Stand by me: Daughters is a heartbreaking, years-in-the-making documentary exploring the complex relationship between incarcerated fathers and their daughters
Into the limelight: in settings both grim and glamorous, Sean Baker's Anora repeatedly shows how despair is the bedrock for the false-front distractions of American kitsch
Body doubles: David Cronenberg's The Shrouds and Pedro Almodóvar's The Room Next Door find both auteurs still playing around the permutations of the flesh, but in a decidedly retrospective mood
If you build it: a pervading sense of mourning is the most coherent thing about Brady Corbet's The Brutalist, an otherwise largely unfocused and self-important movie
Trick mirror: The Substance seems inescapably in thrall to the seductive, glossy surfaces of Hollywood beauty standards that it is supposedly skewering
Righteous outlaw: The Goldman Case is a brilliant example of a courtroom drama that eschews familiar tropes, placing an individual subject into the context of a larger, historical subject in scrupulously open-ended fashion
