Dave Calhoun

It sits at the mature end of Tarantino’s work, bringing his tongue-in-cheek storytelling together with exquisite craft and killer lead performances from Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio. And yet, it’s still very much a Tarantino film, trading in genuine emotion one minute, unapolegetically silly the next.

Quietly epic and sad but never sentimental.

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

It’s not a despairing movie – Mungiu even suggests that a new generation might put things right – but it’s a brutally honest one.

It’s a deeply humane film, as well as a quietly hilarious one.

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

Demange is a strong storyteller and masks the script’s tendency to nod to every opinion and social division by offering a masterclass in tension as soon as his dramatic bomb starts ticking.

It’s not a pretty story, but its warmth lies in its fondness – love, even – for the two boys at its heart.

It’s an intoxicating marvel, strange and sublime: it combines sci-fi ideas, gloriously unusual special effects and a sharp atmosphere of horror.

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

The film conceals as much as it reveals, and its beauty is that it pretends to do nothing else. It embraces a mystery and protects it, and it’s thrilling to behold.

The film offers little relief to the nerves, but it’s a surprising, curious drama, consistently thoughtful, artful and provocative.

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

Yes, The Lobster is arch: this is cinema in quotemarks, tongue-in-cheek storytelling that uses absurdity to hold a mirror to how we live and love. At its best, it has incisive things to say about how we shape ourselves and others just to banish the fear of being alone, unloved and friendless.

What’s different is the detail with which Loach and his collaborators examine the effects of work and society on the nuclear family.

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

The Assassin is a beautiful, beguiling film; it's impossible not to get fully lost in its rarefied world.

It’s a superb morality play that immerses us deeply in a society’s values and rituals and keeps us guessing right to its powerful final shot.

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

To enjoy the film's arresting musings on language, time and how much we can ever understand others, you'll have to close your eyes and ears to the wealth of schlocky hokum surrounding them.

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

There are no interviews, characters nor narration, and after an hour it can feel like a chore. Yet the images are staggering.

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

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.

You won’t know whether to laugh or cry.

It wins you over with its scrappy underdog antics and then, later, bowls you over with its heavyweight insights.

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

It's a bold film, full of energy and spunk, but a patchy, half-formed, rambling one too.