Numbers indicate if entries are listed in order of preference

Saskia Baron

Anatomy of a Fall

Broker

Fallen Leaves

Joyland

Killers of the Flower Moon

Otto Baxter: Not a F**ing Horror Story

Return to Seoul

St Omer

Scrapper

A Thousand and One

“Nothing is stronger than true love,” a young laird says to a headstrong young woman in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), his voice heard above the sounds of wind and waves. She replies, “No, nothing.”

In his final years Michael Powell mooted the possibility of a Bartók trilogy. He wanted to add to the growing popularity of his work on Bluebeard’s Castle, the deepest of one-act operas, an idea he had previously rejected of filming the lurid "pantomime" The Miraculous Mandarin and, as third instalment, not the earlier ballet The Wooden Prince but a film about the composer’s time in America and his return, after death, to Hungary.

The KLF are endlessly fascinating. There’s never been a “pop group” like them. From the late Eighties into the early Nineties, they treated music, especially electronic dance music, as a laboratory for lunatic experiment. Unlike most avant-garde thinkers in pop, though, they made a glorious and highly unlikely commercial success of it, via a series of globally successful singles (and, to some degree, the album, The White Room).

The shop assistant turned World War Two Land Army girl Alison Smith, clad in a summer dress on the sabbath, steps through a glade onto a hilltop track above the village of Chillingbourne in Kent. It’s the same road once taken by medieval pilgrims riding to seek blessings or do penance at Thomas Becket’s shrine in Canterbury Cathedral.

Michael Powell fell in love with his celluloid mistress in 1921 when he was 16. It’s a love affair that he’s conducted for 65 years. At 81, he’s not stopped dreaming of getting behind the camera again. At Cannes this year he hinted at plans to make a silent horror film, but he’s reluctant to talk about it.

Nobody ever forgets The Red Shoes (1948) because it’s a movie that seems to change the way an audience experiences cinema. A story about a diverse group of individuals collaborating to make art, the film is itself a wonderful example of the process.

In the current reappraisal of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, what to make of the depiction of women in their key films, that striking tribe of Isoldes with chestnut hair and passionate natures?

Announcing “A Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger production” or, alternatively “A Production of the Archers”, an arrow thuds into the centre of a roundel. Whether in black and white or colour, that famous rubric not only conflates the auras of Robin Hood and the Royal Air Force, but issues a warning you’re about to get a shot in the eye. 

Brannigan begins in arresting fashion, Dominic Frontiere’s funky theme playing over leery close ups of the titular hero’s Colt revolver. Directed by Douglas Hickox and released in 1973, this was the only film starring John Wayne which wasn’t shot in the US.