Cinema writes the story of our present. And it’s struck me how beautifully, if mournfully, this collection of my favourite films released this year speaks to two of our most pressing concerns: history, how it weaves its tendrils into the present and how foolish we become if we ignore it, and loneliness, which starts to feel like a death sentence if we cannot find a way to speak to each other.
These ideas are present, in subtle or dominant ways, across all 15 entries on this list. Certainly, it wasn’t intentional, but it may have been subconscious.
Here, based on UK release dates, are the best films of this past year.
15. The Beast
In Henry James’s 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle, a man isolates himself from the world purely out of fear that some unnamed catastrophe, a prowling “beast”, is pacing circles around his life, readying to strike. Bertrand Bonello’s film isn’t a direct adaptation – instead, it reveals that James’s “beast” has only grown stronger and more ferocious in the decades since. Segmented across time, its story concerns a woman, Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux), who is being “purified” of her past lives in order to more efficiently serve an emotionless, logic-ruled AI future.
It’s not a happy film, but it is a truthful one, and its effects can be hard to shake. Every time period has its own Gabrielle and its own Louis (George McKay). Whether in 1910, 2014, or 2044, the pair’s fears and insecurities overwhelm their potential for love. It’s in the contemporary section that Bonello suggests how dangerous such self-imposed isolation can be. There, Louis shoots violent, misogynistic manifestos on his phone. They are echoes of our real world. He craves connection but rejects vulnerability, and, because he can’t acknowledge how the first is impossible without the second, instead succumbs to entitlement and hatred. The Beast is a frightening tragedy, yet – past, present, or future – it belongs entirely to us.
Read our original review of The Beast
14. Four Daughters
There is, perhaps, a universal desire to step back into our own memories, to retrace them with the years of acquired wisdom and see them with new clarity. Art grants us that opportunity. In Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania’s experimental documentary Four Daughters, the life of Olfa Hamrouni, whose eldest daughters Ghofrane and Rahma Chikhaoui left home to join the Islamic State, is re-examined through a series of workshopped dramatisations. Some involve Olfa. In more difficult moments, actor Hend Sabri steps in. Younger daughters Eya and Tayssir Chikhaoui play themselves, while Ichraq Matar and Nour Karoui play Ghofrane and Rahma.
Ben Hania, with her unexpected collective, has created a space for these women to step outside of themselves, to talk and to challenge each other, and to let daughters finally say what they’ve held close to their chests for an entire lifetime. Out of it arises a complex portrait of motherhood, invested in empathy and not in blame, that would seem impossible if it were written by the hand of a single author. Call it therapy as art, art as therapy. Whatever the case, Four Daughters shines a light on the places too often left in the shadows.
13. Kneecap
West Belfast, Irish-language hip-hop trio Kneecap ended a formative year with a worldwide tour and widespread media recognition, by winning their legal case against Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch for the unlawful blocking, when she was business secretary, of a £14,250 arts grant. She cited an objection to those who “oppose the United Kingdom itself”. Band member DJ Próvaí turned up to court in a mock police Land Rover flying Irish and Palestinian flags. Is it too late to tack it onto the end of their self-named biopic? It’d make for a perfect, poetic epilogue.
With the help of writer-director Rich Peppiatt, and Oscar-nominated actor Michael Fassbender, Kneecap – DJ Próvaí, Mo Chara, and Móglaí Bap, all starring as themselves – have delivered a cinematic manifesto for their art, for the radical liberation offered by the Irish language, and for the lives of the so-called “ceasefire generation”, those born after the Good Friday Agreement. It’s equal parts poignant and wildly funny, a sex-and-drugs-laced argument for authenticity over respectability (respectable to whom, anyway?). Some parts are fictional, some parts are true. DJ Próvaí did, proveably, once drop his trousers to reveal the words “Brits out” written on each butt cheek.
Read our original review of Kneecap
12. Perfect Days
While there are several films on this list that deal with the nature of loneliness, it’s Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days alone that dares us to embrace it rather than fear it. What if we reconsidered a solitary existence not as a lack of friends, partners, or family, but as an opportunity to forge deep, nourishing connections with the world around us? Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho) is a toilet attendant in Tokyo. He lives by his routine. We witness him in contemplative silence as he readies for work, climbs into his van, and puts on a cassette tape – the soundtrack is made full with The Velvet Underground, Patti Smith and Otis Redding. He is free to see what others do not: light patterned across concrete, a lone dancer out in the park, people huddled in cafes.
Wenders hasn’t romanticised Hirayama’s monk-like existence. He’s reminded of his isolation by his comparatively boisterous colleague Takashi (Tokio Emoto) and estranged sister Keiko (Yumi Asō). Sometimes he’s struck by the grief of unknown experiences lost. Still, Perfect Days feels restorative because Yakusho’s performance wills it to be. It’s resilient in its gentle nature, and culminates in a stunning close-up set to Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good”, a summary of all that’s come before, achieved without a single line of dialogue spoken.
11. Challengers
Challengers reconfigures Jules et Jim (1962), François Truffaut’s classic story of a ménage à trois, for the hyper-capitalistic age, in which desire can no longer be untangled from achievement and streamlined efficiency. There’s not a lick of the bohemian to tennis players Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), even if the latter is prone to sleeping in his car. In director Luca Guadagnino’s world, love is hungry (literally so, in his cannibal tale Bones and All), and frequently selfish, and Challengers leaves provocatively unsettled the politics of desire: who, exactly, is in love with who?
Do Art and Patrick love Tashi, or each other? Does Tashi, forced into early retirement by an injury, love these boys, or merely the way they worship her? Is tennis their life’s meaning, or merely an outlet for frustrated desires? There’s no firm answer to these questions while Guadagnino holds his audience under his spell – of sweat-locked curls and muscled thighs, Zendaya in full stardom mode, and the throbbing of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score. Every conversation is a tennis match, and every tennis match is a sex scene.
Read our original review of Challengers
10. Dune: Part Two
“Frankly, I hate dialogue,” Denis Villeneuve declared, rather provocatively, in an interview earlier this year. “I’m not interested in dialogue at all. Pure image and sound, that is the power of cinema.” While there are a number of films on this very list that disprove his theory, Dune: Part Two is evidence at least that he’s a man who lives by his own code. There are lone frames here that bear the same chilly, symbolic weight you’d ascribe to a newly unearthed relic, its meaning not immediately obvious, but so sumptuous and heady it demands eternal attention.
While 2021’s Part One, adapting the first half of Frank Herbert’s foundational sci-fi novel, breathed dread, Part Two is choked by menace. Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), manipulated by his own mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), and her Bene Gesserit clan of space-witches, discovers that the path laid out for him can lead only to mass death and destruction. But, even on such scale, Villeneuve works with a delicate hand, in the subtle changes made to Herbert’s book, or the poison-tipped performances of Chalamet, Ferguson, and Austin Butler, as snarling antagonist Feyd-Rautha. Dune: Part Two is unlike any other blockbuster in existence.
Read our original review of Dune: Part Two
9. All of Us Strangers
All of Us Strangers is a ghost story with blurred borders, suspended between memory and dream, between real conversations and the ones we wish we could have had before it was too late. Andrew Scott delivers a career-best performance, powered by unprocessed grief that leaves his face and body twisted, perpetually uncomfortable. He plays Adam, a frustrated screenwriter living in a seemingly vacant new-build block in south London. All of a sudden, Harry (Paul Mescal) is at his door, drunk and yearning for connection.
Within the unclosed gap in their courtship, writer-director Andrew Haigh, loosely adapting Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel Strangers, weaves in another unsettled narrative. Adam travels back to his childhood home, outside Croydon, only to find his mother (Claire Foy) and father (Jamie Bell) there, despite the fact they’ve been dead for decades. He retreats back into his adolescence, back into his pyjamas, back into their bed, wondering, if he’d been able to find peace then, whether his life now wouldn’t feel so unmoored. With scenes shot in Haigh’s own childhood home, All of Us Strangers offers formidable vulnerability – a piece of the artist’s heart, in which we might find mirrored a piece of our own.
Read our original review of All of Us Strangers
8. All We Imagine as Light
The first Indian film to win the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, All We Imagine as Light is a portrait of loneliness not entirely unlike All of Us Strangers. Both their titles, and their mood, feel inclusive. But the sharp, hollowing scrape of Haigh’s story is here mellowed out into a dull but persistent ache. It haunts Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a woman living in Mumbai whose absent husband creeps back into her consciousness when he sends her, out of the blue, a rice cooker. At night, she crawls out of bed to embrace it.
Payal Kapadia’s film reminds us that silence can exist at the heart of even the busiest metropolis. Yet without words, a woman like Prabha is still able to stretch her hand out in solidarity to those around her, from her roommate Anu (Divya Prabha), in a relationship with a Muslim man she’s too afraid to disclose to her parents, to Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a widow who’s about to be evicted from her home. In All We Imagine as Light’s second half, Kapadia allows us to drift, beautifully, into a dream space. Freed from the city’s relentlessness, the trio finally have the chance to reflect on their own desires. Their revelations feel like a long overdue exhale.
Read our original review of All We Imagine as Light
7. No Other Land
No Other Land’s urgency not only comes from the images it depicts – the gradual, but determined destruction by occupying Israeli forces of Masafer Yatta, a network of Palestinian villages in the West Bank – but from the fragile yet hopeful friendship it nurtures at its centre. Law student and activist Basel Adra has been collating footage of the forced expulsion, and its increasing violence, since the age of 15. But, after meeting Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, the pair formed a wider team responsible for the documentary, collaborating with Palestinian filmmaker Hamdan Ballal and Israeli cinematographer and editor Rachel Szor.
Abraham helps rebuild homes, writes feverishly about the demolitions, and becomes frustrated when news doesn’t seem to spread. He’s the empathetic voice of the outsider, driven by the feeling that something must be done and must be done now. But this has been Adra’s entire existence. It was his father’s, too. He jokes that Abraham thinks he can single-handedly end the occupation in the next 10 days. Between the frightening realities it portrays, No Other Land allows space to explore the relationship between these two men, and what it has to say about the true nature of solidarity. Abraham became the target of death threats when, in his speech at the Berlin Film Festival, he denounced the inequality of rights between him and his co-director, calling for “this situation of apartheid between us “ to end.
6. La Chimera
La Chimera is as precious and delicate a work as the artefacts its wayward hero, archaeologist Arthur (Josh O’Connor), pulls up from the ground. It’s the great gift of Italian director Alice Rohrwacher, whose films (among them 2018’s Happy as Lazzaro) seem born out of pure magic and memory. There is something here we can call a concrete story: Arthur, in Eighties Tuscany, is freshly released from prison, only to immediately fall in with a band of “tombaroli”, or local graverobbers. He wanders from hill to hill, in his unwashed linen suit. His great love, Beniamina (Yile Vianello), is long gone. He visits her mother, Flora (Isabella Rossellini) and finds his self-serving, capitalist impulses challenged by her free-spirited music student, the symbolically named Italia (Carol Duarte).
More often than not, Rohrwacher’s film slips into the realm of myth and folklore. Arthur has preternatural visions, like the Oracle of Delphi. He searches for Beniamina, like Orpheus did Eurydice, yet remembers her with a thread in her hand like Ariadne guiding Theseus out of the Minotaur’s maze. Who, in La Chimera, is lost? Who guides who? Who is alive? And who is dead? The film is a spell, in which history takes on its own power, and where all are lost, and all are eventually found.
Read our original review of La Chimera
5. Blitz
While Alice Rohrwacher may depict the line between past and present as slippery and elusive, Steve McQueen shoots a connecting line between the two with the determination of Robin Hood drawing back his bow. In his Second World War epic Blitz, he borrows the conventions of classic children’s literature – about the young packed up and sent away on trains, saved from the city’s terrors, and seeking adventure in the great British countryside – in order to create a portrait of the era that feels entirely revelatory.
We see through the eyes of its young Black protagonist George (an astounding Elliott Heffernan), who leaps off one of these trains in order to make his way back home to the arms of his mother, Rita (Saoirse Ronan). Through his eyes, we can take in the city’s reality. It’s presented in uncompromising detail, from the underground jazz clubs springing to defiant life, to an air-raid warden (Benjamin Clementine) making his stand against bigotry, to the fear-gripped hearts of civilians as they try to take shelter, only to discover that their government has barred them from the safety of the underground stations. We’re so lucky to have a filmmaker like McQueen, who sees with such empathy and clarity.
Read our original review of Blitz
4. I Saw the TV Glow
Any “best of” list is bound to incite arguments about what has and hasn’t made the cut. I’m thankful, then, for Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, a film explicitly about the futility of insisting we all share one objective experience. Our relationship with art is our own, and sometimes it can come from such an intimate, unknowable place that it seems to tell us things about ourselves we haven’t yet learnt.
It’s a film about the trans experience, though its central metaphor is so potent that it welcomes in other interpretations: two kids in 1996, Owen (a haunting Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), bond over a low-budget, late-night supernatural TV show called The Pink Opaque. It speaks to them, in ways they struggle to articulate. Maddy embraces the freedom it offers, while Owen denies it, and their choices leave them walking alongside each other on what feels like opposite sides of a cliff face. For Owen, the world stays askew. And, in that context, the words “there is still time”, scribbled in chalk on a suburban street, scream out to the viewer. There. Is. Still. Time.
Read our original review of I Saw the TV Glow
3. The Zone of Interest
When Jonathan Glazer’s Academy Awards speech, accepting the Best International Feature Film Award for The Zone of Interest, became a point of controversy for the mere mention of “the ongoing attack on Gaza”, it only reiterated his film’s message. It, and Steve McQueen’s Blitz, have no interest in placing history behind a glass case merely to be quietly observed; they are intended by their filmmakers to serve as mirrors, in which we’re challenged to see the reflection of now, and our own role in it.
Glazer’s film starkly presents the domestic life of Rudolf Hoss (Christian Friedel), the real-life commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, and his family. Much of it, at first, would seem banal, if it weren’t for the sickly knowledge that they live metres away from where an estimated 1.1 million people – 960,000 of them Jewish – were murdered with bureaucratic efficiency. It’s hidden away, behind barbed-wire walls, but the signs are still there: the rail-thin bodies in muddied uniforms delivering groceries, the faint sounds of screams, wives gossiping about the clothes they stole off Jewish victims. Hoss’s family, including his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), live what they think is a self-made, hermetic reality. But as made clear in Glazer’s provocative final scenes, set in the present day, such denial will not withstand the inevitability of history.
Read our original review of The Zone of Interest
2. Poor Things
Poor Things is one of the most accessible films of Greece’s master of the weird, Yorgos Lanthimos (for the opposite, look to his delightfully thorny Kinds of Kindness, which was also released this year), thanks partially to the literary witticisms of screenwriter Tony McNamara. Yet it’s still a giddy fever dream gazed upon with a distorted fish-eye lens, where geese wear the heads of dogs, ocean liners sail beneath marble-pink skies, and late-Victorian fashion erupts into latex raincoats and ruffled underpant-shorts.
Lanthimos uses Alasdair Gray’s source novel to weave an ecstatic portrait of a kind of metaphorical rebirth. Such is the power of Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), the reanimated body of Victoria Blessington, a suffocated woman of society, with her own baby’s brain placed in her cranium as part of an experiment by Dr Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). She is Frankenstein’s monster sans tragedy, and ready to take the reins of her own destiny; to forgive her creator and make peace with her strange existence; and to explore the world and take from it all that she can, even as men try to control her through sex, philosophy, and marriage. We could all learn to be a bit more Bella.
Read our original review of Poor Things
1. Hoard
It may surprise you to see a smaller release like Hoard top a list above two awards-season heavy hitters, but there’s not much point in me telling you the films you’re most likely to have already seen are worth your time. And anyway, this one cut me right to the bone. Hoard is the feature debut of Luna Carmoon, and it’s both a spiritual companion, and striking opposite, of Charlotte Wells’s much-lauded 2021 film Aftersun, with Paul Mescal. Both deal with young women sifting through the memories of parents gone too early from their lives, operating under some futile belief there are answers hidden there, beneath an unturned stone.
Aftersun lived in the ephemeral thump of a holiday resort dance floor. Hoard lives in mess – in foul, rotted, magical, well-loved mess. It’s the boldest British debut in years because it refuses every inclination to aestheticise or compartmentalise loss; instead, grief is allowed to run wild and rampant, into ugly and uncomfortable spaces. Maria (Lily-Beau Leach) has a mother (Hayley Squires) with a hoarding compulsion. They love each other dearly, becoming twin queens of their tiny kingdom of trash. But it’s dangerous. Maria, eventually, is separated from her and taken into foster care.
Years later, after unexpected news, Maria (now Saura Lightfoot Leon), seeks out that same smelly refuge in bin man and fellow former foster kid Michael (Joseph Quinn, also featured in this year’s Gladiator II and A Quiet Place: Day One). Leon and Quinn challenge their characters to an ever-escalating feral state – and these are spectacular performances, as toxic and perverse as they are tender and hungry for connection, even if it involves a spoon and a bowl of ashes (connect the dots yourself). Carmoon will assuredly go on to big things. It’s just a question of whether you want to be there, where it all started.
