Cate Blanchett plays Lydia Tár as a charming, authoritative, magnetic, and terrible person. We’re fully immersed in the life and perspective of a deeply unpleasant person and there’s a complex catharsis as the film charts her downfall. Todd Field makes us feel not sympathy but maybe empathy for Tár even as we’re disgusted by her many abusive actions. Cinema at its best encourages us to explore complex and complicated feelings and TÁR is at once delicate, considered, and forceful.

A 1970s BBC British horror that has fallen through time to be released in 2023. The Volunteer (Mary Woodvine) undertakes the same ritual each and every day and it gradually becomes clear that she’s not a botanist but something deeper—something older—and that the flower she’s protecting is something more. ENYS MEN shows an England where nothing changes to such an extent that time starts flowing backwards and overlapping with itself. Memories, people, places, and objects all merge into one as the relentlessness of conservatism flattens everything into the same person, the same flower, the same menhir.

EO directed by Jerzy Skolimowski uses the language of cinema to push us to empathise with a non-human protagonist and therefore expand our sense of subjectivity to cover the perspective of its titular donkey. Without dialogue and with an incredible soundscape, EO follows a circus donkey as he encounters other animals and wanders through the ruins and conflicts of modern European history. Like Kossakovsky’s GUNDA and Arnold’s COW, EO pushes us to consider the exploitation of animals and the subjectivity of the others on this planet.

A post-apocalyptic period piece filmed in the context of the nuclear annihilation of two cities and 220,000 people, RASHOMON strips down humanity until it finds cynicism, deceit, selfishness, and despair. With no truth, there can be no agreement and no reconciliation or forgiveness even after the body’s death. It’s a bleak, empty, and egotistic world where everyone is out only for themselves. Until, that is, a baby cries and hope is found in the simple act of kindness to the generation who can rebuild this shattered world.

If you set out to purposefully miscast a film, you couldn’t do a better job than THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES did inadvertently. Tom Hanks is too inherently likeable to be the racist Wall Street guy callously throwing other people to the wolves; Bruce Willis is too self-serious to be the drunken journalist accidentally ruining lives; Kim Cattrall and Melanie Griffith are in entirely different movies. The tone is all over the place and doesn’t succeed in telling the story of racism and social stratification that it’s trying to tell. Like HEARTS OF DARKNESS and APOCALYPSE NOW, the making of the film (in the form of Julie Salamon’s book The Devil’s Candy) is more interesting than the film itself. Too inept to even be fun.

A great performance from Jane Fonda as a sex worker whose reward for navigating a paranoid world of shadowy figures and sexual assault is to end up with John Klute (Donald Sutherland), the most boring man alive. Alan J. Pakula excels at capturing the dark grime of 1970s Manhattan and the paranoid state of America at the time. Fonda carries the film with a humanising portrayal of a woman traumatised by men’s violence and unashamed of her profession. It’s just such a shame that Sutherland’s character is the basis for the title and yet his character is so bland: he’s also the same age as me currently in this but looks ten years older.

Not my favourite of Lawrence Gordon Clark’s Ghost Stories for Christmas, LOST HEARTS is altogether too literal. Adaptations of James work best when the haunting is diffuse, unknowable, and tied to the ghost of England.

Like THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN, GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS feels like a play in that it’s carried by its terrific dialogue and performances. This is a man’s world (perhaps only one woman in the background in the Chinese restaurant) with all the toxicity and grime that that implies. These are Masters of the Universe in miniature: men who were raised to rule the world reduced to resetting their personalities wholesale to sell property deals that no-one needs and, since this is the only masculine satisfaction they can achieve, their whole world has been reduced to the game of lying and selling.