Trap in many ways is representative of M. Night Shyamalan’s entire career, one showing a clear abundance of talent but also an odd deafness to the music of classic thrillers. He’s a rebel, someone who had always been an outsider to Hollywood, even when he achieved mainstream success within it.

Now with the release of the $200 million blockbuster Deadpool and Wolverine, it seems a franchise that’s supposed to make fun of the Hollywood machine has become it’s headline act. It’s an uncomfortable fit for a character that works best at the edges of the mainstream. Here Deadpool is a superhero so steeped and entrenched in the memeification of popular Hollywood culture that it devolves into a shallow pool of cameos, callbacks, and fan-service.

Twisters continues it’s predecessors strength of providing plenty of cinematic damage. By the end credits, tornadoes get a chance to destroy a rodeo, a power station, a movie theatre, a water tower but from what I can tell, no cows. What is fresh to the formula is the injection of a teenage romance plot straight from a YA novel.

You can’t help but admire the commitment of Costner. Whilst some may call his vision old-fashioned, he is entirely dedicated to a type of classical excess that always strays into literary dimensions. You could be fooled into thinking Horizon was based on a Margaret Mitchell novel.

At 79 years old, director George Miller has the right to slow down, but it’s a tribute to him that Furiosa: AMMS has the same boundless energy we’ve come to expect. This desert is still full of outlandish vehicular combat, playfully imagined and deftly organised, and if it was ever in doubt, Furiosa: AMMS cements Miller’s status as the master of wheel carnage.

Dune: Part 2 is movie built from confidence. As a story of guerilla warfare, of natives vs colonists, technology vs faith, the grand themes of this world offer us a nutritious backdrop for drama.

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.

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.