Who is the most online filmmaker? Is it Radu Jude and his Andrew Tate Snapchat filters or Eugene Kotlyarenko, with his cast of brainrotted and vocal-fried internet obsessives? For all their hyper-contemporary themes and neo-Godardian doomscroll structures, neither have escaped the format and presentation of a traditional film. Their work is still made for a darkened room and big screen. But a new chronically online gigachad auteur has entered the chat – one with a wholly 21st-century visual language and distribution method to match the neurosis of our time.

This October, Conner O’Malley (with co-director Danny Scharar) released his latest film Rap World via YouTube. Set in 2009, this mockumentary (read: primitive vlog) follows Tobyhanna-based white rappers Matt (O’Malley) and Casey (Jack Bensinger) and their producer Jamie (Eric Rahill) as they record a make-or-break album in one evening. It’s their ticket out of a one-horse town, a bildungsroman that’ll fund the purchase of “a hundred Corvettes”. But, the trio’s progress is continually thwarted by procrastination: an impromptu photoshoot with a firearm, a house party, a “smoke sesh/concept talk”. Throughout they cross paths with other gridlocked young people unable to escape the cold grasp of Coolbaugh township, played by a murderer’s row of niche internet comics including Caleb Pitts and Edy Modica.

Like Stand-Up Solutions’ tech-bro-wannabe or The Mask’s failed improv guy, O’Malley’s characters are outcasts, the sub-hundred-follower set, for whom the internet age promised everything and left them with nothing. Rap World meets them post-financial collapse, an era branded with hope but belied by hopelessness. What else can you do besides hang out with friends and play Wii Sports?

The lost children of the internet are covered in more conventional films like Gia Coppola’s Mainstream, but what sets O’Malley apart is medium and form. His work is not made with the big screen in mind. It’s not a stretch to suggest someone might stumble across Rap World and believe it to be a genuine 2009 artefact until the credits roll. The form is also era-specific, all grainy, shaky and drowned in in-camera filters as if someone is experimenting with their digital video (DV) camera while bored. Nothing in the film is concerned with being ‘filmy’, the only concern is creating a faux document of early 21st-century malaise.

An apt – albeit unlikely – comparison is Aftersun, with both films using DV footage to capture tragedy in the lost and disenfranchised. But while Charlotte Wells’ film uses DV sparingly and as a conduit to the past, it’s a stylish quirk but not a necessity – merely giving the impression her film is more formally experimental than it is. O’Malley shows you can adhere to the form of a home movie and have pathos. The lack of a crystal clear Arri camera makes Rap World what it is, all the requisite tragedy can be captured on cameras the characters would use. 2023’s The Mask is equally as formally disciplined, mimicking a thirty-open-tab rabbit hole fall down different social media. Through a collage of TikToks, Instagram Lives and Facebook posts he creates a Schrader-esque portrait of tragic vigilantism. For O’Malley the visual language of the internet isn’t a helpful tool to apply modernity or style. It is the whole format.

Rap Worlds’s implicit political slant also feels more natural than Internet films with a capital I, which strain under the weight of their own importance. In an off-hand remark on a late-night drive to McDonald’s Matt (who is revealed to be thirty) confides that “I don’t think I want, or will even be able, to buy a house.” There is no dwelling on this admission, but the idea these three will never be able to escape their bleak hometown underlines every aspect of the film. Their financial situation gives them no vision beyond Tobyhannah, the dire American economy means Matt even forgoes buying cereal because “it’s too expensive” and if their album is a success they will remain ‘Tobyhanna lifers’ Casey claims. In a state of constant ennui, real life (Matt’s co-parenting and familial issues) is too real to confront, he and his crew retreat into half-imagined rap fantasies and eschew their government names for MC titles. Essentially, the internet made manifest.

This suburban despondence is as tangible and real as in any Mike Leigh film – it’s Meantime for middle America. In cultivating and adhering to realism, it feels like a riff on Leigh’s process that ensures actors can interact with any part of the set. It’s as if any moment a character could open a closet to throw on a skull graphic tee or find a Chronicles of Riddick DVD on the floor. O’Malley understands how essential realism is in the attention economy; the cultural dominance of farm-to-table short-form means videos filmed in bedrooms and on high streets are now far more relevant and eyeball-grabbing than traditional long-form comedic fiction. Any feature film has to compete with countless, leaner, TikToks. For every Anora, there are a million Hailey Welchs. Rather than trying to retro-engineer a funny internet video into film form, O’Malley goes full vérité making a film à la vlog. It even ended up where it would have had the protagonist distributed it: YouTube.

This sense of verisimilitude is helped by the amateurish production values from the fictional filmmaker behind the camera. Rap World is cut as if the editor is only ever a second away from losing interest in the scene, and the erratic uses of royalty-free music cues and on-screen text, which only serve to reiterate what the audience is seeing, establish a cutting style that’s so 2009. This is a character still grappling with the weight of iMovie’s VFX war chest before amateur content production was synthesised into the sleek Get Ready With Me or rapid-fire cooking video formats enabled by rapidly evolving iPhones and the in-app intuitive editing options offered by TIkTok and Instagram. Likewise, the dialogue has a proto-shitposting quality; O’Malley’s characters are the millennial patient zeros of constant media consumption and unable to communicate outside of it. You could pull any line of dialogue and it would make a great @dril post.

Rap World is not just accessible on a 21st-century platform, it adopts a visual language that suits the platform. It’s a film tailored to your iPhone. This is cinema made for the internet, not about the internet. But for all its Web 2.0 literacy, its greatest strength is the protagonist’s earnestness. All every O’Malley character wants is connection – a real one, not a WiFi password.

In a green, rural backwater of Costa Rica, middle-aged Clara (Wendy Chinchilla Araya) is in arrested development. She lives in a secluded forest with her hyper-religious family, yet her burgeoning sexuality is stimulated by everything from soap operas to soil. And all this is underscored by a hodgepodge of references to the Virgin Mary.

It’s a film apt for current socio-political climes, as the verdant beauty of nature is framed as a cure-all for woes, and it’s where Clara finds solace. Nathalie Álvarez Mesén’s film remains slightly distanced throughout, raking back the sand of her imagery but never really digging deep. The film treats its subjects as Clara’s family do her – at arm’s length.

And yet, the feverish and feral performance by Araya drags the film back from operating as a wispy metaphor. For Clara, every noise or voice offers an eerie reminder of her real life, and pulls her back from this waking dream. Clara is always on the precipice of eruption; her simmering exasperation is just waiting to transform into bubbling hellfire. This works as a metaphor for the film as a whole, which is always reaching towards its ideas and themes but never truly grasping them. Ironically, for a story about a woman who struggles to express herself, the film tangles itself in knots with its ill-defined ideas.

From The Favourite to Dickinson, anachronism has become a popular trope of the post-millennium period piece, where 18th-century Queen’s parties are soundtracked by New Order and wigged Whigs breakdance. Few films have had as profound an influence on this trend as Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract, bringing an abundance of absurdity into this once prim and stuffy genre.

Mr Neville (Anthony Higgins), a conceited, darkly handsome artist, is hired to produce 12 landscape drawings for Mrs Herbert’s (Janet Suzman) distant husband – an offer the opportunistic Mr Neville only accepts in return for sex. He produces a different pencil sketch of the exterior each day, demanding an unimpaired view of the house. But Mr Neville’s lack of cathedral thinking ultimately leads to his downfall.

The idea for The Draughtsman’s Contract was born out of a holiday to Hay-on-Wye in which the director spent his time drawing the local architecture. Mr Neville is a man with clear but outlandish demands, and it is not hard to see him as a surrogate for Greenaway. Throughout his filmmaking career, Greenaway has always questioned the role of the artist, and the hands in Mr Neville’s drawing are in fact the director’s own.

Twenty-four years before Sofia Coppola brought Converse into the 18th century, Greenaway envisioned a film engorged with anachronisms. An initial three-hour cut featured a cordless telephone and the director’s own approximations of Roy Liechtenstein paintings on the walls. Unlike the drawings in the film, Greenway interpolates, and never imitates. He presents history through a distorted circus mirror, Mannerism warped with a 20th-century attitude. A history where draughtsmen throw apples at statues and everyone speaks in a surreal panto-timbre.

In recent years, Greenaway has been vocal about the need for an ‘image-based cinema’. Yet in this cutting comedy of manners he allows his grasp of the English language to shine, with deliciously acerbic lines such as “Carp live too long, they remind him of Catholics” and “Why is this Dutchman wagging his arms about, is he homesick for windmills?” It might be a stretch to suggest that the film acts as a kind of proto-Twitter, where funny quips and one-upmanship are used in lieu of level-headed discussion, but a barb aimed at Mr Neville, “I will cancel your eyes,” has an unintended pertinence today. Had it been released today, one can easily imagine the film being endlessly quoted and memed online.

Greenaway adopts a less-is-more visual approach, the elongated, wide-angle shots spotlighting the military-grade quips and palatial setting. The once aspiring painter made the switch to film after stumbling across Last Year at Marienbad and Breathless. Here he has his cake and eats it, referencing 17th-century painting and ’60s Euro cinema. The operatic tableaus on display here could have been pulled straight out of the Renaissance era. The long tracking shots over dinner feel like the French New Wave estimation of a Rembrandt, a subject Greenaway would return to 26 years later.

The Draughtsman’s Contract is a film of old clothes and new attitudes. Of verbose language and Barry Lyndon-esque visual symmetry. Black-and-white sketches backdropped by painterly cinematography. And then there’s the score by Micheal Nyman, a composer who found his voice playing Mozart like Jerry Lee Lewis, which recalls dance music with its subtly varied repetition (although the harpsichord transports you straight to 17th century England). Nyman’s work reflects the bravado and routined excesses of the characters, employing a range of historically inaccurate instruments. It’s no surprise that the piece ‘Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds’ was sampled by the Pet Shop Boys on 2013’s ‘Electric’.

In many ways, The Draughtsman’s Contract feels like an hors-d’œuvre for Greenaway’s 1989 Thatcher-satire The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, which dials up the grotesqueness of his characters to 11 and features an even louder, longer Nyman score. “I do not disguise or disassemble” says Mr Neville at one point in the film, but Greenaway dismantles the past and disguises it with his own image. However, the impending (and historically accurate) Married Women’s Property Act hangs over the male characters.

This is where the influence of Greenaway’s film can be felt most keenly today. Just as Mr Neville is finally outmanoeuvred by Mrs Herbert and Mrs Talmann – his lifeless body discarded in the moat – so the women of modern period pieces like Hulu’s The Great take control from their foolish and impotent male counterparts.

Here we go again. All Quiet on the Western Front ’22 is the first German-language adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s classic war novel, not a remake of the 1930 Hollywood film of the same name. Although the filmmakers would have you believe this is an entirely fresh update, increasingly war films of this ilk are a dime a dozen on Netflix.

We find Paul (Felix Kammerer) cycling down the sparse cobbled streets of wartime Europe on his way to join the war effort. As a baby-faced 17-year-old he must lie about his age in order to enlist with his mates. When Paul is handed his uniform, he naively thinks it’s someone else’s – it has someone else’s name on it, after all. He swiftly becomes a shell of his former self as he traipses towards the Western Front, his friends by this point either estranged or dead, his youthful joie de vivre replaced by zombified attrition.

The film is peppered with tender, albeit heavy-handed, metaphors for the loss of innocence experienced by young men like Paul: fox cubs snuggling up to their mother; a small beetle being encased in a matchbox. But any respite from the tub-thumping ‘this is war’ violence is short-lived. The film’s Netflix-ready sheen also renders much of the action coldly anonymous. For the most part, this is war-by-numbers.

Meanwhile, Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl) and General Friedrich (Devid Striesow) clash behind the scenes over how the war should be fought: the former a jaded peacemaker; the latter a wannabe soldier who never fought. Brühl and Striesow display serious pathos, their faces as heavy and worn as the soldiers’ boots – by focusing on this pairing, director Edward Berger provides much-needed nuance away from Paul and his fellow soldiers.

Much like Volker Bertelmann’s score, however, which oscillates between delicate strings and stabbing synths, Berger’s film flits between minor and major keys without finding a harmonious balance. It’s a workmanlike addition to the anti-war genre, and you’ve almost certainly heard this tune before.

The Terrence Malick rumour mill was set spinning in 2019, as Mark Rylance was poised to begin shooting the director’s then-titled passion project The Last Planet. “Terry wrote four versions of the character of Satan,” he revealed, “and I thought I would play only one. But I heard I was going to play all four.”

Filming got underway soon after, moving from Iceland to southern Italy before wrapping in Rome. Karim Debbagh, one of 14 producers listed in the credits, described the film as a “highly spiritual experience” that puts a “dark genre twist” on the Good Book.

The film’s IMDb page shows grainy set photos of a betrilbied Malick standing next to a donkey with Poldark’s Aidan Turner. The logline of the since retitled The Way of the Wind (which will no doubt be released under a new moniker) is ‘A retelling of several episodes in the life of the Christ,’ including passages that bear a resemblance to the Book of Job, which Malick previously covered in 2011’s The Tree of Life. The director’s recent output has been lauded, but will his first direct adaptation of scripture alienate non-believers?

In typical style, Malick has assembled a cast of A-listers and art-house darlings. Géza Röhrig will play Christ, Matthias Schoenaerts will play Saint Peter, and former heart-throb du jour Douglas Booth, who Malick mistook on the phone for Douglas Hodge, will appear in an as yet unspecified role.

Malick will also reunite with his A Hidden Life star Franz Rogowski and director of photography Jörg Widmer, so expect more wide-lensed, naturally-lit cinematography. In 2020, Eleni Karaindrou (Ulysses’ Gaze) was enlisted to compose the score.

With little more than a peep from the actors involved, online speculators have begun to question the status of the film. Despite cropping up on annual ‘films to look forward to’ lists, Malick’s marathon editing process has seemingly left the project in limbo. Earlier this year, reports suggested that Cannes head Thierry Frémaux and Malick had conversations for a walk down the Croisette, which didn’t come to pass.

The rumour mill claims that it may end up as an ‘unfinished symphony’. But with post-production on Knight of Cups and Song to Song taking three and five years respectively, it’s still too early to say when it will be ready.

Malick’s acolytes can only pray at the altar in the hope of a trailer, first-look image or fresh announcement. Martin Scorsese spoke at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival about how Malick wrote him a letter after watching Silence, asking ‘What does Christ want from us?’ Maybe, in The Way of the Wind, he will find his answer.