I always find myself using the word ‘deftly’ when reviewing Christian Petzold’s films but that’s because there’s an effortlessness to the filmmaking that feels so completely natural. In PHOENIX, Petzold deftly weaves threads of personal identity and political identity such that Nelly (Nina Hoss) rebuilding herself through the eyes of another after her unimaginable trauma is also the story of Germany reconstructing itself as a nation after the national shame of the Holocaust and Zionist Jews rebuilding themselves in Palestine as what Naomi Klein (2023) calls the “New Jew—that unbound alter ego of the pale, studious, melancholic Old Jew.”

Maybe the best way to explore the modern human condition is through black comedy. ROTTING IN THE SUN is an inventive and surprising satire on what it’s like to live now, in existences mediated by the internet. Apart from Vero (Catalina Saavedra), all the characters’ have their experience of the world mediated through their phones: from the opening shots of Sebastián (Sebastián Silva) googling how to commit suicide to the fatal moment of inattention while scrolling Instagram to the final scene of a manslaughter confession being garbled by a translation app. The depressed young creatives are in prisons of social media, of ego, and of the Instagram brands they’ve built around themselves.

“I’ve been here before,” starts Sam Smith’s theme for SPECTRE. And we have. SPECTRE recycles so many elements from previous Bonds in a rearrangement that is less than the sum of its parts: a seven-letter title and insight into Bond’s past like SKYFALL; a shadowy criminal organisation like QUANTUM; Bond and his love interest getting to know each other on a train like CASINO ROYALE; a high-speed boat chase down the Thames starting from the MI6 Building like WORLD.

PAPRIKA has the visual and narrative inventiveness that fans of INCEPTION think it has. It’s a joyously confusing depiction of dreams and dreamscapes that I’ll need to watch a second time to properly take in. Kon Satoshi uses just enough analogy between dreams and both cinema and the internet to be intriguing but not to weigh the narrative down with allegory. The continual fat jokes raised an eyebrow but, like TOKYO GODFATHERS’ queerness, it feels like they were in service of humanising a character who others might treat as ridiculous.

It’s fun to imagine the screening for Studio Ghibli executives and creative staff where they realised that Miyazaki Hayao’s ‘last’ film involves an ageing wizard who allows the world he’s created to crumble because he can’t find a worthy successor.

It would be hyperbole to blame SKYFALL for the ills of the United Kingdom after the 2015 general election. And yet…

It’s hard to avoid reading this film through a class lens whereby Matthew Broderick’s character, Dr. Steve Finch, is positioned as the reasonable one in the central conflict entirely through his middle-class status rather than through any reasonable actions. His opulent suburban home and his status in a professional job establish him as the middle-class norm which is intruded upon by Buddy Hall (Danny DeVito), a debt-ridden working-class interloper whose Christmas decorations are offensive not because they disturb Steve per se but simply because they’re gauche compared to the Finch’s WASPy ‘traditional’ Christmas.

A forgettable adaptation. Mark Gatiss’ new episodes consistently fail to capture the eerie atmosphere of the ‘70s A Ghost Story for Christmas shorts and they end up feeling awfully flat.

What stands out in David Lowery’s telling of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the film’s poetic depiction of a land perched between paganism and Christianity, in that boundary space between competing ways of life: a solstice of cultures, a time—like Christmas—when the barriers between worlds are made thin. The pagan forces of nature and the kingdoms of Christendom are at war throughout the film, fighting over a land that is already saturated with the red bloodshed of centuries. And what’s it all for? In the end, even as he dreams of running from his own mortality, Gawain (Dev Patel) discovers that he’s already rotting from the inside out. The green that The Lady (Alicia Vikander) tells us will take everything already took him and his kingdom long ago.

A victim of sloppy pre-production and the AMPTP’s failure to negotiate, QUANTUM OF SOLACE was clearly not ready to be made. Quite apart from the undercooked script, Eon Productions should have waited to settle with Kevin McClory’s estate so their shadowy criminal organisation could have been Spectre instead of the damp squib that is Quantum (though interesting in retrospect to use ‘Q’ as a symbol for their globalist conspiratorial organisation). The too-many action sequences are directed without a sense of spatial cohesion and the attempted themes around climate change, green(e)washing, and Western imperialist involvement in South American coups are too blunt to be incisive.