Time Out

Its urge to find beauty in the wreckage of war has a forced quality, a romanticism at odds with this grim world. Still, with LGBTQ+ stories so rare in the filmography of World War I, it’s a rare and welcome perspective – as well as another showcase for a gifted young filmmaker.

It’s a striking debut from writer-director Maria Martinez Bayona with a fearless performance from Hall, as Claire rebels against convention and reflects on her life.

Full Phil is a 70-minute short story of a film with a few good jokes, some touching moments, and two Hollywood stars really going there (Stewart’s food consumption is heroic). It’s fun but, like Mr Creosote’s mint, only wafer thin.

Director László Nemes (Son of Saul) returns to World War II to force two real-life foes – French Resistance chief Jean Moulin and Nazi interrogator Klaus Barbie – into a grim dance macabre in this elegant and viscerally intense wartime thriller.

Overall, though, this is a timely drama from a director with a growing canon of eloquent humanist work – a melancholy torch song to the stories that play out beneath our changing skylines.

Zvyagintsev has made another remarkable film full of moral clarity that will get up the nose of all the right people. He may just be the greatest Russian filmmaker since Tarkovsky, and he’s definitely the ballsiest.

The storytelling doesn’t quite live up to the craft and performances.

The Romanian filmmaker has tackled similar themes before, most recently in 2022’s Transylvanian xenophobia drama R.M.N., but it’s extra punchy to see him casting a steely glance at a society other than his own. His latest is another chilly but gripping effort, that surges from cosy to traumatic in a heartbeat.

Alicia MacDonald’s Finding Emily is a charming and heartfelt romcom that explores what happens when the ‘what if?’ goes too far.

Bitter Christmas finds the Spaniard at his most raw and introspective – looking inwards and not entirely enjoying what he finds.