As sign-posted by the unfairly maligned girl-power scene in Avengers: Endgame, having three female leads in a $270 million dollar blockbuster is a step in the right direction, if a lately plotted one. It’s a shame the enormous and over-compensated human machinery of the Marvel Studios empire have simply fumbled the task of placing them in a story that illustrates their talents. As we watch the effective charisma of each performer fly across the screen, we’re assaulted with an abundance of dull, gentrified storytelling from a studio suffering from it’s own success.

You’re acceptance of Saltburn’s entertainment is connected to your willingness to spend time with unlikable characters. Our outsider is Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), a scouser Oxford undergraduate who’s lost amongst the university’s upper-class privilege. He struggles to fit in. He gets the worst seat in the dining hall. He isn’t invited to the Christmas party.

Jonathan Glazer’s disciplined The Zone of Interest (2023) is both a treatise on peripheral horror and an audacious act of demythologising. In the foreground, he adopts the slow living of upper-echelon Nazi life with it’s cups of tea and washing of long leather boots. In the background, the appalling questions raise their dreadful heads to turn domestic drama into appalling horror.

Napoleon huffs and puffs his way through the French emperor’s greatest hits, spinning a bleak and darkly colored yarn heavy on scale but light on personal revelations.

I’ve heard that Fincher splits his work into two categories, movies and films. Se7en (1995) is a movie, an audience pleasing thriller with conventional crime table-setting. Not low-brow exactly, but greasy and gruesome in its traditional mystery scares. But The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) is a ‘film’, because thematically it’s a serious, unconventional, head-scratching experience full of thinly veiled philosophizing on the nature of life and death.

With the atrocious The Exorcist: Believer in theaters, David Gordon Green has reminded us of something that has been clear for decades: William Friedkin’s The Exorcist is not a franchise-able horror property. And the reason is because The Exorcist (1973) isn’t a horror movie, it’s a mystery.

Scorsese uses David Grann’s bestseller about the true 1920s murders as a guide to paint a wide canvas that provides us a fascinating exploration of a tragic story but also leaves us more exhausted than exhilarated.

Balancing big-budget world building, grief, and familial themes, Gareth Edwards’ ambitious sci-fi is primarily an action movie built from the bones of other, more original stories. And yet Edwards’ remarkable visual sensibility and a sense of gleeful homage keep this exciting endeavour mostly on track.

Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci is a pulpy amalgamation of The Godfather and The Bold and Beautiful. As equally serious as it is campy, it’s a family saga of corruption and back-stabbing that ultimately entertains because it may be the longest and most expensive soap opera ever produced.

Unfortunately The Matrix Resurrections is another reminder that this series has only ever had enough strong narrative ideas for a single entry. While Lana Wachowski provides some throwback moments for fans of the original 1999 release, what is incredible is how dated the execution feels.

For many reasons, Daniel Craig’s performance in his fifth and final outing as 007 is his most relaxed in the role. Here he stands calmly, as the bullets miss him once again, confident that his legacy as one of the best Bonds since Sean Connery is solidified.

Director Paul Schrader is no stranger to film noir or to damaged loners, and yet whilst he has mined this type of material many times before, in Oscar Isaac he has found a special conduit through which to channel his dark sensibilities.

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is an epic start to what could be a two part classic, but there are still narrative challenges ahead.

Continuing Marvel Studio’s trend of hiring directors of acclaimed independent films, next is Destin Daniel Cretton, whose previous work Short Term 12 (2013) and Just Mercy (2019) tackled social issues with tremendous honesty.

In his most structurally ambitious epic, Ridley Scott solidifies himself as a master at staging historical action, yet unfortunately The Last Duel misses when it comes to its depiction of subjective truth.

Like her previous feature, The Rider (2020), Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland looks closely at the harsh, human reality of a working-class subculture that has been left behind by whatever the American dream is supposed to be.