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It’s fitting that Grant Singer opens Reptile, his meandering feature directorial debut, with an “Angel of the Morning” needle drop. Chip Taylor composed that aching tune about a one-night stand because he wanted to capture a passionate and ephemeral feeling. “It was beyond words,” he has said of the 1967 song. “And that is the power.”

Singer, like Taylor, reaches for the ineffable. The director, who’s helmed music videos for pop music royalty up until this point, is obsessed with controlling atmosphere and setting the mood. He crowds Reptile with gripping sequences, suspenseful moments, dramatic pauses and surprising levity — elements that, despite their overuse, keep the audience on edge and strategically blur the lines between dreams and reality. A malevolent score by Berlin-based composer Yair Elazar Glotman, with an assist from Venezuelan musician Arca, helps calibrate this tension and adds to the movie’s overall mysterious air.

There’s no doubt,...

You may never see a thriller more determined to tell you what a thriller it is than “Reptile.” The film, the feature directorial debut of music video and commercial director Grant Singer, is so stylish that it’s obnoxious and so determined to crank up the portentousness at every opportunity that it almost plays like a parody of a dense, thorny crime thriller.

But if you take it with a sense of humor and appreciate the performances by Benicio del Toro, Justin Timberlake, Alicia Silverstone, Eric Bogosian, Frances Fisher and other actors trying to put a spin on all those thriller beats, the Netflix production can be a hoot at times. As to whether you’ll still care about whodunit after more than two hours of overheated foreplay and teasing – well, I couldn’t do it, but your mileage may vary.

The structure is pretty classic: We meet Will Grady...

As Martin Scorsese once said, “Music and cinema fit together naturally. Because there’s a kind of intrinsic musicality to the way moving images work when they’re put together. It’s been said that cinema and music are very close as art forms, and I think that’s true.” Indeed, the right piece of music–whether it’s an original score or a carefully selected song–can do wonders for a sequence, and today we’re looking at the 25+ films that best expressed this notion this year.

From seasoned composers to accomplished musicians, as well as a smattering of soundtracks, each musical example perfectly transported us to the world of the film. Check out our rundown of the top 25, which includes streams to each soundtrack in full.

25. The World to Come (Daniel Blumberg)

24. Little Fish (Keegan DeWitt)

23. Crestone (Animal Collective)

22. Shiva Baby (Ariel Marx)

21. Summer of 85 (Jb Dunckel...

It’s movie math: Take one pregnant woman, add a bunch of shady people, multiply by the natural anxiety that comes with bringing new life into the world, and voila, you’ve got a “Rosemary’s Baby” riff! But while John Lee’s “False Positive” may have seemed — at least initially, thanks to some well-made marketing materials — like some sort of millennial version of the classic horror effort, it doesn’t work on its own merits, let alone as a take on the 1968 feature. While the inevitable comparisons don’t help matters — and really, films about women who are pregnant and scared don’t need to automatically be compared to Roman Polanski’s film, certainly not anymore — its own faults are obvious even without the snappy parallels.

Trapped in some bizarre movie genre hinterland, wholly resistant to veering too far in any direction,

Ambition and ideas aren’t in short supply in the film,...

Tilda Swinton’s voice echoes back coolly from billions of years hence in Jóhann Jóhannsson’s brief essay on humanity’s future destiny

Two years after the death of the Icelandic film composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, his only movie as director has become available in the UK on streaming platforms. It is a 70-minute cine-novella or essay film: a meditation on humanity’s future existence and what it means, or will mean, to be posthuman.

The score is by Jóhannsson, working with sound artist and composer Yair Elazar Glotman, and this eerie, breathy soundtrack works well with its unearthly images. Last and First Men is inspired by the 1930 novel of the same name by British Sf author William Olaf Stapledon, narrated by a figure from humanity’s final evolutionary form billions of years in the future. This voice is performed with crisp lack of affect by Tilda Swinton.

Narrated by Tilda Swinton, ‘Last And First Men’ debuted at the Berlinale earlier this year.

BFI Distribution has secured UK and Ireland rights to Last And First Men, directed by late Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, in a deal with Films Boutique.

The fiction-documentary hybrid, narrated by Tilda Swinton, was completed posthumously following the death of the Arrival and Sicario composer in 2018.

As cinemas remain closed in the UK due to the Covid-19 lockdown, Last And First Men will launch on streaming platform BFI Player on July 30 and will be made available to other digital platforms as a transactional title.

The...