In light of thinking about Zoë Kravitz’s extraordinary directorial debut, Blink Twice, we noticed that there’s a secret history of female actors who have taken up the mantle of director that stretches back to the medium’s formative days. This is not a qualitative survey, more a potted history of female screen performers who have been able shift to the other side of the camera, and hopefully these 50 capsule reviews, when taken together, gives a sense of the sweep, the evolving styles and the eventual surfeit of opportunity in an industry that, for its first century, seemed to frame directing as a male-only sport. Please note: in the instances we detail below, we do not see the move from actor to director as being hierarchical in any way – they are two distinct roles which require a unique set of physical and emotional tools to do them well.

1. Assunta Spina (1915)
Directed by Francesca Bertini

There are film historians who claim that this Italian melodrama from 1915, co-directed by Gustavo Serena and silent era diva, Francesca Bertini, offers the blueprint for a mode of filmmaking later referred to as neorealism. And it’s easy to see why. It is the story of jealousy, male rage and rigid conservatism in the streets of Napoli, as the lustrous heroine of the tile (played by Bertini) has her face slashed with a knife by her husband when she dares to dance with the local fishmonger at a wedding party. The first half of the film details Assunta’s flighty whims and feminine charms, not so much a femme fatale as a liberated woman during a time and in a place where such freedoms were frowned upon. The second half moves into the courtroom, and the shock revelation that Assunta choses to defend the actions of her barbarous beau, much to the consternation of her friends and family. And yes, the kernel of neorealism is there to see, in its raw depiction of the political degradations of the era. David Jenkins

2. The Dream Lady (1918)
Directed by Alice Guy/Elsie Jane Wilson

One of the surest ways to direct a movie as a woman in early Hollywood was to work with your husband – such married duos included Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley, Helen Holmes and JP McGowan, and Elsie Jane Wilson and Rupert Julian. That final pairing set sail for the United States from Australia after years of acting, landing in Hollywood in 1914. After starring in films alongside Lon Chaney, Wilson was called upon by Universal Pictures to direct several “women’s pictures”, often centring on children. Her surviving feature, The Dream Lady (1918), is much more intriguing than such dismissive branding suggests. It fits into a curious category of gender-play movies made in Hollywood in the early silent era, with the title character played by Carmel Myers granting a young woman’s wish to become male, with bisexual romantic antics ensuing. A great shame then that Wilson’s film career came to an abrupt end shortly after. Lillian Crawford

3. The Girl in Tails (1926)
Directed by Karin Swanström

The Girl in Tails is one of two surviving films (from a total of four) directed by actress and longtime thespian Karin Swanström, and it’s for that reason that her name is not so well known when it comes to the classic era of Swedish cinema. Swanström’s name is etched into the annals of film history for being the person who discovered Ingrid Bergman while working as a studio talent scout. Yet this film demonstrates an easy knack for comic levity and spry social satire, as it follows young Katja (Magda Holm) as she heads to her examination ball in a man’s coat and tails because her widower father refuses to shell out for a dress. In her new gender-twisting guise, she smokes cigars and quaffs whiskey, and generally socks it to the conservative hoi poloi. DJ

4. The Red Meadows (1945)
Directed by Bödil Ipsen, Lau Lauritzen Jr.

This flinty document of wartime derring-do netted the Palme d’Or for its makers in 1945, and it’s not difficult to see why. Directed by Bödil Ipsen, who had acted through much of the silent era, The Red Meadows trains its focus on double- hard Danish resistance fighter Michael (Poul Reichhardt) who undertakes a grandiose factory bombing during the Nazi occupation despite believing that there’s a traitor in the midst of his close-knit crew. Ibsen and co-director Lau Lauritzen Jr bring a feeling of luxe Hollywood craftsmanship to a hard-nosed thriller with a genuinely complex moral core. Ipsen kept directing into the early 1950s, before she capped off her career by returning to acting, receiving a Bodil Award for her turn as a grandma in Eric Balling’s Faith, Hope and Witchcraft from 1960. DJ

5. Death is a Caress (1949)
Directed by Edith Calmar

Norway’s answer to Ingmar Bergman was a woman; Edith Carlmar to be exact. Though she worked more regularly as an actor, her 10-year directorial career proffered a bounty of exciting and passionate works which merged Hollywood standards such as noir and melodrama with a more solemn, Scandinavian sense of depressive fatalism. Her debut feature, Death is a Caress from 1949, suggests itself as a classic tale of murder, dames, liquor and hard love. Sonja (Bjørg Riiser-Larsen) swings her car into a local mechanics, only to have one of the more dashing grease monkeys, Eric (Claus Wiese), throw aside his whale sausage (!) and go in for the romantic kill. Yet this is a flashback, as the film’s opening scene sees Eric confessing to the murder of his wife. It’s an emotionally tortuous ride, with the pair falling in and out of love with one another depending on where they are, what they’re doing and how much they’ve drunk. DJ

6. The Bigamist (1953)
Directed by Ida Lupino

If there was a Mount Rushmore of female Hollywood filmmakers, Ida Lupino would be the first face carved on it. While better known in her day as an actor, Lupino’s crowning achievements – for which she remains criminally overlooked – came behind the camera. In the early 1950s, she helmed a string of pictures for RKO including the socially conscious noir, Outrage, and the tennis romance, Hard, Fast and Beautiful! (the OG Challengers!). After parting ways with RKO, Lupino and then-husband Collier Young went fully independent, self-financing and distributing The Bigamist at great personal expense. Creatively speaking, it was worth it. This stylish, superbly acted film follows Harry Graham (Edmond O’Brien), a travelling salesman constantly yo-yoing between two wives (played by Joan Fontaine and Lupino herself ). Harry’s double life quickly unravels after an adoption agency looks into his background, with Lupino treating this morally complex taboo subject with great empathy and emotional intelligence. Adam Woodward

7. Forever a Woman (1955)
Directed by Kinuyo Tanaka

Kinuyo Tanaka is one of Japan’s defining screen icons. Among the most popular stars of pre-war Japanese films, she continued to have a prolific acting career in the post-war landscape, working with such directing titans as Yasujirō Ozu, Mikio Naruse and Kenji Mizoguchi. In 1953, Tanaka became the second Japanese woman to direct a feature, after Tazuko Sakane. Each broadly concerned with different notions of femininity, her six films as director include some of the most exquisite dramas of Japanese cinema’s history. Forever a Woman – also known as The Eternal Breasts – may be her masterpiece. Written by outspoken feminist Sumie Tanaka, the film adapts the biography of poet Fumiko Nakajō, who died young of breast cancer. Offering a daring depiction of female desire enduring in defiance of societal expectations, this is a deeply moving story of securing self-expression and autonomy in spite of all manner of hardships. Josh Slater-Williams

8. El Camino (1964)
Directed by Ana Mariscal

A glamorous screen icon of General Franco’s Spain, Ana Mariscal was a mainstay of local cinema screens during the 1940s. That is until 1953 when she suddenly tried her hand at writing, producing and directing, along with acting, in her debut feature, the rip-roaring Segundo López, Urban Adventurer. She remained primarily an actor while occasionally crossing over to the dark side, and her best film arrived in 1964 called El Camino, telling of a young country boy and the hijinx that he and his friends get up to ahead of his departure to the city for more scholarly pursuits. Though the film and Mariscal’s work in general are little-known outside of her home country, El Camino was recently the subject of a new restoration which premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. DJ

9. The Girls (1968)
Directed by Mai Zetterling

Mai Zetterling should be more famous outside of her native Sweden than she currently is. The tide may be turning, however, as in a bizarre algorithmic anomaly, her astonishing 1968 film The Girls (among many other canonical classics of Swedish cinema not directed by Ingmar Bergman) can be found languishing in their own digital cul-de-sac on Netflix of all places. She was a child star with her career kick-started by an iconic role in Bergman’s 1944 film Torment. 20 years and countless roles later, she made the hard transition to directing and gave up her work in front of the camera. Following her erotic cause celebre, Loving Couples, which blazed an early trail for screen nudity, she returned with her wild feminist masterpiece, The Girls, in which the all-female cast of a production of Aristophanes’s Lysistrata must contend with the domestic expectations that come as part and parcel of the gender. DJ

10. Wanda (1970)
Directed by Barbara Loden

According to the 2022 Sight & Sound poll of the greatest films of all time, Barbara Loden’s sole directorial effort, Wanda, is more beloved than anything made by her more famous husband, Elia Kazan, none of whose work managed to place within the top 250. She came up as a theatre actress, and worked in various supporting roles for film and TV, most notably her turn as the chaotic lush Ginny in Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass. For many decades, Wanda was the small indie film that nobody loved – so much so that its original negative was neatly thrown out as trash before some plucky restoration experts saved it. The film sees Loden playing a discombobulated, down-and-out nomad who abandons her child and hits the road. Instead, she finds winos, abusers and petty criminals who use her as they would a soiled rag. Its dismal subject matter belies a core of transcendent truth about what it really means to be a woman. DJ

11. A New Leaf (1971)
Directed by Elaine May

There’s a very fine new biography of Elaine May on the shelves now called ’Miss May Does Not Exist’ by Carrie Courogen which details the grand sweep of her turbulent career in much more detail that we have space for here. Rather than film acting, Ms May earned her spurs in the field of improvisational comedy (head to page 74 for more details on that), and she soon went on to direct and star in the macabre, self-lacerating comedy, A New Leaf, alongside Water Matthau. The question one might ask of this film is not whether it is one of the funniest debut films of all time, but whether it’s one of the funniest screen comedies period, as the action details one man’s sordid quest to murder his wife for money. In this instance it’s the criminally-shy (and fabulously wealthy) botanist Henrietta Lowell (May). The set-up may be simple, but every frame is wrung dry for comic nuance. DJ

12. 36 Chowringhee Lane (1981)
Directed by Aparna Sen

Aparna Sen was credited with redefining Bengali cinema in 1981 with the release of her devastating melodrama about the crushing loneliness and fading spirit of an Anglo- Indian teacher played by Jennifer Kendall. An actress who began her career in Satyajit Ray’s anthology film Three Daughters, and worked with him on three further films, went on to create cinema full of similar social commentary on contemporary India. Her father was filmmaker and critic Chidananda Das Gupta who, along with Ray, founded the Calcutta Film Society. She first decided to turn to writing and directing when sitting bored in her dressing room on the set of a mainstream Bombay film and working in the kind of cinema she “did not believe in.” 36 Chowringhee Lane works on multiple levels in its themes of exclusion, solitude and the place of the Anglo-Indian in society while also being exquisitely crafted, especially the haunting Bergmanesque nightmare sequence. Kat McLaughlin

13. Be Pretty and Shut Up! (1981)
Directed by Delphine Seyrig

Several years before the “Bechdel Test” – wherein two female characters must talk about anything other than a man – appeared, Delphine Seyrig posed a similar question to a group of 22 actresses. Among them were Jenny Agutter, Jane Fonda, Maria Schneider, Shirley MacLaine, and other stars from Hollywood and Europe, none of whom could say that they had ever played a woman who had a warm relationship with another woman. Seyrig herself traversed both sides of the Atlantic in her acting career, coming to prominence in 1961’s Last Year at Marienbad, and became energised by parts in films directed by women, including Marguerite Duras and Chantal Akerman. Seyrig ’s brief directorial turn was more radical, more cinéma vérité in style, forming the collective Les Insoumuses in 1975 with Carole Roussopoulos and Iona Wieder to tear down patriarchal cinema. Be Pretty and Shut Up! is the masterpiece of that period, giving voice to the real women behind the fake ones. LC

14. Yentl 1983
Directed by Barbra Streisand

This one’s a bit of a cheat, as Streisand obviously made the lion share of her scratch from her work as a beloved musical artist. But, like many in that game, the siren call of cinema was too much to resist, and she built up a rather tasty acting portfolio in the sixties, with films like Funny Girl, What’s Up, Doc? and mega weepie, The Way We Were. Her 1983 directorial debut, Yentl, remains a staggering achievement, not merely for her central dual performance as a cross- dressing waif attempting to climb the all-male rungs of the local rabbinical school, but down to the incredible assurance of her direction and the film’s immersive period production design. It’s a film which allows Streisand to trade punches with the best prestige talent of the 1980s, and she went on to become the first woman to win a Best Director gong at the Golden Globe Awards. DJ

15. Ratboy (1986)
Directed by Sondra Locke

It is one of the great sorrows in the history of cinema that Sondra Locke’s life and career have become so inextricably tangled with the one of Clint Eastwood, her co-star in classics such as Bronco Billy and The Outlaw Josey Wales and the man with whom she shared a notoriously toxic relationship. After long wanting to direct, Locke finally got her chance with Ratboy, produced by Eastwood and telling the story of a, well, rat boy. A commercial and critical fiasco, this eccentric love story between an unusual boy and an older woman who explores him for financial gain found its rightful place within the generous bosom of cult cinephilia over time. It is strange and whimsical and often incoherent but a blast nonetheless and, in a painfully ironic twist, now stands as a reminder of what could have been had Locke not bumped into a few rats of her own. Rafa Sales Ross

16. Down and Out in America (1986)
Directed by Lee Grant

Three years before Michael Moore coined the blockbuster documentary with Roger & Me, classic-era actress Lee Grant took her own stinging sideswipe at the scourge of Reaganomics with her devastating, hour-long reportage piece, Down and Out in America. Grant speaks to independent farmers being stiffed and left destitute by local banks in Minnesota; the denizens of a parking lot shanty town in Los Angeles; and a desperate family who have been corralled into a festering helltrap known as a “welfare hotel” in New York. Grant was probably best known as one of the mainstays of the iconic soap opera Peyton Place, but is known now primarily for her documentary work, which was placed on a pedestal early in the Covid pandemic when she became one of the first subjects to receive an online retrospective which included all-new restorations of her vital work. DJ

17. Stripped to Kill (1987)
Directed by Katt Shea

Katt Shea was cast in a fair share of tawdry exploitation flicks throughout her acting career, racking up small roles in classics such as Scarface, Barbarian Queen and Psycho III, where she ended up meeting B-movie stalwart Roger Corman. With aspirations to one day make her own films, Shea presented Corman with the premise that would launch her directorial career: a sleazy slasher set largely in a strip club. A detective (Kay Lenz) goes undercover as a stripper in order to find the killer, all while the bodies continue to pile up. The result was 1987’s Stripped to Kill, an entertaining, straight to video sexploitation flick that announced Shea as someone who can confidently navigate her way around the stylish yet trashy genre film. Shea is also clearly well-intentioned in the way she depicts the strippers as people with lives and personalities, treating the artistry behind their routines with the sense of spectacle that slashers more commonly tend to lend to their kills. Marina Ashioti

18. Little Man Tate (1991)
Directed by Jodie Foster

The year 1991 was something of an annus mirabilis for Jodie Foster. February saw the release of Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, the film that would earn Foster her second Oscar and for which she is probably still best known. Six months later, she rolled out with her directorial debut, Little Man Tate, the story of a boy genius who struggles under the weight of his intellectual burden. Being a former child star herself, it’s not hard to see why Scott Frank’s screenplay appealed to Foster – and in playing the title character’s hard- working single parent, she delivers one of the most sensitive and moving performances of her career. Foster returned to the big chair four years later for the frothy Thanksgiving family comedy Home for the Holidays, since then has continued to dabble behind the camera (The Beaver, Money Monster). “This is not a business that is kind to women, but it needs them,” she told TIME in 1991. Truer words have rarely been spoken. AW

19. Unstrung Heroes (1995)
Directed by Diane Keaton

Diane Keaton famously made the decision to prevent being typecast as a lovable ditz following her Oscar win for Annie Hall by starring in more “adult-oriented” films such as Looking for Mr Goodbar and Interiors. Her sporadic side hustle as a director, which began in 1995 with the winsome Unstrung Heroes, suggested that she was done with the darkness, as the film offers a rose-tinted rendering of Franz Lidz’ bestselling memoir which detailed his youthful interactions with two eccentric uncles. Keaton takes a leaf out of the Woody Allen book of period recreation, offering a larger-than-life, Rockwell-esque depiction of working-middle class life 1960s Los Angeles. It’s a film of comic platitudes and goofy set-pieces, with Seinfeld star Michael Richards as the dangerously impulsive MVP, playing paranoiac extrovert, Danny. Prior to this feature, Keaton had earned her spurs directing music videos, various episodes of Twin Peaks season two, and even a 1987 documentary on the concept of the afterlife (entitled Heaven). Yet any and all eccentricity had been watered down by the time of the charming but eminently forgettable Unstrung Heroes. DJ

20. Private Parts (1997)
Directed by Betty Thomas

A member of The Second City improv troupe (alongside Bill Murray), Betty Thomas’ screen breakthrough came via drama rather than comedy. A main cast member on influential police procedural Hill Street Blues (1981-87), Thomas won an Emmy and received six further nominations for best supporting actress across the show’s run. She practically retired from acting after the series ended, switching to directing TV and then movies. Mostly directing comedies, her filmography includes several modern updates of pre-existing properties, such as The Brady Bunch Movie (1995) and Doctor Dolittle (1998). Her most stylistically bold movie is Private Parts (1997), a comic biopic of controversial media personality Howard Stern, in which Stern plays himself, repeatedly breaking the fourth wall. Profoundly unfunny, the film nonetheless endures as a fascinating cultural artefact concerning a mainstream hit stemming from a shock jock’s self-mythologising. JSW

21. Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl (1998)
Directed by Joan Chen

Like many, I personally discovered Joan Chen’s directorial debut through Jamie Stewart, who, tonally influenced by the film’s emotionally distressing core, named their experimental rock band Xiu Xiu. Another fun trivia fact is that Chen is best known for her role as Josie Packard in Twin Peaks, and in 2016, Xiu Xiu would release a haunting tribute album composed of cover songs from the Twin Peaks soundtrack, but I digress. Chen’s debut is at once a beautiful, deeply devastating and difficult to stomach picture, made as a response to a brutal government policy in ’70s cultural revolution-era China that relocated millions of Chinese youth to the countryside for a life of forced labour. It’s a harrowing indictment of the violence, greed and corruption that would rob the hopes, dreams and futures of an entire generation in the name of “progress”, and especially of the horrible treatment faced by the young girls who would be separated from their families and forcibly robbed of their bodily autonomy. MA

22. Faithless (2000)
Directed by Liv Ullmann

By comparison to Ingmar Bergman’s six-hour 1973 miniseries Scenes from a Marriage, the 154-minute Faithless is short. Both films exist in familiar Bergman territory of infidelity and divorce, with the key distinction that the director’s former partner Liv Ullmann is present in front of the camera in the former and behind it in the latter. Ullmann had previously directed one other film, Sofie in 1992, before turning to the script Bergman wrote about a woman reflecting on the affair which destroyed her marriage. At no point can Faithless be described as an “Ullmann film” rather than a Bergman one. If anything, it is Bergman pastiche—there’s a music box which plays an excerpt from Mozart’s ‘The Magic Flute’, sumptuous reds and desolate rooms, even an elderly filmmaker living on Farö called Bergman. It is the film of an old lover carrying out Bergman’s vision at the end of his life. LC

23. In My Skin (2002)
Directed by Marina De Van

In films such as François Ozon’s Sitcom and his early short, See the Sea, French actress Marina de Van cut a compellingly unstable and otherworldly figure on the screen. The logic of her move to directing seems sound, as is the fact that with her debut feature In My Skin she made what is – for this writer – one of the most uncomfortable and gruelling explorations of the uneasy relationships between body and mind that’s ever been etched to celluloid. It’s a gore flick with a twist, once which presents bodily mutilation with a rare medical matter- of-factness and sensuality, with de Van playing a woman who becomes obsessed with a festering gash on her legs that she receives while at a party. The film was inspired by de Van’s own complex relationship with her body, and is currently awaiting a plush Blu-ray release and its due acceptance as a singular modern classic. DJ

24. Slap her… She’s French (2002)
Directed by Melanie Mayron

Anyone who thinks the verb “to stan” derived from the Eminem song of the same name about one of Slim Shady’s obsessive fans is dead wrong. The reality, if fact, is that it’s a diminutive of Stanley Kubrick, who fanboyed all over Claudia Weill’s 1978 film Girlfriends, which starred Melanie Mayron as an unlucky-in-love New Yorker just trying to get through the day without being humiliated. It’s a great film which revolves around an incredible central performance, yet Mayron moved to directing shortly after her stints on camera and has never looked back. In 2002, she was airlifted into the shoot of the evocatively titled Slap Her… She’s French when the original director dropped out, and ended up making an extremely weird and lightly subversive high school comedy about a narcissistic queen bee (Jane McGregor’s Starla Grady) and her self-serving decision to take in a French exchange student (Piper Perabo’s Genevieve LePlouff ). It’s very rough around the edges, but it has some interesting visual motifs, and Mayron definitely has the type of dry sense of humour that can enhance wacky material such as this. DJ

25. The Dead Girl (2006)
Directed by Karen Moncrieff

There’s a pattern of actresses attaining a level of fame and creative freedom before making the move to directing, but sometimes the switch can occur within a more low-key context. Karen Moncrieff worked as a successful TV actor throughout the ’90s, biding her time perhaps before she put a full stop on that career and started a new one as a writer/ director, something she’s been doing since her 2002 debut, Blue Car. Today we’re focusing on her second feature, the grim, bifurcated and weirdly radical drama, The Dead Girl from 2006, which brings together a star-studded cast (Toni Collette, Brittany Murphy, Rose Byrne, Marcia Gay Harden, Mary Beth Hurt) to offer five different perspectives on the tragic and violent death of a sex worker. This underrated, Carver-esque tale places a local serial killer in the backdrop and explores intimate and occasionally incomprehensible human reactions to situations such as these. DJ

26. Waitress (2007)
Directed by Adrienne Shelly

This is a film not to be viewed on an empty stomach. Written and directed by Adrienne Shelly, who also appears in a small supporting role, Waitress is the story of small-town Southern gal Jenna (a sparkling Keri Russell), who finds solace from her abusive marriage in the simple act of baking. Specifically, Jenna loves to make pies – pies of every conceivable shape, size and flavour. There’s the Naughty Pumpkin Pie, the Jenna’s First Kiss Pie, the I Don’t Want Earl’s Baby Pie (a blue-plate special) and, of course, the I Can’t Have No Affair Because It’s Wrong And I Don’t Want Earl To Kill Me Pie. Inventive and witty, sweet yet unsentimental, it’s the kind of romantic comedy that American cinema seems to have forgotten how to make. Tragically, Shelly’s promising directorial career was cut short – she was murdered just a few months before the film made its premiere at Sundance – but Waitress remains a charming, sugar-coated testament to her talent both as a filmmaker and a performer. AW

27. Two Days in Paris (2007)
Directed by Julie Delpy

Julie Delpy is unforgettable as the hilariously frank and deeply thoughtful Celine in Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy. Following the success of Before Sunset and after struggling to get funding for multiple screenplays, Delpy pitched an idea for a similar rom-com featuring herself playing a French woman in a relationship with an American. Delpy was born into an acting family and cast at the age of 14 in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1984 Detective. She then studied film at NYU and shifted predominantly between European and US arthouse working with Krzysztof Kieslowski, Jim Jarmusch and Agnieszka Holland. The tortuous nature of love has been a theme in many of her roles and she continued that with Two Days in Paris; a verbose tour around various exes and a frustrating relationship with a neurotic boyfriend. It’s a sharply observed, if occasionally obvious, culture clash comedy where Delpy plays a satisfyingly hot-mess of a woman. KM

28. Whip It (2009)
Directed by Drew Barrymore

From the small girl in Spielberg’s E.T. to one of Charlie’s Angels and Adam Sandler’s greatest recurring screen partner, Drew Barrymore is one of the most successful sweethearts in the history of America’s sweethearts. After producing for 15 years, the actress fell in love with Shauna Cross’ book about a group of roller derby players, first acquiring the rights for her production company and eventually making it her directorial debut. The result is a lively and all-around great time tale of female camaraderie that only ever falters when it steps away from the women and introduces a wannabe rockstar as the love interest to Elliot Page’s delightfully named Bliss Cavendar. Still, there is much fun to be had with this classic sports comedy featuring an all-timer 2000s cast in Kristen Wiig, Alia Shawkat, Marcia Gay Harden and Barrymore herself. RSR

29. Higher Ground (2011)
Directed by Vera Farmiga

Best known for her Academy Award-nominated performance in the film Up in The Air, Vera Farmiga made her directorial debut with the 2011 film Higher Ground, a narrative of one woman’s lifelong struggle with faith. Farmiga initially intended only to act in the film, but when financing fell through, Tim Metcalfe, one of the screenwriters, proposed that she take on the role of director. Farmiga was drawn to the story’s twists and strong female friendships, saying it ‘pumped air’ into her spiritual life. Premiering at Sundance in 2011, it received good reviews and was nominated for the Grand Jury prize. However, with only a limited release in the US, it wasn’t a huge success at the box office – a disappointing outcome, as the film’s agnostic approach makes for a sincere and thought-provoking picture. Since then, Farmiga has produced 40 episodes of the thriller series Bates Motel, but is yet to direct again. Madeleine Wilson

30. The Adopted (2011)
Directed by Mélanie Laurent

The Anglophone world knows Mélanie Laurent best for her Nazi-bashing turn in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), but the French actress has had a rich career in her home country. Born in Paris in 1983 to a ballerina and the man who voices Ned Flanders in the French version of The Simpsons, Laurent got her break aged 16 from Gérard Depardieu. In 2011, she made her feature directorial debut with The Adopted, a film which begins with a couple reenacting Humphrey Bogart and Dorothy Malone’s bookshop encounter in The Big Sleep. It sets the twee tone, focusing on two sisters, Lisa (Laurent) and Marine (Marie Denarnaud), and their relationship with Marine’s boyfriend Alex, a formidable role for Laurent’s Inglourious Basterds co-star Denis Ménochet. The bittersweetness often leans too far into the saccharine, albeit revealing a directorial talent which led Laurent on to make several more features including Breathe (2014) and the César-winning documentary Tomorrow (2015). LC

31. Stories We Tell (2012)
Directed by Sarah Polley

As critics, we are often guilty of overusing the phrase “personal movie” to describe a project which bears the unmistakable fingerprints of its author – aren’t all films, by their very nature, personal to some degree, their themes and emotional truths filtered through the lens of individual experiences and perspectives? Well, if that is the case, then it’s hard to think of anything more personal than Stories We Tell, Sarah Polley’s unique cine-memoir of her parents and extended family. This is a film I have watched maybe half a dozen times since it was first released, and one I have thought about perhaps more than any other over that same period. The simple reason is that it is beautifully made and brimming with compassion and humour. But more than that, it’s a film that gently forces you to confront your own preconceptions of what family is, and to what extent we allow our shared histories to shape our identities and relationships. AW

32. In a World… (2013)
Directed by Lake Bell

Often a highlight of dramas and comedies where she’s usually a supporting player, American actress Lake Bell has proven particularly adept at voice performances, with her recent TV work as Poison Ivy in the anarchic animated sitcom Harley Quinn (2019 to present) being consistently excellent. Bell’s feature debut as writer, director and producer, In a World… leans heavily on her vocal talents and the nuances of dialects and speech patterns. Starring as a voice coach competing in the movie trailer voiceover profession, the film was inspired by an article surveying the scant number of female voices in movie marketing. A somewhat scattershot comedy, In a World… is full of endearing performances from the assembled ensemble, including Fred Melamed as Bell’s character’s father, who’s a king of the voiceover world his daughter is trying to crack. JSW

33. A Tale of Love and Darkness (2015)
Directed by Natalie Portman

After making her acting debut at the age of 13 in Léon, Portman rose to fame with her role in the Star Wars prequels before gaining widespread critical acclaim with her award-winning Black Swan (2010) performance. In 2015, she made the leap into her sole directorial project to date, A Tale of Love and Darkness, to tell the story of Israeli-Jewish author Amos Oz. Portman has spoken about how she felt personally connected to and inspired by Oz’s autobiography about growing up during Israel’s establishment, given her Israeli-Jewish identity, and starred as Oz’s troubled mother in the film. Though Portman also discussed the difficulty she faced as a woman when taking control during the directing process, the film is undoubtedly reflective of her creative vision. In some ways, she has engaged with the complications of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but ultimately, she has presented a significantly one-sided exploration of Jewish lives by neglecting the Palestinian peoples’ experiences. Maes Kerr

34. Scottish Mussel (2015)
Directed by Talulah Riley

Making her film debut in Joe Wright’s 2005 Pride & Prejudice, English actress Talulah Riley built up a respectable screen resume in the years that followed. She proved a reliable ensemble player in the likes of Richard Curtis’ The Boat That Rocked (2009) and Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010), though she perhaps remains best known for marrying Elon Musk twice. Before the second divorce came Scottish Mussel, a film that Riley wrote, directed and co-starred in, based on a story idea developed by her father. It’s a romcom in which a Glaswegian chancer (Martin Compston) tries out illegal pearl fishing in the Scottish Highlands, only to fall for an English conservationist (Riley) who’s trying to protect endangered mussels. Staggeringly inept in writing and execution, the woeful, patronising film plays out like Riley and her producers had never even met a Scottish person before her cast arrived on set. JSW

35. By the Sea (2015)
Directed by Angelina Jolie

As a director, Angelina Jolie’s remit has been to tackle social justice issues in various unsubtle ways, with a repeated interest in the subject of survival in warzones (In the Land of Blood and Honey, Unbroken, First They Killed My Father). 2015’s maligned masterwork, By the Sea, is another survival story, but an outlier in her directorial corpus, due mainly to its intimately confessional mode and uncomfortable sense of verisimilitude. The film depicts the breakdown of a glamorous couple’s marriage, with Jolie (credited as Jolie-Pitt) playing a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and Pitt playing her emotionally manipulative author husband. When the film was initially revealed, the public had their collective loins girded for a vanity-flecked mega-flop. Yet the film was dismissed because of its utter bleakness and seriousness of intent, a glossy Hollywood icon’s howl into the void and a ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?’ de nos jours. DJ

36. Pitch Perfect 2 (2015)
Directed by Elizabeth Banks

It is remarkable that Elizabeth Banks came to direct the sequel to a capella smash comedy Pitch Perfect given her first directorial turn came with a segment of Movie 43 (2013) featuring a Tampax commercial in which a girl is eaten by a shark thanks to her menstrual blood. Her feature debut revealed a more capable filmic hand, working on a larger scale than her predecessor Jason Moore had in the first film. Banks’s intuition for humour has been honed through her acting career, starting with the 1998 independent film Surrender Dorothy, and as a producer with her company Brownstone Productions. Despite the significant box-office success of Pitch Perfect 2, Banks did not return to direct the third film, moving on instead to take the reins of the 2019 Charlie’s Angels reboot and Cocaine Bear in 2023. Banks clearly has a flair for bringing off-kilter comedy to the Hollywood mainstream. LC

37. Paint it Black (2016)
Directed by Amber Tamblyn

If Amber Tamblyn’s performance in Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants charmed audiences in 2005, her directorial debut of the 2016 film Paint it Black undoubtedly casts her in a new light. While she does not act in the film, her directorial choices of spinning cameras, flashing lights and haunting piano pieces make for a compelling story that follows two women confronting the repercussions of a suicide. The film homes in on the realisation of change, and the effects of growing up, via a dark yet honest route. While Tamblyn described the move from actor to director as an easy change, she has touched on the fact that she spent years giving herself permission to make the switch, showing the industry has a long way to go in accepting the change as more women go from actor to director. MW

38. Unicorn Store (2017)
Directed by Brie Larson

Two years after her 2015 Academy Award win for Room, Brie Larson’s directorial debut, Unicorn Store, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. Although the actress reportedly found significant personal resonance in the movie, in which she also stars, this was not actually a long-gestating passion project. Larson auditioned for an abandoned version of the film several years prior, only for a directing offer to later come her way pre-Oscar win, based on shorts she’d helmed. Following the misadventures of an art school dropout who’s still obsessed with childish things, Larson’s film – written by Samantha McIntyre – bowed to mixed notices, only finally securing distribution from Netflix over a year later in the run-up to Captain Marvel’s 2019 release. While veering dangerously close to oppressive levels of whimsy, Unicorn Store proves a more nuanced exploration of creativity and maturation than its glittery exterior may suggest. JSW

39. Little Women (2019)
Directed by Greta Gerwig

There was a time where you could claim to be a paragon of counterculture cool if you knew the name Greta Gerwig. She spent much of the ’00s as a muse and focal point for the so-called “mumblecore” movement, and as an actress she cultivated a reputation as someone willing to go all-in to get the performance. She was taken under the wing of the mainstream for a while, keeping time as the best thing in a string of tired studio comedies, until she eventually chose to strike out on her own as an extremely successful writer/director. Of the three films she’s made, we’ve stumped for her sumptuous, scintillating adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s perennial 1886 novel, ‘Little Women’, over the impressive debut (Ladybird) and the box office behemoth (Barbie). Little Women, her François Truffaut homage, still gives us the best measure of Gerwig’s creatively-unshackled abilities as a director, as well as her gift for making cinema that’s as emotional and earnest as she is IRL. DJ

40. Atlantics (2019)
Directed by Mati Diop

There’s an iconic sequence in Clair Denis’ 2008 film, 35 Shots of Rum, in which Mati Diop engages in an erotically-charged bar-room dance to The Commodores’ ‘Night Shift’, cementing one of the great screen debuts of modern times. One might hazard that she has since been highly selective about her acting gigs since then, working with Denis again in Both Sides of the Blade, and in a smattering of TV shows, shorts and features. This is likely down to her side-hustle as a shorts director, which culminated in 2019’s extraordinary Atlantics, an adaptation and extension of her own 2009 short documentary. The film is an emigration story with a ghostly twist, mixing a slickly rendered and politically inclined form of social realism with an experimental, otherworldly edge. She returned in 2024 with the Golden Bear-winning Dahomey, which explores similar themes of the political legacies of colonialism, and we can’t wait to see what she comes up with next. DJ

41. Black Christmas (2019)
Directed by Sophia Takal

If you pay close attention, Sophia Takal’s acting and directing roles can be viewed as playing out in tandem. She’s portrayed reckless, subversive and wildly outspoken women in films by Joe Swanberg and her husband Lawrence Michael Levine while also examining toxic behaviour, duality and the patriarchal structures that feed on women’s insecurities through her filmmaking. Part of the post-mumblecore Brooklyn scene, she has worked on microbudgets to acclaim for her first two directorial features, Green and Always Shine. Jason Blum, following criticism of never financing a horror by a woman, asked Takal to helm a remake of pioneering slasher Black Christmas. It was released closely following the #MeToo movement and Trump’s election, with Takal and co-writer April Wolfe exploring the camaraderie of women when faced with hypocrisy, violence and trauma. Unfortunately, the nuance of her previous features was replaced with bluntly didactic commentary on the horrors of being a woman. KM

42. One Night in Miami (2020)
Directed by Regina King

Emmy and Oscar winner Regina King first broke into acting at the age of 14 with a recurring role in the American sitcom 227. Her career would mostly steer towards TV work in the years after, although it was Boyz n the Hood director John Singleton who would encourage her to drop out of college and pursue acting full-time, the two going on to collaborate in three of his films. Following years of directing for TV, King found in Kemp Powers’ eponymous play the perfect subject for her directorial debut. Although adapted from the stage and set mostly in one room, King’s direction grants One Night in Miami a dynamic, compelling feel, made even more effective by an inspired work of casting. Many tipped King to become the first Black woman to be nominated for a Best Director Oscar back then. That it didn’t happen remains a great travesty. RSR

43. She Dies Tomorrow (2020)
Directed by Amy Seimetz

Long before Greta Gerwig ’s human Barbie asked “Do you guys ever think about dying?”, the question was on Amy Seimetz’s mind. Kate Lyn Sheil stars as a young woman (…named Amy) who is preoccupied by the feeling that she is going to die imminently. What initially seems like paranoia turns into a pandemic when her friends also begin to experience the same strange symptoms. Released at the height of the Covid pandemic, Seimetz’s film had a small release and as a result, is somewhat underseen. That’s a great shame, as it’s a haunting, beautifully unique psychological thriller that captures the unique pain of chronic anxiety. What’s more, Seimetz financed the film using her pay from 2019’s Pet Semetary, making She Dies Tomorrow arguably the best thing to come out of that limp remake. Hannah Strong

44. Bruised (2020)
Directed by Halle Berry

To this day the only Black woman to win a Best Actress Oscar, Halle Berry amasses a slew of iconic roles in popular cinema, from playing the Bond girl to Pierce Brosnan’s 007 in Die Another Day to the titular Catwoman in the 2004 adaptation. The actress slipped into the director’s chair after reading the script for Bruised and believing that the main character should not be a white woman in her twenties but a middle- aged woman of colour. Berry went on to not only direct but star in this competent if not a little too formulaic drama about Jackie Justice, a down-on-her-luck fighter offered a final chance at redemption. If the film itself can’t escape the shackles of the subgenre, Berry at least turns in a compelling performance, especially when playing against the excellent Sheila Atim. RSR

45. Passing (2021)
Directed by Rebecca Hall

Fourteen years stood between Rebecca Hall’s first screen appearance aged 10 in one of her father’s TV shows and her breakthrough role in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige. In the time since, the British actress worked in several successful blockbusters, including a short stint in the MCU, but it is her work in indie cinema and films such as Christine and Resurrection that cemented her as one of the most refined actresses working today. It was Hall’s own family history of passing – one of her grandfathers was a man of mixed African and European heritage who assimilated as white – that inspired the actress to adapt Nella Larsen’s book of the same name. The resulting film is a work of great tenderness but also deeply ingrained revolt, a stylish platform for career-best turns for both Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson, both incredibly moving in Hall’s poignant study of stark dichotomies. RSR

46. The Lost Daughter (2021)
Directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal

The way Maggie Gyllenhaal has confronted sexual taboos and complicated women in her acting career has generally been exciting… let’s not think too much about her underwritten role in The Dark Knight. From her daring breakthrough performance in cult S&M romance Secretary to her role as a woman struggling with a lack of success in the darkly disturbing The Kindergarten Teacher, her portrayal of conflicting desires and destructive behaviour has always been intriguing. Sure, Crazy Heart and even to an extent Sherrybaby could be seen as awards bait type resilient single mum roles, but they were also affecting and beautifully performed. When Gyllenhaal wrote to Elena Ferrante to ask for the rights to adapt her novel, The Lost Daughter, it was agreed on the condition that she would direct. Following Ferrante’s empowering request, Gyllenhaal directed a crushingly truthful drama about the demands of motherhood, desperate yearnings for freedom and incandescent rage. KM

47. Don’t Worry, Darling (2022)
Directed by Olivia Wilde

Following on from her crowd-pleasing directorial debut, Booksmart, Olivia Wilde ventured into more challenging narrative territory with this sleek psychosexual thriller starring Hot Young Things Harry Styles and Florence Pugh as a 1950s couple living a picture-perfect version of the American Dream that looks too good to be true. Which, of course, it is. Essentially a modern retelling of The Stepford Wives with added oral sex, Don’t Worry, Darling is a film whose ambition is to be admired, but also one whose bizarre denouement leaves you questioning the journey rather than savouring it. However, for all its obvious faults (and the less said about the TMI publicity tour the better), there’s no shortage of entertainment here, with Wilde once again showing that she has a knack for directing action and eliciting strong performances. One for two and with an intriguing slate of upcoming projects, there’s a sense with Wilde that her best is yet to come. AW

48. The Happiest Season (2020)
Directed by Clea DuVall

Clea DuVall became relatable to all snarky goth girls and weirdo outsiders in the 1990s thanks to her roles in The Faculty, Girl, Interrupted and Can’t Hardly Wait but it was her iconic lesbian character in Jamie Babbit’s gay conversion comedy But I’m a Cheerleader that cemented her as a name to watch. Her sexuality stopped her from grabbing certain opportunities at the time. Though her close friends and family have known she is gay since she was 16 it was something she didn’t wish to share publicly until 2016 which also marked the blossoming of her directorial career with The Intervention. For her follow-up, DuVall used her personal experiences to make one of the first gay Christmas rom-coms starring Kristen Stewart. It’s a joyfully funny celebration of family dysfunction and poignant observation on the multitude of emotions involved in being closeted and how that can impact the ones you love. KM

49. September Says (2024)
Directed by Ariane Labed

After first gaining recognition for her role in Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg, Greek-French actress Ariane Labed would go on to find acclaim working with Yorgos Lanthimos (whom she would later marry) on Alps and The Lobster. Since then she’s worked with filmmakers including Peter Strickland and Joanna Hogg, and this year she made her directorial debut with an adaptation of Daisy Johnson’s novel ‘Sisters’. September (Pascale Kann) and July (Mia Tharia) are sisters with a close bond living with their artist mother and enduring almost constant bullying from their classmates. After a serious incident at the girls’ school, the family relocate to the rural Irish coast, but the relationship between September and July becomes increasingly fraught as time goes on. It’s a striking, often shocking and strange debut, but one that firmly establishes Labed as an intriguing filmmaking voice. HS

50. The Balconettes (2024)
Directed by Noémie Merlant

Although Noémie Merlant has been acting since 2008, her breakthrough came when she was cast in Celine Sciamma’s remarkable romantic drama Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Since then, Merlant has added a feather to her cap by launching a directing career, and for her second film, The Balconettes she co-wrote the script with Sciamma, which follows a trio of damsels in distress sweltering in their Marseilles apartment on the hottest day of the year. But when tensions with the sexy photographer across the street boil over, the free-spirited, free-loving camgirl Ruby (Souheila Yacoub), neurotic writer Nicole (Sanda Codreanu) and flighty actress Elise (Merlant on double-duty) find themselves having to hide a body. It’s a cheeky, gleefully bloody affair that takes to task France’s enduring culture of misogyny and sexual violence – and confident evidence that Merlant is a true multi-hyphenate. HS

For many younger cinephiles, the films of Werner Herzog provide an ethereal gateway drug to the world of hardcore European art cinema. I say this not to denigrate the quality or intellectual depth of the work, but as a fond personal recollection of seeing Aguirre, Wrath of God way too young and feeling worried for the actors on screen in a way that was both exciting, terrifying and above all, exciting. The images in this film didn’t look like the images in other films.

Herzog is someone whose estimable screen catalogue provides both extreme diversity and satisfying unity at the same time – that is to say, for Herzog, no subject matter, genre or style is off the table, as long as it subtly ascribes to his unique view of the world and humanity. The filmmaker has spoken at length about the meaning and rationale for his work, and on occasion has stated that he is not a filmmaker, but a writer, and that the images are processed entirely from his thoughts and ideas.

Personally speaking, the pleasure that I have accrued from his films relates to his ability to locate poetic order amid the chaos and mystery of the world, its landscapes and its people. He is someone who proves that you can be a humanist while also believing that life is little more than a meaningless nightmare of suffering. And so, ahead of a BFI retrospective of his work, here are my top ten Herzog essentials.

10. My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? (2009)

At the 2009 Venice Film Festival, the majority of Herzog-based energy was trained at the world premiere of his novel, Nic Cage-starring crooked cop thriller, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Yet, another, superior Herzog joint rolled out in a surprise slot, and it’s a film which definitely gives an affirmative answer to the question: is Michael Shannon the new Klaus Kinski? The film is Herzog’s take on the “true crime” sub-genre, but of course bites its thumb at convention, with Shannon playing a frazzled actor who becomes so fixated on his role that he attempts to murder his mother with a sabre. Contains an amazing scene of Shannon and Brad Dourif tooling around at an ostrich farm.

9. Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997) / Rescue Dawn (2007)

While he’s not one for sequels, Herzog is known for revisiting and recalibrating his past works, and the story of German aviator Dieter Dengler provides the material for multiple films and books. Little Dieter Needs to Fly is a documentary about Dengler’s unlikely escape from a Laotian POW camp during the Vietnam war, with Dengler himself on hand to talk through the details. Rescue Dawn, meanwhile, offers a straight fictional retelling with Christian Bale in the lead. It sounds like a standard triumph-over-adversity newspaper cutting, but Herzog focuses instead on the human body’s capacity for suffering and the human spirit’s capacity believing in impossible things that may just save our lives.

8. Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)

It wasn’t going to be long before Herzog dipped his toe into the translucent pool of 3D technology, and he came up trumps with 2010’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams. He heads on an expedition underground to the Chauvet Cave in Southern France to train his camera (and special lenses) on the primitive paintings that were created many tens of thousands of years ago. The transcendent spectacle of seeing the paintings and the hidden natural enclosure would likely be enough for some viewers, but as with all of Herzog’s documentary work, it’s his spry, inquiring narration that tips this over the top.

7. Grizzly Man (2005)

Where Herzog famously espouses a view of the world as being dominated by chaos and confusion, the subject of 2005’s Grizzly Man, amateur environmentalist Timothy Treadwell, lived by a very different set of beliefs that ultimately led to him being killed by a hungry bear in the wilds of Alaska. The film is almost like Herzog saying to the viewer, “See? See what happens when you embrace the idea of harmony and grace? You will die horribly.” It also contains one of the greatest, Mondo-esque scenes in the director’s canon, where Herzog is filmed listening to an audio recording of Treadwell’s death and advises the owner of the tape to never listen to it and to destroy it (advice he later reneged on saying it was the product of his own shock).

6. Fitzcarraldo (1982)

Without meaning to sound facetious, 1982’s Fitzcarraldo exemplifies the can-do spirit of the Herzog project. The art of filmmaking is one that is bound to practical logistics and the understanding of technical processes, and the famous sequence of Klaus Kinski organising the transport of a steamboat over a hill deep in the Amazon Rainforest is one of the great metaphors for the toils of making movies. The film offers jaw-dropping spectacle by the bucketload, and you know you’re seeing images that were created without any conventional safety nets. Yet as the years have passed, there’s a faint whiff of colonial celebration to the story of a man attempting to introduce opera to depths of rural Brazil.

5. Fata Morgana (1971) / Lessons of Darkness (1992)

Yes, we’re cheating a little by doubling up this pair of “ambient” documentaries, but there’s so much visual and thematic connectivity between the two that we thought we’d do a double-bubble. In fact, “documentary” doesn’t feel like the right term for Fata Morgana and Lessons of Darkness, which offer stark images of landscapes from around the globe and use camera position, editing and music to subvert and, in many cases, heighten the meaning. The slowed-down sequences of billowing flame clouds in a post-Gulf War Kuwait give the sense of a fantastical apocalypse in motion.

4. Stroszek (1977)

A personal, slightly left-field favourite among Herzog’s early missives, 1977’s Stroszek is a comic tirade against American cultural imperialism and is famous for being the film that Joy Division’s Ian Curtis was watching before he took his own life. The film marks the second and final collaboration with the mysterious actor and musician Bruno S. who exudes such unorthodox screen presence that you don’t need to worry too much about following the mayhem of the plot about a German alcoholic seeking (and very much not finding) his fortune on the barren flats of Wisconsin, USA.

3. Nosferatu (1979)

We have to remember when we watch Robert Eggers’ forthcoming remake of Nosferatu that Werner Herzog already made an excellent one back in 1979. If there’s one thing that Herzog is very much not known for it’s sex and eroticism, so this one is very much an outlier on those terms, as it’s a film which is lifted no end by the chemistry between Klaus Kinski’s Count Dracula and Isabelle Adjani as Lucy Harker. It’s a film that’s rich with visual metaphor, and uses its central tale to speak of a world that’s crumbling from within. It’s also not a horror film, but rather a lilting study of a man driven by impulses he has no way to suppress.

2. Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972)

If we’re formulating lists of films that we’d like to see projected on an IMAX screen, then Herzog’s seminal, shocking 1972 historical epic of colonial adventure in the Amazon would be very near the top of the pile. From its opening shot of conquistadores filing carefully along a precarious mountain ridge, set to the ambient strains of German prog band Popol Vuh, to its agonising finale with star Klaus Kinski set adrift on a raft with only monkeys for passengers, it’s still an awe-striking work of imagination and ingenuity that looks and feels like nothing else before or since. Its strident and articulate political critique of imperialist plunder still rings as loudly as it ever has.

1. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974)

One thing to say about Werner Herzog is that he’s made an extraordinary amount of films, and he has tended to make at least one or two great ones for the last five decades and counting. Our top four here draw very much from a vintage run in the 1970s, and this is perhaps a reflection of the freedom he was given to tell such tales at a time when funding was neither so restrictive nor so hard to come by. 1974’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is one of his most moving, philosophically rich and least didactic works, as it tells of a nineteenth-century foundling (played by Bruno S.) who spent the first 17 years of his life chained up in a dark cellar with only a toy horse for company. The film charts his subsequent acceptance into and rejection from bourgeois society, and where Herzog has often focused on the chaos inherent in nature, this is a film about society as a phantom of structure and logic. In the end, chaos is everywhere, certainty is a myth, and the world – for better and for worse – will remain a location of infinite mystery when your time on it finishes up. Watching it again now for its 50th anniversary year, you get a sense that it’s one that has influenced many modern filmmakers, from Greta Gerwig (Barbie) to Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things).

So that’s a wrap for 2023… And it has been a banger. The 30 motion pictures you see in the list below are the result of intense internal deliberations deep in the LWLies secret lair in Shoreditch, and there was some democracy involved, but also a fair bit of common sense and personal lobbying. The list runs from 1 February 2023 to 31 January 2024 (to account a little bit for some early US releases, such as Poor Things and All of Us Strangers), but we were fairly stringent on the cut-off. For our number one film, there’s something unassuming about it on first watch but, like all great art, it doesn’t just lodge itself in the mind, but demands repeated reappraisal and discussion.

30. Typist Artist Pirate King

For better and for worse, we say to Carol Morley: never change. She is someone who, throughout her career, has ploughed her idiosyncratic furrow with passion and intensity. Sometimes, the final products don’t land, but with her new one, a comic dissection of English manners as told through the life of artist Audrey Amiss, she has produced one of her best and most heartfelt movies, lifted no end by a wonderful central performance from the great Monica Dolan.

29. Anatomy of a Fall

Justine Triet’s 2023 Palme d’Or winner is powered by a stratospheric performance by the German actor Sandra Huller, who plays a novelist who is accused of killing her husband by pushing him out of the window of their pine chalet. The film takes us through the legal minutiae of the ensuing investigation, but is more interested in having us consider the slippery and abstract nature of truth.

28. How to Have Sex

One of 2023’s finest debuts, How to Have Sex is a film that filters vital questions regarding sexual consent through the chronicle of a classic rite-of-passage sun holiday. Three young female friends see this moment as a chance for some gloves-off thrill seeking, but the lads they hook up with have other ideas. Manning Walker picks apart a difficult moment in the path to maturity, and does so against the neon-lit landscape of Malia.

27. Napoleon

Ya gotta laugh though, haven’t you? No really, you do… Ridley Scott rolls out a grandiose historical biography of the 18th century French military tactician, and has Joaquin Phoenix play him like an up-tight incel whose omnipresent tricorne hat covers up a head full of deep Freudian neuroses. It’s a film that split viewers over its fidelity to the recorded reality and the extreme focus on Napoleon’s obsessive love for his wife Josephine (Vanessa Kirby), but the battle scenes are some of Scott’s finest, and the whole thing, however you take it, is an unabashed hoot.

26. Rye Lane

Anyone who thinks the rom-com is dead should have a word with debutant director Raine Allen Miller, whose Rye Lane is a film which fondly borrows from the genre’s hallowed past while offering something completely fresh and invigorating. Blessed with the chemistry-heavy paring of David Jonsson and Vivian Oparah, this one was a big, charming win and hopefully the start of something big for its maker.

25. Evil Dead Rise

This was a good year for malevolent cheese graters (see also David Fincher’s The Killer), and the one that crops up in Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise makes for one of the year’s most ingeniously nauseating scenes. This clever reshaping of the 1981 Sam Raimi original sees the action transplanted to a mouldering apartment block, and the film is all the better for its mixture of earnestness and humour, and of course the torrents of red stuff that fill the hallways.

24. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem

As financially successful as they’ve always been, movies about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have always been awkward brand cash-ins aimed at an indiscriminate demographic of Prime-guzzling teens. Jeff Rowe, with the help of his pal Seth Rogen, takes a leaf out of the Spider-Verse playbook and delivers something new, genuine, heartfelt and very funny with this property. The animation is innovative, the script is very funny, and the voicework – especially from the four young newcomers playing the eponymous heroes in a half-shell – is absolutely top-notch.

23. Return to Seoul

Park Ji-min delivered one of the breakthrough performances of 2023 in Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul, in which she plays a tenacious Korean orphan who was fostered by parents in France, and who decides to return to the home she feels resentful towards to find the parents who abandoned her. It sounds like a traumatising weepie, but it’s very much not, as the protagonist’s practical, emotionally detached methods help to present this intriguing situation with humour and pathos in rich abundance.

22. Samsara

One of the measures by which we select the films that eventually make it on this list is to ask whether they’re showing us something we have never seen before. Samsara, from Spanish experimental filmmaker Lois Patiño, ticks that box and then some with this hush, ambient tale of transcendence and transport to a higher plane of being. At the 2023 BFI London Film Festival, this one played at the BFI IMAX, and we hope that it gets a few more showings there when it’s released in the new year.

21. Pacifiction

Spanish filmmaker Albert Serra rocked the 2022 Cannes competition with this insidious and subtle exploration of French colonial influence in the South Seas. Benoît Magimel, who’s fast making a name for himself as one of the world’s great actors, stars as a diplomatic emissary who wants to have his finger in every pie going, but whose attention is diverted when a possible end to his all-encompassing reign rolls into town in the form of a nuclear sub. Contains one of the year’s great shots of boats being tossed around by giant waves.

20. Afire

A big discovery was made in Christian Petzold’s latest film, Afire. And that discovery is that the words “Club Sandwich” as enunciated with a German lilt are in fact the funniest spoken words in all languages. For a director whose films tend to be on the more serious, melodramatic end of the spectrum, this was something a little different for him: a deceptively light comedy about a young novelist unable to overcome his pretensions and preconceptions of the world.

19. How to Blow Up a Pipeline

The tightest film of 2023 was Daniel Goldhaber’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline, a thoughtful dramatic adaptation of Andreas Malm’s 2020 non-fiction book which explores the morality of direct-action activism. Calibrated as a classic-era heist movie, in which a disparate crew comes together to – you guessed it! – blow up a pipeline, the film also to make sure that their message rings out across the landscape and leaves a chillingly ambiguous mark on the audience as well.

18. Fallen Leaves

The return of the king. Finnish maestro Aki Kaurismäki returns to the scene in 2023 doing what he does best: producing immaculate hangdog romances in which the poor, desolate and downtrodden find love on the chilly streets of Helsinki. There’s also surreal karaoke, tragic missed connections, evil capitalists, and one of the greatest cinema date scenes ever committed to film.

17. Earth Mama

A small but remarkable debut feature from Savanah Leaf which offers a visually and atmospherically unique take on Black parenthood in the modern age. Leaf is gifted with a taciturn but open-hearted lead performance from Tia Nomore as Gia, an expectant mother who has already had two of her kids taken from her custody by authorities and must now navigate a malevolent bureaucracy. It’s social realism with an ambient, more lushy visual twist.

16. Polite Society

One of the year’s finest British offerings came from the maker of one of the millennium’s best TV sitcoms: We Are Lady Parts. Nida Manzoor rises to the challenge of the feature film debut by whisking together a traditional tale of generational malaise among the bickering members of a Pakistani family in London, and a high-kicking action spectacular in which one teenager must save her sister from a conspiracy that could unravel the very fabric of the community. Very funny, completely charming – we can’t wait to see what Manzoor and star Priya Kansara do next.

15. Trenque Lauquen

The title of this intimate opus refers to a province in the west of Argentina, and it’s being used in the same way as David Lynch used the name Twin Peaks – to denote a locus for mystery and intrigue. Laura Citarella spins a tale of one woman’s journey through the rabbit hole of history and her obsession to uncover the details of a romance literally found between pages of books at the local library. But then it jackknifes suddenly into more surreal and profound territory, celebrating female autonomy and the allure of small, independent collectives.

14. Saint Omer

The time-honoured courtroom drama took on a new form in 2023, and at the vanguard of this change was Alice Diop’s extraordinary and harrowing Saint Omer. Its story, which is based on the writer-director’s own research, tells of a woman who’s in the dock on charges of murdering her young child, and her testimony takes us to some dark, morally and philosophically ambiguous places. We love Diop’s short films and documentaries, but this fiction feature debut is arguably her first masterpiece.

13. Past Lives

That rare bird: a film that debuted at the Sundance Film Festival that really delivers the goods. Playwright Celine Song transitions seamlessly to film with the lilting, long-distance romance of Past Lives, in which telecoms technology and social media help a Korean couple rekindle a formative romance with her having emigrated before things could really blossom. Tender, wistful and never judgmental, we’re just hoping and praying that Song isn’t chewed up and spat out by the Studio machine.

12. Passages

We’re not entirely sure who deserves top billing here. Could it be the three extraordinary leads in Ira Sachs’ Parisian partner-swapping ménage à trois? Or could it be Sachs himself, who culled the story from his own formative experiences of Cupid’s poorly-aimed arrow? But maybe we’ll just give it to the costume department, especially the person who found the three-quarter length top that Franz Rogowski wears to a “meet-the-parents” luncheon.

11. Barbie

2023’s model blockbuster, in more ways than one. More than just a movie, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is a form of cinematic alchemy that achieves what so many aspire towards and so often fail spectacularly: pleasing everyone all the time. Meeting in the middle between corporate-mandated franchise extension and weirdo art movie, Barbie deserves every penny of its extraordinary success, not least for gifting Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling with two of their most perfect roles to date.

10. Oppenheimer

The film about a bomb that did the exact opposite at the box office. Christopher Nolan cements his movie-Midas status by giving us a glitchy, three-hour biopic of morally-scarred atomic bomb inventor Robert Oppenheimer, and making the sort of money usually reserved for films with spandex-clad movie stars and lots of awful CGI. Next to becoming Official God of Movies Throughout the Galaxy and Beyond, the sky’s the limit for what Nolan does next. And, of course, this could be his golden ticket come Oscar time…

9. The Killer

In 2020, David Fincher made the film Mank, which served as an ode to his departed father in that it was based on a film script he wrote. With The Killer, the famously-fastidious filmmaker has come up with a film which may serve as autobiography, the comic chronicle of a zen perfectionist assassin (played by Michael Fassbender) whose attempts to precision-calculate the requirements of his job always seem to come up short. Dismiss as slight at your peril.

8. Killers of the Flower Moon

This state-of-the-nation epic based on a ripping page-turned by New Yorker scribe David Gran saw its maker, Martin Scorsese, in a reflective mood. Killers of the Flower Moon is a film about the mechanics of genocide, carried out by wealthy white settlers against unknowing natives, but also one which ponders the tragically ephemeral nature of storytelling and, by extension, history itself. Leo’s great. Bobby’s brilliant. Garlands go to Lily Gladstone.

7. Showing Up

There’s been a murder, and the victim is the UK theatrical prospects of Kelly Reichardt’s scintillating new film, Showing Up. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022 and there hasn’t been a whiff of it on these shores… until a Blu-ray release cropped up in online listings for the end of January 2024 (right before our cut-off for this poll). Michelle Williams stars as a cantankerous sculptor who has to deal with all manner of trifling nonsense to enable her to get the hard work of creativity done. It’s a beautiful film, and we hope that some people over here get to see it big.

6. Priscilla

While Baz Lurhman gave us a predictably OTT hot-foot through the life of Elvis Presley in 2022, Sofia Coppola delivers a better film is just about every respect with her supremely thoughtful, elegant and unshowy take on the early life of the King’s first wife, Priscilla Presley. It stars newcomer Cailee Spaeny who delivers a career-making turn as the porcelain doll who eventually cracks, with man-of-the-moment Jacob Elordi as her mamma-loving weirdo spouse. It’s biography with the Wiki bullshit pulled out and deep psychological analysis placed in its stead.

5. All of Us Strangers

Following a brief sojourn into the world of television, Andrew Haigh knocks it out of the stratosphere with his return to the big screen with this emotionally overwhelming adaptation of Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel, ‘Strangers’. Andrew Scott has seldom been better as a lonely writer whose memories of past loves (Paul Mescal) and family dramas (Jamie Bell, Claire Foy) coalesce into a time-switching tale of romance and regret. Plus, lots of eighties electro pop bangers on the soundtrack.

4. The Boy and the Heron

So is this Hayao Miyazaki’s third or fourth retirement movie? He definitely mentioned he was packing things in after Spirited Away, and that was five films ago now… Anyway, let’s not bother picking over all that, and be thankful for the fact that the Studio Ghibli grand fromage has delivered one of the Japanese animation house’s finest works, a melancholy compendium of pet themes and far-reaching philosophical inquiry. It’s ambitious and occasionally obscure, yet the seriousness of intent is always enveloped within the filmmaker’s patented brand of eccentric creativity.

3. Poor Things

It’s the film Yorgos Lanthimos was born to make! Okay, hyperbole aside, Poor Things feels like the sweet, sweet product of filmmaker who’s set out his intellectual stall (Dogtooth), done his industry dues (The Favourite), and has now been handed a carte blanche by the head of accounts to make whatever he god-damn wants. And this free adaptation of the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray casts Emma Stone in the role of globetrotting nymph Bella Baxter – a young woman with the brain of a child who’s learning human behaviour from scratch. It’s a stellar piece of cinematic craft, which acts as a gilded pedestal for a one-for-the-ages performance from Stone.

2. Asteroid City

The jury is still deliberating, but we can’t help but wonder if Wes Anderson’s latest mad missive is also his greatest to date. His interest in the telling of the tale as much as the tale itself manifests in the nesting stories of a theatre troupe putting on a play about an extraterrestrial sighting in the desert-town of the title. There’s more stars than Heaven in the movie, but special mention should go to long-time Anderson totem, Jason Schwartzman, who is gifted his first lead role in an Anderson film since Rushmore. In short, twisty, immaculately-directed mainstream metafiction has seldom been so fun. And so moving!

1. May December

If you take a peek in Todd Haynes’s trophy cabinet, you’ll notice he already has some LWLies silverware from when he secured the number one spot in with Carol for our 2015 films of the year. So consider this one the double. When we caught his scintillating, disorienting new one, May December, at the Cannes Film Festival, we walked from the screening unsure of what we’d just seen. Perhaps it was an acerbic comedy which handled the darkest of subject matters with dainty abandon? Or a big, brassy actor stand-off, with Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore both on superlative form? Perhaps it was a stealthy critique of biographical cinema, screen acting and the impossibility of emulating another person on film? Maybe it was all of those things? Or none of them? To be frank, we still haven’t quite decided. But what we do know was that this was the film that still has us chortling, gasping and wincing just thinking about it, a discussion-point movie par excellence and another crowning achievement in the career of its director. Our only prayer now is that the award season set take notice. And if you wanna hear from the man himself, take a listen to this episode of Truth & Movies in which the august Hannah Strong interviewed him about the making of this brilliant film.

Movies, now more than ever! As another year draws to a close, it’s time to reflect on the films that stayed with us long after we left the cinema. We considered UK cinema and VOD releases from January 2022 until January 2023, so there might be a couple you’re yet to see, but rest assured every film here is a certified masterpiece. Looking for Licorice Pizza, Memoria, and a few other early 2022 releases? Check the 2021 list! Did your film of the year make the cut? Tweet us your favourites of 2022 @lwlies.

30. In Front of Your Face

Only the second feature from prolific South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo to receive a UK release, In Front of Your Face is one of the director’s more approachable character pieces, but one that doesn’t hold back when it comes to exploring his delectably obscure preoccupations with love, sex, family, God and social performance (particularly when soused). And in actor Lee Hye-young, Hong has found one of his most formidable collaborators who is very clearly operating on his sometimes obscure wavelength. David Jenkins

29. The Woman King

As massive fans of Gina Prince-Bythewood’s 2020 action epic The Old Guard (and, well, all her other movies too), we were very excited to see what the director would do next. The barnstorming The Woman King seamlessly melds action spectacle, historical drama and an all-timer Viola Davis performance to deliver this chronicle of a tribe of West-African female warriors tasked with defending their kingdom. DJ

28. The Batman

Robert Pattinson wore the iconic cowl and scowl with relish. An equally fully leather-clad Zoë Kravitz purred alongside him. And, against all odds, director Matt Reeves brought sexy back to the Hollywood blockbuster (is anyone seriously craving a return to the CG-smoothed chasteness of the MCU after this?). Speaking of getting hot under the collar, a quick word on Colin Farrell’s fat-suited supporting turn as Oswald Cobblepot. We’ve heard of scene stealing, but Farrell’s Penguin practically hijacks the whole damn picture. “No habla español, fellas?” Adam Woodward

27. Funny Pages

Good luck getting The Nutty Squirrels’ ‘Uh Oh’ out of your head after watching Owen Kline’s directorial debut, about a young comic obsessive in search of authenticity. After the sudden death of his influential art teacher, high schooler Robert Bleichner (Daniel Zolghadri) convinces his parents to let him move out of their suburban home into a dank apartment with two grown men so he can pursue his artistic aspirations. A run-in with unstable curmudgeon Wallace (Matthew Maher) ensures future calamity. It’s a grubby, cringe-inducing, wickedly funny little film, zipping by at 86 minutes long, and hopefully a sign of great things to come from Kline. Hannah Strong

26. The Kingdom Exodus

I’m not going to spend too much time worrying why, but we were mercifully spared another round of the great Film Vs. TV classification debate with the release of a third season for Lars Von Trier’s demonic sitcom initially broadcast on Danish small screens. Everyone was probably too busy laughing or thinking about death, the two opposing forces unstably commingling in the absurd, deeply cursed Rigshospitalet, where an ensemble of doofuses and manifestations of pure evil make schtick out of a banal malevolence hovering somewhere between the UK Office and Twin Peaks: The Return. Patients can check out any time they like, but they can never leave. Charles Bramesco

25. Corsage

By all accounts, Empress Elisabeth of Austria (1837-1889) was a bit of a loonbag, but that’s not the tack Marie Kreuzer takes with her impressionistic biopic of the flighty monarch. Vicky Krieps – making her first appearance on this year’s list, but not her last – is suitably sultry and enigmatic as the mother and wife who’s reacting strangely but not surprisingly to the ravages of mid-life. Her existential trauma is exacerbated by the trials, tribulations and petty diplomacy of life at court, and the film offers a tragicomic and relatable examination of aristocratic malaise. DJ

In UK Cinemas 26 December 2022

24. A Night of Knowing Nothing

Payal Kapadia casts a nocturnal spell over her politically vibrant feature debut about the anxieties of student-led protest against heinous police brutality, Hindu nationalism and casteism in Narendra Modi’s India. A Night of Knowing Nothing is an excellent, self-reflexive film with visceral sound design that evokes traces of Chantal Akerman’s Je Tu Il Elle in its use of autofiction, culminating in a love letter to cinema as a means of enacting political change. Marina Ashioti

23. Cette Maison

Miryam Charles rejects the narrow, sensational framework of true crime to bring forth an earnest, unique and thoroughly theatrical vision of speculative poetics in her assured feature debut, which takes the suspicious circumstances of her teenage cousin’s death to imaginatively reconstruct her memory. A ghost story that touches upon personal trauma, bereavement, gender violence, diasporic memory and displacement, deftly bringing complex cultural issues into its dreamlike construction. MA

22. Il buco

The film that made spelunking cool again. Following a James Cameron-esque absence from filmmaking, the industrious Italian director Michelangelo Frammartino returns triumphantly with this meticulously filmed chronicle of a cave diving expedition in the rugged wilds of rural Calabria during the 1960s. Not only are you forced to hold your breath as people lower themselves into an abyss with lengths of old rope, but you also share in their private wonder as they experience for the first time the sublime wonders of the deep. DJ

21. Happening

French memoirist Annie Erneaux won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022, and that honour followed hot on the heels of a deserved Golden Lion win at the 2021 Venice Film Festival for Audrey Diwan’s searing adaptation of her 2000 novel of the same name. A fearless performance by Anamaria Vartolomei, essaying the school-age Erneaux in the early 1960s, looking for an abortion during a time when such procedures were illegal. A vital piece of socially-conscious drama that never once feels like a crass message movie. DJ

20. Flux Gourmet

All respect due to the very real Lydia Tár, but if you’re going to watch one work of stylised stoicism about a haughty, sexually controlling woman using her authority in the music world to run her little corner of it with a ruthless tyranny this year, it should be Peter Strickland’s fart-scented satire. At the Sonic Catering Institute, an experimental trio making avant-garde music from sundry foodstuffs bristles under the patronage of the domineering Jan Stevens (a name that eventually ripens into a terrific running joke), their personalities clashing in a piquant stew of ego, anxiety, fetishism, and resentment. It’s a rare delicacy in both senses, uncommon in its off-kilter sensibility, and raw enough in its unguarded vulnerability for juices to drip down the chin. CB

19. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair

Horror and the ennui that stems from being a depressed teen growing up online converge in Jane Schoenbrun’s feature debut that takes us on a trip down creepypasta lane. For the uninitiated, creepypastas – a portmanteau of the words ‘creepy’, ‘copy’ and ‘paste’ – are horror-related legends shared online, inspired by folklore, urban legends, and chain mail. Sharp, audacious and thoroughly distinct, this is a film that skilfully demonstrates the ways in which the internet can be a genuinely terrifying, unknown terrain, and hits the nail right on the head in portraying the nebulous concept of Being Online. MA

18. The Northman

Though Robert Eggers’ Viking action epic is set closer to the advent of the wheel than most big-budget spectacles, he’s not reinventing it; a guy wants to avenge his father’s murder, a setup already used most famously for Hamlet, Shakespeare’s indecisive wussification of the snarling berserker Amleth played here by Alexander Skarsgård. Eggers’ devilish genius hides instead in the details, how he situates this primal narrative in a long-lost civilisation with brutal customs alien to our present. And yet for all its historical studiousness, this is still Hollywood entertainment of the first order, harkening back to a time not so long ago when blockbusters took pride in such simple pleasures as sex, practical effects, and unadulterated bloodlust. CB

17. Aftersun

Charlotte Wells’ debut feature was the toast of Cannes after it appeared in the Critic’s Week sidebar, and it’s been a runaway success ever since, which is richly deserved. Paul Mescal and first-timer Frankie Corio deliver the joint performance of the year as father and daughter Callum and Sophie, as this evocative drama weaves together DV footage with rich, grainy cinematography to capture the spirit of a mid-90s package holiday. With period details on point and an acute understanding of the hazy, fluid nature of memory, Wells has announced herself in a truly impressive fashion, and created a film that is sure to go down as a modern British classic. HS

16. The Worst Person in the World

Joachim Trier sees out his Oslo trilogy with a deeply funny, deeply sad romance, starring the revelatory Renate Reinsve as Julie, a directionless thirtysomething who fits through life from one job to the next, desperately in search of her purpose. It’s perhaps a little lighter in tone than Trier’s Reprise or Oslo August 31st, but this effortlessly charming romantic dramedy manages to capture the uncertainty that comes with becoming an adult when you still feel kind of like a kid. HS

15. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

It’s somewhat astonishing that American cinema’s quintessential Good Boy, Rian Johnson, turned around this storming, franchise-extending whodunnit in just two years, and with a pandemic raging in the backdrop. And yet here we are with 2022’s most blithely intelligent and tricksily structured entertainment, boasting an ensemble of dreams (Ed Norton! Kate Hudson! Dave Bautista! Janelle Monáe! More!) led by Daniel Craig as cravat-sporting dandy sleuth, Benoit Blanc. Forget Bond – this is who Craig’s going to be remembered for. DJ

14. Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood

The lack of fanfare for this new Richard Linklater gem was deafening when it dropped onto Netflix during a post-award slow period. Which is a shame as it’s a nostalgic gem which very much sees the Texan tornado working within his reflective and emotive comfort zone. It’s an effusively charming rotoscoped memory patchwork detailing life in suburban Houston for a boy who ends up manning the apocryphal space mission of the title. DJ

13. Jackass Forever

It took 13 long years to get the band back together, but Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, Wee Man and co managed to pull it off and then some. The welcome addition of some fresh meat pays dividends, with the likes of Poopies and Dark Shark gamely indulging in some all-new puerile pranks and pratfalls, but it’s Ehren ‘Danger’ McGeherey who’s worth his weight in gold, enduring balls to his balls, a bear attack, and countless other on-screen indignities with little more than a world-weary grin. Going into Jackass Forever you might be tempted to think the long gap would dull the impact, but despite the passage of time, a flaccid penis will always be funny to a certain subset of sickos among us. But really? It’s always been the heart that makes Jackass what it is, and seeing this group of bozos back together is chicken noodle soup for the soul. HS

12. The Fabelmans

Early box-office figures haven’t been encouraging, but wouldn’t it be something if Steven Spielberg was able to spin a mainstream hit out of his bleakest, most tormented perspective on memory, family, and impermanence since Schindler’s List? He and screenwriting partner Tony Kushner had the good sense to hide these conflicted feelings inside an outwardly nostalgic dash down a junior cineaste’s poster-plastered memory lane, “the biggest American director who ever lived gets personal” being an easier sell than the ugly truth. It’s only once we’re seated that we realise Sammy Fabelman’s early dabblings in the cinematic form serve as an escape from the domestic nightmare in the margins of his life, as his parents’ marriage cracks and shatters, leaving him with decades of guilt possibly dispelled by this homespun exorcism. CB

In UK cinemas 27 January 2023

11. Benediction

Terence Davies’ achingly sad biography of the decorated First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon contains one of the most disarmingly poignant shots of any film from this year. During his forced convalescence at a military psychiatric hospital, Sassoon (Jack Lowden) confides in a doctor that he is gay and has fallen in love with one of the other residents, who is due to return to the trenches. From this heart-rending confession Davies cuts to an empty rain-soaked tennis court situated in the grounds of the hospital; in a single motion the camera slowly turns to meet one end of the net, whereupon it glides mournfully along the top tape. I still haven’t gotten over it. AW

10. Bergman Island

It’s hard to think of a better film about the process of creating art from a pointedly female perspective than Mia Hansen-Løve’s gently reflexive wonder, Bergman Island. Vicky Krieps – fast rising as one of the earmarks of moviemaking quality – stars as a loose MHL avatar taking a writing retreat to the island of Fårö – a spartan idyll that Ingmar Bergman called home during his later life. It’s a work that exudes confidence and poetic insight from its every precisely-calculated frame. DJ

9. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

Laura Poitras offers a rambunctious treatise on art, politics, power and community in her portrait of renowned photographer and activist Nan Goldin, which made history at the 2022 Venice Film Festival as the second documentary title to ever claim the Golden Lion. The film takes on an intricate, profound approach to the opioid epidemic that takes Poitras’ body of work to a brilliant new plateau, the textures of its mixed-media construction coalescing in an artful and direct confrontation of global arts institutions’ complicity in the crimes of their billionaire donors. MA

In UK cinemas 27 January 2023

8. Top Gun: Maverick

He did it. That crazy son of a bitch did it! Who would have guessed that one of the biggest box office smashes of 2022 would be a sequel to a slightly hammy ’80s actioner, best remembered for a series of peppy one-liners? Tom Cruise was determined to make his long-awaited Top Gun sequel soar, and combining high-octane stunt work with deceptively simple storytelling and a winning cast resulted in one of the most satisfying cinematic experiences of the year. Conclusive proof that blockbusters can still look like actual movies instead of flat green screen, Cruise might be a maniac, but there’s no doubt that he still cares about the cinematic experience. HS

7. Mad God

That stop-motion virtuoso Phil Tippett’s magnum opus took thirty years to complete has dominated much of its coverage (now including this!), but this pleasure cruise through the gloppiest depths of Hell looks like it was forged through dark spells and hideous suturing across untold millennia. An air of the mystical permeates a minimally-plotted, dialogue-free cataloguing of subterranean horrors, its ancient cultures and lost codes hinted at by creatures locked in senseless rituals and Sisyphean tasks. But the greatest wonders here are manmade, the rotted fruit of a psychotically driven man’s quixotic labours; just as the computerised perfection of a new Avatar film makes us wonder how this could all be fake, the meticulously textured production design commands an inverse respect. People made this. It all existed. CB

6. RRR

An admission: we came late to SS Rajamouli’s RRR (aka Rise Roar Revolt), the Telegu-language epic which was the only film in 2022 to thread the needle between Singin’ in the Rain, The Matrix and the peak canon of any cinematic buddy comedy you care to mention. Like Nigel Tuffell’s custom-made amp, this is a film that can go up to 11, and the glorious thing about it is that it somehow stats at that volume and maintains its insane momentum across three train-crashing, tiger-punching, fortress-penetrating, tap-dancing hours. A pure shot of cine-adrenaline. DJ

5. Armageddon Time

James Gray is no stranger to bringing aspects of his family history to the big screen, but Armageddon Time represents his most personal undertaking, focusing on a transitional period in his pre-teen years, when Gray moved from public to private school. Starring lively newcomer Banks Repeta as a stand-in for Gray, this snapshot of life in Regan’s America manages to be wry, sincere and surprisingly unsentimental, with Gray taking great pains to acknowledge that he was kind of a brat in his younger years. It’s a moving portrait of childhood loneliness and the limits of memory, and a welcome addition to the wider portrait of Gray as an Artist. HS

4. Decision to Leave

Not a single second is wasted in Park Chan-wook’s much-anticipated follow-up to The Handmaiden. Decision to Leave sees the director switching gears, stripping away his trademark violent excess to give us one of the most romantic films of the year, earning him the Best Director prize at Cannes. The film’s meticulous, operatic arrangement is paired with sexy camerawork, phenomenal shot composition, innovative editing and stellar performances by Tang Wei and by Park Hye-il. Tense, thrilling, tender, and intoxicatingly entertaining. MA

3. The Banshees of Inisherin

Farrell. Gleeson. Condon. Keoghan. Jenny the Donkey. The finest ensemble of the year? Quite possibly. Martin McDonagh’s fourth feature is arguably his most grounded, and it’s all the better for it. A quietly devastating break-up film about the dissolution of a long friendship (and also about the Irish Civil War), Banshees is as bitingly funny as it is melancholy – not an easy balance to strike, but by harnessing the exquisite eyebrow acting of Colin Farrell and the breathtaking, austere beauty of the rural Irish coast, McDonagh makes it work. HS

2. Crimes of the Future

The return of the king. There were reports ahead of the 2022 Cannes Film Festival that the long-awaited return of Canada’s David Cronenberg would have patrons hurling into the aisles. And while Crimes of the Future very much did not deliver on those terms, what it did give us was one of the most melancholic and tantalisingly portentous studies of human evolution out there. Funny, terrifying and, ultimately, very, very beautiful. DJ

1. Nope

Yep! It’s been a very solid year for Jordan Peele, with his debut feature Get Out having recently been voted into Sight & Sound’s recent top 100 greatest films of all time poll, and all that on the back of his slam-dunk sci-fi opus, Nope. 2022 was not a vintage year for blockbuster cinema, so praise be for this eccentric, enthralling, effects-driven oddity that channels a Twilight Zone-style alien invasion thriller into a parable about the ethics of image-making in the 21st Century. DJ

The peculiarities of memory are such that the human brain doesn’t retain cinema as front-to-back narratives, but as indelible fragments: a shot, a scene, a costume, a song cue, or perhaps most frequently due to the simple pleasure of dropping a movie quote to someone who gets it, a single line of dialogue. Whether foregrounded in a trailer played ad nauseam or imprinted by an unforgettable viewing in the theater, speech sticks with us long after the memories of what actually happened in a film start to fade.

Here at Little White Lies HQ, our motley crew of contributors have spent the past year with snippets of script flapping around in their brains like so many bats in a dank cave. And so in an effort to free ourselves of whatever we might call the spoken equivalent of an earworm ditty, we’ve shared the stickiest line-readings of 2022, from the erotic come-ons we can’t unhear to the accent work we can’t quite parse.

“Suck me,” Stars at Noon

Claire Denis is famed for her ability to find effortless sexiness in actors who electrify her films with a naturalistic erotic charge. And so it was like lifting a plate cloche to find a slab of spam where we expected filet mignon when, during a sex scene in Denis’ Stars At Noon, star Joe Alwyn turns to Margaret Qualley to deliver the immortal instruction of “suck me.” Joe Alwyn’s attempt to downplay the line in a growl only draws attention to the fact that “suck me” is a line that cannot be downplayed. Just as the sun shines a lining of silver from behind a cloud — and, by the way, Qualley’s got another bit of howler dialogue involving clouds — the command’s awkwardness is undeniable. As delivered by Alwyn, “suck me” is so powerfully unsexy that it makes one briefly wonder whether any Claire Denis dialogue has ever truly been sexy, or whether it has simply always been in French. Are there other “suck me”s scattered across her filmography? – Sophie Monks Kaufman

Dropping the F-slur, Barbarian

Barbarian reserves as much menace for the different shades of implicit and explicit rape culture as it does for the monster lurking under a Detroit rental home. With two ends of the spectrum occupied by the awkward yet well-meaning Bill Skarsgård and the monstrous Richard Brake, Justin Long stands smack in the middle. As a Hollywood director accused of rape by an actress, Long acknowledges his character’s vile actions with mundane shallowness, punctuating a reassuring phone call with his mother by answering his next call with a boisterous “What up, fagGOT!” As his lips curl into a smug smirk, his pitch drops at the last syllable to give the slur extra oomph. With one word, Long lets the mask drop. He may not be the worst monster in the film, but with that casual utterance, he reveals himself as something just as vital to the misogynistic spectrum: the piece that bridges the two ends into a cohesive whole. – Carol Grant

“Yummsville”, Brian and Charles

A voice with the android flatness of a computer software text-to-speech function echoes from within a seven-foot robot with a discarded mannequin’s head and a washing machine body. “Yummsville,” it says. Charles, the robot in question — played by a nearly-suffocated, half-blinded Chris Hayward — is referring to fresh cabbage, his favourite food. Of all the witty quips and one-liners that grace Jim Archer’s cult-classic-to-be Brian and Charles, this is the one that sticks. A single word, so deliciously silly, delivered through the monotonous (yet never dull) automated voice of a literally lifeless character can still feel as joyously alive as anyone can be. – Rafa Sales Ross

“Okay. Let’s shoo the elephant from the room: ‘What the hell happened to her face? Did she, uh, schedule a nose and eye job and bail before the surgeon finished the other half?’ No. I was, uh, I was attacked. Thank you.”, TÁR

Lydia Tár delivers this line to the members of her orchestra after arriving to work with a battered face; in reality, the injury resulted from chasing her young grooming victim into an abandoned apartment complex, getting scared by a dog, and slipping on some concrete in an attempt to flee. Blanchett’s delivery demonstrates several of the character’s dimensions, from her practiced friendly charm as she imitates the orchestra’s thoughts, to her grave announcement of the lie which she hopes will garner pity. By this point in the film, her more sinister manipulations have been made so obvious that this less-consequential lie comes off as comical, especially considering her refusal to offer more details on the event beyond the vague claim of having been “attacked.” Blanchett’s delivery is perfectly pathetic. She’s out of breath, as though she’s in a hurry to get past the phony story in fear no one will buy it. If you haven’t cottoned on to the fact that Tár is a comedy by this point in the film, this line should make it clear. – Esther Rosenfield

“Dumplings, suckers!”, Armageddon Time

Maybe it’s because James Gray’s stylised dialogue doesn’t work for everyone that he doesn’t really get enough credit for his sense of humour. In his hyper-personal Armageddon Time, a chaotic dinner scene sees impetuous 11-year-old Paul – expertly depicted by newcomer Banks Repeta – announce to his family that he doesn’t want to eat the spaghetti and fish that his mother has prepared for dinner (which: fair), instead choosing to order Chinese food with a casual air that implies this is a regular occurrence. The pièce de résistance comes when the defiant Paul exclaims “Dumplings, suckers!” over the yelling from the family gathered around the dining table as he calls the takeaway. It speaks to an almost impressive audacity that occasionally rears its head in pre-teens, in line with Paul’s soon-to-be-challenged notion that he’s untouchable. It’s also refreshing to see a filmmaker create a cine-memoir in which he’s quick to admit he was a little brat, rather than some doe-eyed moppet whose only concern was growing up to be a great cineaste. Me? I’m off to order Chinese. – Hannah Strong

“I don’t think these mashed potatoes are gonna work”, Don’t Worry Darling

Don’t Worry Darling owes a lot to genre TV series like Black Mirror and The Twilight Zone, but a cooking calamity is straight from the sitcom playbook. Sporting his wife’s cutesy apron, trying to mash unboiled potatoes using a whiskey decanter, Harry Styles is giving I Love Lucy as seemingly dreamy husband Jack. Florence Pugh’s Alice is suitably disoriented, and her quizzical expression after surveying the kitchen mess matches my own as I wonder if this movie is about to lean into comedy. Yes, but only briefly: Jack leans in to confess, but instead, a punchline comes. Styles speaks in an accent with a whiff of his actual Cheshire inflection, dabbling in slight transatlantic tones that caused an avalanche of comments before the film even came out. “I don’t think these mashed potatoes are gonna work,” he murmurs. I add a laugh track in my head every time I think about this line — maybe Wilde should’ve done this too. – Emma Fraser

“Oh, give over. He might have come back any minute. I’d have looked a right Charlie!”, Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris

There aren’t many films for which I’m willing to leave my critic’s hat in the foyer, but for Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, I did just that. Lesley Manville seemed to be imitating my nan, a woman with the warmest heart, but who will also pick a fight with anyone she thinks might be doing her wrong. For all her charming tussles with Isabelle Huppert, it was this retort when an officer tells her she’s been entitled to a war widow’s pension for several years that still stands out in my mind. Her outrage at the notion she might have remarried, along with the Cockney slang “Charlie,” feel so specifically British. I told dear Nan to see the film, and she phoned me up after: “What did you think of it, Nan?” “Well it was a bit far-fetched, wasn’t it? Fancy going all the way to Paris for a bleedin’ dress!” “Mrs. Harris reminded me a bit of you.” “Oh, you cheeky mare!” – Lillian Crawford

Call and response, Nope

With Nope, Jordan Peele assembled a coterie of hot young stars for an old school blockbuster, but because the man also has capital-T Taste, he also cast two of the most leathery-voiced lifers in Hollywood. Armed with a velvety baritone that makes him sound like he’s permanently accompanied by a cello, Keith David is a down-on-his-luck horse wrangler optimistic that if “we really put on a show, you know they are gonna bring us back from the sequel.” Whereas Michael Wincott, who sounds like he gargles glass each morning, is a renowned cinematographer lamenting that “the dream you’re chasing, where you end up at the top of the mountain, all eyes on you? It’s the dream you never wake up from.” The deep purrs from David and Wincott are at either end of the Hollywood Art Versus Commerce debate, but also proof that line delivery can rival aliens in terms of pure spectacle value. – Leila Latif

“NO ONE IN THIS ROOM IS AN ARTIST”, Funny Pages

Owen Kline’s first feature Funny Pages is a different kind of coming-of-age film, one in which our young hero gradually realizes that he’s chosen a path of permanent immaturity. Robert (Daniel Zolghadri) is an aspiring underground cartoonist whose precocious obscurantist interests bring him into contact with the kind of crate-diggers and outsiders who would be (niche, minor) legends if drawn by R. Crumb, but are hopelessly unfit for real life. The film climaxes with a Christmas-day drawing lesson—paid for by mom and dad—commissioned from Wallace (Matthew Maher), an emotionally volatile, probably neurodivergent, definitely precarious former inker, who finally cracks: “NO ONE IN THIS ROOM IS AN ARTIST!” The entire movie—the poignancy and horrible blurting hilarity of a marginal person; the moral naivete of the know-it-all-teenager who sets out to decorate his life with such figures; the startling chastening loneliness of a life in thrall to the culture of the past—is crystalized in Maher’s childish rage and tragicomic lisp. As a semi-professional film critic, I could hardly relate personally, of course, but I felt something nonetheless. – Mark Asch

“I will not leave my donkey outside when I’m sad”, The Banshees of Inisherin

Much of the pleasure and power of The Banshees Of Inisherin comes from the reframing of righteousness; teeny-tiny grievances are given an enormous stage in a way that only makes sense once you’ve spent a minute with them. One of these is Pádraic Súilleabhán’s (Colin Farrell) steadfast determination to keep his animals close to him at all times, the most meaningful company in a lonely life his sister Siobhán (Kerry Condon) doesn’t quite understand. So when Farrell finally huffs and puffs as Siobhán suggests for the billionth time that Jenny the donkey should maybe hang out outside, like normal donkeys do, the determination in his voice is breathtaking. “I will not leave my donkey outside when I’m sad,” he says, putting a full stop on this logical, fair and well-merited situation. It has the wishfulness of a child but the force of a man who could make you chop off all your fingers. Just let them live, for God’s sake. – Ella Kemp

“Save the moon, save Earth”, Moonfall

“THE MOON IS NOT WHAT WE THINK,” declares the tagline for Roland Emmerich’s wackadoo Hollow Earth Theory propaganda picture and box-office megabomb. The film itself strives to strike that same chord of absurd self-seriousness to varying levels of success, coming closest when our man Patrick Wilson gets his “Today we celebrate our Independence Day!” moment. He’s a good actor who’s done a lot of good work, but he doesn’t let that stop him from giving all of himself to a deeply — knowingly? maybe! — terrible film. He intones the mission brief of “Save the moon, save Earth” with the same conviction he brought to Joe Pitt in Angels in America, plowing right through the beautiful silliness of the concept of saving the moon. For that matter, isn’t saving Earth kind of a ridiculous notion too? Has anyone ever actually saved the entire planet from anything? This, I suspect, is the magic of the movies. – Charles Bramesco

You would be hard-pressed not to find something worth watching across myriad streaming platforms and traditional TV viewing options available. A glut of television excellence in 2022 means inevitable blind spots and missing titles from this line-up of new offerings and old favourites — it remains impossible to keep on top of everything. Long overdue pandemic-delayed high-profile productions made a triumphant return, while big-budget fare jostled for attention alongside more intimate stories. It is a snapshot of what this medium offers, whether adaptions, original narratives, spinoffs, or reboots that are deemed a must-watch.

25. Peaky Blinders (BBC/Netflix)

The final season of the Birmingham gangster series entered the 1930s, pushing the now-sober Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) to the brink with a plan to infiltrate and stop British fascism. On and off screen grief informs the darker mood as creator Stephen Knight addresses the loss of Helen McCrory while still ensuring Polly’s presence is felt. Murphy plays new shades of despair and nihilism in his dual role as a crime boss and politician, trying to keep it together while the world falls apart.

24. Under the Banner of Heaven (FX on Hulu/Disney Star)

It has been an excellent 12-plus months for Andrew Garfield performances that dig deep into exploring different versions of faith, guilt, and how work is entwined with these factors. Dustin Lance Black adapts Jon Krakauer’s non-fiction book examining a double homicide that rocked a Mormon community in the 1980s. Garfield plays a detective stuck between his commitment to the LDS church and his professional duty, and Gil Birmingham is as compelling as his partner, offering an outsider’s perspective.

23. Babylon Berlin (Sky Atlantic)

The big-budget German series’ fourth outing kicks off on New Year’s Eve 1930, so while there is still dancing (this year’s earworm is “Ein Tag wie Gold”), it is beginning to tip toward the bleaker end of the scale. Berlin is beset not only by rampaging men in Nazi uniforms (including a familiar face) but organised crime gangs at war with each other. Lars Eidinger wields a cape like no other, as the eccentric (and wealthy) industrialist Alfred Nyssen was not impacted by the financial crash at the end of the last season, but he does encounter new obstacles.

22. The Dropout (Hulu/Disney Star)

Amid a sea of real-life scam adaptations, Amanda Seyfried in a black turtleneck as Elizabeth Holmes stands head and shoulders above the fraudulent heiresses and startup power couples. New Girl creator Liz Meriwether proves she is equally adept at exploring the nuances of the Theranos founder as she is at sitcoms in a limited series that gets to the heart of this scandal. Seyfried deftly portrays a Girlboss cautionary tale, whether awkwardly dancing to Lil Wayne or practising the recognisable deeper voice. It is a performance so good that Jennifer Lawrence dropped out of playing Holmes in a movie version.

21. A League of Their Own (Amazon Prime)

Thirty years after Penny Marshall’s beloved baseball comedy was released, it gets the TV adaptation treatment. Abbi Jacobson and Will Graham have brought back the Rockford Peaches. This time, they have expanded the world further, following Black players like Max Chapman (Chanté Adams), who were not permitted to play in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Queer love stories are vital to this depiction, maintaining the heart of Marshall’s series while acknowledging the era’s realities. This reimagining knocks it out of the park.

20. Derry Girls (Channel 4/Netflix)

The final season of Derry Girls maintained the tricky balance required for a coming-of-age sitcom set against the backdrop of the Troubles in mid-90s Northern Ireland. Creator Lisa McGee dishes out a Spice Girls tribute for the ages, a flashback episode to when the parents were teens, and the lengths required to blag Fatboy Slim tickets. Soundtrack and fashion choices will spin viewers back in time, and there is no shortage of laughs. However, McGee excels at the surprise gut punch when you least expect it and doesn’t sugarcoat the inevitable change.

19. Only Murders in the Building (Hulu/Disney Star)

The second season of the podcast whodunnit is whimsical and biting in its expanding true crime universe. Yes, the crime takes place in the same luxury Arconia residence, but Charles (Steve Martin), Oliver (Martin Short), and Mabel (Selena Gomez) must confront secrets that go back years — and, in some cases, decades. The rich visuals are part of this comedy’s charm, as is the growing cast of memorable characters. Themes of loneliness and community are explored further, and Shirley MacLaine is excellent in a guest-starring role.

18. Abbott Elementary (ABC/Disney Star)

Creator and star Quinta Brunson’s Emmy Award-winning comedy proves that network sitcoms are still vital and hilarious amid a crowded TV landscape. The underfunded Philadelphia school offers a backdrop that deals with the realities of this setting without ever feeling preachy, marrying the mockumentary format with Norman Lear’s social commentary sensibilities. Sheryl Lee Ralph and Janelle James’ performances couldn’t be more different, but both stand out in an ensemble brimming with charm and comedic chops.

17. Andor (Disney+)

Star Wars and Marvel dominate the Disney+ TV original line-up, which can sometimes get repetitive. Enter Tony Gilroy with a prequel to Rogue One that gets to the heart of rebellion on a granular level without a lightsaber in sight. Diego Luna reprises his role as Cassian Andor leading an impressive cast that includes Stellan Skarsgård, Andy Serkis, Fiona Shaw, and Denise Gough. Among notable set pieces, Gilroy cranks up the tension with a heist, a prison breakout, and a funeral procession. The latter utilises Nicholas Brittel’s emotive score in one of 2022’s most unforgettable sequences.

16. Pachinko (Apple TV+)

For starters, Soo Hugh’s adaptation of Min Jin Lee’s 2017 novel has the best opening title sequence of the year. Cutting between archival images and the brightly-lit pachinko parlour, in which each generation of the large ensemble dance exuberantly emphasises the threads of this decades-spanning story. The narrative toggles between Japanese-occupied Korea in the early 20th century to the 1980s when the prejudicial ripple effect is felt long after colonial rule ended. Oscar-winner Yuh-jung Yohn plays the older version of Sunja, embodying the theme of endurance running throughout the stunning eight-episode series.

15. The Good Fight (Paramount+)

Trying to respond to political chaos in near real-time might seem like a fool’s errand, but Robert and Michelle King found the perfect vessel in their spinoff of The Good Wife. In its sixth and final season, protest and civil war loom as the lawyers continue their work in an increasingly fraught environment. It is rare to have a satire that manages to be this biting and playful in its exploration of the current climate. Christine Baranski has portrayed Diane Lockhart for the last 13 years, and this character will be sorely missed.

14. Hacks (HBO Max/Amazon Prime)

Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) goes on the road and out of her Las Vegas comfort zone in the second season of the Emmy-winning comedy. The creative partnership doubling as a platonic love story between Deborah and Gen Z writer Ava (Hannah Einbinder) navigates multiple obstacles stemming from an act of professional betrayal. Work binds them, and this drive to succeed in this field triumphs above everything else. Einbinder more than holds her own opposite Smart, navigating grief rippling beneath the surface. Vulnerability is not easy for Deborah or Ava, but peeling back the layers is a rewarding experience.

13. The English (BBC/Amazon Prime)

Capturing the expansive and dangerous American West has long preoccupied filmmakers, which sees British writer-director Hugo Blick tackle this setting in a stunning six-part limited series. Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer play the unlikely travelling duo who are both searching for a resolution to a painful past. A tension-building score by Federico Jusid coupled with an expansive landscape captured beautifully by Arnau Valls Colomer contribute to one of the year’s most visually arresting pieces of television.

12. The Bear (Hulu/Disney+)

“Yes, chef!” rings out loud and clear by the end of the first season of this dramedy set in Chicago. The frenetic atmosphere of the kitchen is cranked up further in an episode shot in one long take, and while this is undoubtedly a highlight, there is more to this series than a technical gimmick. Loss, ambition, and family are served up amid arguments about hot dogs, sandwiches, and spaghetti — all of which will make you hungry. Jeremy Allen White, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and Ayo Edebiri lead the impressive ensemble amid the culinary chaos.

11. Yellowjackets (Showtime/Sky Atlantic)

The year began amid Yellowjackets’ first gripping season, which saw the survivors of a plane crash grappling with whatever went down in the wilderness when they were teenagers. We know matters will eventually tip into Lord of the Flies territory (with added cannibalism), and the mysterious forces (or cult) did not stay in the secluded woods. The adult cast in the present-day scenes includes heavyweights like Melanie Lynskey and Juliet Lewis, and their younger counterparts more than rise to the occasion within the fraught ‘90s timeline.

10. The Patient (FX on Hulu/Disney+)

Therapy and television are comfortable bedfellows, whether as a sitcom backdrop dating back to The Bob Newhart Show (and then Frasier) or aiding the likes of Tony Soprano. In what feels like a reverse Hannibal, a serial killer kidnaps his therapist to overcome his deadly compulsions. Domnhall Gleeson plays the murderer looking to change, with Steve Carrell as the recently-widowed licensed professional. It is a taught, intimate and often claustrophobic examination of what makes us human, loss, and buried trauma. The Americans showrunners Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields have struck tension-filled gold again.

9. Bad Sisters (Apple TV+)

Bad Sisters starts with a body before unravelling why each of the five Garvey sisters has a reason to want John Paul (aka the Prick) dead. Sharon Horgan adapted the series from a Flemish whodunnit Clan, layering the story with Irish humour and dread in crisscrossing timelines. In the present, insurance agents and half-brothers Tom (Brian Gleeson) and Matt Clafin (Daryl McCormack) must prove foul play to save their business. Horgan’s script deftly walks the line between horror and heart, with PJ Harvey’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Who By Fire” as an atmospheric theme song.

8. This is Going to Hurt (BBC/AMC+)

Adam Kay is an overworked, sleep-deprived junior doctor, breaking the fourth wall to indulge in gallows humour or give additional commentary on the bleak situation. No, this is not the NHS by way of Fleabag but an adaptation of Kay’s non-fiction book of the same name. Ben Whishaw offers a multifaceted take on the prickly protagonist who wields sarcasm as a shield against the reality of a healthcare system ready to break. Even at its darkest, the drama never lacks compassion.

7. For All Mankind (Apple TV+)

The alternate-history depiction of what would happen if the Soviets landed on the moon first enters the 1990s and a race to Mars. Space tourism and private firms getting in on the astronaut business mean it is no longer a case of the US versus Russia, complicating an already tense head-to-head. The second season ended in tragedy, and For All Mankind quickly reminds viewers that leaving Earth is dangerous. No other series has this many jaw-on-the-floor sequences that are equally exhilarating and emotionally draining.

6. The White Lotus (HBO/Sky Atlantic)

Mike White switches Hawaii for Sicily, but the guests staying at The White Lotus are as blissfully unaware. Meghann Fahy steals the show as affluent (seemingly) devoted wife Daphne while trying to bond with Aubrey Plaza’s prickly Harper on a surprise overnight trip away from their husbands. While the mystery of who has died bubbles beneath the glossy surface, White dials up the intrigue and farce with a helping hand from enterprising local women Mia (Beatrice Grannò) and Lucia (Simona Tabasco) and uptight hotel manager Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore).

5. Somebody Somewhere (HBO/Sky Atlantic)

Bridget Everett’s small-town Kansas dramedy is a semi-autobiographical look at what her life might have looked like if she hadn’t moved to New York City. Sam (Everett) is still an open wound dealing with her sister’s death and the complicated relationship with her family. Through co-worker Joel (the brilliant Jeff Hiller), she finds salvation in an open mic cabaret hosted in a church after hours. It is a beautiful and frequently hilarious meditation on finding your people and how much power there is in making music together.

4. Station Eleven (HBO/Lionsgate+)

Based on the book by Emily St. John Mandel’s book, the pandemic in Partick Sommerville’s limited series adaptation may sound a little too close to reality. Thankfully, this exploration of the role of art in a post-apocalyptic setting offers hope among the ruins of the world as it was. Crisscrossing timelines are anchored by tween and adult Kirsten (Matilda Lawler and Mackenzie Davis), with Himesh Patel delivering a standout performance as reluctant hero Jeevan. Director Hiro Murai sets the tone, and Dan Romer’s score adds to the unforgettable tapestry.

3. The Last Movie Stars (HBO/Sky Atlantic)

Ethan Hawke took the boxes of transcripts given to him by Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward’s children, enlisting his many actor friends via Zoom to explore the potency of this relationship — within and outside of Hollywood. Interviews conducted as part of an abandoned Newman memoir provide the foundation of Hawke’s docuseries quest that examines the personal and professional highs and lows, never shying away from their imperfections. Hawke’s knowledge and enthusiasm, coupled with his experience, give an insider perspective that adds to the intimacy of the project.

2. Barry (HBO/Sky Atlantic)

It is impressive that Barry creators Bill Hader and Alec Berg find new ways to paint the hitman-turned-actor into deeper corners. Barry has a target on his back, and an exhilarating motorbike chase sequence strips away any music to further ramp up the tension. It is the darkest and funniest season to date, peeling back the layers of the TV industry. Barry isn’t the only one at a crossroads as Sarah Goldberg’s Sally goes through triumphs and tribulations, NoHo Hank (Anthony Carrigan) experiences love, and Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler) gets a second chance.

1. Severance (Apple TV+)

Being able to divide your work and personal life sounds like a dream, but creator Dan Erickson’s extreme version of this scenario proves otherwise. Adam Scott plays both sides of the severed coin with precision; his Outie is withdrawn and grieving his wife, and his Innie enthusiastically tows the company line. Slowly the divided world begins to merge, and the surreal nature of this workplace increases. Directors Ben Stiller and Aoife McArdle capture the absurd and increasingly disturbing elements while never losing the underlying connections that flourish despite the circumstances. Anyone for some interpretative jazz?

Crikey, is that the time? As we reach the over-half-way mark of 2022, it’s a good time to look forward to the films yet to come in our cinematic calendar – both the big awards contenders, and the festival hits that will be making their way to a cinema near you. Excited to see something not on our list? Tweet us @LWLies.

1. Don’t Worry Darling 

Olivia Wilde proved her mettle as director on Booksmart in 2019; now, she’s back to show the world that she’s not just a filmmaker, but a Serious Filmmaker, the kind capable of making a visually showy psychodrama boasting both Academy Award nominees and the weighty themes with the potential to add her to their ranks. In a Stepford-ish suburban utopia seemingly frozen in postwar prosperity, a housewife (Florence Pugh) questions whether her husband (Harry Styles) and the patriarchy he represents have told her the whole truth about her reality. Smart money says she’s been unwittingly held captive in deluded isolation — like M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, fueled by star-spangled misogyny — but surely there’s more to it than that. Charles Bramesco

2. The Fabelmans 

Steven Spielberg has gone to war, to the furthest reaches of the dankest jungles, to the end of the future itself — and now he’s going home. The final frontier unconquered by Hollywood’s favourite son is the personal artist-in-repose picture, which he’ll at last assay with this semi-autobiographical recollection of a childhood spent in post-WWII Arizona, fantasising about filmmaking glory. Newcomer Gabriel LaBelle plays the Spielberg stand-in, joined by Michelle Williams as his mom, Paul Dano as his dad, Seth Rogen as his uncle, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood breakout Julia Butters as his sister for a full family affair. Also tipped to play a small but significant role: none other than David Lynch, the caliber of elusive talent bookable only through the Spielberg cachet. CB

3. White Noise

Even if the rumours that Noah Baumbach requisitioned $140 million in Netflix money for his upcoming Don DeLillo adaptation have been most likely overstated, there’s a hint of bigness to this production unprecedented in its director’s oeuvre. DeLillo’s landmark novel about a professor of Hitler Studies (Adam Driver, his hairline the worse for wear) coming undone in the wake of an Airborne Toxic Event spreading harmful chemicals over his cosy college town isn’t just Baumbach’s first go at directing someone else’s writing, it’s a shift into a surreal, absurd postmodernism alien to what we’ve come to understand as his style. Greta Gerwig, André “Three Stacks” Benjamin, Don Cheadle, and Raffey Cassidy round out the cast on what could be the most audacious use of Netflix’s now-ended blank check program yet. CB

4. Athenae

Romain Gavras’ crime comedy The World Is Yours received positive comparisons to Guy Richie and Quentin Tarantino when it premiered in the Cannes Director’s Fortnight sidebar in 2018, and now he’s teamed up with Les Misérables director Ladj Ly for his next project (Ly’s on co-writing duties). Details are thin about this Netflix-produced French drama, but it wrapped in late 2021 and according to CineEuropa, “plunges at the heart of tensions between policemen and young people of the banlieue”. Given Gavras and Ly’s past work, it’s likely to be a pretty arresting (and undoubtedly pertinent) take on the current French socio-political climate. Hannah Strong

5. Avatar: The Way of Water

You don’t bet against the house, and you don’t bet against James Cameron. And not just in terms of box office, either — of course the long-anticipated sequel to his pioneering space odyssey will make one trillion dollars, just as surely as the sun rises in the east — but on shock-and-awe power for its own mighty sake. For a wide swath of viewers, it won’t matter if the script for the next chapter in the saga of the azure-skinned cat people is as boneheaded as the last one. They’ve come to bask in the digitised splendour of Cameron’s limitless vision, under which kaleidoscopes of islands can hover in the sky while mutant flying sharks dip in and out of the photorealistic water below. Resistance is futile. CB

6. Tar

For younger readers with cloudy memories prior to the year 2006, Todd Field was once an in-demand director of sensitive actors’ showcases, his one-two successes with In the Bedroom and Little Children marking him as a major name of his moment. But a decade-plus of stalled projects have largely kept him out of the game, a lamentable hiatus soon to end with this character piece focusing on the invented Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett), the first female conductor for a major German orchestra. She brings us into the dog-eat-dog world of international classical music, peopled by a fittingly global cast that includes Noémie Merlant, Mark Strong, and Nina Hoss. Will Blanchett, like the character she portrays, be outstanding in her Field? CB

7. The Son

Playwright Florian Zeller adapted his own script The Father to critical acclaim in 2020, earning Anthony Hopkins his second Academy Award. Now comes the second in his stage trilogy, with an impressive cast comprised of Hugh Jackman, Laura Dern, Vanessa Kirby, and…Anthony Hopkins! Jackman and Dern play a divorced couple whose adolescent son is going through a particularly turbulent time – given that The Father was a quietly devastating portrayal of aging, it seems all but certain that The Son will be similarly tough-going. Get your Kleenex at the ready, and potentially some fresh Oscar statuettes for that starry cast. HS

8. The Master Gardener 

It’s another Paul Schrader production, so a few assumptions can be safely made: there will be an intense, ageing man (Joel Edgerton, as a horticulturist hiding an obligatory dark past) with a weird name (Narvel Roth, in this instance) paired with a younger companion (Quintessa Swindell, taking over for Schrader’s initial pick Zendaya) whose soul he must salvage before it’s too late. This time, however, we’ve also got Sigourney Weaver as the wealthy dowager who owns the estate so dutifully tended by Narvel. Sin, penance, and redemption will swirl together in one Protestant shame-spiral, as is Schraderian tradition. Who could ask for anything more? CB

9. The Banshees of Inisherin

Five years after Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Irish playwright and provocateur Martin McDonagh is returning to his native land, and a duo he’s worked with before – Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson. The pair play old friends who take a trip to a remote Irish island, where things take a turn for the worse when one tries to break off the friendship, with disastrous results. As if that wasn’t enough, throw Barry Keoghan (an expert in playing Weird Little Guys) into the mix, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster in the best way possible. HS

10. Ticket to Paradise

Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again director Ol Parker has quite a repertoire of rom coms to his name, and the reunion of George Clooney and Julia Roberts is an enticing prospect. Their daughter, played by Kaitlyn Dever, heads off on a trip to Bali with her best friend (the excellent comedic presence Billie Lourde, a Booksmart scene-stealer) and falls head over heels for a local. When she decides to marry him, her divorced parents attempt to intervene. Rom-coms have been experiencing something of a flop era, so it’s high time we saw a resurgence, and if anyone can be entrusted to bring them back from the brink, surely it’s George and Julia, right? RIGHT? HS

11. The Menu 

The vibe is off at Hawthorne, an ultra-exclusive, invite-only haute cuisine supper club located on a remote island and presided over by the expert, menacing Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes). Pinheaded foodie Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) is wowed by the inscrutable foams and pastes, but his slightly savvier girlfriend Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) has her misgivings about the secret ingredients that may be lurking in these dishes. The dark truth of their once-in-a-lifetime meal will be revealed in brutal fashion, though who’s to say what that will be — a tartare of human flesh, meant as a savage metaphor for the carnivorous tendencies of the rich? In any case, bon appetit. CB

12. Wendell and Wild

Return of the King – it’s 12 long years since Henry Selick’s Coraline, and now, finally, we get a new stop-motion adventure from the animation pioneer. What’s more, it’s a collaboration with the dynamic duo Key and Peele, who co-wrote the script (from an unpublished book by Selick and Clay McLeod Chapman) and co-star. Key and Peele play scheming demon brothers who enlist the help of a teenage girl to summon them to the land of the living, with a supporting cast including Angela Bassett, Ving Rhames and James Hong. You’d have to have a heart of stone to not be excited by all that. HS

13. She Said

Journalists Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor were responsible for breaking the Harvey Weinstein scandal back in 2017 – their New York Times investigation was detailed in a 2019 bestseller. Rebecca Lenkiewicz has adapted that book for the big screen, and Maria Schrader (best known for Netflix’s Unorthodox) is on directing duties for what will surely be an awards contender. Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan play Twohey and Kantor, while Samantha Morton and Patricia Clarkson take on supporting roles. No word on who’s playing Ronan Farrow yet. HS

14. Amsterdam

We’ve finally got a title for the project long referred to as “Untitled David O. Russell Feature,” and the wispy suggestion of a plot: in the 1930s, three friends (Christian Bale, John David Washington, and Margot Robbie) land themselves smack dab in the middle of a murder investigation tied up in a far-reaching, clandestine conspiracy with roots in the fabric of American history. Beyond that, what’s going on is anyone’s guess, though the machinations will involve Rami Malek, Robert De Niro, Mike Myers, Michael Shannon, Chris Rock, Anya Taylor-Joy, Alessandro Nivola, Zoe Saldana, Timothy Olyphant, Andrea Riseborough, Matthias Schoenaerts, and — not to be outdone on arthouse street cred by boyfriend Joe Alwyn’s gig in the new Claire Denis — Taylor Swift. The game is afoot! CB

15. Pinocchio 

He’s certainly been talking about it for a while now — the earliest trade-rag bulletins date back to 2008 — but it looks like Guillermo Del Toro has really, truly completed his long-delayed take on the tale of the Italian puppet who came to life. After a decade-plus spent in development hell, an unorthodox approach to the material will see the light of day as audiences take in a stop-motion fantasy complete with musical numbers, a ‘dark, twisted tone,’ and a fresh historical context in fascism-beset 1930s Italy. A vocal cast including Ewan McGregor, Christoph Waltz, Tilda Swinton, and Cate Blanchett (as Sprezzatura the Monkey, no less!) add their own prestige to what’ll undoubtedly be one of Netflix’s biggest releases of the year. CB

16. Babylon

Murmurs from a preliminary test screening of the latest showbiz fantasia from Damien Chazelle foretold something momentous, ambitious, and profane. One anonymous attendee has been quoted as declaring the drama set in Hollywood’s Golden Age to be Chazelle’s Wolf of Wall Street, a probable hint that this old Tinseltown will be (historically-accurately) fuelled by staggering quantities of cocaine. That’s to be expected from the miliieu and its blend of fact with fiction tying a not-Clara Bow (Margot Robbie) to a not-John Gilbert (Brad Pitt), not to mention an eclectic supporting cast gathering Tobey Maguire, Samara Weaving, Flea, Eric Roberts, Olivia Wilde, and Spike Jonze, to name only a few. Everyone’s ready for their close-up. CB

Release: January 2023

17. I Wanna Dance with Somebody

Whitney Houston was a singular talent who endured an awful lot of hardship during her life, which was cut tragically short at the age of 48. It was only a matter of time before she got the biopic treatment, but if anyone can do The Voice justice, it’s legendary filmmaker Kasi Lemmons. Naomi Ackie plays Houston, while Ashton Sanders plays Bobby Brown and Stanley Tucci is her record producer/mentor Clive Davis. The only cause for concern is screenwriter Anthony McCarten, who was also responsible for Bohemian Rhapsody. Oof. HS

18. Hocus Pocus 2 

Was anyone really crying out for a Hocus Pocus sequel? Well, we’re getting one anyway. Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kathy Najimy reprise their roles from the 1993 original, as three teenagers must stop the Sanderson Sisters who have returned to present-day Salem. Doug Jones, Tony Hale and Hannah Waddingham are new additions to the cast, plus a score of Ru Paul’s Drag Race alumni. Director Anne Fletcher actually started her career as a choreographer before transitioning to films including Step Up, The Proposal, and most recently the charming beauty pageant comedy Dumplin’ – so she might just pull it out of the bag. HS

19. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

Rian Johnson’s Knives Out sequel is titled after The Beatles’ song from their self-titled 1968 album, which was purposefully written by John Lennon to confuse fans who obsessed over their lyrics. It contains many references to other Beatles songs, and Lennon said it ultimately meant nothing. What might this have to do with the latest Benoit Blanc mystery? Who knows, but we do have eyes on a pretty stacked cast that rivals the first film: Edward Norton, Janelle Monáe, Kathryn Hahn, Leslie Odom Jr., Jessica Henwick, Kate Hudson, and Dave Bautista are all joining Daniel Craig for the next crime caper. HS

20. The Pale Blue Eye

Between playing a God Eater in Thor: Love & Thunder and starring in David O. Russell’s next project, Christian Bale’s quite busy, but he’s found time to make another film with his pal Scott Cooper, who previously directed him in Out of the Furnace and Hostiles. The Pale Blue Eye is based on a novel by Louis Baynard, and sees Bale play a veteran detective named Augustus Landor, who is recruited to investigate a string of murders at the United States Military Academy – where he is aided by a young recruit by the name of…Edgar Allen Poe. Poe’s played by the rather excellent Harry Melling, and the rest of the cast is pretty promising too, with Gillian Anderson, Timothy Spall, Robert Duvall and Charlotte Gainsbourg all apparently on board. Cooper is something of an inconsistent filmmaker, but we’re here for an Edgar Allen Poe detective story – especially one that’s being touted as a horror thriller. HS

21. EO

For a parade of unceasing, silent suffering, Jerzy Skolimowski’s latest makes for a pretty chill meander through the Polish countryside. Credit it to the six donkey actors collaborating for the beatific lead performance, the eyes of spectacular ass EO (pronounced ee-yaw, as in the noise the animal makes) conveying both the withstanding of hardship and his indifference to the many tribulations piled upon him. A spiritual pack mule, he eats some carrots and falls in with a pack of football hooligans and witnesses a murder, sauntering through it all at his own unbothered pace with the nature-guided sureness of the waves lapping up against the shore. CB

22. The Eternal Daughter

It’s hard to say if we’ll see Joanna Hogg’s lockdown film anytime soon – she shot it in secret back in 2020, and speculation has been rife since, but there’s no sign of it yet. This is Hogg’s fourth collaboration with Tilda Swinton, and has been described as a haunted house film, which sounds extremely intriguing. A24 (who also took on The Souvenir Parts I and II) are distributing it, so they must have been impressed. Is a Venice bow too much to ask? HS

23. The Whale

Darren Aronofsky has been biding his time since unveiling the polarising metaphorical whatsit titled mother! in 2017, and it sounds like he’s readied another densely conceptual hunk of work for us to digest. Pun intended, considering that the drama revolves around a morbidly obese man (Brendan Fraser, going way against type in what’s shaping up to be a slow-building comeback for the ‘90s star) mourning the loss of his lover and attempting to reconnect with his teenaged daughter (Sadie Sink, of Netflix’s Stranger Things), all while adjusting to his grief-driven weight gain. The heavy-duty prosthetics piled onto Fraser will undoubtedly split audiences, but either way, it’s a gift just to have something to feel strongly about. CB

24. Chevalier

Stephen Williams is best known for his work in television, notably on Lost, which makes him directing this historical biopic all the morning interesting. Kelvin Harrison Jr. stars as Chevalier de Saint-Georges, a talented French-Caribbean violinist and composer in the 18th-century French court. His skill leads him to the creme de la creme of French society, but after he falls out of favour with Marie Antoinette, he sees his social standing begin to slip – and uh, the French Revolution doesn’t help matters much either. Harrison Jr. is a great young actor, so he could really make this role something special. HS

25. Flux Gourmet

In Peter Strickland’s arch, squelchy satire of art-world pretension set at the ‘Sonic Catering Institute,’ dinner is not served, but played. A trio of experimental musicians synthesising noise from food fall prey to infighting, egos, and outside manipulation in what can sometimes feel like an MTV “Behind the Music” special fed through several rounds of garbled translation. Their fetishes and insecurities — particularly those of the chronically flatulent documentarian chronicling the group’s residency — rise to the top like so much milkfat, skimmed off with barbed affection by Strickland in his style of inimitable, void-plumbing abstraction. CB

26. Disappointment Blvd

Said to clock in at a whopping four hours, Ari Aster’s impending new film is short on intel, the only description being “an intimate, decades-spanning portrait of one of the most successful entrepreneurs of all time.” That could mean anything. Scathing stealth Walt Disney biopic? Maybe! What’s known for certain is that Joaquin Phoenix will deliver another typically towering performance, backed by Nathan Lane, Patti LuPone, Parker Posey, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Richard King, and Michael Gandolfini — all of whom sorta have period-piece-friendly faces. Those taken to betting may do well to bank on something set around the first half of the twentieth century. The rest of us can only wait. CB

27. Havoc 

Gareth Evans has made quite a name for himself between The Raid, The Raid 2 and Apostle, as well as the well-received television series Gangs of London, and his next action-thriller promises more high-stakes adrenaline, likely with some nifty stunt choreography too. Tom Hardy, Forrest Whittaker, Timothy Olyphant and ​​Luis Guzmán are among the cast in this story of a drug deal gone wrong and a detective attempting to rescue a politician’s estranged son, but perhaps the most intriguing part of Havoc is that it was shot in Wales – Hardy was spotted at the Barry Island Pleasure Park. How this does or does not factor into the film remains to be seen, but as film fans may remember from Locke, we do know Hardy loves to attempt a Welsh accent. Here’s hoping we get one in Havoc too. HS

28. Armageddon Time

James Gray’s poignant work of dramatised memoir garnered some of the most positive notices out of the Cannes Film Festival, with special commendations (of the Oscar-prognostication variety) reserved for Jeremy Strong and Anne Hathaway as the loving, imperfect parents to Gray’s pint-sized stand-in. When not busy avoiding threats of grounding or his dad’s belt, little schmendrick Paul Graff (Michael Banks Repeta, one to watch) dreams of stardom as a painter, learns a little about social stratification in his fledgling friendship with classmate Johnny (Jaylin Webb), and bonds with his refugee grandfather (Anthony Hopkins). It’s peak GFTJ — IYKYK. CB

29. Resurrection

In this house we love and support Rebecca Hall – after the success of her directorial debut Passing, she’s back in front of the camera in Andrew Semans’ psychological thriller, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year. Hall plays a woman desperately trying to protect herself and her teenage daughter from her abusive ex-partner, played by Tim Roth, who returns after a 22-year absence. It’s worth going into Resurrection not knowing much about it, as there are some truly buck wild moments, including one monologue from Hall which I’m still thinking about six months later. HS

 30. War Pony

Directors Riley Keough and Gina Gammell won the Camera d’Or for best first film out of the Cannes premiere of this slice-of-life drama set on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. There, a pair of Lakota boys (Jojo Bapteise Whiting and Ladainian Crazy Thunder) struggle along separate yet parallel paths, cash-strapped and knocked around by lives that force them to grow up fast while still ultimately being kids goofing around. The naturalism of the locally-cast actors anchors what could’ve been non-stop misery in a grounded register, the pointed critiques about the undue hardships faced by this community paired with the sort of fidgety adolescent ennui that comes from long summer days with nothing to do. CB

31. Three Thousand Years of Longing

Narratologist Dr. Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) picks up a lamp while passing through Istanbul for an academic conference, and lands in a story she knows all too well: a djinn (Idris Elba, CGI’d up to a massive scale sure to delight gigantism fetishists) pops out of the curio with an offer of three wishes, a setup that Binnie has been around long enough to recognize as an ironic comeuppance waiting to happen. His ensuing effort to convince her of his good intentions slingshots the film into a maximalist fantasy that could only come from George Miller, a grandiose vision teeming with lost love, wild creatures, and swooping camerawork. At its tender heart, it’s a tribute to the oral tradition of yarn-spinning, brought to dazzling life by the visual component of cinema. CB

32. Bones and All

That Italian scamp Luca Guadagnino is already filming his next picture (Challengers, a tennis drama starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist and scheduled for an August 2023 release) but all eyes are on his “cannibal love story”, starring Timothee Chalamet and Taylor Russell and hitting cinemas in November. Adapted from Camille DeAngelis’ 2016 novel, it sees Russell play Maren, a disenfranchised teenager who embarks on a romance and a road trip with drift Lee (Chalamet) through Regan’s America. If reports are to be believed, they’re joined by an enticingly starry cast of Mark Rylance, Michael Stuhlbarg, André Holland, Jessica Harper, Chloë Sevigny, Francesca Scorsese, and David Gordon Green. One thing’s for sure: the stans are going to eat this one up. Literally. HS

33. The Nightingale

The Fanning Sisters, together at last! Mélanie Laurent directs Dakota and Elle in this adaptation of Kristin Hannah’s 2015 novel, set during the German occupation of France as two sisters try to survive and resist Nazi rule. Vianne and Isabelle are estranged from each other and their father, as the Second World War begins, their paths diverge, but both must face the harsh reality of oncoming war in their homeland. The film was initially scheduled for December this year but appears to have been pulled from Sony’s roster – here’s hoping it makes an appearance in the near future. HS

34. Emily the Criminal

Aubrey Plaza plays a college grad with a criminal record and crushing debt in John Patton Ford’s feature debut – a highlight from this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Looking for a way out of her dire situation, the titular Emily becomes embroiled in a credit card scam, but soon finds herself in over her head. It’s a stylish thriller and something we haven’t seen from Plaza, but the film also makes some salient points about the criminal justice system and concept of a victimless crime. HS

35. Close

Lukas Dhont’s second feature was a Cannes darling and took home the Grand Prix prize, as well as a Mubi distribution deal for the UK and A24 representation in the USA. It’s the story of two young boys, whose close friendship is cut short after a tragic incident – you’ll want to emotionally prepare yourself for this one, which left nary a dry eye in the house at Cannes during its premiere. A tender, closely-observed portrait of childhood relationships and grief, it’s a film with a piercing approach to difficult subject matter that pulls no punches, and features magnificent performances from its young stars, Eden Dambrine and Gustav de Waele. HS

36. The Wonder

Author Emma Donohue’s novel Room was adapted to great success back in 2015, earning a Best Picture nomination and a win for actress Brie Larson – this is the second of her books to make it to the big screen, this time with Sebastian Lelio at the helm. Florence Pugh plays a nurse who is called to a small Irish town to watch over an 11-year-old girl, who is reported to have gone months without eating and has become a local celebrity as a result. Her faith in science is tested as a result, though she also forms a connection with a local journalist reporting on the curious case. Pugh’s joined by Niamh Algar, Ciaran Hinds, Toby Jones, Elaine Cassidy and Tom Burke, and with Ari Wegner on cinematography duties, you know it’s going to look beautiful if nothing else. HS

37. Killers of the Flower Moon

It’s a new film by Martin Scorsese! Fine, for those of you who require more than seven words of convincing: Jesse Plemons plays an ol’-fashioned lawman come to 1920s Oklahoma to suss out the varmint responsible for the string of murders perpetrated in the local Osage tribe, his investigation backed by a young J. Edgar Hoover in the last days before the ‘Bureau’ would be rebranded the FBI. Could the culprit be local cattle magnate William Hale (Robert De Niro), his crimes possibly motivated by a distaste for his nephew (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his decision to marry an Osage woman (Lilly Gladstone)? Any way you slice it, the master director’s first proper dalliance with the Western will be a capital-E Event, unmissable for devotees of the American cinema. CB

38. Women Talking

It’s not as if Sarah Polley has spent the last decade sitting on her hands — she’s made a short, done a bit of exec-producing for her fellow Canadian talents, written some TV and directed some more. But it’s still heartening to see a filmmaker of such skill back in the director’s chair on a proper feature project for the first time in about a decade, and tackling such a delicate topic in her grand return. Her drama convenes a group of eight Mennonite women (Frances McDormand, Claire Foy, Rooney Mara, and Jessie Buckley among their number) in a secret hay-loft quorum so that they can determine what to do about the culture of normalised rape in their community. Whatever their choice, Polley’s pet themes of female suffering and resilience will be front and centre. CB

39. Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.

Adamma Ebo’s debut feature (adapted from her 2018 short of the same name) stars Regina Hall and Sterling K. Brown as a megachurch power couple, attempting to rebuild their congregation following a scandal. They’ve hired a documentary team to film their journey, but with rival preachers waiting to fill their shoes, the journey to salvation is a difficult one for Trinitie and Lee-Curtis Childs. Ebo (along with her producer sister Adanne) has been tapped to work on the Donald Glover Mr. and Mrs. Smith television series over at Amazon next, so they’re about to be megastars – best get in on the ground floor and check out this dark comedy, which was a highlight from Sundance earlier this year. HS

40. Nope 

With a couple of trailers now online, we know a bit more about Jordan Peele’s next horrorshow than we did at the year’s outset. Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer play horse-trainers at an inland ranch servicing the film industry out in LA, a pair shocked to find their family’s parcel of land frequented by alien visitors in B-movie flying saucers. They figure that capturing the extraterrestrials on video could be their ticket to instant stardom, and set out to make a movie themselves instead of just assisting from afar. With Peele, there’s always a deeper game of subtext at play beneath the genre exterior — perhaps a commentary on the roles Black professionals have played in American entertainment, filtered through little-green-men paranoia? CB

41. The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future

Cows are so hot in cinema right now – First Cow, Cow, and now The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future. Chilean filmmaker Francisca Alegria’s magical realism drama centers on a dysfunctional family deeply impacted by a suicide years previous, who experience the sudden return of a loved one which forever changes their lives. Alegria previously won a jury prize at Sundance for her short ‘And the Whole Sky Fit in the Dead Cow’s Eye’ so she clearly has some strong feelings about our bovine friends. HS

42. Showing Up

A longtime professor at Bard, Kelly Reichardt intimately understands the petty indignities of balancing a career in the arts with the collegiate BS necessary to keep the bills paid, a tension translated into gentle levity with this low-key, low-stakes comedy. Michelle Williams returns to the steely, exasperated mode only accessed in her Reichardt collaborations as a little-known Oregonian sculptor with more distractions than talent, juggling a dysfunctional family and irksome colleagues while prepping for the exhibition that probably won’t be the big break she’s hoping for. Humble in its ambitions, annoyed yet affectionate in its lampooning of scene politics, it’s another sublime work from a filmmaker who can do no wrong. CB

43. Triangle of Sadness 

Ruben Ostlund’s latest arrives anointed as the 2022 Palme d’Or winner, so make of that what you will. Harris Dickinson’s performance as a male model whose holiday with his influencer girlfriend goes awry was one of the festival’s highlights, and regardless of where you land on Ostlund more generally, it can’t be denied that the man always swings for the fences. Set on a luxury cruise ship beset by a series of unfortunate events (including a visceral outbreak of food poisoning) the passengers soon see their social hierarchy upended when everything goes to pot. Toilet humour and class critique abound, as well as Woody Harrelson as the ship’s alcoholic Marxist captain. All aboard! HS

44. Tuesday

Not too much is known about the debut feature from the Croatian Daina O. Pusić, or for that matter about her, seen here with a moustache and covered in blood. She’s only got a handful of shorts to her name, but she’s got significant backing from both the BBC, the BFI, and A24 for the “mother-daughter fairy tale” expected to land a festival berth this fall. And she’s got a bona fide star in lead Julia Louis-Dreyfus, ostensibly the mother appearing alongside Lola Petticrew (last seen as a human under the impression they’re a parrot in the oddball Wolf) as her daughter. Wherever the story goes from there, Pusić has earned a lot of good faith from a lot of industry players, and arthouse audiences will be curious to see what they saw. CB

45. Eureka

It’s been eight long years since the last feature from Argentina’s Lisandro Alonso, but students of his work are used to waiting a long time for things to happen. The slow cinema trailblazer brings his disorienting, stylized methods back to the wilds of his home nation for a Western, of a sort; Viggo Mortensen plays a hard-bitten rough rider on the hunt for his missing daughter and the no-good suhmbitch (Iranian-British filmmaker Rafi Pitts) what done took her. Sounds like a down-the-middle John Ford homage, but when it comes to the cerebral and unpredictable Alonso, a plot synopsis can only do so much to capture what he’s really doing. CB

46. Bardo (or False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths)

Alejandro González Iñárritu has been away for a while – it’s seven years, to be exact, since his bleak bear-heavy The Revenant was released and finally won Leonardo DiCaprio his Oscar. He’s back with another long-titled film co-written by Nicolás Giacobone, this time set and filmed in his native Mexico and starring Daniel Giménez Cacho. Reportedly Bardo sees “a renowned Mexican journalist and documentary filmmaker, returns to his native country facing his identity, familial relationships, the folly of his memories as well as the past and new reality of his country” It’s also the second film Darius Khondji has shot in 2022 – the other being James Gray’s Armageddon Time. As Netflix has distribution rights, Venice feels like a likely premiere spot for this one (21 Grams and Birdman also opened there). HS

47. Decision to Leave 

Park Chan-wook’s sultry neo-noir about a detective who becomes embroiled with the wife of a dead man premiered at Cannes, and is a flagship global release for the good folk over at Mubi. It’s an icy drama about connection and loneliness, with stand-out work from Tang Wei. Folks hoping for something more akin to Chan-wook’s Oldboy or Vengeance films might be disappointed, but the change of pace is quite novel, and the juxtaposition between the coastal and mountainous regions of South Korea is used to great effect. Do you love to yearn? Then this is truly the film for you. HS

48. Empire of Light

Sam Mendes’ wildly successful war epic 1917 was highly thought of by both critics and audiences, so the pressure is on for his next film, set in an English coastal cinema during the 1980s. He’s opted for a completely different genre this time – Empire of Light is a romance, with a plum cast of Brit talent in Olivia Colman, Colin Firth, Toby Jones and Michael Ward. Written during lockdown, Mendes has said this is an “extremely personal story” about cinema and finding love in unlikely places. One thing’s for sure: your mum is probably going to love it. HS

49. De Humani Corporis Fabrica

In a year that’s already given us a new film by David Cronenberg, the most shocking, stomach-turning, ultimately miraculous exploration of the human body instead comes from the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab. The avant-garde documentary filmmaking team (led here by Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, of the deep-sea fishing freakout Leviathan) fed newly developed micro-cameras into the deepest recesses of patients at a handful of French hospitals, breaking up the intense passages of prostate-draining and eyeball-scraping with glimpses of the goings-on at these large, complex institutions. Their cooperative functioning isn’t so different from that of the organ systems we see with more clarity than ever, as beautiful in their harmonious design as they are ghastly. CB

50. Blonde

Word has it that Netflix has gotten gun-shy about releasing their hot-ticket Marilyn Monroe quasi-biopic, featuring sex bomb Ana de Armas as a fictionalized take on one of the most glamorous screen idols to have ever lived — maybe it has something to do with the rumored NC-17 rating for passages of intensely graphic sexuality, or director Andrew Dominik’s stated refusal to budge one inch on recutting or censorship. In any case, he’s stated his hope that the long-awaited character portrait gets a premiere at the Venice Film Festival later this fall, and Netflix maintains that it’ll be out for the public by the year’s end. CB

On the belated and extremely exciting occasion of a new work by David Cronenberg incoming (another film called Crimes of the Future), we decided to delve back into his delectable, disgusting and deranged back catalogue and, purely for sport, rank the films of his fleshy oeuvre to best.

21. Fast Company (1979)

The top and bottom of this list feature Cronenberg’s duel forays into the car movie. If you looked long and hard enough at this glossy action quickie from 1979, you might see some glimmers of the fetishistic longing that were to form the backbone of 1996’s Crash, but there are probably better ways to spend your time. That’s not to say that this bouncy story of the Canadian rally driving scene isn’t a fun little runaround, but it’s the sort of film that provides kicks that many, many other filmmakers are able to supply in a similar style. By no means a write-off, and very fun in its own right, but the least Cronenberg-y Cronenberg film by a long shot. David Jenkins

20. Crimes of the Future (1970)

The second film Cronenberg made lends its title to his latest work, but that’s where the connection ends. This 40-minute, lightly-experimental work concerns a catastrophic plague caused by cosmetic products, which has wiped out the global population of women. Adrian Tripod is hunting for his mentor, dermatologist Anton Rouge, who may have also been wiped out by the virus.

Shot without sound, an eerily calm voice-over from Tripod reveals how various men have adapted to their world without women, culminating in his joining a group of pedophiles who conspire to rape a young girl in order to impregnate her. It’s a harrowing watch, and certainly touches on themes that would become cornerstones of his future oeuvre – but even at a zippy 40 minutes, the film feels glacial. Hannah Strong

19. M. Butterfly (1993)

Cronenberg diehards consider his adaptation of David Henry Hwang’s play – itself a fictionalisation of a true espionage affair, as well as a rejoinder to Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly – to be a minor outlier in the director’s filmography, a costume-drama mercenary gig in his first and only collaboration with Warner Bros. But even if there aren’t any geysers of viscera or pus-leaking orifices, he maintains his preoccupation with the body while blending in with more sedate, buttoned-up subject matter than usual. In the attraction between a French diplomat (Jeremy Irons) and the Pekingese opera singer (John Lone) he doesn’t realise isn’t a woman, the space between one’s legs can be a secret weapon or fatal weakness.

The film’s daring gender play (“Only a man knows how a woman is supposed to act,” posits one key line of dialogue) syncs up neatly with its invocation and dismantling of Orientalist stereotypes; the docility and submission expected of women by men is doubled in the patronising dynamic between white colonisers and the Chinese locals using that ignorance against them. It’s not quite sui generis in that unmistakably Cronenbergian way, but he wasn’t phoning it in, either. Charles Bramesco

18. Stereo (1969)

David Cronenberg’s first attempt at a feature film follows a group of telepathically gifted individuals undergoing a parapsychological experiment within the clinical halls of an academic facility, while a monotone voiceover recites beatnik technobabble over silent black white photography. We see the prolific director gestating themes of sexuality and the limits of consciousness in equal measure here.

He’s evidently always had an exceptional eye for composition, with the artful framing of brutalist architecture, detached observational style and wide-angle shots subtly distorting the contours of reality and making for a mesmerising (yet not particularly captivating or enjoyable) watch. The seeds of a winning formula are readily apparent, but Stereo works more as a curio for Cronenberg enthusiasts and completists, rather than a standalone feature. Marina Ashioti

17. Cosmopolis (2012)

Find you a man who loves unfilmable novels as much as David Cronenberg challenge. If counter-culture classics such as Burroughs’ ‘Naked Lunch’ and Ballard’s ‘Crash’ weren’t enough, DC opted in 2012 to hire the world’s foremost teen heartthrob (Robert Pattinson) and plonk him in the middle of this chaotic and experimental Don DeLillo adaptation about an overconfident twentysomething billionaire’s trip across New York in a Limo to have his hair cut.

Along the road he’s interrupted by a coterie of colleagues, hangers-on and financial gurus, as they drop obscure wisdom bombs on his lap and stoke his sense of existential dread, leading him to discover he’s the target for anti-capitalist assassins. Minute-by-minute, it’s certainly a lively and involving work, though you can’t help but feel that its maelstrom of sloganeering (a big Cronenberg trait) is better served with the relatively slow and stately act of reading a novel. DJ

16. A Dangerous Method (2011)

This fascinating and fine film dares to dive into the technical minutiae of early 20th century psychoanalytic inquiry, and is also perhaps one of Cronenberg’s most mature films. That’s not to say it doesn’t push his abiding interests in the idiosyncrasies of the human body, but it does so in a way that avoids the usual flights of body horror fancy. At its centre is the respectful professional rivalry between Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), whose work is altered and refined by the presence of patient-turned-academic Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley).

A Dangerous Method offers a forensic examination into the idea that, in order for one to be able to deduce the psychological turmoil of others, one has to experience them directly themselves. As such, the film chronicles the coiled sexual dynamics between Jung and Spielrein that result in a strange intellectual transcendence. It’s perhaps a little subtle and stagey to really hit home dramatically, but definitely earns extra marks for drawing out a career-best performance from Knightley. DJ

15. Scanners (1981)

It’s a real mind-blower – wait, where are you going? – not just in the explosive displays of telekinetic might, but in the galaxy-brained expansion of its scope. What starts as a movie about X-Men-like civilians on the loose is warped by paranoid this-goes-all-the-way-to-the-top thinking into a larger conflict between warring factions, with no less than the fate of Earth at stake. The military-industrial complex gets in bed with Big Pharma to perpetuate a world-takeover scheme, but Cronenberg doesn’t bother introducing a noble counterpart to oppose them.

The closest thing to a protagonist is a morally ambivalent pawn, similar to the rest of the characters in his ineffectual smallness when compared to the institutional workings of authority. He’s scrambling underfoot as titans in the shadows decide his fate, despite his ability to make their skulls blow up like rotten oranges. Perhaps the single most well-known sequence from Cronenberg’s body of work, it’s just the smashed cherry topping a deceptively dense treatise on superpowers, both the comic-book and geopolitical kind. CB

14. The Dead Zone (1983)

Cronenberg and Stephen King feels like a natural pairing; they’re both interested in the relationship between violence and humanity, and the here Jeffrey Boam adapts King’s 1979 novel about a mild-mannered teacher who awakens from a coma after five years only to discover he’s developed clairvoyant powers, often relating to troubling future events.

Johnny Smith (an against-type Christopher Walken) retreats from society, horrified by his unwanted gift, but circumstance soon brings him into conflict with charismatic Senate candidate Greg Stillson (Martin Sheen), and he’s forced to make a difficult decision about the fate of the world. King adaptations are more miss than hit, but The Dead Zone is one of the better ones, even if the three-act structure is so rigid it detracts from the emotional pull of it all. Still, the climactic scene in which Stillson uses a baby as a human shield is burned into my retinas for life. HS

13. Maps to the Stars (2014)

For a while, it looked like Cronenberg’s final feature would be this acrid disemboweling of Los Angeles, a company town of sociopathic child stars, exploitative stage parents and cruel prima donnas clinging to their last scraps of fading glamour. If that makes this sound like a retread of the clichés lining Sunset Blvd – an influence hungrily cannibalised here – rest assured that the incest and pyromania push the tone into a surreal, savage register all its own.

Beyond a damning comment on Hollywood from a genius constantly lurking to the north, the notion that looks function as the regional currency makes way for rousing sexual gamesmanship as a uniformly superb ensemble including Robert Pattinson, Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska, and John Cusack all plot to dominate one another. The corpse-strewn Shakespearean ending could’ve been a fine concluding note for Cronenberg, proof that his advanced age had done nothing to dull the edge of his terrifically deranged filmmaking. Mercifully, it won’t be. CB

12. Eastern Promises

Viggo Mortensen’s second collaboration with Cronenberg also saw him return to London for a gritty story of forced prostitution and Russian mob enforcers. Naomi Watts is the midwife who inadvertently becomes embroiled in London’s seedy criminal underbelly when she delivers the baby of a teenage girl who dies in childbirth; Mortensen the hardened cleaner for the Russian mob tasked with putting an end to her snooping. There’s an iconic fight in a bathhouse, tattoos so realistic Mortensen was mistaken for a gangster offset, and Polish auteur Jerzy Skolimowski as Anna’s ex-KGB uncle – a recipe for a brutal thriller with deadly twists and turns, that manages to say plenty about redemption for violent men. HS

11. The Brood (1979)

It was only a matter of time until Cronenberg tackled motherhood, an experience that already sounds like something he came up with: your belly distends, a small parasitic creature feeds on your life force, your breasts emit fluid at unexpected intervals, morning sickness, placenta, umbilical cords, etc. His canniest move is to examine the siring of offspring as a psychological impulse as well as a bodily one, taking the deliciously cynical view of children as mere vessels for our grudges and fears.

A mental patient under the sway of her therapist (played by Oliver Reed, a vainglorious addition to Cronenberg’s roster of evil doctors) generates dwarf-like spawn that scamper about doing her violent bidding, absorbing and acting on the deep-seated hatreds amassed from a childhood of abuse. In outré terms fitted snugly into the structure and visual language of slasher flicks, the film articulates every mom’s worst fear: an inability to stop one’s pride and joy from inheriting their defects, dysfunctions and traumas. CB

10. Spider (2002)

One for the “heads” as the kids like to say, 2002’s Spider sees Cronenberg decamping from his Toronto nest and heading to the grubby pubs and parlours of 1950s East London for this subtle but deeply affecting tale of childhood trauma and out-of-body projection. Ralph Fiennes plays the mumbling, grumbling Dennis “Spider” Cleg, a latch-key loner who’s recently been released from a mental institution and has decided to head back to his formative stomping ground to piece together a life-changing event from his youth, the title referring to a web he creates which stands in as the cross-crossing strands of his memory.

Tipping its hat to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, we watch as the abused Spider sees his short-tempered father (Gabriel Byrne) shift his attentions from his demure, black-haired wife (Miranda Richardson) to a buxom blond strumpet (Miranda Richardson), which leads to a dark act and a brutal deception. It’s one of those films which becomes more Cronenbergian as its plot creeps forward, and it adopts the director’s oft-used cinematic mechanism of taking us into the subjective and often morally unreliable POV of its lead character. DJ

9. Rabid (1977)

Cronenberg’s twisted approximation of a zombie movie doesn’t skimp on the feral bloodlust. But for all the visceral terror of consumption and assimilation at the hands of our desiccated loved ones, he takes just as much interest in this sickness as a medical condition with unpredictable symptoms. The spread of a germ that sends the infected into carnivorous frenzies shows virality to be an equally social and biological phenomenon; the lean script balances insights addressing the macro (watch how quickly and ruthlessly the city of Montreal acquiesces to the deaths of its citizens) with the micro (the prehensile stinger tucked away in the armpit ranks among the master’s finest mutations).

Bolstered by a performance of alternating determination and panic from Marilyn Chambers, making an auspicious foray into non-pornographic acting, this vision of a squishy, slimy, vomit-covered apocalypse established Canada’s most provocative filmmaker as someone with a consistent set of thematic preoccupations he’d continue developing over the next five decades – in other words, an artist. CB

8. A History of Violence (2005)

Based on the graphic novel of the same name by John Wagner and Vince Locke, Cronenberg’s 15th feature film marked a transition from the highly conceptual stories that preceded it; this one is a straight-up white knuckle thriller, as diner owner and family man Tom Stall finds himself thrust into the spotlight following a violent confrontation at his restaurant. The attention leads figures from his past back to Stall, and threatens the life he’s built for himself, but Stall isn’t going quietly. While A History of Violence might seem more straightforward than some of Cronenberg’s previous work, it is no less interested in the relationship between the human body and violence, and our infinite potential to inflict misery onto others in the name of self-preservation. HS

7. eXistenZ (1999)

eXistenZ builds on the ideas Cronenberg had introduced Videodrome while exploring themes similar to its Hollywood counterpart, The Matrix, which came out in the same year. Multilayered spaces and temporalities make up the fabric of the titular video game as players hop from one reality to the other. The game doesn’t involve a headset, console or controller, but rather requires the essential body modification elements characteristic of the Cronenberg canon. Players enter virtual realities by fondling a squelchy orifice plugged into the bottom of their spine.

The world-building is entertaining and full of exciting twists that keep the viewer engaged; Jennifer Jason Leigh is terrific, Willem Dafoe is at his sleaziest, and Jude Law is (checks notes) running around holding a gristle gun that uses teeth as ammunition. The labyrinthine plot somewhat resembles the wandering chronology of modern NPCs and the artifice of dialogue-heavy RPGs, yet in satirising the interactive video game craze, the commentary veers perilously close to alarmist boomer logic. It’s not his most ambitious feature, but it’s wickedly entertaining, mad fleshy, grotesque, horny, and ’90s as hell. MA

6. Naked Lunch (1991)

If there’s one thing that David Cronenberg is very good at it’s literary adaptations, and for his take on William Burroughs’ scandalous 1959 opus, he decided to draw fairly lightly from the prose and the story in order to produce a picture that was, a) semi-coherent, and b) not the most obscene thing ever committed to celluloid. It tells of a two-bit exterminator played by Peter Weller who descends into a long, violent and confusing head trip due to the fumes he uses to kill bugs.

He assumes the guise of a secret agent and enters into a strange battle against a mysterious outfit known as Interzone Incorporated, and initially believes he must murder his philandering wife. Within the director’s canon of films which excavate the limits of the human body, this one precedes titles like eXistenZ, Videodrome and A Dangerous Method in presenting the images and dramas we build inside our own minds – in this instance, fuelled by toxic substances. DJ

5. Shivers (1975)

Shivers was released the same year as JG Ballard’s novel High Rise, which focused on a luxury apartment block which descends into chaos as the building’s rigid class structure breaks down. Great minds think alike – Cronenberg’s first full-length feature is also set in an affluent apartment complex, where a sexually-transmitted parasite causes the residents to turn on each other in sexually violent ways.

It’s easy to see the link between Shivers and his previous film, Crimes of the Future, but Shivers definitely has a little more polish and aims for shock value over a more cerebral experience. At the time Shivers was, uh, not a critical success (and it cost Cronenberg his apartment once his landlord caught wind of the films he was making) but it’s a fun, gross take on the pandemic genre, and sex-crazed zombies are a curiously untapped horror trope. HS

4. Dead Ringers (1988)

The only thing better than Jeremy Irons as a prickly gynecologist whose fascination with the female reproductive system seems to extend beyond academic curiosity? Jeremy Irons as two prickly gynecologists whose fascination with the female reproductive system seems to extend beyond academic curiosity! He gives an all-timer double-duty performance as Beverly and Elliot Mantle, doctors and twins identical in appearance yet complementary in disposition, forming a lecherous yin-yang as alpha Elliot seduces their patients before passing them as hand-me-downs to beta Beverly.

The arrival of the effervescent Geneviève Bujold shatters their fragile symbiosis and sends Beverly into a yonic mania, commissioning custom surgical tools fit to plumb the alien vaginas tormenting his fevered imagination. As the brothers frantically try to reestablish their equilibrium, they come to resemble the id and superego of a single psyche split in twain, trying in vain to resolve itself. For Cronenberg, it’s right in his sweet spot, yet another closed system disrupted and evolving in frightful, unnatural directions. CB

3. The Fly (1986)

Cronenberg’s remake of the schlocky 1950s sci-fi monster flick sees Jeff Goldblum giving the performance of a lifetime as Seth Brundle. The Fly kicks things off in media res, with a wayward scientist’s molecular teleportation invention attracting the attention of science journalist Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis). It’s the ’80s – the golden days of mind-blowing practical effects – so trust Cronenberg to deliver a gnarly masterpiece about scientific hubris and the dangers of progress.

Seth Brundle’s gradual and grotesque transformation plays out as one of the most genuinely terrifying slow burns in cinema history, with visceral disgust underpinning depth, wonder, empathy and pathos. And talk about on-screen chemistry! Goldblum and Davis are both in top form. Every scene between Seth and Veronica in the first two acts brims with buckets of sexual tension (the pair were together at the time and tied the knot a year after the film was released). It’s one of the best sci-fi horror films ever made, and scores a few extra points for making science and journalism seem like sexy professions. MA

2. Videodrome (1983)

James Woods gives an all-timer performance as smut pedalling television exec Max Renn in this psycho-thriller which has long been a staple for the midnight movie scene. After discovering the disturbing snuff television channel known only as Videodrome, Renn becomes obsessed, seeking to uncover the secrets even as it threatens the life of his girlfriend Nicki (played by the magnificent Debbie Harry) and the truth about the channel becomes more and more twisted.

The threat of cultural collapse in American society due to aggressive sexual and violent appetites has been a long-time obsession for Cronenberg, but nowhere is this more apparent than in Videodrome, an eerie slice of the grotesque that delivers a masterclass in special effects and still holds up in our present hyper-connected world of constant media consumption. Long live the new flesh indeed. HS

1. Crash (1996)

Some people get their rocks off by canoodling in bed – with themselves or another. There are those who glean sexual gratification from, say, sneezing in someone’s armpit. Crash is, in a sense, a film about the latter category, a steely essay that zeroes in on a group of sexual outlaws searching the untapped corners of society in to attain their erotic highs. Adapted from JG Ballard’s 1973 novel of the same name, Cronenberg’s film stands as perhaps the single, teetering apex of a cinematic project which has consistently explored the human capacity for both physiological and psychological desire.

It is, at its core, the sweet tale of a group of furtive auto fetishists who are well aware that their attempts to feel good could easily lead them to being left as a battered corpse on a motorway hard shoulder. James Spader and the great Deborah Kara Unger play the Ballards, a hot couple in a masochistic open marriage who fall in with a crew of hardcore metal-heads who re-enact the car wrecks of beautiful Hollywood celebrities. Even though the moral outrage the film caused was largely aired by a group of conservatives who hadn’t actually seen the film, it’s still so creatively provocative that if they had seen it, their heads may have exploded (see Scanners). DJ

“I never draw fauns, centaurs or mythical creatures anywhere else,” said Picasso of the French Riviera. “They only seem to live in these parts.” Indeed it is a place where sublime visions are realised – the Cannes Film Festival is 75 in 2022 and remains an example of the continuous prominence of this Cote d’Azur locus of international cinema.

Of course, the festival has a rich history of glamour and artistic innovation over the years, but there have also been scandals and controversies a-plenty. Inspired by the number of steps on the famous red carpet leading to the Salle Lumiere, where dreams are made and broken, here are some intriguing facts about the world’s most beloved film festival.

1. The Cannes Film Festival was set up in 1939, in opposition to the increasing fascist influence over the Venice Film Festival. Though not the unanimous favourites, Olympia by Leni Riefenstahl and Luciano Serra, and Pilota by Goffredo Alessandrini were given the main award – the Mussolini Cup – in 1938. Representing the French delegation was the diplomat Philippe Erlanger who, outraged, decided to set up a rival international film festival, with no political pressures, censorship or restrictions.

2. This International Film Festival, as it was then called, was initially going to be held in Biarritz, but various groups campaigned for it to be situated in Cannes, and so the decision was overturned in favour of the so-called ‘Pearl of the Riviera’. So yes: Christina Aguilera’s much-mocked question “So, where is the Cannes film festival being held this year?” would once have been pertinent.

3. The Festival was supposed to go ahead in September 1939. However, war was declared and proceedings ground to a halt. The USSR contribution to that year’s line-up, If War Comes Tomorrow, directed by Lazar Antsi-Polovsky, was unfortunately apt. It was not until 1946 that the International Film Festival was able to be inaugurated. There was not yet a dedicated building – screenings were held in a casino. Retrospective awards were given out in a tribute ceremony in 2002 to the films that were never shown in 1939.

4. The first few festivals were more a celebration than competition – most films that were entered won something. Eleven films received the Grand Prix in 1946. During the 1950s when the festival really took off and gained the glitz it now known for – helped no end by the presence of stars like Cary Grant, Sophia Loren and Brigitte Bardot – it became more competitive.

5. In 1949, there were a series of sartorial incidents which came to be known as the Affair of the Ties. Given the gorgeous weather, many attendees went to bathe in between screenings. Consequently, the organising committee decided that some screenings would require a tie to be worn and some would not, leading to confusion and offence, as some directors thought their film was given less merit if it was screened sans tie-requirements.

6. Despite the festival’s founding principles, during the Cold War an article was added to the Festival’s constitution that allowed for a form of diplomatic censorship. Between 1950 and 1956, provocative films were allowed to be removed from the competition despite their cinematic quality. Ciel sans étoiles, directed by Helmut Käutner, was pulled from the competition in 1952 so as not to elicit a negative Soviet response, and the West Germany embassy requested that Night and Fog, a documentary by Alain Resnais, be withdrawn from the Festival in 1956 – a compromise was reached whereby it was screened out of competition.

7. In 1953, Picasso obtained a special dispensation to break the notoriously stiff festival dress code and enter the Palais wearing a sheepskin coat for a screening of The Wages of Fear by Henri-Georges Clouzot. Clouzot later made a documentary about the artist, The Mystery of Picasso, which received a Special Jury Prize in 1956.

8. Around 4500 journalists attend the festival on average – Cannes has the second-largest media coverage of any event after the Olympics. This makes it a prime location for staging and snapping iconic images. In 1954, multiple paparazzi were injured as they scrambled to photograph the British actor Simone Silva topless on the beach. She was unofficially named ‘Miss Festival 1954’ but was asked to leave as her antics were considered vulgar, publicity-hungry and a distraction from the Festival proper.

9. The Palme d’Or was created in 1955 – the festival organisers invited several jewellers to compete to design the trophy. The original winner was Parisian jeweller Lucienne Lazon. The trophy has since undergone several design revisions. Each year, two reserve Palme d’Ors are made in case there is more than one winner – or in case one trophy gets broken.

10. In 1968 a group of directors brought the festival to a standstill in solidarity with the student protests being held all over France. Among others, Jean-Luc Godard, Louis Malle and François Truffaut refused to let the curtain go up on Carlos Saura’s film Peppermint Frappé, and screenings were subsequently stopped.

11. In 1971, The Married Couple of the Year Two, a romantic comedy starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, closed the festival. Couples who could prove that they had been married that year (1902) were invited to the screening, and a special box was reserved for newlyweds married on the day the film was shown.

12. In 1975, Paul Newman set off a photographers’ strike – tired from his journey, he refused to pose on arrival. When he performed the ritual climbing of the steps in the evening, photographers placed their cameras at their feet in protest. Isabelle Adjani was greeted with the same response in 1983.

13. In 1987, Maurice Pialat was mightily booed as he went to collect his award for Under the Sun of Satan. His legendary response, delivered with a raised fist which amusingly contrasted Pialat’s grandfatherly cardigan, was that it didn’t matter if the audience didn’t like him, because “I can tell you I don’t like you either.”

14. In 2001, a group of actors promoting 24 Hour Party People – about the Manchester music scene in the ’80s and ’90s – threw fake dead pigeons at each other outside a restaurant, imitating The Happy Mondays, who they play in the film. Diners, believing the birds to be real, were mostly unamused, except for Joel and Ethan Coen, who were that year jointly awarded Best Director for The Man Who Wasn’t There. They reportedly appreciated the entertainment factor that the stunt lent their lunch.

15. Publicity stunts are a frequent feature at the Festival – fights are staged, planes are rented, mankinis are unleashed. In 2009, to promote the Belgian black comedy The Misfortunates, the cast decided to recreate a scene from the film by cycling naked through the centre of Cannes. The director, Felix van Groeningen, claimed that a motorbike followed behind them with their underwear in case they got arrested.

16. Many films prompt audience outcry – the booing, as well as the applause, at Cannes is legendary. But in 2002, Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible proved so shocking that it prompted one of the biggest walkouts in festival history. 250 people left the screening, and fire wardens administered oxygen to the 20 people who fainted.

17. Lars Von Trier’s controversial Antichrist was given an unofficial anti-prize in 2009 by the Ecumenical Jury, who have sat at various international film festivals since 1973 and each year give an award to a film which has special spiritual merit. They decided that Antichrist was ‘most sexist’.

18. In 2013, around the time of the Festival, there was a wave of jewel heists in hotels where many of the rich and famous stayed while attending Cannes – the last of which was noticeably inspired by 1955’s To Catch A Thief. 103 million euros worth of jewels were stolen from an exhibition at the Carlton Hotel entitled Extraordinary Diamonds. The thief was never caught.

19. Also in 2013, a three-way Palm d’Or was awarded for the first time to Blue Is the Warmest Colour – director Abdellatif Kechiche and stars Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux all received the award, as the judges thought that given a slight change of cast the film would not have worked as well. Kechiche considered this something of an insult and auctioned his trophy to fund his next film.

20. Security at Cannes is famously tight – everyone in attendance must have a specific badge. But there are exceptions. 2013 was a great year for festival gossip, as a man posing as Psy, the South Korean rapper of Gangnam Style infamy, was revealed to be an imposter after having blagged his way into multiple parties and posed for photos with fans. He was only caught after being spotted by the real Psy’s manager.

21. Though there is no specific Festival rule specifying shoe height or style, a number of women were denied access to the festival based on their flat footwear in 2015, in what came to be dubbed ‘heelgate.’ In response, Denis Villeneuve and the male cast of Sicario vowed to wear heels to climb the steps, but disappointingly never delivered. A number of high-profile protests followed the scandal, with actors such as Julia Roberts and Kristen Stewart shucking their stilettos and walking the red carpet barefoot.

22. In 2018, Thierry Frémaux, Executive Director of the Festival since 2007, attempted to discourage selfies on the red carpet. He admitted he didn’t have the power to ban them outright but explained that the festival did want to reduce the disorder and traffic caused by people taking selfies on the steps. He called selfies “ridiculous and grotesque,” and warned: “You never look as ugly as you do in a selfie.”

23. Each year, a Palm Dog award is given out to the best on-screen hound. Previous winners include Bruno from Belleville Rendezvous, Mops from Marie Antoinette and Brandy from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. As of 2018, there is also an Underdog category as part of the Palm Dog awards, which will go to ‘a dog, human or conspicuously deserving creature for facing adversity as the underdog’.

24. Surprise, surprise – there are 24 steps up to the Palais des Festivals, covered by 60 metres of carpet. The carpet is changed three times a day so that it looks fresh under famous feet as the steps are climbed and photos are taken. As a result of media pressure for the Festival to address its environmental impact, the carpet has been fully recyclable since 2016.

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At the beginning of 2022, industry operator and LWLies contributor Josh Slater-Williams made a pithy comment on social media in response to a list of the top 30 box office earners of 2021. He noted that only four films on the list were not based on existing intellectual property – and one of those films was the low-balling Ryan Reynolds vehicle Free Guy, which references a lot of existing IP as part of its story and production design.

So that’s 26 of the top 30 films of 2021 – top in the sense that people were going to the cinema in droves to see them – all either sequels, remakes, refits, literary adaptations, musical adaptations, spinoffs, franchise extensions or, in the case of Jungle Cruise, based on the popular theme park ride of the same name.

Piggybacking on existing IP – or, as it’s thought of in the industry, serving content to a pre-existing fanbase – is as old as the hills when it comes to the Hollywood industrial complex. That’s not to say that this mode of filmmaking inherently yields negative results, as among that top 30 there are a handful of indisputable bangers.

Yet it’s hard to feel there’s not something wrong when an artform is at a place in its evolution where originality offers scant financial recompense, and those with the commissioning power are risk-averse to the point where we’re careening into a glossy monoculture in which newfound progressive ideals are being buried in endless reams of give-the-people-what-they-want candy floss.

In response to that list, we offer up the results of a poll surveying the best films of the 21st century – the catch being that every single one is a true original and was put out in the world in the hope that an audience would crave something different, and not more of the same.

Personal top 10 lists were supplied by the following contributors: Ege Apaydin, Mark Asch, Marina Ashioti, Anton Bitel, Anna Bogutskaya, Charles Bramesco, Cheyenne Bunsie, Anna Cale, Jake Cole, Philip Concannon, Lillian Crawford, Nicole Davis, Isaac Feldberg, Emma Fraser, Patrick Gamble, Katie Goh, Rōgan Graham, Steph Green, Glenn Heath Jr, Tom Huddleston, Pamela Hutchinson, David Jenkins, Trevor Johnston, Ariel Kling, Aimee Knight, Michael Leader, Saffron Maeve, Emily Maskell, Katherine McLaughlin, Ben R Nicholson, Caitlin Quinlan, Rafa Sales Ross, Fatima Sheriff, Josh Slater-Williams, Hannah Strong, Matt Thrift, Lou Thomas, Matt Turner, Sydney Urbanek, Laura Venning, Greg Wetherall, Sam Wigley, Brianna Zigler

Explore the personal top 10s

50. The Duke of Burgundy (2014)

Directed by Peter Strickland

If 2012’s Berberian Sound Studio announced filmmaker Peter Strickland as a maker of metaphysical horror doodles that skirt on the extreme boundaries of genre, then 2014’s The Duke of Burgundy doubles down on that intent. Here he draws on ’70s softcore – those porn epics that actually had a plot! – to tell of a sadomasochistic relationship between two women, set in a world populated entirely by women. A dazzling one-off, and a dark jewel in the corpus of one of the UK’s most consistently idiosyncratic dreamweavers. David Jenkins

49. Hidden (2005)

Directed by Michael Haneke

An affluent couple besieged by a videotape stalker are siphons for Michael Haneke’s incisive interrogation of colonialism and the historical, some might say wilful, amnesia of European society. Partly inspired by the 1961 Paris massacre which saw as many as 200 Algerian protesters slaughtered by the Sûreté Nationale (an event referenced by Daniel Auteuil’s character), Hidden has been described by its director as an example of how collective guilt can be connected to a personal story. Adam Woodward

48. Synecdoche, New York (2008)

Directed by Charlie Kaufman

In Charlie Kaufman’s ever-expanding autumnal epic, a playwright’s middle-aged crisis spirals into a neurotic quest for self through reflexive art. Yet in staging his own life as an impossibly all-inclusive drama, melancholic Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is confronted with his own loneliness, mortality and insignificance in a vast, indifferent universe. The results are a sprawling anxiety dream of the human condition – profound, sophisticated and dizzyingly bleak. Anton Bitel

47. Superbad (2007)

Directed by Greg Mottola

There is no better work of modern cinema that captures mid-to-late 2000s adolescence than Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s grandiose retelling of their high school experiences, led by Jonah Hill and Michael Cera. The beauty of Superbad is that it pulls no punches – it is as caustic, offensive and uncomfortable as teen life tends to be. But what makes the film is that it is deeply empathetic, revealing a gooey centre of juvenile male friendship. Brianna Zigler

46. Whiplash (2014)

Directed by Damien Chazelle

Damien Chazelle’s electrifying examination of artistic ambition is an intense psychological drama that pushes a young jazz student and the nerves of its audience to the absolute limit. Resisting the laziness of binary ‘good’ and ‘evil’, Whiplash is instead a skillfully crafted character study that deconstructs the notion of excellence. As the utterly terrifying Terence Fletcher, JK Simmons’ delivers a malevolent mentor for the ages. Cheyenne Bunsie

45. Tabu (2012)

Directed by Miguel Gomes

Great things were expected from Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes following his extraordinary docu-fiction hybrid, Our Beloved Month of August, from 2008. What we have with Tabu is a work which both expands on an exciting cinematic project and exceeds expectation. This diptych sees the estranged lover of an elderly Lisbon dowager tell of their youthful Cape Verdean love affair while she lays dying. Eccentricity and earnestness have rarely been seen as such close bedfellows in this classically-tinged romantic epic. DJ

44. Inside Out (2015)

Directed by Pete Docter

The Pixar MO of creative brilliance paired with sweeping emotional heft is on full display as the personified emotions of an 11-year-old girl come together to help her cope with life in a new city. An intricate imagining of what shapes a personality teamed with a simple, relatable narrative, Inside Out is a tear-jerking and visually absorbing psychological comedy. It won an Oscar and more than stands up to such Pixar giants as Toy Story and Up. CB

43. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter…and Spring (2003)

Directed by Kim Ki-duk

Set in and around a monastery on a remote lake, Kim Ki-duk’s sublime feature traces the seasons of a man’s life in a floating world – from wanton boy to criminal young man to devout adult. Disarmingly simple and deeply spiritual, this is all at once Buddhist parable, humanist fable and universal allegory, never shying away from life’s cruelties while carefully initiating the viewer into something akin to religious experience. ABit

42. Spirited Away (2001)

Directed by Hayao Miyazaki

Best described as a dream, Spirited Away presents a unique world that feels open and takes you on the bizarre tangents of adventure. Hayao Miyazaki raised the bar for accessible animated storytelling that doesn’t patronise its audience, as every character is visually iconic and/or imbued with metaphor, from the pollution of the River Spirit, to the materialism and over-consumption of No-Face. The beats of the story follow the beat of their own drum, which can’t be said for so many cookie-cutter children’s tales nowadays. Fatima Sheriff

41. Blissfully Yours (2002)

Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s languorous second feature was brought to international attention when it won the Un Certain Regard prize in Cannes. Festivals are a force for good when it comes to the advocacy of films that are not ripped from existing IP sources, and the Thai maestro set the template for his searching, whimsical, humanist mode with this bucolic tale of a love affair between a young woman and her ailing, illegal immigrant boyfriend. DJ

40. Lost in Translation (2003)

Directed by Sofia Coppola

While many of Sofia Coppola’s films are based on pre-existing material, the originality of Lost in Translation resulted in her only Oscar to date for its screenplay. Like In the Mood for Love, the film follows a ‘brief encounter’ romantic structure that threatens its characters and audience alike with the pangs of dispriz’d love. With a soundtrack featuring The Jesus and Mary Chain and Peaches, it’s impossible not to fall for. Lillian Crawford

39. Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen

The Coen brothers’ ballad of a beleaguered musician tips its hat to various real-life figures from Greenwich Village’s now legendary folk scene, most notably Dave Van Ronk; it even ends with a cameo-of-sorts from a certain harmonica playing troubadour. Yet while the film wears its influences on its cigarette-burned sleeve, there’s always the sense that the Coens are adding something new to the Great American Songbook rather than merely strumming a familiar tune. AW

38. 35 Shots of Rum (2008)

Directed by Claire Denis

Claire Denis has gone on record as saying that this gorgeous, lilting 2008 film was inspired by Yasujirō Ozu’s Late Spring from 1949 – but don’t call it a remake. Denis and her regular co-screenwriter Jean-Pol Fargeau co-opt a loose, near imperceptible framework of the Japanese classic and make this story, of a father feeling the pangs of melancholy about his daughter growing up and moving away from him, entirely their own. DJ

37. The Headless Woman (2008)

Directed by Lucrecia Martel

In the spirit of the great Spaniard Luis Buñuel, Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel carries on a grand tradition of sticking it to the banal complacency of the bourgeoisie but does so with tragic empathy rather than withering satire. A middle-class matriarch accidentally drives over something while scrambling for her phone and, thinking it was a stray dog, just carries on with her life. But this moment causes a strange, temporary rupture in her being, and Martel uses her film to channel a warped perception of the everyday. DJ

36. Knight of Cups (2015)

Directed by Terrence Malick

Treading the well-worn terrain of Hollywood’s moral and creative bankruptcy, Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups employs an almost Cubist approach to editing that suggests the former might be alleviated by curing the latter. Arguably the most radical of Malick’s late-career films, Knight fully surrenders to the modernist language of the director’s sensory overload, offering new ways of seeing that bypass narrative for the pure emotional logic of the characters’ souls. Jake Cole

35. Ginger Snaps (2000)

Directed by John Fawcett

A teenage girl’s body is weird, but it shouldn’t grow a tail, spurt fur and create an insatiable bloodlust. Usually. On top of being bullied, the Fitzgerald sisters have to deal with Ginger turning into a werewolf after being unexpectedly attacked by one. A perfectly gross meld of the teen and horror movie genres, Ginger Snaps is a sibling love story and an ode to teenage girls who don’t fit in. Anna Bogutskaya

34. Happy Hour (2015)

Directed by Ryūsuke Hamaguchi

Running at 317 minutes, Happy Hour is by some way the longest film on this list – and yet not a moment is wasted. Its scale in screentime is scarcely matched in scope, focusing on four middle-class women in Kobe, Japan with several languorous scenes in restaurants and theatre groups reminiscent of Jacques Rivette’s modernist epic, Out 1. As director Ryūsuke Hamaguchi grows in reputation, this will forever be his magnum opus. LC

33. It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012)

Directed by Don Herzfeldt

Don Hertzfeldt is the most hardworking filmmaker on the planet. Not only does he write, direct, produce, animate and distribute his films pretty much single-handedly, they are without exception works of rare, transcendent beauty. Hertzfeldt’s lone feature to date film remains his crowning achievement: following the lonely adventures of a stick man named Bill, it’s a brutally human portrait of depression and social isolation that steadily rises to a crescendo of heartbreaking, ecstatic glory. Tom Huddleston

32. Donnie Darko (2001)

Directed by Richard Kelly

The mind of a teenage boy can be a perverted explosion of hormones and rage, but also a place that spurts kindness and curiosity. Richard Kelly’s cult classic grasps that duality with a character whose fiendish urges and frustrations at society guide him on a superhero origin story of sorts. The daring narrative combines apocalyptic anxieties, pop culture obsession and state of the nation satire while also powerfully expressing the pain of puberty. Katherine McLaughlin

31. Raw (2016)

Directed by Julia Ducournau

Only Julia Ducournau could give us a feature debut that blends cannibal body horror, pronounced corporeality and adolescent sexual awakening, all while asking, “are you your body, or is your body you? And what does that mean in terms of identity?” Raw disavows both glamourised and demonised depictions of monstrous femininity, instead honing in on the protagonist’s coming of age and her voracious, insatiable hunger for flesh. Marina Ashioti

30. Le Quatto Volte (2010)

Directed by Michelangelo Frammartino

You’ll notice there aren’t a great many documentaries in this list, as the notion of filming and shaping reality almost falls between two stools in the IP debate. What we do have is Michelangelo Frammartino’s wondrous Le Quattro Volte, a playful quasi-documentary about goat herding in Calabria that constantly calls into question the very methods of its manufacture, asking whether objective truth in filmmaking is any kind of achievable goal. DJ

29. Stray Dogs (2013)

Directed by Tsai Ming-liang

Every film made by Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang would be in contention for his best, but one likely to be hovering in the top tier for most fans of the director’s corpus of glacially-paced wonders is Stray Dogs. It’s a simple portrait of a poverty-stricken family searching desperately for money and food, and in the end all they’re able to sustain themselves with is art. This film is one of the great examples of how long takes can slowly subvert perception of an image or an action into something transcendent. DJ

28. Petite Maman (2021)

Directed by Céline Sciamma

Long live the matriarchy of Céline Sciamma! Petite Maman is the culmination of her cinematic skill with yet another unique perspective on female love that clocks in at just 82 minutes. Existing in a liminal, ambiguous space between home and forest, Sciamma’s film turns a delicate exploration of grief and depression into child’s play. It is a paragon of simplicity and authenticity that will make you tear up and want to hug your mum, and more cinema should aim for that. FS

27. A Serious Man (2009)

Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen

Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) can’t catch a break. With his son’s Bar Mitzvah approaching and tenure just out of reach, his wife announces she’s leaving him for Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed). The Coens’ darkly comedic take on their midwestern adolescence bridges reality and fiction into a profoundly Jewish and speculative work of faltering faith. When everything is going wrong, what does it mean? It means the universe laughs at our suffering. And so are we. BZ

26. Millennium Mambo (2001)

Directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien

Though Taiwanese New Wave lynchpin Hou Hsiao-hsien is considered to have one of the greatest bodies of work of any director, living or dead, this current focus on original storytelling means that his regular screenwriter, Chu T’ien-wen, should also get her dues. She penned this shoegaze-y character study of a relationship in quiet freefall, and a young woman’s decision to break free of a toxic romance in the city and return to her rural roots. As with all of Hou’s films, the radical, elliptical telling of the tale is just as important as the tale itself. DJ

25. Margaret (2011)

Directed by Kenneth Lonergan

Six years on the shelf is rarely a good look, but in the case of Kenneth Lonergan’s second feature – shot in 2005, released in a hobbled cut in 2011 – the reasons for the delay couldn’t be clearer: the director refused to budge. Quite right, too. His definitive three-hour cut is a discursive, achingly empathetic study of teen privilege and misguided activism, with a fierce central turn from Anna Paquin. TH

24. Frances Ha (2012)

Directed by Noah Baumbach

A picaresque tale of a freewheeling young woman under pressure to take life more seriously, Noah Baumbach’s black-and-white, New York-set Frances Ha cemented Greta Gerwig – its luminous star and co-writer – as a major voice of her generation. The film is a loving homage to the French New Wave while capturing the liberation and the loneliness of life in a big city with wit, humour and heart. Laura Venning

23. Berberian Sound Studio (2012)

Directed by Peter Strickland

It’s quite a feat to make squashed fruit and vegetables the gory centrepiece of a film, but Peter Strickland pulls it off with ease in his disturbing deconstruction of sound, violence and cinema. It’s a celebration of pioneering experimental composers, foley artists and sound engineers that addresses sexual harassment in the film industry, while also toying with giallo horror tropes and culture clashes with a nightmarish intensity and dryly comic edge. KM

22. Ida (2013)

Directed by Paweł Pawlikowski

Another nun film caught in conflict between the sanctity of faith and the grim realities of the world around her? Not quite… Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2013 Oscar-winner Ida is a simple yet deeply profound story of self-discovery. Impeccably lit, meticulously composed and bolstered by superb sound design and an exceptional use of static black and-white cinematography, the distinctive artistry of Ida makes it a mesmerising slice of transcendental cinema. MA

21. Bacarau (2019)

Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, Juliano Dornelles

As it reaches its delirious climax, Bacurau gorges in the ecstasy of the avenged colonised. Knives held by brown hands cut through white skin and bullets blast through rusty weapons stained by the dried sweat of those who once fought for the same ravished land. It’s a thrilling, precise exercise in historical rereading that translates Brazilian politics through a pulsing, genre-bending homage to Glauber Rocha and John Carpenter. Rafa Sales Ross

20. Cameraperson (2016)

Directed by Kirsten Johnson

Overturning documentary convention and challenging traditional ideas of film authorship, Kirsten Johnson’s alchemical Cameraperson creates an extraordinarily intimate, if oblique narrative out of wildly various footage. Life, death and ethics hang in the balance with each carefully placed sequence, all of which were shot by Johnson during her impressive 25-year career as a documentary cinematographer. This story, however, is all hers. She says: “I ask you to see it as my memoir.” Pamela Hutchinson

19. Dogville (2003)

Directed by Lars von Trier

Films shot entirely on bare soundstages often make it difficult for viewers to suspend disbelief. Yet the unadorned set of Lars von Trier’s cinematic triumph Dogville potently immerses us into the underbelly of smalltown America. It’s a dog-eat dog world, and when a runaway with a seemingly poised calm (Nicole Kidman) seeks refuge in Dogville, she finds herself at the mercy of the townsfolk. Von Trier strips it down to the bare essentials of storytelling, with the enchanting performances of his star-studded cast taking centre stage. MA

18. Manchester by the Sea (2016)

Directed by Kenneth Lonergan

Filmed on location in and around the eponymous Massachusetts town, Kenneth Lonergan’s laconic drama about a grief-stricken handyman is at once universal in its thematic scope and singular in its depiction of the tight-knit blue-collar community that anchors the story. Interestingly, the initial premise originated not with Lonergan but noted New Englanders Matt Damon and John Krasinski, with the former at one stage planning to direct and star in the lead role. AW

17. The Master (2012)

Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Paul Thomas Anderson’s disquieting portrait of postwar ennui follows troubled veteran Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) as a sexually voracious loner who succumbs to the charms of charismatic cult leader Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Together, the two men form a perverse odd couple, quietly throbbing with the kind of unrealized craving begotten from early-twentieth century repression. Their story shapes a singular, timeless narrative of belonging and desire, with Anderson’s craftsmanship firing on every cylinder. BZ

16. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

Directed by Wes Anderson

“I’ve had a rough year, dad.” If The Royal Tenenbaums remains Wes Anderson’s most enduring film it’s because it brought his rich, imaginative world of dysfunctional families, vibrant tableaux and deadpan delivery to the mainstream. It also remains his most sincerely emotional film. Among a brilliant ensemble, three child prodigies grow into three disaffected adults trapped by the nostalgia of their early brilliance, soundtracked by an equally nostalgic mix of Nico, Paul Simon and more. LV

15. Melancholia (2011)

Directed by Lars von Trier

A family gathered in a castle for a lavish wedding crumbles under the very same sky where a rogue planet aptly named Melancholia makes its way towards Earth. Lars von Trier’s spin on the disaster movie is as nihilistic as one would expect and as close as cinema can get to encompassing the all-consuming dread that accompanies both a tangible threat of extinction and the unyielding swamp of depressive catatonia. RSR

14. Yi Yi (2000)

Directed by Edward Yang

The late, very great Edward Yang was taken from us far too soon at the age of 59, and his 2000 film Yi Yi (aka A One and a Two…) ended up being his untimely swansong. But what a swansong it is – an intimate family saga which splits its focus between the emotionally unfulfilled members of a middle-class Taipei family, whose journey of self refelction is sparked by a need to talk to their comatose grandmother. It’s soap opera supercharged with levels of profundity, insight and melancholic poetry seldom seen in modern movies. DJ

13. Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003)

Directed by Tsai Ming-liang

Made well before the streaming era, Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn presciently eulogises the communal aspect of the cinema. That this tribute shows theatre patrons doing anything but paying attention to the movie playing is both the film’s deadpan punchline and its loving affirmation. Tsai’s minimalism dissolves barriers of reality, making spectators of actors and dramatised characters of viewers as all resemble ghosts seeking connection to art and each other. JC

12. Eden (2014)

Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve

Few films are as immersive as Eden. Directed by Mia Hansen Løve and inspired by her brother Sven’s career as a DJ, it’s best described as an experience. From acid-fuelled raves in neon caverns to house parties and Paris bars, Hansen Løve recreated the bygone era of her youth in all its messy glory. Eden also boasts an epic soundtrack centred on Daft Punk, and a pitch-perfect dissection of Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls. LC

11. Before Sunset (2004)

Directed by Richard Linklater

Exactly nine years after meeting on a train in Before Sunrise, Celine and Jesse reunite, accidentally on purpose, in Paris. They are older, more cynical and romance-weary, but the memory of their day-long, puppy-eyed love affair in Vienna resurfaces intensely when they meet again. During 80 perfect minutes, they walk and talk, about everything and nothing. In an agonising cliffhanger that wouldn’t get resolved for another nine years, they decide whether to stay together. AB

10. Syndromes and a Century (2006)

Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

The fiery antagonisms of the science vs religion debate are captured with pin-drop tranquillity in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s ambient portrait of a rural Thai hospital that’s not dissimilar to one the director’s parents worked in. Workplace romances, ghostly emanations and Buddhist monks requiring urgent dental work make up this breezily comic pathwork of wistful remembrance and mischievous formal experimentation. Also: Best. Ending. Ever. DJ

9. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)

Directed by Céline Sciamma

“Not everything is fleeting. Some feelings are deep.” It’s near impossible to convey the transcendent poetic genius and haunting elegance of Céline Sciamma’s magnum opus. Unfolding on a desolate island in 18th-century Brittany, every frame is a Rembrandt; a lyrical dissection of desire. Few filmmakers can depict yearning and the feminine gaze quite like Sciamma, whose sensory investigation into passion and the complex web of looking is as effortless as it is intoxicating. MA

8. The Tree of Life (2011)

Directed by Terrence Malick

With symphonic grandiosity and import, Terrence Malick’s grand philosophical inquiry interweaves the story of a 1950s Texas family with that of the universe’s origins, heralding the miracle of creation in both. Overwhelming? Well, naturally. Synthesising sound, imagery, and narrative in all their evocative power, Malick marries his mastery of the form to his boundless ambition and a fierce sense of soul in order to induce transcendence and touch the cinematic sublime. Isaac Feldberg

7. Get Out (2017)

Directed by Jordan Peele

The game-changer that no one saw coming. Jordan Peele’s chilling masterwork about a Black man who goes to meet the family of his white girlfriend upended the horror genre and loaded it with impeccable symbolism and satire. It delivered a much-needed skewering of liberal racism and gifted pop culture with the concept of ‘The Sunken Place’. A gold standard, it’s now near-impossible to combine race and horror without inevitable comparison. CB

6. Phantom Thread (2017)

Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Anderson’s 2017 film, ostensibly the result of a series of comic text messages with his old pal Daniel Day-Lewis, arrived with less fanfare than either 2012’s The Master or 2014’s Inherent Vice. Yet, according to our poll, it’s the most well-loved of his eccentric event movies, telling of a (literally) toxic love affair set in the stuffy halls of a midcentury London fashion house run by domineering perfectionist, Reynolds Woodcock. It’s one of the director’s most low-key, poised and elegant movies to date, and may just be his masterpiece. DJ

5. First Reformed (2017)

Directed by Paul Schrader

The film that launched a million social media memes is also one of the finest directorial works of the man who is known for being one of Martin Scorsese’s most vital creative wingmen. Ethan Hawke locks into career-best mode as a faithless pastor who ponders the option of taking violent action against those who are wilfully destroying the planet. As usual for Schrader, the pastor’s plans are scuppered by the pressing desire to save a holy innocent who has recently entered into his circle. DJ

4. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

Directed by Michel Gondry

This is a sci-fi romance of unusual eccentricity and force, and also a defiantly humanist work about the futility of being able to cultivate a human connection. We all yearn for love, that most ineffable, impermanent of things; knowing this, writer Charlie Kaufman and director Michel Gondry map intricacies of memory and its loss as an endless labyrinth, through which the characters in this film search and stumble, beholden only to the pursuit of love as itself a reality deeper than truth. IF

3. Parasite (2019)

Directed by Bong Joon-ho

When Parasite made history as only the second film ever to win both the Palme d’Or and the Academy’s Best Picture, Bong Joon-ho made a seismic impact on the world cinema landscape. At the core of this hyper-real social satire steeped in spatial metaphor lies an intricately woven exploration of capitalism and class warfare told with deliciously genre bending unpredictability. Bong’s films are truly in a world all of their own. MA

2. Mulholland Drive (2001)

Directed by David Lynch

Mulholland Dr was an early 21st-century masterpiece, unlike anything we’d seen before, and now it’s impossible to imagine cinema without it: the shadowy bogeyman lurking behind every boilerplate Hollywood thriller or romance. From the distinctive, disruptive mind of David Lynch, it is a queer blend of film noir and tinseltown lore, in which dreams play out like classical ‘reality’ and the truth is revealed, but only just, in a non-linear nightmare. PH

1. In the Mood for Love (2000)

Directed by Wong Kar-wai

Told in exquisite vignettes awash with deep reds and dusky greens, a sedate yet heightened story of repressed yearning unfolds in Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love. After the breakout success of the kinetic Chungking Express and grittier tragedy of Happy Together, the initial response to In the Mood for Love was more muted. Yet two decades later it has rightfully been enshrined as Wong’s masterpiece. Set in 1962 in British Hong Kong, Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung exude captivating beauty and grace as neighbours in an apartment block drawn together as they realise their spouses are having affairs with each other. The agony of their own unresolved desire is palpable; time slows down when they meet as if they’re desperate to cling on to every moment before it’s lost to the past. A major influence on countless filmmakers and with one of the most quietly devastating endings ever, their brief encounters are impossible to forget. LV