Every frame of this film is burned into my brain after watching it once every two years or so since I was old enough but it remains delightful every time, joyous every time, and I well up every time during the scene of the Christmas yet-to-come where Tiny Tim (Jerry Nelson) has died. It’s wild that this iteration of Kermit (Steve Whitmire), one not performed by Jim Henson, might be the most frequently-seen Kermit. Disney is leaving money on the table by not doing other literary adaptations with Muppets.

Released at a time when the franchise had been overtaken in spectacle by Bourne and Mission: Impossible, Martin Campbell’s second slightly-harder Bond reboot wisely eschews a central action sequence in favour of an intimate and wonderfully tense extended poker game. It’s a brilliant sequence, all the more so for never wasting time spelling out the rules of Texas hold ‘em for the audience and trusting that, even if they don’t know a flush from a straight, the acting and direction will communicate the tension. The action sequences are good (especially free-running in Madagascar) but that central section makes the film.

A thoroughly charming found-family Christmas anime which mines comedy from some very tragic scenes and finds a delightful balance between those tragicomic elements. The film excels at weaving a twisting narrative but never feeling tangled. Some aspects of the portrayal of queerness through the character of Hana (Umegaki Yoshiaki) feel regressive in 2023 and through my particular cultural lens as a white Anglo critic but on the whole it feels like Kon Satoshi had his heart in the right place with it particularly as the characters deepen and reveal themselves throughout the narrative.

An American family discovers their ancestral Scottish titles and, to the delight of locals who love licking the boot of the British Empire, must decide whether to take on the vast tracts of land that their ancestors stole in the Clearances despite knowing nothing about the ecological responsibilities of Highland land ownership. The strangest element is the intense and flirtatious relationship between the brother and sister who continually talk about how “close” they used to be and have more chemistry than any other couple.

Fassbinder introduces Petra von Kant (Margit Carstensen) in bed, stripped of her wigs and her extravagant clothes. He then painstakingly builds the character up in layers to show us exactly who this horrible woman is before just as painfully stripping away those layers as part of her emotional downfall. This film is a masterclass in shot composition and blocking, each shot as carefully composed as the image of Midas and Bacchus in Petra’s bedroom and each revealing hidden emotional truths as Michael Ballhaus’s camera moves, focuses, and frames its subjects. The implication, told through small character beats and shot composition, that Marlene (Irm Hermann) was once the Petra to Petra’s Karin is quietly devastating: a vision of Petra’s future always present and always silent.

It’s such a pleasure to see a big movie take its time building up its characters and its setting so that the eventual kaiju action has emotional and thematic resonance. We spend enough time with Kōichi (Ryunosuke Kamiki) and his family in post-war Tokyo that by the time Godzilla shows up in the city, we fully understand how he represents not only Kōichi’s PTSD and survivor’s guilt but the trauma of Japan writ large. The film even builds from there as a repudiation of how Japan conducted itself during the war and the state’s horrific disregard for its soldiers’ lives. One element of the ending is a smidge too far but the film had built up so much good will that I didn’t really mind.

A fairly languid biopic of Nora Barnacle (Susan Lynch) and her relationship with James Joyce (Ewan McGregor), a relationship that seemed as toxic as it was sexually charged. Lynch is pretty good as Nora, her hair growing ever larger and wilder the more neglected and abandoned she becomes. McGregor is never quite convincing as a tormented writer and his petty jealousies feel petty rather than understandable which makes the central relationship feel weightless. Letterboxd draws its data from the TMDB API so we can blame them for Lynch getting second-billing behind a man in the cast credits on a movie where she plays the title character.

An origin story in the mould of JOKER in that the events of the narrative do not make the character into the character we see in other films. Wonka (Timothée Chalamet) starts the film as a chocolate-making eccentric and, sure, he acquires a chocolate factory by the end but that happens in thirty seconds after the film’s main narrative has been concluded. Chalamet is woefully miscast and this is most apparent whenever he attempts a line delivery like Gene Wilder. For a fun children’s film, a lot of scenes were horribly underlit (not helped by the digital projection at the multiplex where I saw it) which muted the colours. Go listen to Primus & the Chocolate Factory instead.

Olivier Assayas’ CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA has an ineffable quality that makes it an artwork that is more than the sum of its parts. The themes around celebrity, artistic production, and the industry of cinema slowly open out into universal themes of ageing and confronting the person you once were as your youth fades. The central relationship between Maria (Juliette Binoche) and Val (Kristen Stewart) is beautifully observed and acted—prickly but intimate; tense but loving—and reminiscent of the mother-daughter relationship in Bergman’s AUTUMN SONATA. As the blending of fiction and reality muddle their emotions, the two women become intertwined before Val, the representation of the youth that Maria cannot come to terms with losing, the embodiment of her Sigrid, disappears like clouds drifting away.

Nobody is out here portraying the despair and loneliness of existing in capitalist spaces like Kaurismäki. We hear raucous laughter and joy through a door that Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) holds open but chooses not to go through. At this point in the film, he is too mired in the life-sapping energies of supermarkets, docks, and sad karaoke bars for that. Similarly Kaurismäki’s subversion of the romantic comedy gives his protagonists several opportunities to meet cutely and instead they deny themselves repeatedly.