4 pieces
John Crowley's third collaboration with A24 runs the ten-year relationship in a non-linear shuffle, and the shuffle is what makes the film survive its cancer-drama premise. Just barely, but it does.
Mike Leigh's first film since 2018 reunited him with Marianne Jean-Baptiste for a character study of sustained anger. The argument is that the film is one of his best, and the conditions that produced it are the ones his method has been waiting to find.
Andrea Arnold's fifth feature split the reviews, and the split was real. The retrospective argument is that the film's unexpected magical turn is not a failure of the social-realist grammar, it's what the grammar was always walking toward.
Steve McQueen's first feature since Small Axe attempts a sprawling wartime mural of London. The mural mostly works. The boy at its centre is the reason it sometimes does not.