Top 10

As Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) sleeps securely in her mother’s arms, a bright circle of light skittishly bounces across the door, its glow illuminating the murky shape of a key. Nelly and Marion (Gabrielle Sanz)...

Recent cinema has been marked by its reckoning with myths and legends: some based in truth, some overt fabrications, some lost to time, some painfully traceable. Spencer tackles the Royal Family; Dune brings a...

There is something deliriously off-kilter about Limbo, Ben Sharrock’s absurdist comedy about a group of asylum seekers awaiting processing on a remote Scottish island. Nothing is ever quite right. In its...

“To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.” In The Simpsons episode titled ‘Homer vs. the Eighteenth Amendment’, after battling humourless lawman Rex Banner, Homer Simpson...

A darkened interior frames a lone man striding across a dusty plain. It’s one of the most well-worn images in cinema, and it provides a powerful visual shorthand for the themes of any Western: domesticity vs...

Best Picture. Best Director. Best Actress. Winning over 100 awards in total, Nomadland’s success at the Oscars may have seemed, ultimately, inevitable, but there was still a surge of warranted joy when...

In a conversation with musician David Byrne, director Mike Mills said it’s his natural urge to make every film feel like the chorus of a song. Choruses are often the zeniths of a song. A wondrous combination...

The best films of 2021 marshalled all of the techniques of cinema to tell their stories in ways that could only be achieved within the medium of film. The Father mastered editing and production design, using...

Well, 2021 wasn't the improvement we all deserved after a dire 2020. Perhaps that was just wishful thinking. I sincerely hope that you and your family are safe and well, as we prepare to enter year three of...

The ending of another year is a time that lends itself to reflection. So let’s look back on the good old days, when going to the supermarket didn’t feel like a health hazard, when cinemas were open and...

Released less than a month before the UK entered lockdown, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a memory from the Before Times. Not only is it about so much of what has been taken from us this year, but the film...

Editor note - While Little Women was released on the 26th December 2019 in the UK, due to time constraints our group of writers did not get the chance to vote for it in last year's Top 20. For that reason, we...

One of the things that separates my very favourite films from those that are merely excellent is that they seem to fold in other mediums as they go. With its dense plotting and lovingly textured surroundings,...

Mermaids, one-eyed seagulls, and glimpses of sea monsters; Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse is anything but a mainstream horror. This undeniably weird film landed in the UK in the “normal” part of 2020,...

In a year so dominated by collective illness, loss, and pain, focusing on the tragedy of a single family for two hours can feel remarkably refreshing. Shannon Murphy’s debut feature Babyteeth is an intimate...