The best movies of the year so far

It’s been an eclectic cinematic year so far. Coda upset the odds at the Oscars, but the Hollywood dream factory appears to have finally kicked into top gear over the past six weeks as Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Top Gun: Maverick and Jurassic Park: Dominion all made enough money to suggest that audiences are keen to have blockbuster movie-making back in their lives.

Elsewhere, Nicolas Cage finally got to play himself in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Michelle Yeoh was Everything Everywhere All at Once, we found a new, even darker Batman in Robert Pattinson, Channing Tatum and Sandra Bullock teamed up to terrific comedic effect in The Lost City, and the returns of Dumbledore and Downton Abbey were both somewhat muted.

However, after looking back over the past fiveand-a-half months, Stuff to Watch has come up with a list of the 10 titles we believe are well worth revisiting or catching up with for the first time.

Dedicated to ‘‘those who stayed’’, ‘‘those who left’’ and ‘‘all those who were lost’’, as well as his good mate, the late John Sessions, Kenneth Branagh’s love letter to his hometown and the power of cinema is a sumptuous, heartfelt joy from start to finish. Shot in gorgeously crisp black-and-white, peppered with Schindler’s List-esque fanciful smatterings of colour emanating from educational family trips to ‘‘filums’’, Belfast offers an emotive and evocative experience that few films have in recent years. You can almost smell the Ulster Fry and taste the dusty streets, as we see the world through 9-year-old Buddy’s (newcomer Jude Hill) eyes. screenwriter KD Davila’s skill is in balancing the absurdity of the situation with a believable modern-day backdrop of suspicion and mistrust between races. ensemble also includes Rooney Mara, Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette and Willem Dafoe.