FILMS OF THE YEAR

Frank Herbert’s space epic returned to cinema, sleeker and saner than David Lynch’s version, although you still wonder what lurid extravaganza Alejandro Jodorowsky would have made of it. By contrast, Denis Villeneuve treated the material with stately, hyper-grandiose sobriety. It still felt like the intro to a bigger film, but Charlotte Rampling, Rebecca Ferguson and Timothée Chalamet contributed gravitas to sway your scepticism, while Patrice Vermette’s designs were dazzling.

Campion returned with a modern western that unpicks the male codes of a genre. Based on Thomas Savage’s superb, long-overlooked novel, it starred Benedict Cumberbatch and Jesse Plemons as rancher brothers, whose lifestyle changes when one brother’s new wife (Kirsten Dunst) moves in with her decidedly unmacho son (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Shot in New Zealand, this was a magnificent landscape film that also mapped dark inner territory.

Set in 1995, this Oscar-nominated war drama from Bosnian writer-director Žbanić was about a schoolteacher working as a translator for the United Nations in Srebrenica and trying to save her family when her city was taken over by the Serbian army. Jasna Djuricić gave an animated performance as a heroine of action and