Dave Calhoun

The absence of George and John is felt keenly, but Paul and Ringo are a pleasure to listen to as ageing raconteurs.

Baldwin and Toback make a snappy comic duo, and half of their talks with a line-up of luminaries focus on the art of filmmaking rather than the business.

When the film gets outdoors, it soars, and Ceylan continues to dig with acute intelligence into the dark corners of everyday human behaviour.

This film is about wonder, not balance, and it turns us delirious in the white heat of this pair’s chaotic, unflinching passion.

Like the original, T2 Trainspotting is a winning mix of low living and high jinx, a stylized spin on real life.

As the actors move fluidly between various states, shedding one skin while assuming another, Polanski makes this subversive parlour game matter.

Politics and entertainment are never an easy mix, and Jimmy’s Hall is a familiar, slightly unsurprising coming together of the two from Loach and his writer Paul Laverty. Sometimes you can see the joins, but there’s also great warmth, charm and humour among the ideas, and the sense of time and place is especially strong.

In the end, the characters are more lasting than the story, which is a standard save-the-city-from-destruction yarn. But this crew is a riot, and their world is intriguing and even a little meaningful.

Director and co-writer Diego Quemada-Díez condenses many acute observations about life as an emigrant into a sure-footed, credible story.

The Clan shouldn’t be as enjoyable as it is. But it’s a delight to be in the hands of a storyteller who can impress you with his stylistic bravado (one sequence cuts together a nasty death with ecstatic sex) while never losing sight of the suffering at the story’s heart.

Tale of Tales might lack magic in the immediate, flashy sense, but its strange spell is altogether seductive and special.

It might be familiar territory for Almodóvar, but only a master of his art could make it look so easy.

This is a portrait of cycles and change. But the mood of the film suggests that we should be impressed that this ever-growing, ever-changing city of ours is still chasing after new versions of the modern.

Pattinson is great in what is surely his best post-Twilight performance to date.

If Heli lacks enough focus and thematic clarity to make it properly special, it's still winningly provocative and always compelling.

The film’s pleasures are simple – soaring landscapes, old-school DIY adventure and some sweet performances by the child actors. It makes for a charmingly old-fashioned family adventure.

Anyone with a beating heart will be forgiven for allowing it to break during this unflinching and thoughtful account of the life and death of the soul singer Amy Winehouse.

The Secret Agent is vicious and vivid in its sense of place and danger. But it also has a streak of weirdness and offers a very human take on the political-crime thriller genre.

U.N.C.L.E. has enough style and smarts to make it an amusingly louche summer movie: a cultivated mix of action and wit, suits and cities, that feels refreshingly analogue in a digital world.

The film's quietly angry plea is for compassion, understanding and more than one eye open on this modern horror.

With Dolan, you feel you're in the company of a truly original voice and one unafraid to make his mistakes right up there on the screen.

Away has the mild rush of a coming-of-age dream, the sort that lodges in your memory as symbolic and significant as you pass from one stage of life to the next.

This is some flu: it plunges us into a deeply strange and unsettling version of reality. It’s undeniably confusing, but it leaves you with a powerful, if imprecise, feeling of a society that’s sick from something far worse than a passing virus.

What makes this more than just a punishing, fearful, expertly crafted thriller focused on one man’s endurance is heavily down to Emmanuel Lubezki’s attractive, thoughtful photography.

In style, the film’s ambition sometimes oversteps its ability, but it’s a rare London gangster film that has something to say about the city and says it with wit and little resort to bloodletting

It’s a teasing celebration of outsiderdom without being a full-on endorsement

Hogg displays a welcome desire to draw on global film influences and ignore the unwritten rules of what British cinema should or should not seek to achieve, especially in the realm of films about the monied and unsympathetic.

Exhibition succeeds in making us feel deeply uncomfortable for peering into other people’s lives.

Caught by the Tides is more a montage of music and miscellaneous episodes than anything representing a traditional drama. It’s strongly propelled by music – from Chinese classical music to techno to rock – and it’s a heady visual mix of styles and formats: from grainy, phone-like footage in a documentary style, to much more pristine and considered imagery.

Writer-director Anna Muylaert’s observations on family relations and invisible-but-firm class barriers are always acute.

Archipelago confirms Hogg as a daring and mischievous artist, and a major British talent whose next move will be intriguing.

A masterclass in how the most local, most hemmed-in stories can reverberate with the power of big, universal themes.

The Lovers and the Despot is compelling as a Cold War-era thriller, but it also offers a small window on life in the higher echelons of power in North Korea at that time.

As you’d expect from Kore-eda, it’s all told with the utmost detail and care, and a gentle score from the late Ryuichi Sakamoto only adds to the overarching air of thoughtfulness and empathy.

Brand is a winning – cuddly even – bridge between his film’s ideology and the wider world.

More than ever Payne allows the humour to rise up gently from his story rather than burst through it.

It's a spare film, muted in colour and unflashy – and it's all the more powerful and urgent for it.

If ever a film puts its arm round a kid and says: ‘Don’t worry, I’ve got you’, that’s Bird and Bailey. She’s a character you feel Arnold would lie on railtracks to protect – and that’s a powerful, moving instinct to share.

It’s as interesting for what it doesn’t show as for what it does.

It’s a small, successful sketch of now-great lives.

‘Childhood’ is not always a subtle film, and some of the writing and acting feel like a bit of a slog. But its very spooky mood leaves a strong impression.

The film is not without its problems – Michelle Williams is an elusive lead, and a wide array of characters come at the expense of depth – but it’s a knotty, thoughtful piece of work nonetheless.

Human Flow is rooted in specific current national and political situations, yet it offers a portrait of forced human movement and suffering that feels almost timeless.

Dunst handles her sidekick role with a mature ease that’s new to her, but it’s the men you remember: Mortensen in psychological freefall and Isaac always tough to read and hiding something behind a handsome, controlled exterior. It’s a gentle and smart blast from the past.

Kormákur creates such a convincing world – the craft of this film is astonishing – that you’re willing to forgive its less delicate touches in favour of its totally compelling depiction of what it must be like to ascend into a place that’s heaven one moment and hell the very next.

Once you get past some bumps in the road of believability, Our Kind of Traitor turns into a brisk, energetic drama, with Anthony Dod Mantle’s photography adding interesting layers to a fairly straightforward plot.

This punky adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel Filth is a glossary of grimness, a dictionary of darkness. But it also dishes up humour that’s blacker than a winter’s night in the Highlands and unpolished anarchy that’s true to Welsh’s out-there, frighteningly frank prose.

As filmmaking, X+Y is unassuming and not entirely remarkable, but the relationships play so sweetly and memorably.

It’s a daring spin on history and the power, or otherwise, of the individual: a puzzle that is well worth trying to solve.

Skyfall is a highly distinctive Bond movie. It has some stunning visual touches.... Also, it mostly manages to convince us that there’s something at stake by giving a hint of Bond’s emotional life beyond this story.

Bloodlight and Bami defiantly reflects the experimental whirlwind of Jones’s existence: her ability to look and feel relevant decades since she started out.

Cat lovers (and possibly fans of ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’) will appreciate the role of an ageing black feline as a symbol of the sudden changes in Nathalie’s life. Everyone else should warm to the way that Hansen-Løve distils the chaos of life and the life of the mind into such a warm, thoughtful, surprising drama.

[Chazelle's] soaring, romantic, extremely stylish and endlessly inventive La La Land is that rare beast: a grown-up movie musical that's not kitschy, a joke or a Bollywood film. Instead, it's a swooning, beautifully crafted ode to the likes of Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Stanley Donen's Singin' in the Rain.

Rush is fast, slippery, stormy and dangerous.

Along with the film’s hippy-ish musings on the relationship between humans and the elements, it gives the film a moving, supernatural touch.

Although Binoche is the film’s star, her presence is smartly muted, allowing us time and space to discover the world as she does, and providing room for complexity in considering the ethics of his character’s work and of Carrère’s film itself.

Overall, there aren’t many shades of gray in Hacksaw Ridge, but it’s a movie that fulfills its purpose with vigor, confidence and swagger, and those battle scenes are impossible to take your eyes off.

Maybe an hour would have been enough, but even the slower patches have charm to burn.

Wang’s film feels less like an exposé than an eye-opener; a portrait of a reality that feels almost otherworldly in its distance and difference.

Writer-director Francis Lee has drawn on his own farming background and his film is full of convincing detail. The lack of chat feels especially truthful.

This is an imperfect film, bold but occasionally baffling, and one that in its final act grows into something much more exciting than you might initially expect.

At times, you ache to put the brakes on the chaos, but still Pixar manages to do with all this what they do best, turning the everyday rough and smooth of childhood experience into a thoughtful, inventive adventure, full of totally appropriate lurid and strange imagery.

The story itself, a twisty, hard-to-keep-track-of tale of revenge and double and triples crosses, is not especially remarkable. But that barely matters when there’s such virtuoso image-making on display.

It’s uncompromising. It’s disturbing. But it’s also deeply human, allowing for many glimpses of human kindness and human frailty beyond a wall of anonymity and pain.

There’s great energy to this film: quick dialogue, snappy performances and a lived-in feel make us quickly believe this world, its characters and their hang-ups.

You won’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Feels both modern and traditional – a halfway house between the broodier Nolan way of shaking things up and the louder, bone-crunching style that director Zack Snyder established with films such as ‘300’ and ‘Sucker Punch’. Man of Steel is punchy, engaging and fun, even if it slips into a final 45 minutes of explosions and fights during which reason starts to vanish and the science gets muddy.

There’s nothing cloying or corny about the way Arnold depicts these beasts. What she gives us is a straightforward slice of a cow’s relentless life of muck, milk, breeding and feeding.

The world that Zootropolis creates is intelligent and fascinatingly detailed – it feels more like a movie by Disney-owned Pixar than a straight Disney film.

It’s a simple, angry work, determined to get across its point with force and with few distractions.

It’s lightly played, often very funny and shot all over Paris with energy and wit, and boosted by superb, inquiring turns from Broadbent and Duncan.

This is sombre, artful and winningly ambiguous.

One of the most pleasing things about Blue Jasmine is that it feels truly knotty and never obvious in how it unfolds.

The connections might be a little more strained and diffuse than in "Nostalgia for the Light", but their cumulative power is strong nonetheless.

David Sington (In the Shadow of the Moon) shows extreme confidence in his subject by revealing the deeper truth in fragments, essentially allowing Nick to deliver a monologue or one man show, drawing us deeper and deeper into his story.

Oldman is brilliant; Molina’s Halliwell less subtle; and the film’s dissection of cottaging quaintly amusing.

It’s not wildly original, but it’s steely and stylish, and as a story it has a ruthless streak to it that’s weirdly appealing.

As Farhadi casts his roving, distracted eye over this unhappy community, sharing his story in a choppy, documentary style, it ends up feeling like a curiously detached exercise, more academic than wholly satisfying.

Sometimes you find yourself wishing for an alternative version of the film unfolding before your eyes. ‘Belle’ is a good-looking and exceedingly polite film where perhaps a more complex one with less good manners would have been better.

Oddly, the comedy of this partnership is dialled down, and the film’s few wisecracks don’t really land. It’s adventure, though, that everyone really wants from an Indiana Jones movie, and on that front it delivers and then some by prising open the old box of tricks and performing them one-by-one with care and respect. Add to that the rousing familiarity of John Williams’s score, and it all amounts to a comforting if not especially challenging reboot.

The relentless gloom can feel oppressive, but there’s plenty of ambition here, especially in the layered storytelling and woozy sense of time and place, with plenty of soaring aerial shots that nod quietly to the all-seeing eye of a computer game.

There are powerful and enlightening scenes, and there’s a catchy energy to the battlefield action. But the immediacy and credibility of the women’s mission feels compromised by one-too-many corny moments, unconvincing dialogue and a sense of uncertainty on Husson’s part over whether she wants to take a poetic or realist approach to her tale.

Nobby is hardly a character for the ages. He's a basic fool. The movie, too, is chaotic and crude. But its lack of sophistication, like its odd mix of souped-up action and base comedy, ultimately feels like a badge of honour.

Even Dench, while adeptly highlighting the vulnerabilities of age and the loneliness of power, can’t distract from the soft treatment, which leaves little room for the harsh realities of prejudice which must have made this a more painful and ugly chapter for many involved than this film ever dares suggest.

It has a rigorous, even unrelenting, grey, green and brown palette and, narratively, it’s tough to penetrate.

There's no escaping it: Money Monster is a basic, silly movie. But it has on its side a top-notch cast and an entire absence of self-seriousness.

A charismatic performance from Downey Jr and the growling presence of Duvall makes up for a multitude of sins in this big and brash family drama that puts the heavy emphasis on drama over family.

This is a thoughtful film, but one that's slightly limited by its own careful restraint.

While it fascinates as much as it frustrates, the film’s saving grace is that it always feels honest and never cynical. It seems both relevant to us and personal to the filmmaker.

It’s an uneven work, mysterious in its refusal to tell us much at all about Daniel, but it has a ring a truth to it even when it slips into less enigmatic thriller territory.

Wears its heart a little too much on its sleeve. But it also manages to pack a punch, and the lead performances from Bercot and Cassel are strong.

The film’s pace barely leaves you time to think – blink and you’ll lose the plot. But there’s plenty of imagination here to honour the spirit of Carroll’s topsy-turvy tales, even if the emotional resolutions are of a distinctly twenty-first-century sort.

There’s a pleasing no-frills tone to the whole enterprise as well as a convincing grasp of the rituals and beliefs of the age.

It’s a film that moves to the convincing rhythm of real life.

What Luhrmann makes intoxicating is a sense of place – the houses, the rooms, the city, the roads – and the sense that all this is unfolding in a bubble like some mad fable. Where he falters is in persuading us that these are real, breathing folk whose experiences and destinies can move us.