be a thoroughly and unsurprisingly decent character from the outset. This movie, a backstory-followup to the 1994 classic in the same photorealistic animated style as the 2019 reboot, is in fact a punchy, heartfelt and rather ingenious drama, with a fair bit of storytelling energy from screenwriter Jeff Nathanson and director Barry Jenkins.

Our favourite animated heroes return, facing arch nemesis Feathers McGraw alongside a malfunctioning AI gnome – it’s an exciting and utterly timeless joy

Forget Tom Cruise riding his motorbike off a cliff in Mission: Impossible. Wallace and Gromit are on a comfy narrowboat teetering on the edge of the Pontcysyllte aqueduct, having defiantly chucked a bunch of boots at the villain … weapons which, gloriously, have the sole purpose of facilitating a gag about something getting “rebooted�. Nick Park’s immortal creations return in the first Wallace and Gromit adventure for 16 years, a stop-motion animated sequel to the 1993 Oscar-winning short The Wrong Trousers. It’s exciting, ingenious, funny and an unmissable Christmas treat.

Our human and canine heroes are, as ever, inventors, cheese enthusiasts and warriors in the cause of righteousness and their new confrontation with wickedness involves references to Eric Morecambe, Buster Keaton and the Flintstones – but also to Virginia Woolf and John Milton. So as well as everything else, Wallace and Gromit are doing their bit to keep English literature alive in UK universities. As we join the story, Wallace has invented a new “smart� Gnome-robot, or Norbot (unsettlingly voiced by Reece Shearsmith) which helps around the house and garden. Wallace becomes increasingly infatuated with his new robo-helpmate and Gromit’s feelings are hurt.

Carrey’s Dr Robotnik is the best thing in elaborate third-instalment shenanigans that are pretty good fan-service fun

A third Sonic film rolls off the production line with remorseless inevitability, and no little excitement among its core early-teen fanbase; the Marvel Cinematic Universe could take a lesson or two in how to keep the audience onside. The kerfuffle over Sonic’s weirdly designed teeth seems a long time ago and if Jim Carrey is really only in it for the money, he certainly gives his double role here some major welly. And while no one could deny the cash-grab fan-service underpinning to the entire project … well, it’s actually a not unenjoyable experience, even if you are someone on whom the intricacies of early-00s game narrative are lost.

So this Sonic reboot takes the time-hallowed third-instalment approach by foregrounding a “dark� version of Sonic – in fact near-identical hedgehog Shadow, distinguished from our hero by his black and red colouring. At the start of proceedings, Shadow escapes from a containment unit where he is being held for various convoluted reasons, and Sonic (along with his echidna and fox sidekicks) is called in to deal with him. Pretty soon, for further convoluted reasons, they briefly find themselves fighting alongside Ivo Robotnik before – and I don’t think this is a major spoiler – unearthing Robotnik grand-père in an abandoned military base. Then … it starts getting complicated.

A boy raised underwater by dolphins goes in search of his human mother on dry land in Mohammad Kheirandish’s incoherent fable

‘Can I keep it, mommy?� It’s likely that even very small kids will smell something fishy about this family adventure from Iranian animator Mohammad Kheirandish. Like The Jungle Book at sea, this is the tale of a human baby rescued from drowning by a dolphin called Snowball and raised as one of the family. To try to explain the preposterousness of keeping a baby alive in the ocean, the dolphins are shown swimming him up to the surface for air every now and then. And to be honest, by the end of the movie, a human breathing underwater is the least of the narrative incoherences.

The baby, who fell into the ocean after the plane he was travelling in crash landed, grows up believing he is a dolphin. In fairness to him, there is a high degree of sameyness in the animation of the creatures: fish, dolphin, human, all have the same pop-eyed expression. The boy discovers the truth when Snowball blurts out the story of the crash. So with a locket containing the picture of his mother found in the plane wreckage, he goes off in search of her on land.

Robin Bextor’s documentary about FW Murnau’s 1922 silent masterpiece makes some sharp points but leaves noticeable holes

There are two types of vampire: one is the vulpine, Bela Lugosi-esque seducer, while the other is the “verminous� kind pioneered by Count Orlok in the 1922 German silent horror classic Nosferatu. That’s one of the sharper observations in this reasonably interesting but shakily organised documentary timed to coincide with the Robert Eggers remake; a comeback, after decades of hot vampire dominance, for the hideous original progenitor in our atavistic, post-pandemic times.

FW Murnau’s Nosferatu, a first but unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, was almost lost when the author’s widow succeeded in having most copies of it destroyed. What a loss that would have been: a sui generis masterpiece that was instigated by producer Albin Grau meeting a Serbian soldier on the western front who claimed his father was a vampire, and which compressed mass anxieties about war and disease into an oppressively deathly fable. It would surely have taken the emerging horror genre years to reconstitute Nosferatu’s visual vocabulary of eerie dissolves and other uncanny effects. Not to mention a key piece of the vampire legendarium, also invented by the film: that they are killed by sunlight.

Sönje Storm’s thoughtful film about her great-grandfather Jürgen Mahrt focuses on his photographs of nature and ignores the horror unfolding around him

Here is a thoughtful, austere documentary by Sönje Storm that largely avoids the irony-potential hinted at in the title. It is about her great-grandfather, Jürgen Mahrt: a remarkable, self-taught naturalist and photographer from Elsdorf in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, who sold off some of the family farm that he inherited to pursue his great passion for the natural world.

Mahrt’s work was interrupted by war service from 1914 to 1918, but he continued until his death in 1940, amassing a gigantic archive of beautiful photographs which he colourised himself with fine brushes; it gives a colossal account of what we would now call the biodiversity of the Elsdorf forest and the surrounding lakes, fields and moorland, especially the numberless lost species of butterfly. Mahrt would sometimes eccentrically position stuffed dead birds in a natural setting for his photographs. He was less interested in human subjects, although towards the end of his life he took candid, posed shots of Elsdorf townspeople.

Craig plays an American expat living indolently in Mexico City in this sometimes uproarious adaptation of William Burroughs’ autobiographical novel

Queer is a story of lost love and last love and mad-about-the-boy obsession, featuring an excellent performance from Daniel Craig – needy, horny, moody, like his Knives Out detective Benoit Blanc on steroids and with something of his portrayal of Ted Hughes from 2003’s Sylvia.

It’s adapted by screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes from the autobiographical novel by William Burroughs, directed by Luca Guadagnino and wonderfully shot by cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom with digitally rendered landscapes and streetscapes that bring the boozy, bleary reality into alignment with the many (disquieting) dream sequences.

Crowe’s safari-going Russian oligarch is the main redeeming feature of this Spider-Man-adjacent tale but there’s not much to like elsewhere

Only the robust presence of Russell Crowe – and what might conceivably be a sly visual joke about exiled Russian plutocrat Mikhail Khodorkovsky – make this generic slice of superhero action worth watching.

Kraven the Hunter has been an exotic, marginal figure in the Spider-Man part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but now he gets his own film and Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays him as an ultra-muscly super predator with Spidey’s skill in whooshing up and down buildings and a sense for something amiss – although the great arachnid himself does not appear. Kraven thinks of human beings as the only worthy game (that is: bad people who deserve what’s coming to them) and despises people who presume to kill noble beasts. Taylor-Johnson himself gets to fearlessly wrestle with a few digital big cats.

Sadly for UK viewers, this is not a sexy reboot of one of our greatest film franchises. All the roles in it, however, have their equivalents

For vulgar-minded Brits, a Hollywood film title sometimes carries its own unintended associations and unfortunate resonances. Many were pained at the raucous response from some here in 2017 to the title of Robert Redford’s earnest film Our Souls at Night. Now here is a moderate new piece of Netflix product, a thriller about a bomb smuggled on to a plane in hand-baggage, starring Taron Egerton as Ethan, the airport security officer in a tense situation and Jason Bateman as the sinister explosives mastermind. It’s called … Carry-On.

That title is self-explanatory for everyone in the United States. But it’s bound to get British Netflix subscribers very overexcited, assuming as they surely will that the greatest movie franchise in the history of cinema is about to be rebooted with a sexy new cast. Egerton is a Brit. Couldn’t he have warned Netflix that the film ought possibly to have been retitled for the UK?

Alexis Bloom’s documentary, which shows the Israeli prime minister and his family under police interrogation over corruption charges, reveals their sense of entitlement

The grotesque Hamas pogrom of 7 October 2023, in which around 800 Israeli civilians were murdered and 250 taken hostage – supported by some who do not believe Israel has a right to exist, still less defend itself – became Israel’s 9/11, igniting a horrendous retaliatory war with a secondary consequence for aghast onlookers – a consequence which is the subject of this documentary from Alexis Bloom. It refocused attention on what can only be described as the country’s ruling family, led by prime minister Benjamin “Bibi� Netanyahu and his wife Sara. (Their egregious son Yair here emerges with the remarkable distinction of being more rightwing than his parents.) They have become like haughty royals, self-pitying and self-dramatising: Netanyahu as a mixture of Donald Trump and Louis XIV.

The film shows us extraordinary leaked police interrogation video footage of Netanyahu, relating to the bribery and corruption charges he had been facing; allegedly accepting gifts in return for political favours from oligarchs such as former arms dealer, intelligence operative and Hollywood movie producer Arnon Milchan and telecoms plutocrat and media owner Shaul Elovitch. His corruption charges had given rise to gigantic demonstrations within Israel when it became clear that his proposed judicial reforms were designed to make his prosecution more difficult. It seemed as if he was on the way out. But the Israel-Hamas war changed everything, though the Israeli public are demanding to know when the hostages are coming home, and if the prime minister has any great interest in negotiating an end to hostilities.

Full of celebrity interviews, wild anecdotes and ex-wives, this indulgent documentary gives the star the affectionate treatment he deserves, including an arch Joan Collins

That lovable British star Roger Moore, who ascended to movie Valhalla with seven James Bond films between 1973 and 1985, gets the indulgent, affectionate treatment he deserves in this documentary celebration, featuring interviews with Christopher Walken, Pierce Brosnan, 007 superfan David Walliams, franchise producers Michael G Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, his children Geoffrey (an eerie echo of his dad), Deborah and Christian, and of course Joan Collins who is almost Roger’s female equivalent in arch self-deprecating wit. Steve Coogan impersonates the Moore narrative voiceover, mostly reading from his garrulous memoir The 007 Diaries: Filming Live and Let Die, which in a less corporately controlled age Moore was allowed to bring out in 1973 as a tie-in.

This is a very enjoyable watch for Moore devotees, though the long stretch of home videos towards the end might test your patience a little bit. The film shrewdly shows how Roger really did invent himself, a lifelong method acting project constructing an unvarying dapper persona which did not change in TV interviews (though invariably accessorised by a large, louche cigar).

On the eve of his retirement, the much-loved musician revisits his rise to stardom and his evolution as a gay man in a flashback-filled documentary

Here is a snapshot of the great singer-songwriter and pop genius as he prepares to retire from touring; he is to play his final live show in the US at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, venue of his legendary 1975 concert, with many people in the vast crowd now wearing their own versions of his diamante Dodgers outfit.

Never Too Late shows him on tour, hosting his podcast with his husband, David Furnish, and hanging out with friends and family, with the film periodically flashing back to that period of his US breakthrough in the early to mid-70s. It was an era of staggering productivity with lyricist Bernie Taupin, dominating the album charts with multiple LPs, playing on stage with his friend John Lennon in New York for what was to be Lennon’s own live swan song. But Elton was also unhappy in his relationship with manager John Reid, abusing drugs, evolving towards acceptance of his own identity as a gay man (in his podcast he reveals he still has not got used to the word “queer�) and searching for love.

Jacques Audiard’s trans gangster musical gets six nods while Anora and Nickel Boys are surprise omissions

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Ampas) released shortlists for 10 of its award categories including best international feature and best song on Tuesday, solidifying prospects for Emilia Pérez, the Jacques Audiard-directed trans gangster musical starring Zoe Saldaña and Karla Sofía Gascón.

The shortlists are a midway point in the Oscars voting process, with members of relevant Academy branches voting to whittle down contenders from all titles submitted and eligible.

Studio says ‘many parents would prefer to discuss certain subjects with their children on their own terms and timeline’

An upcoming Pixar animated television series will no longer include a transgender teenager after Disney removed dialogue that referenced the character’s gender identity.

Win or Lose, which will begin on Disney+ in February, follows different members of a young mixed gender softball team, the Pickles, in the lead up to their championship game. Voices in the show include comedian Will Forte as the team’s coach, Dan.

Roles in All About My Mother and Life is Beautiful cemented her status as one of Spain’s ‘most iconic’ actors

The award-winning Spanish actor Marisa Paredes, best known to international audiences for her work with directors such as Pedro Almodóvar, Guillermo del Toro and Roberto Benigni, has died at the age of 78.

Announcing her death on Tuesday, Spain’s film academy said the country had lost one of its “most iconic actors� and a beloved veteran of more than 75 films.

Global streaming platforms biggest investors but Stan contributed the most locally produced titles

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Investment in feature films and television dramas made in Australia has tanked, according to the latest report by the government’s funding body for the screen production industry.

In the 2023-24 financial year, spending dropped by almost 30%, Screen Australia’s annual drama report released on Tuesday shows – 10% below a five-year average which included a massive slump in production in 2020 due to Covid-19.

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Auteur’s strange and exuberant 1984 epic was the subject of ridicule in years following but it deserves a second chance

In another universe, Star Wars ended with David Lynch. Intrigued by the monochromatic surrealism of Eraserhead and The Elephant Man, George Lucas approached the oddball auteur to take the reins on the third installment of the breakout space opera, only for Lynch to decline. If he hadn’t, however, he would have pushed the grotty practical effects and the Jedi’s quasi-mystical soup of east-west philosophizing to new extremes strafing the inscrutable. The resulting film would have been so aggressively strange, so unconcerned with commercial appeal or even basic legibility, so deeply ensconced in its creator’s circle-obsessed psyche that the hoped-for franchise would be regarded as radioactive for decades, its intellectual property arable again only after nearly half a century. The film Lynch did make, 1984’s Dune, allows us to visit this universe.

As the rights to Frank Herbert’s doorstopper novel bounced around producers and directors through the 70s before landing on the docket of the risk-taker Dino de Laurentiis, chances are good that the elevator pitch eventually came to include mention of Star Wars, maybe with a “meets Jaws!� appended to tease the sand-worm spectacle sequences. Ambitious showbiz types wanted to believe that a hit was embedded somewhere in Herbert’s intricate jumble of metaphysical lore and interplanetary geopolitics, requiring only an artist of sufficient vision to get it out. The image may seem laughably remote today, but on the heels of The Elephant Man’s eight Oscar nominations, Lynch cut the figure of a thirtysomething awards darling capable of marrying grown-up entertainment with boundary-pushing formal daring. (David Lynch: at one time, the Damien Chazelle of his day!) Once the attached Ridley Scott dropped out to make Blade Runner and Lynch fell in love with the source text, it seemed like all the stars had aligned.

Ahead of the release of We Live in Time next month, we celebrate the filmography of a breakout British star, from Little Women to Lady Macbeth

The only reason this fabulous DreamWorks animation is not nearer the top of this list is that Pugh is not the star - that’s Antonio Banderas as Puss. But her Goldilocks, head of the Three Bears crime family, is surely channelling none other than the great Billie Whitelaw in The Krays.

​Count down to Christmas with favourites selected by Sean Baker, Gillian Anderson, John Waters, Mike Leigh, Gurinder Chadha, Will Sharpe and more

The Christmas movie has, in recent years, become its own industrial complex, algorithmically churned out by streaming services to hit various subscriber demographic sweet spots. Perhaps the seemingly disposable likes of Hot Frosty and Meet Me Next Christmas will be treasured for many Decembers to come, but they have a tough canon to crack, as represented by our all-star Advent calendar of festive movie favourites, chosen by some of the film industry’s best and brightest, invited by the Observer New Review to help our readers count down to the big day itself.

Some of the films here are as firmly entrenched in the season as mince pies and fir trees – who can argue with director Gurinder Chadha’s selection of It’s a Wonderful Life or actor Joe Alwyn’s of The Snowman? Others are less obvious: you wouldn’t expect John Waters, Hollywood’s emperor of bad taste, to go cosy and cute, and sure enough, his choice of the notorious video nasty Christmas Evil would make many a person bring up their turkey dinner. For a lot of us, meanwhile, our personal Christmas classics aren’t technically Christmas films at all, but made so by timing and association: we’re steering clear of the played-out Die Hard debate, but Himesh Patel certainly isn’t alone in finding the holiday incomplete without the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and screenwriter David Nicholls makes a strong case for Phantom Thread as festive viewing. To each their own Christmas, and to all a good night.

Ahead of his birthday next month, we celebrate the filmography of Washington, from his charisma-oozing role in Cry Freedom to his colossal performance in Gladiator II

Already radiating charisma, and sporting a credible South African accent, Denzel Washington earned the first of his 10 Oscar nominations for this portrayal of anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko. Alas, Richard Attenborough’s well-meaning film seems more preoccupied with the fate of the white journalist (Kevin Kline as Donald Woods) on whose book this was based.

In the first of a new series in which writers explain their favourite mood-lifting watch, an ode to a charming 40s romance

In search of solace, I always turn to a film that will take me away from myself. I Know Where I’m Going! is, as you could absolutely guess if you didn’t know, a film about a journey. In this film from 1945, Joan (Wendy Hiller) a modern young woman with grand ideas, sets off by the sleeper train from Manchester to Scotland. Her stated destination is a Hebridean island where she plans to marry her wealthy industrialist fiance. But fate has other ideas in this magical film from the mercurial duo of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

The train journey is off-track from the start, tilted by Joan’s absurd bridal dreams, complete with Scottish hills draped in tartan, and the Archers’ whimsical camera trickery, which transforms a top hat into a smokestack. You just know that it’s curtains for Joan’s meticulous typewritten itinerary. In fact, danger awaits her in two forms: lethal waters, and true love. First, Joan’s progress is thwarted by bad weather: fog then high winds. During her enforced delay in Tobermory she meets the locals. There’s Catriona (Pamela Brown), a wonderfully wild woman who lives a full life without any of the material things that Joan holds far too dear. And mostly there’s Torquil (Roger Livesey), a magnetic local man on leave from the Royal Navy. This is what really puts Joan, and her plans, in peril. But why wouldn’t she want to be blown off course by such a man? A man who knows this magnificent scenery so well, and who so charmingly translates the Gaelic lyrics at a ceilidh: “You’re the maid for me.�

Ridley Scott’s sequel is certainly long awaited, but does it match up to the original, who will get an Oscar nod, what’s in a kiss and were you not entertained?

• This article contains spoilers for Gladiator II

Twenty-four years on and Ridley Scott’s belated follow-up to his biggest critical success is finally on cinema screens. How does it compare to the first film? Can Paul Mescal convince? Does Denzel Washington steal the show? And how about that rhino? Here’s the place to unpick it all.

Since her sparkling debut in 1995 – in Larry Clark’s Kids – this American original has been an indie cinema favourite, excelling in edgy, complex roles. We pick the standouts

Kudos to Sevigny for fully committing herself to fellating her director and co-star, Vincent Gallo, in the sleaziest, least necessary scene in his downbeat, 1970s-style road movie. Elsewhere, the driving sequences are mesmerising, but I must be careful what I write about the iffy sexual politics since Gallo once called me a “commie lesbian witch�.

Women around me in the cinema groaned at what Amy Adams’ character had to put up with in the film – and it was nothing to do with dogs

Nightbitch is not the best film of the year. But if it becomes a cult classic, that will primarily be down to its perfect portrayal of one specific dynamic: weaponised incompetence.

In Marielle Heller’s adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s bestselling novel, Scoot McNairy embodies the “useless� husband, weaponising his incompetence to varying degrees of absurdity. Amy Adams plays the protagonist, “Mother�, who grows increasingly frustrated and angry at her husband’s idiocy, eventually transforming into a dog, complete with eight nipples.

Sebastian Stan gets a best actor nomination for playing younger Trump in The Apprentice and a there’s a musical about a gender-reassigned Mexican gangster. Trump won’t be happy

• Golden Globes 2025: Emilia Pérez scores 10 nominations as Kate Winslet, Selena Gomez and Sebastian Stan each take two

• Full list of 2025 nominations

The Golden Globes nomination list once again raises the curtain for awards season in this new, uncertain era for the movies: post-strike, post-pandemic, but very much pre-AI. Of course, the Globes cover TV as well, and may well in years to come find themselves in a new era of relevance as so many, rightly or wrongly, claim the distinction between the two is blurring. It is certainly supposed to be a new era of respectability for the Globes, which (it hopes) has put to bed accusations of non-diversity and kickbacks. It’s hoping also that this year’s presenter Nikki Glaser will do better than last year’s icily received turn from Jo Koy.

It’s a great Globes list for streamer Netflix, hip distributor A24 and indeed the Cannes film festival, whose films are well represented. But awards lists will always annoy someone and this year that someone is going to be President-elect Trump, who will no doubt be infuriated at the best actor (drama) nomination for Sebastian Stan, who plays young Trump in the early-years biopic The Apprentice. Trump hates it, although I thought the movie went pretty easy on him. Jeremy Strong picks up a best supporting actor nomination for playing Trump’s toxic mentor Roy Cohn.

Despite Minnelli’s memoir not being finished and a queue of ‘Academy award, Emmy, Tony and Grammy winners excited to talk’, the star of the upcoming biopic is already obvious

As the repeatedly stalled Madonna biopic has shown, it’s difficult to make a film about a real-life icon, especially when the icon in question has a say in who will play them. And so it might prove to be with Liza Minnelli. Earlier this year, Minnelli announced that she is writing what is sure to be a blockbuster memoir. The book promises to pull no punches which – when you factor in her parents, her addiction issues and her complicated love life – is a hell of a lot of punches not to pull.

The book isn’t due to come out until 2026. Despite this, the television rights have already been optioned and, even though it’s so far in the distance, Minnelli has already got several ideas about casting. In an email to People magazine, she wrote: “First, we need a great script and an actress who loves to move,� adding, “Honey, first, I’m a dancer … like the great line in Chorus Line: God, I’m a dancer … a dancer dances … even with replaced hips and scoliosis!�

As BBFC’s Wicked warning leaves usual suspects green with anger, is a polite notice on a website really worth frothing about?

Wicked has faced more than its fair share of controversies since it was first announced; from the uproar over recasting the play’s leads, to fan-made posters going viral for the wrong reasons, to the debate over people singing along to it in cinemas and ruining it for everyone.

As such, Wicked does not wish to cause any more upset, which is why it has gone out of its way to cut any new controversy off at the pass. Exhibit A: the BBFC has slapped a warning on the film, alerting viewers that it features scenes of discrimination against those with green skin.

The writer and director, who died this week, helped to define what big screen spoofs would look like in the decades after

• Jim Abrahams, co-creator of Airplane! and The Naked Gun, dies aged 80

Very few people can honestly claim to have changed the direction of comedy, but Jim Abrahams – who died this week – is one of them. Thanks to the procession of spoof movies he made, both alone and with his fellow writer-directors David and Jerry Zucker, Abrahams helped to carve out a brand new genre of comedy, equal parts straight-faced and scattergun.

The most enduring Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker (ZAZ) film remains Airplane! After leveraging the show they honed at University of Wisconsin–Madison into the entertaining if directionless sketch film The Kentucky Fried Movie, the trio came across the 1957 aviation thriller Zero Hour! on television. They were so taken by the silly plot and wooden acting that they decided to parody the whole thing, by hewing so closely to the original that they ended up buying the rights to avoid a lawsuit.

Hey, frustrated theatre kids: no one is going to musicals to hear you sing. And don’t listen to the Rock – some of us actually want to hear the film we’ve paid to see

In shocking news for grumpy people who like to stay home, fans are going to public screenings of the movie-musical Wicked and choosing to sing along loudly with the songs. It’s happened so frequently that cinemas in the US have put up PSAs asking audience members to keep quiet.

It’s not a new story – theatres, concerts and cinemas have always been battlegrounds of etiquette. During a midday screening of Call Me By Your Name that I once attended, two middle-aged women pulled out an entire roast chicken and began eating it with their bare hands, interrupting a tender scene of queer romance in the Italian countryside with cracks, rips and slurps. Our issues today – people singing in movies, kids filming entire concerts on their phones, people throwing hard objects at singers – are just modern-day versions of conundrums like, I don’t know, when is it polite to throw rotten tomatoes and jeer during a public hanging? Put more than two people together and someone will be annoying – it’s true of audiences, communes, and also why I don’t truck with polyamory.

The British arthouse cinema chain has changed hands. Its new American owners would be wise to ignore industry gloom and invest in discerning movie audiences

Who wants to buy an arthouse cinema chain? That question may seem unexpected now that being depressed about post-pandemic filmgoing appears to be the industry’s default position. But the sale of the Curzon cinema group to New York investment company Fortress – part of a foreclosure auction of assets belonging to current American owner Cohen Realty Enterprises – has been met with a lack of surprise, still less alarm, in the industry and within the Curzon group itself, who reportedly regard the new owner as more likely to invest and to nurture long-term growth than the current proprietor. Fortress bid $5m [£3.9m] for Curzon, and insiders are calling it a “bargain�.

This is one of the UK’s prestige cinema companies with a history going back to 1934, now with 350 employees, 16 venues and 58 screens. It consolidated its position in the arthouse marketplace with its acquisition of Artificial Eye in 2006 and the launching of a streaming service in 2010 and this integration was boldly masterminded by its outgoing CEO Philip Knatchbull, the dapper, urbane leader with a movie-aristocrat and actual-aristocrat background – he is the son of producer John Brabourne and grandson of Lord Mountbatten – who left last year.

The star opened about his mother’s death on Sesame Street with a clarity and sincerity rare among celebrities

Andrew Garfield has been hitting the promotional trail hard for his new film We Live in Time. Maybe, you could say, a bit too hard. There are the many, many chemistry-heavy online videos with Florence Pugh. There’s his Chicken Shop Date video with Amelia Dimoldenberg, which is less an interview and more a terrifying nexus point for one-sided online parasocial celebrity relationships. Garfield even took a cardboard cutout of Pugh to a recent red carpet event, which if nothing else signals an aggressive desire to become more meme than man.

However, one promotional pit stop has singlehandedly managed to save Garfield. Two days ago, a video of him talking to Elmo was released online. In it, Garfield discusses the death of his mother and the complicated forms that his grief has taken.

Studios usually twist themselves into pretzels to avoid confusing movie titles. But this Christmas, unwary fans of the CBBC show should beware

Great news, parents! In just a few short weeks, a new Horrible History DVD will be released. Imagine the look of absolute delight on the faces of your children as they giddily unwrap their present and realise that their favourite CBBC show has created new material.

And then imagine the growing look of horror on their faces as they scan the cover of the DVD case and see that the main image is a clenched fist and some spiked knuckledusters. And then their violent disappointment as they slowly put two and two together and realise that instead of buying them Horrible Histories (a DVD of sophisticated yet child-friendly historical parody sketches from most of the people behind Ghosts), you have actually bought them Horrible History (the new limited edition four-DVD boxset of violent, decades-old kung fu movies by the Chinese director Chang Cheh).

From Sly Stallone at the White House to Hulk Hogan at the RNC, Donald Trump has made no secret of his affinity for hyper-masculine men. But will the US fall for his action movie-inspired strongman shtick one more time?

There’s a real possibility that Donald Trump sees no distinction between the terms “strongman� and “strong man�. At the presidential debate last month, Kamala Harris said world leaders were “laughing� at Trump. In response, Trump brought up his endorsement from the autocratic Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán: “One of the most respected men – they call him a strong man. He’s a tough person, smart.�

Two months before that debate, the Republican national convention played host to a strong man – or, at least, to a man who exemplified a certain 80s-kitsch version of strength. Hulk Hogan, the former standard-bearer of the then World Wrestling Federation (WWF), rose to fame as a human cartoon character, a pumped-up avatar for American determination and supremacy. During his time in the spotlight, Hogan did battle against stereotypes of America’s enemies – the proudly Iranian Iron Sheik, the proudly Russian Nikolai Volkoff and Sgt Slaughter, a former US marine who had turned against his own country to sympathise with Saddam Hussein. On this night, Hulk Hogan was at the RNC to throw his support behind the third presidential campaign of Trump, a figure who has tapped into a potent vein of nostalgia for a mythologised 1980s, an era characterised by muscular action movie heroes, wrestlers, and unapologetic displays of machismo.

Paramount’s ‘hybrid’ spin on the animated cartoon is bound to be disturbingly freakish, as it mixes real actors with animated baby-blobs

Not so long ago, the trailer for next year’s Minecraft movie seemed to go out of its way to become the single ugliest thing ever witnessed by humankind. Not only did it feature real life actors weaponising the worst facets of their personae, but the CGI – unable to decide whether it wanted to look like the source material or Pixar – fell between the two, giving us creatures that looked as if they were made in the glass boxes that Japanese farmers use to make square watermelons.

However, as awful as the Minecraft trailer looked, the gauntlet has now been thrown down. Deadline has announced that Paramount is making a movie based on the 1990s animated cartoon Rugrats. But what stands to launch the film into the all-time ugly movie hall of fame is this: the Rugrats movie is going to be a live-action/CGI hybrid.

Ronan Day-Lewis has brought his father out of retirement to shoot Anemone, yet any great actor knows the difficulties of working with young, inexperienced directors

Seven years ago, I recorded my swooning-fanboy professional farewell to Daniel Day-Lewis who at the age of 60 had announced his retirement from movies. He was just going to do Phantom Thread with Paul Thomas Anderson, apparently, and then that would be it.

No. Surely not. I dared to hope that he would change his mind. Now he has dramatically retired from retirement, and is shooting a movie called Anemone, co-starring Sean Bean and Samantha Morton. It should be great news. It is great news. And yet many DDL fans will have woken up this morning, pondering a strange and disturbing dream they’ve had about Jaden Smith, son of Will. Whatever can it mean?

Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha, the makers of our No 2 film of the year, are currently under arrest. They talk about their trial, crossing red lines and why they’re ready to fight

• The best films of 2024
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You’re on trial in Iran for making My Favourite Cake. You were in court this morning. What happened?
Behtash Sanaeeha: We were supposed to be in court. But there is very high air pollution in Tehran today, so the government closed all public buildings.

What are you charged with?
BS: We have three charges against us. One is propaganda against the regime, another is breaking Islamic rules by making a vulgar movie. And the third is spreading prostitution and libertinism. It’s ridiculous.

The actor on 90s nostalgia, how exhaustion helped with his latest role, and his guilt at revealing the truth about Christmas classic The Holiday

Actor Jude Law, 51, grew up in south-east London as the son of teachers. His breakthrough role in The Talented Mr Ripley earned him a Bafta, an Oscar nomination and enduring tabloid attention. Always versatile, he’s been cast in more complex roles as he’s aged, most recently playing Henry VIII in Firebrand. He’s currently starring in Star Wars: Skeleton Crew on Disney+, and next comes The Order, which Law co-produced and stars in as veteran FBI agent Terry Husk. Directed by Justin Kurzel and written by Zach Baylin, it’s an action film with a political message, anchored in the true story of a white supremacist terror group’s downfall. Its leader was inspired by The Turner Diaries, a novel referenced by Trump supporters during the 2021 attack on the Capitol.

What appealed to you about The Order?
Zach wrote it before the 6 January insurrection happened but by the time we came on board, we were very aware of its relevance. We also knew we had a cat-and-mouse drama that we could lean on, and that meant we could unpack the characters and let this rather disturbing story tell itself. It’s set in 1983 and reminded us of movies from that era and a little earlier – Three Days of the Condor, Serpico, The French Connection.

The man behind Amy and Senna has turned his attention to ‘techno-authoritarianism’ in the genre-defying 2073. He talks to our journalist – one of the movie’s unlikely stars – about the events that fed his dystopian vision

It was some time in the early 2000s and Asif Kapadia, already a successful film director, a wunderkind whose first feature in 2001, The Warrior, won the Bafta for outstanding British film, was travelling back from New York.

“There’s a beautiful, gorgeous sunset over Manhattan. I’m in a limo being taken to the airport. And I was taking photos of Manhattan because I was driving over Brooklyn Bridge and it’s just all so cinematic and I became subconsciously aware of the driver watching me in the rear view mirror.

His intense turn in Netflix’s smash hit thriller made the Croydon-born actor go global. Next up he’s playing Mufasa in the Lion King prequel. Bring on the big roles, he says

Imagine a young James Earl Jones, Darth Vader himself, if he was from south London. That’s how smooth and chill Aaron Pierre, 30-year-old actor and star of Netflix hit Rebel Ridge, sounds when he fixes you with his sea-green eyes and tells you how his day’s been going: “I’m still working myself out, you know? Still learning, still growing …� That voice, in combination with those eyes, commands an audience’s attention, even in relatively small roles. Such as when he played Cassio in a 2018 production of Othello at south London’s Globe; or a man escaping slavery alongside Thuso Mbedu in Prime Video’s 2021 Golden Globe-winning series The Underground Railroad.

The voice-eyes combo also marks Pierre out as a natural heir to Earl Jones, the veteran actor whose seven-decade career included the original Star Wars movies, as well as voicing Simba’s stern-but-loving father Mufasa in the animated Lion King movie back in 1994. It’s a role that Pierre will step into when the latest instalment in the franchise, a prequel to the photorealistic 2019 remake of the Disney classic, comes out later this month.

The former Take That star has made a biopic, Better Man, in which he’s played by a CGI chimpanzee. He talks about sex, drugs and the traumatic madness of 90s pop

In the grand retelling of his life, Robbie Williams wanted to be a lion. To be as strong, respected, and feared as the large cat tattooed on his right shoulder, or even as lithe as the tiger emblazoned on the front of his Rock DJ pants. “I was trying to find some self-worth at the time,� he says. “We all are, always. So I was like ‘I AM A LION!’�

Instead, in the gloriously bonkers musical biopic Better Man, from The Greatest Showman director Michael Gracey, Williams is played not as the King of the jungle but as a clownish, CGI chimp.

In their feverish film, Craig plays a man embroiled in a drug-fuelled gay affair. He and director Guadagnino talk about love, ageing – and a forgotten sex act

There is no shortage of directors who have made movies about gay life only to then backtrack and claim they were not specifically gay stories after all: Tom Ford did it with A Single Man, William Friedkin with both Cruising and The Boys in the Band. Luca Guadagnino, the director of Call Me By Your Name and this year’s steamy tennis romcom Challengers, is not about to play that game. “It is the most gigantic gay film in history,� he says of his latest picture, for which he recreated 1950s Mexico City on 12 stages at the Cinecittà studios in Rome. “I don’t think there has ever been a bigger gay movie.� Then again, he doesn’t have much wriggle room: the film is called Queer.

His feverish adaptation of William S Burroughs’s novel, which was written in the early 1950s but not published until 1985, concerns an American expat, William Lee, who locks eyes with a young stranger across a crowded cockfight. This is Eugene Allerton, a clean-cut, blade-like presence, played by Drew Starkey. And who should star as Lee, the gauche, fumbling, sweaty goofball, but Daniel Craig? If No Time to Die hadn’t killed off James Bond, Queer would have done it in a trice.

The director and actor talk about identifying with the angry lead in their new film Hard Truths – and why it took Netflix less than a minute to turn the movie down

Most days, Mike Leigh and Marianne Jean-Baptiste are divided by an ocean. The 81-year-old director has a home in Cornwall, while the 57-year-old actor moved to Los Angeles more than two decades ago in frustration at the dearth of roles available to her in the UK. This was even after she had been Oscar-nominated for Leigh’s 1996 masterpiece Secrets & Lies, in which she played an optometrist tracking down her biological mother.

Drinking tea today in a London hotel room, with Jean-Baptiste wearing circular black designer frames and Leigh resembling an off-duty farmer in his blue gilet, it is only a table that divides them. As they chat, one of them will occasionally reach across the gap in affection or solidarity. They can’t quite touch – their chairs are a shade too far apart – but the gesture is as fond as a squeeze of the hand.

The Call Me by Your Name director’s overlong William Burroughs adaptation boasts some fine performances, but any gritty realism feels totally manicured

The writing of William Burroughs is not for everyone. But even his detractors would agree that he was not in the business of prettification. His loosely autobiographical satires – Junkie, for example, or the novella Queer, which forms the basis for this film – embrace the brutish ugliness of base and animalistic urges. His was a defiantly unsavoury writing voice – prose that was rotten with self-loathing and reeking of stale beer sweat. Whatever else, it came from a place of unvarnished personal truth and authenticity. All of which makes the incongruous approach of Italian director Luca Guadagnino (Suspiria; Call Me by Your Name) to this sprawling adaptation of Burroughs’s self-lacerating 1985 story of obsession, addiction and burnout such a tonally jarring misfire.

Admittedly, the film talks the talk, with Burroughs’s words brought to bullish life by Daniel Craig’s ripe performance as William Lee, Burroughs’s alter ego and an American expat in 1950s Mexico City, who spends his time trawling the bars, bleary with tequila and sloppy with lust. Craig is terrific, delivering a wholly committed, vanity-free turn that weaves between swaggering self-importance and a complete lack of dignity. But his performance is continually undermined by the arch artificiality of the film’s design. Shot largely on a set constructed at Rome’s Cinecittà studios, the whole look of the picture screams phoniness. Obvious cinematic fakery isn’t always a problem; I adored Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, which might have been shot inside a giant snowglobe for all the effort it made to embrace realism. But for Burroughs’s worlds, all grit and spit and blood and bitterness, you need a backdrop smeared with the fingerprints of the past inhabitants; a sense that the streets have been lived in, slept and occasionally died on.

Ahead of Grand Theft Hamlet, in which Shakespeare’s play is staged entirely inside a video game, check out cinema’s avenging princes, from Laurence Olivier to Ethan Hawke

When I was 16, for a high school English assignment I composed a short play titled Deconstructing Hamlet, made up entirely of decontextualised quotes from Shakespeare’s play, all placed in conflicting dialogue with each other. It probably wasn’t as clever as I thought at the time, but it was early proof to me of the Danish tragedy’s endless adaptability – a virtue that the film industry has amply seized upon over the past century or so. Even with that in mind, Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane’s ingenious documentary Grand Theft Hamlet, in cinemas next month (and on Mubi early next year), stretches the point further than most, examining a lockdown staging of the play within the online digital realm of Grand Theft Auto, emerging as a strangely moving testament to the communal comforts of gaming and performance alike.

Hamlet has been filmed so frequently that it has earned something of a hiatus. The last major “straight� version on screen was Michael Almereyda’s 2000 version (on Apple TV+), with a moody Ethan Hawke as the procrastinating prince out for revenge on his elders. A modern-dress interpretation awash in glossy Y2K styling, it’s now pretty much a period piece capturing what seemed cool at the turn of the century. Hawke is rather good, but it’s undeniably try-hard, while its fashioning of Hamlet as a critique of corporate corruption, with Claudius as the CEO of “Denmark Corp�, had already been better done by Akira Kurosawa in his nasty, spiralling 1960 neo-noir The Bad Sleep Well (BFI Player).

From his killer two-note Jaws riff to the sheer uplift of Star Wars, Williams captures a movie’s essence with tunes that stick. Now the Hollywood great is celebrated in a Disney+ documentary

Some years ago I interviewed the British director Edgar Wright about his favourite soundtrack albums. I mentioned that, in the age before videos, I had owned and learned by heart the spoken-word-and-song soundtrack for the Magic Roundabout feature film Dougal and the Blue Cat. Wright reminded me that, in the 80s, there had been a tie-in Storybook album for Steven Spielberg’s ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, with Michael Jackson narrating the film and breaking down in tears when ET appears to die. The record also included John Williams’s score, which, as Wright noted, “told the story better than any narrator ever could�.

Now streaming on Disney+ is a new documentary, Music By John Williams, in which the French-American film-maker Laurent Bouzereau (creator of umpteen behind-the-scenes movie docs) interviews the American composer, who has defined the face of modern orchestral movie music. Williams’s recollections, from his earliest days as a hard-practising pianist (he has a background in jazz) to his blockbuster collaborations with film-makers such as Spielberg and George Lucas, are as clear and concise as his earworm theme tunes for Superman (1978), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Star Wars (1977) – the last of which spawned a double-LP soundtrack that became the biggest selling symphonic album of all time.

Arcola theatre, London
This recreation of Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic is frenetic fun, with the dinosaurs brought to life using physical comedy – and traffic cones

Hold on to your … what? Your enjoyment of this show may well depend on whether you recognise the title. Many will immediately recall a chain-smoking Samuel L Jackson uttering that warning of imminent jeopardy in Jurassic Park. Everybody else will be playing catch up as the 1993 dino saga is recreated with nerdy detail and velociraptor-like speed on a tiny stage using a budget more Scrooge than Spielberg.

Created by the US company Recent Cutbacks, it had a run this summer at the Edinburgh fringe where lo-fi pastiches of blockbusters have become a popular subgenre. Some, like Richard Marsh’s one-man Die Hard tribute Yippee Ki Yay, combine the retelling with new (in his case autobiographical) subplots. But this is a one-note spoof, the joke never amounting to much more than, say, depicting a triceratops with three party hats or substituting an open umbrella for a helicopter action sequence. At times the show gets bogged down – and confusing for Jurassic newbies – by rattling through plot points and minutiae from the movie rather than offering an extra dimension.

Our critic counts down the picks of this year’s bunch – a particularly edgy lot, featuring morbid jokes, profound loss and demonic possessions

Morbid jokes, profound loss, demonic possessions, extreme drug use – but enough about my weekend. This year’s best Australian films are a particularly edgy bunch, from black comedies to white-knuckle drama. To be eligible for this list, films must have had a release outside the festival circuit, either theatrically or via streaming.

Brady Corbet’s ambitious saga starring a fantastic Adrien Brody as a Hungarian architect seeking a new life in the US, is a colossal achievement

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The Childhood of a Leader, Brady Corbet’s swaggering 2015 debut feature about a fascist dictator in the making, wasn’t a masterpiece, but it held itself like one: declaratively, even cockily, ambitious in its thematic reach, formally grandiose in its execution. If you didn’t think it was a truly great film – if, like this critic, you found its brio verged on the pompous – it nonetheless promised one from the American actor turned director, then still a few years shy of 30. Vox Lux, his brilliant cracked-mirror portrait of the pop machine, enthralled many while deterring others, but in The Brutalist, here it finally and undeniably is: the big, brawny chef d’oeuvre that makes the case for Corbet joining the ranks of modern American majors.

That Corbet’s graduation in this respect is an epic-scale film about an artist doggedly pursuing his own legacy-sealing magnum opus – in this case, an architect designing a vast, imposingly severe mountain of concrete modernism, in the face of public scepticism and practical opposition – hasn’t escaped critical notice. On its festival debut in Venice, so many critics reached for the adjective “monumental� that A24 winkingly grouped their quotes together on a poster: uniform bricks of praise, if you will. And yes, at a muscularly sprawling, decades-spanning 215 minutes, elegantly bisected with a built-in interval, The Brutalist is a near-overwhelming feat of construction, inviting some degree of awe by sheer dint of heft.