Tom Duggins

★★★☆☆ Sometimes, it’s tough being really skilled at one thing in particular. Having flown out the blocks with two supremely good, bonafide hit horror films (Hereditary, Midsommar), writer and director Ari Aster had to make a departure to avoid being pigeon-holed as a genre specialist.

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★★★★☆ A sense of powerlessness is often described as a root cause of climate-anxiety, and it seems inevitable that such negative energy would have an equal and opposite: dreams of drastic action. How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a ‘what if’ film about targeting carbon infrastructure, dressed with the contours of a heist movie…

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★★★★★ Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer are a little-known writing and directing partnership based in Brooklyn, New York. But their standing is due a considerable elevation on the strength of God’s Creatures, a film that wields its simple premise with devastating impact.

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★★★★☆ Having horrified audiences most recently with 2020’s Possessor, Brandon Cronenberg – son of David – is about to make an even bigger arterial splash with Infinity Pool, a lysergic hymn to ritual bloodletting and spoilt Westerners who enjoy languorous holidays in other people’s misery. The film stars Alexander Skarsgård and Mia Goth.

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★★★★★ It takes a certain bravery, on the part of a filmmaker, to put their own creative instincts on screen up against the grandeur of a gold-plated masterpiece. But so it is in Tár, where an imagined maestro on the podium of the Berlin philharmonic grapples with Mahler’s Fifth, battling everyone from the orchestra itself to…

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★★★☆☆ Andrew Gaynord, best known for directing episodes of the TV comedy Stath Lets Flats, delivers his feature debut, written by the acting duo of Tom Palmer and Tom Stourton. All My Friends Hate Me is a comic horror film about the town versus gown tensions that come to a head when a university group…

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★★★☆☆ In the early 1940s, with the world at war and Europe hopelessly divided, everyone was writing a spy story. Or at least, that’s what Operation Mincemeat will have you believe: a true tale of ingenious falsehood, where the boundaries between espionage and paperback fiction begin to blur.

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★★★★☆ With A Hero, Asghar Farhadi is back in his cinematic wheelhouse, dissecting the emotional cost of social expectations, delivering a tightly-wound drama of debt, obligation and the difficult question of what one person’s reputation is really worth.

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★★★★☆ The films of M. Night Shyamalan need little by way of an introduction. In the two decades since The Sixth Sense rocketed to the top of the US box office and made his reputation as a masterful deployer of final-act plot twists, his films have had their ups and downs in their treatment by critics…

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★★★★☆ Musician and filmmaker Ben Hozie tends to make films about New York’s more bohemian personalities. From documentary shorts about painters who use their own bed as a studio, to fiction films about philosophy-addled art terrorists, his is the demi-monde of unknown artists and free-thinking outcasts who might just be inching towards madness and getting…

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