Joy: Thomasin McKenzie is luminous in a film about the journey towards test-tube babies that feels more like classy telly
Spot-on lead performances and canny supporting players elevate a nuts-and-bolts script
Witches: A pioneering investigation of post-partum psychosis
Elizabeth Sankey looks to cinematic tropes of occult-adjacent women in her fascinating documentary about mental health and motherhood
Amrou Al-Kadhi: ‘Drag gives you a licence to sort of scare yourself and other people. But how do you bring that into your daily life?’
The performer and award-winning author discusses why and how he made his first film, Layla, a buoyant new drama concerning a British-Palestinian drag queen
Four new films to see this week
Mescal and Washington are solid in otherwise second-hand Gladiator II. Plus charmingly festive Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, vibrant doc Soundtrack to a Coup d’État, and rigorous if cold drama In Camera
Paul Mescal: ‘My favourite actors are Irish. There’s a wildness. We do our own thing’
Gladiator II proves another showcase for Mescal’s tough and tender masculinity, giving rein to his natural instinct as an actor
Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point: Altmanesque seasonal comedy is a wistful riot of chatter and foods
Tyler Taormina’s Cannes contender is a trippy Yuletide vibe
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat: A fleet-footed chronicle that never lets up
Johan Grimonprez’s propulsive account of jazz, colonialism, and the murder of Patrice Lumumba
Four new films to see this week
Saoirse Ronan in in elaborate but conventional WWII drama Blitz, plus superior family film Paddington in Peru, static adaptation of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, and peculiar ‘Legoised’ Pharrell Williams doc Piece by Piece
The Problem with People star Paul Reiser: ‘We’d sit out with our Guinness, chatting with people. We don’t have that in New York’
The comedian’s return to the ‘motherland’ was a big part of making his new comedy. ‘I’ve always been drawn to Ireland. The beauty and the greenness and the underlying melancholy’
Blitz review: Saoirse Ronan has little to work with in Steve McQueen’s absorbing but crowded war-time drama
Steve McQueen’s extensively researched script alights on racism and looting, but at heart is a boy’s own adventure
Paddington in Peru review: Fine lessons wrapped up in fun and fur
This third Paddington instalment can’t live up to its predecessors, but it’s still vastly superior to most G-rated films
Four new films to see this week
Cillian Murphy in Small Things Like These and Hugh Grant in Heretic, plus Anora and Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story
Anora director Sean Baker: ‘What Mikey Madison did was so impressive. She shadowed lapdancers. She spent time in the club’
The US director used to be one of indie cinema’s best-kept secrets. Now his funny, sexy, action-packed new film is frontrunner for the best-picture Oscar
Small Things Like These: Cillian Murphy’s performance is fiercely internalised in a film emblematic of a changing Ireland
Tim Mielant’s memorable film is quietly emblematic of a changing Ireland
Heretic review: Hugh Grant has a ball tormenting young Mormon doorsteppers in this gleeful horror thriller
Formerly foppish actor menaces in claustrophobic nailbiter from Oscar-nominated writers