Amy Adams’s canine transformation in Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch should be nothing we haven’t seen before. There is a fine history of moonlit metamorphoses in werewolf movies: moans that deepen into growls, the stretching and twisting of muscle, fur sprouting at lightning speed. In fact, some people criticised this film for shying away from the body horror at the heart of Mother’s animalistic breakdown. But there is a powerful whiff of catharsis in this low-key transformation scene: watching Adams sniff the midnight air, dig with bare hands into her own tidy suburban lawn, down on her paws, fully dog in body and mind, before the hair begins to bristle on her forearms. Adams’s eerily calm voiceover (“I have one thought: I am an animal”), follows the rippling fur as her character is reborn as a galloping red husky, with a cloud of strawberry-blond hair on a muscular frame. A hunting dog with a one-track mind: “Blood! Blood, blood, blood!” And it’s curtains for the neighbourhood cats. Pamela Hutchinson
One of the trickiest aspects of sports movies is the win/loss binary: how can you construct something thrilling or unexpected without forcing the outcome of a fictional match into a familiar shape? Challengers, the tennis dramedy from Luca Guadagnino and Justin Kuritzkes, finds a way, despite everything in the movie leading up to a tie-breaking tennis match between former best friends Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) and Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), with the implicit stakes of the heart of Art’s wife, Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), the woman (and former tennis prodigy) they both love. When the tie-breaking match begins, Art has just learned, through an elegantly silent callback to earlier in the movie, that Patrick and Tashi have recently slept together. In other words, it’s on – and, as in sports, it’s hard to figure how either binary choice (or even a none-of-the-above abdication) would make for a satisfying resolution. Always an antsy stylist, Guadagnino goes nuttier here depicting the boys’ frenzied rally, moving from a dizzying tennis-ball-eye-view shot to an overhead court shot to a fanciful composition from, somehow, beneath the court, making the players appear to be walking on air. They get closer and closer to the net, until they finally leap into a sweat-soaked embrace. Tashi, who has been slow-motion transfixed in the stands, lets out an instinctive cry, another callback to earlier in the film – an expression of adrenalized ecstasy. And that’s it: in a simple yet amped-up, nearly dialogue-free sequence, the film-makers have communicated something profound about both the potential purity of athletics and the messy bliss of true (and multidirectional) love. It’s an act of supreme confidence that the movie can wait until the last five minutes to go from very good to absolutely great. Jesse Hassenger
There are many good reasons to see a movie in theaters – to witness precision on the big screen, to support independent film, to enjoy the communal experience of, say, gasping in unison at every twist in Conclave. But chief among them, at least for me, is immersion in capital-S Spectacle. No movie delivered on pure cinematic absorption this year like Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two, which is as gorgeous, ambitious and strange as Part One. And no moment in Part Two hits as hard as the last-act opener, when a breaking-bad Paul Atreides arrives at the Fremen sietch to claim power. There are many layers of sublime spectacle at work here: 1) crowd 2) teeth-chattering score (Hans Zimmer’s rock-tinged Arrival, whose subterranean base recalls the sick Sardaukar throat-singing from Part One) 3) borderline comic self-seriousness 4) Timothée Chalamet power strut 5) giant sandworm power pose. Each of the three times I saw Part Two in theaters, I beamed through this auteur crescendo of teenage angst like a demented child with candy. The analytical brain says: what a thrill, to watch Villeneuve paint with the biggest possible canvas, to see an actually visionary blockbuster. But it’s the movie fan brain at the wheel: let’s fucking gooooooo. Adrian Horton
Ti West’s X trilogy has always been a love letter to important moments big and small in the history of horror cinema – with the series’ conclusion, MaXXXine, West cranks it up to full blast. For starters, there’s a rogue’s gallery of callbacks to films such as Halloween, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Psycho and many more (not to mention the trilogy’s first two films, X and Pearl, as well). What’s more, the plot poses Mia Goth’s Maxine as a porn star striving to turn scream queen, helping West drench his film in cinematic landmarks such as Hollywood Boulevard, the BonaVista revolving lounge at the Westin Bonaventure hotel, and of course the Universal Studios backlot, where Maxine comes across none other than Norman Bates’s creepy home. It’s in a central scene where she is being chased for her life by a private detective through one Universal facade after another – ultimately taking refuge within the Bates residence itself – that MaXXXine’s carefully layered approach to deconstructing and reconstructing cinematic history reaches a zenith. It’s a dizzying, hall-of-mirrors moment that poetically splices the immediacy of running for your life with the willful artificiality of the entire X trilogy, letting everything in West’s eXtraordinary trio of films effortlessly telescope together. Veronica Esposito
A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg’s second feature, is about two New York cousins, David (Eisenberg, clenched) and Benji (Kieran Culkin, charming/maddening), who go on a Jewish heritage tour of Poland. It is everything you always hoped Eisenberg would produce and more: clever and funny, light and deep, snappy and moving. It is a lot Woody Allen-ish and a bit Noah Baumbach and a dash László Nemes. In interviews, Eisenberg has said he cut the best jokes from the final edit, as they unbalanced the movie. The line that now gets the biggest laugh is one improvised by Will Sharpe, who plays James, their faintly Richard Ayoade-like tour guide. The day before, Benji has abruptly scolded James for making the tour insufficiently feeling or authentic. Later that evening, Benji behaves appallingly in a restaurant; David again apologises for him and explains why he might be like that. The next day, they go for a tour of a concentration camp and the cousins say their goodbyes to the rest of the group. James hugs Benji and thanks him for his honest feedback, for changing his perspective, re-energising his career. Then, walking off, he chucks David – who has put in some much effort and empathy – the most throwaway “Thanks, David” imaginable. It’s just a perfect little detail: telling and shocking and so, so funny. I laugh every time I think of it. Catherine Shoard
In Jeremy Saulnier’s thunderously entertaining action thriller Rebel Ridge, there’s a great deal of fiery anger. It emerges from Aaron Pierre’s system-trapped hero and then also from us – not just towards those trying to destroy him but to those trying to destroy the movie itself. It landed on Netflix this September with the weakest of fanfare – a movie perfectly suited for a loud, communal big-screen experience quietly premiering on your iPhone. One of many, many moments that made me wish I was experiencing it with a crowd comes during a standoff at the small-town police station as Pierre’s Terry educates Don Johnson’s fabulously vile police chief on what Pace stands for just as his colleague is discovering what MCMAP means (“I think he’s on the Wikipedia page!” among the year’s finest lines). Saulnier squeezes every single drop of tension before delivering some much-needed, if brief, catharsis as a believably messy and cleverly choreographed tussle ensues. Like the film surrounding it, there’s a hugely satisfying balance of brain and brawn that we just don’t get much of in action cinema these days. I cheered from the couch. Benjamin Lee
The Brutalist’s flash-forward coda offers itself up like a Rorschach blot: the grown daughter of now-infirm architect László takes the stage at an exhibition honoring his work and explains that while his magnum opus community center was commissioned as tribute to a goy industrialist’s late mother, László covertly turned the project into a monument to the horrors of the Holocaust. But does the young Zionist’s mention of her home in Jerusalem suggest that Israel is the ultimate historical vindication for the Jews? Or is this scene – in which she says “I speak for you now” to a decrepit man who refused to equate Judaism with Israeli identity in life – saying something subtler about who claims custody of the memory of the Shoah? Writer-director Brady Corbet has kept tight-lipped about his own leanings, but he drops his final musical cue as a hint to his theories about appropriation and ideology, two key themes he last visited with Vox Lux’s translation of pop music to turn-of-the-millennium terrorism. Italo-disco group La Bionda sends us out with a mantra so sprightly as to be unsettling: “One for you, one for me!” Charles Bramesco
There’s a role-playing scene in Hit Man. OK, actually, there’s lots of role-playing scenes. Richard Linklater’s noirish screwball romcom (a genre cornucopia that yields pure cinephile bliss) is about a college professor played by Glen Powell who enthusiastically takes to his new gig impersonating a gun-for-hire for undercover police sting operations. Things really get exciting for Powell’s Gary when, while still in character, he gets involved with one of his marks: Adria Arjona’s Madison, a pouty femme fatale who wants to off her husband. They have an affair, where the role-playing gets steamy and layered. But it’s the (ahem) climax that really seals the deal. The police are on to Madison. Gary, while wearing a wire, is assigned to confront her. And so he does, performing a surprise kitchen scene interrogation, with detectives listening in, while passing notes to Madison, directing her on how to act and react. Throughout it all, Powell and Arjona keep that sexual charge between their characters amped, their eyes tender and flirtatious while their mouths do all the needling and yelling. The two impossibly hot actors are giving performances hitting on multiple levels, and as many erogenous zones, in one of the most joyous and pleasurable scenes the movies gave us this year. Radheyan Simonpillai
Throughout Netflix’s Martha, the riveting docu-biopic on America’s ur-influencer, Martha Stewart is firmly on guard, parrying director RJ Cutler’s probing questions to keep safe wagyu-tender feelings. But then a ray of clarity streaks through late via footage of Stewart at home in a desperate attempt to act normal for another crew of documentarians. Rather than address the elephant in the kitchen (her impending federal prison sentence for fraud), she homes in on an employee sawing at an orange with a puny blade. “Why would you use a little knife to cut a big orange?” she fumes. “You use a big knife to cut oranges, OK? You know how fast a big knife cuts?” She snatches one up to finish the job, but not before cautioning the camera crew not to “get that on film”. Thank God they didn’t listen. We might never have seen Stewart actually living her truth. Andrew Lawrence
It’s tough to choose between the several excellent tornado scenes in Twisters, the Glen Powell-led reboot of the 90s family disaster flick Twister. For me, it has to be the one in which Daisy Edgar-Jones’s brilliant but traumatised meteorologist Kate and Powell’s Tyler, a bad-boy storm chaser/influencer who sells T-shirts that say “Not my first tornadeo”, get swept up in precisely that – a tornado at a rodeo. A twee Americana bonding scene between the romantic leads gets interesting as phone alerts start pinging and people hang on to their 10-gallon hats as a tornado smacks into the arena. It’s stylishly done – a night of neon-lit chaos punctuated with comic beats as a boorish motel guest is more fixated on complaining than hunkering down and our good-looking tornado experts have to think fast to save a mother and daughter’s life. It’s funny, dramatic, romantic and, most of all, it’s comforting – cars and tornado-deniers might be blown away or squashed by pickup trucks but we know that Tyler and Kate won’t be. Which is why in a year of horrors I loved Twisters, a mindless, glorious adrenaline rush of a movie that promises we’ll be safe in the storm. Francesca Carington
Yorgos Lanthimos’s super-rapid follow-up to Poor Things didn’t attract the same thermonuclear levels of media attention, although its subject matter is equally, if not more, disturbing. Perhaps it’s due to Lanthimos toning down the visual fireworks; Kinds of Kindness is almost restrained in its (largely) subdued colour palette and (mostly) anonymous tastefulness. But in reaching back into his “Greek freak” past (in partnership with Efthimis Filippou, co-writer on Dogtooth, The Lobster et al), Lanthimos reminds us what a strong, sinewy narrative can do, along with seamlessly brilliant acting from his entire cast. It’s hard to pick a single moment from the three fables the film contains (in which Lanthimos reshuffles his pack of actors with dexterity) but I’d have to say that Emma Stone once again shows she’s the leading female performer of her generation, her trademark fearlessness on show in the climactic sequence in the film’s final story: she plays a cult member (her third role in the film) who is tested for “contamination” after being manhandled into a sauna, and then expelled from the order, her face transforming into a mask of agony and fear. One for the ages. Andrew Pulver
