Christopher Machell

While Sicilian Ghost Story doesn’t entirely fulfil its promise as a richly themed gothic romance, the visual craft on display throughout is more than enough to recommend.

Not only is Fallout the best Mission: Impossible film by a considerable margin, it is also undoubtedly the best action film of the year.

In a film about resurrected dinosaurs, suspension of disbelief is mandatory, but the script’s illogical nonsense and flat, cartoonish characters compound on each other until any audience goodwill has evaporated.

Infinity War will likely be first choice for the summer season crowd, but Deadpool 2 wins hands down in terms of personal stakes and visual flair.

Racer and the Jailbird is a stylish, often promising film, but sadly one that never coheres into genuine drama.

Beast is rough around the edges but as a feature debut marks out its director as one of the most intriguing new talents in British filmmaking.

Journey’s End is a worthy adaptation, offering a sombre psychological depiction of innocence lost.

The film ultimately ends up feeling like a shaggy dog story – a metaphor for Ted Kennedy, perhaps – engaging, charismatic, but ending with a whimper.

As moving and timely as The Final Year is, it doesn’t quite hit these marks.

Rian Johnson’s film is the real deal, a bold, risky venture unafraid to tell its own story, freed from the weight of nostalgia and formula.

Though Mudbound represent a period of injustice consigned to history, its examination of a toxic, racist masculinity stuck in the past could hardly be more relevant today.

Where Snyder’s previous film at least tried to consider the ramifications of Gods living among us, Justice League is about nothing other than the vapid, commercial need to make a Justice League film.

Una is undoubtedly a difficult watch, and its moral ambivalence may be beyond the pale for some. But the sensitivity with which it treats its subjects and the nuance that the film brings to the most incendiary of debates is admirable.

A deeply felt, loving tribute to a truly remarkable woman.

What keeps Green's film just about on the right side of rote is a trio of solid performances, a sensitive, fair portrayal of Jeff's relationship with Erin with some standout scenes between the two, and a focus on the personal over the political.

With Sorkin's signature whip-crack dialogue driving an astonishingly assured directorial debut, Molly's Game is an exhilarating, superbly crafted crime drama.

A lovingly observed, pitch perfect coming-of-age comedy, Gerwig's warm, astute account of the end of adolescence is a stunning solo debut.

A little overlong and lacking the thematic clout to justify its knotty plot, Atomic Blonde is nevertheless an exhilarating, visceral actioner, more than making up for its flaws with a surfeit of verve and style.

Foregoing breadth in favour of depth, War is at its core a character study disguised as a science fiction epic.

Overall the film's trashy pleasures just about keep it afloat.

The director's technical mastery finally transcends craft to become art and, as a result, this is his best film to date.

Peele's blistering debut is a timely and powerful satire of modern prejudice as much as it is a taut, gripping exercise in horror cinema.

The film’s final shot of Little Edie dancing alone on the filthy floorboards of her rotten hallway is as poignant an image as can be imagined. Simultaneously humorous, pathetic, and triumphant, it is the unconscious statement of a person railing against the world, lost in the maze of her own past and the uncertainty of her future, at once hopelessly deluded and consciously defiant.

Paul Verhoeven’s first English language film Flesh + Blood is bloody, cynical and unrefined, but indicative of his later satirical tendencies.

The editing, too, is rough around the edges, but it all adds to the sense of madness that pervades El Salvador – a sense that only grows the more intense the further that Boyle journeys into this Central American heart of darkness.

With LaBeouf giving the performance of his career and a well-told story that hits all the right beats, Borg vs McEnroe may just well go down as a great tennis film.

William Golding’s tale of public schoolboys stranded on a desert island is an iconic depiction of fundamental savagery. More than fifty years on, Peter Brook’s 1963 Lord of the Flies remains the definitive film, its hallucinogenic brutality as terrifying as ever.

Pieces may not be in the same league as the slasher classics but fans of the genre will find much to enjoy in this knowingly silly exercise in day-glo splatter.

The combination of Capra’s playful sensibility, inimitable 1930s line delivery, and a screwball wit really come together here to capture lightning in a bottle.

Teemu Nikki's Euthanizer reveals itself to be an affecting examination of cruelty.

His Girl Friday is satire of the highest order.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa is at once a deeply satirical depiction of Hollywood and a sumptuous saga of the rise and fall of a star.

I Love You, Daddy is a hilarious, awkward and boundary-pushing comedy about fatherhood, anxiety and the ethics of relationships.

Though It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World struggles to justify its ludicrous length, there are just enough laughs, cameos and memorable set pieces to garner a recommendation.

A flawed film to be sure, but one with flashes of inspiration, occasionally stunning visuals and a Shakespearean sense of claustrophobia.

Where The Wolfman is a a fairgound ghost train, entertaining but ultimately shallow, Cat People is a true journey into the power of fear and belief, at once frightening, disturbing and psychologically complex.

Later remade as The Bird Cage, this first adaptation of Jean Poiret’s play is as moving as it is hilarious in its depiction of moral hypocrisy and familial love.

Not only emblematic of independent American cinema, but, released in 1969, is the definitive statement on the death of the 60s.

The grimy, crime-ridden cesspool of New York in the 1970s and early 1980s is a well-worn cinematic setting, but in her debut 1982 feature Smithereens, indie director Susan Seidelman used guerilla filmmaking techniques and a faux-documentary style to unearth the vitality and the verve of urban life at the bottom.

F for Fake is a sometimes maddening, always brilliant disruption of the conventional documentary.

A pitch dark noir whose eponymous anti-heroine (Joan Crawford) is surely one of the most compellingly flawed women of the genre.

If for no other reason than its place in comedy history, Here Comes Mr. Jordan is interesting, if dispensable viewing.

Youth is as sentimental as it is accomplished, but Xiaogang's mastery both of broad sweep and intimate detail proves an impressive feat.

The In-Laws, while not quite a classic is a terrifically inventive and consistently funny comedy, with an oft-imitated but rarely matched star chemistry.

Funny, exciting, and a little too long, Drunken Master is as charming as it is unbalanced, but its martial arts choreography remains unmatched.

Mary Shelley is a film at relentless pains to tell us how poetic and ethereal its heroine is, but without remotely grasping the political and philosophical underpinnings of her work.

Much like young Jeanette, there is no compromise in Dumont's vision that mixes the irreverent and the austere.

John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film is a stately and moving depiction of the man’s capacity for dignity and improvement.

Arguably Andrei Tarkovsky’s finest masterpiece, the Russian director’s 1979 film Stalker is the culmination of a career-long preoccupation with memory, trauma and the relationship between subjective perception and physical reality.

The Defiant Ones combines Stanley Kramer’s trademark liberal politics with a picaresque adventure that is deftly entertaining, tense and heartfelt.

Despite sharing the stylistic trappings of so many 1980s urban comedies – Three Men and a Baby, Big, Crocodile Dundee – Tootsie transcends its generic conventions with a wonderfully nuanced turn from Hoffman, a terrific supporting cast that includes Bill Murray and Jessica Lange, and a screenplay that is as sensitive as it is funny. Tootsie’s finely balanced writing is one of the film’s greatest strengths, being consistently funny without ever turning the central premise into a gag.

The total effect of these sequences is the feeling of hanging out with Dylan and his entourage. This is perhaps Don’t Look Back‘s greatest trick – convincing its audience that the Dylan we see here is anything other than a column of air: elusive, shifting and perpetually enigmatic.

A faultlessly fun genre picture.

An unsure narrative hampers Age of Innocence’s ability to stand with the director’s more assured work, yet Scorsese’s period drama is a deeply cinematic experience, at once beautiful, oppressive and rich.

The film that made Jackie Chan an international star, Police Story fully embodies the martial artist’s spirit of entertainment – equal parts endearing, goofy and packed with eye-popping kung fu action.

Once again, it’s an unadulterated pleasure to watch Chan and his stunt team at work, jumping, contorting and throwing the human form around in ways that simply don’t seem possible.

Chaplin built his reputation of finding the poignant humour in poverty, and many screwball comedies of the sound era invariably touched on the Depression, none more so than Gregory La Cava’s 1936 My Man Godfrey.

Through a series of vignettes hung together by the widow of a noodle chef, this ramen-western explores how the pleasure and meaning we derive from food are vital and enriching components in the human experience.

Elevating silliness to the level of profundity, House doesn’t so much serve its swirling madness to you as it dunks your head into a cauldron full of it.

Although 12 Angry Men dismays at human weakness, it is fundamentally an optimistic film, celebrating reason and basic human decency in equal measure. In an era when both seem in short supply, Lumet’s film is a reminder that there is never a bad time to stand up for what is right.

Even the film’s weaknesses – a penchant for melodrama and a tendency towards the hysterical – work as remnants of their time and betray an earnest effort to emphasise with the characters and their heightened do-or-die mentality.

At once a searing, affirming and defiant portrayal of race, poverty and frustrated aspiration in America.

The film lacks the crackle of Grant’s later masterpieces yet there remains a great deal to enjoy here with an ending that surprises with its tenderness, not-so-subtle eroticism and visual wit.

A searing indictment of religious fundamentalism and anti-intellectualism. Inherit the Wind’s relevance continues beyond its immediate parallels with McCarthyism.