Ian Nathan

Pop quiz, hotshot: you’re cut loose 375 miles above the Earth, oxygen is running out, communication is lost, catastrophic satellite debris is heading your way and you have no hope of rescue. What do you do? What do you do? The answer is the film of the year.

The most literally exciting film you will see this year. Forget the off-putting banner of another Iraq movie -- go, watch, marvel, endure and book in the palliative of a stiff drink afterwards.

Shimmering with awards potential, Leigh’s glorious picture is a hilarious, confounding, wholehearted and dazzlingly performed portrait of an artist as an ageing man.

Rarely has a film bared itself to simple majesty...it feels epic yet runs barely over and hour and a half. [22 Oct. 1997]

The Marx brothers on top form with their quickfire comedy and banter.

A 50s horror classic that remains a gem of allegorical paranoia.

Violent, poetic, gripping, thrilling and blackly funny: that’ll be the Coens doing what they do best then. Now with added humanity.

Jonze has made a sweet, smart, silly, serious film for our times, only set in the future.

A perfect ensemble of cast, photography and screenplay are all subtly handled through Huston's direction, bringing out Bogart and Hepburn's performances beautifully.

Huston revels in he opportunity for old-fashioned splendour, granting the film the sunset glow of Lawrence Of Arabia and the swashbuckling cadence worthy of the Errol Flynn days. It’s the artful mix of Kipling’s own writing, flights of fantasy with a political core.

Despite a little dating around the edges this is a truly superb example of its genre and a cinema classic.

Max’s re-enfranchisement is a triumph of barking-mad imagination, jaw-dropping action, crackpot humour, and acting in the face of a hurricane.

This is not a film about boxing. This is a film about the human condition and about cinema itself.

This magnificent, often anarchic pastiche of Russian literature’s portentous habits with a side order in Bergmanesque death wallowing actually finds Allen at his silliest. Which also means it is extraordinarily clever silliness, with designs deliberately stolen from Chaplin, Keaton and the Marx Brothers. It is film that explores comedy’s infinite variety via the medium of the existential philosophy of those big Russian sagas slumped in history like sulking teenagers.

Kubrick's superb version of William Thackery's first novel is meticulous and philosophically stimulating but it can leave some audiences unmoved on an emotional level.

Lavish pirate adventure that launched Errol Flynn onto 1930's screens and ensured that buckles would be swashed for a good few years to follow.

Possibly Lean's most complicated movie, Kwai is a towering work.

Amadeus skewers the period finery - stunning costumes, production design, sublime music - with piercing intelligence and thematic gravitas.

It was the complete nightmare that invented the "summer blockbuster", launched the genius on a global scale and delivered an astonishingly effective thriller built on a very primal level: fear.

As unexpected as it is intelligent, thanks to virtuoso work from Spielberg and Kushner, Lincoln is landmark filmmaking, while Day-Lewis is so authentic he pulls off that stovepipe.

The world Jordan envisions is desperate, but Hoskins’s human heart offers a lovely thread of hope.

The luxurious feel of the film is a perfect counterpoint to the painful truths drawn on each brother's face, whilst Pfieffer is much more than eye candy.

There is simply nothing like it out there: profound, idiosyncratic, complex, sincere and magical; a confirmation that cinema can aspire to art.

Danny Boyle's finest since "Trainspotting." In fact, it's the best British/Indian gameshow-based romance of the millennium.

An often overlooked fine entry in the Kurasawa canon, this shows a good many western 'epics' how it's done.

One of modern American film’s most intelligent and provocative accounts of a nation’s political failings, and a near-perfect depiction of journalism at its purist and most inspired. To be more succinct, it is quite brilliant.

As black, sinful and nasty as a weekful of Hitchcocks, this is as fresh and intoxicating now as it was back then. In a word: deadly.

Cruel comedy with a delicious light touch.

A placid, poignant, well-kept secret of a movie.

Stunning cast and scenery cannot fill the hole where the heart of this film should be. A satire with an unnaturally soft centre.

It's not a great film, but Lee's superhuman skills make it an occasionally jaw-dropping experience.

A thumpingly good ode to friendship, hope, wit, wiles and wisdom, brimming with crackling characters and topped with the most twisteroo of twists since "The Crying Game."

It’s a fairy-tale, a glittering New York fable told in a silvery black and white, laden with nostalgia for times and oddities long gone from the hallowed halls of Broadway. Another Allen gem.

Really smart people on a really smart person: Fassbender, Winslet, Sorkin and Boyle await Oscar nominations. But for all its relevance and grandeur, Steve Jobs is ridiculously entertaining. You might say, user-friendly.

An outstanding thriller based on a stageplay (by Frederick Knott) that fits so much better on the screen because, as well as the expansive, cinema is really good at claustrophobia.

So godlike is Spielberg’s status that we often take his talents for granted. The strange, riveting mix of Bridge Of Spies is another sterling reminder that we shouldn’t.

Take it from us — ignorance is bliss. The less you try to figure out Anderson’s rambling, mesmerising mystery, the better. Just relax and let this beautiful, haunting, hilarious, chaotic, irritating and possibly profound tragicomedy wash over you. There is nothing else out there like it.

Technology, as ever, is examined through a pessimistic prism, but the script is equipped with enough jargon and detail to expose the work and responsibility of the filmmakers.

A fulsome, fascinating piece of 20th century Irish folklore.

Intelligent and moving depiction of the futility of war with a superb script and mesmerising performances from all.

A fascinating film that is by turns fascinating and mysterious.

There is true beauty in the realism at the heart of what could come across a fanciful movie plot, with its documentarian coolness of execution, the crisp rhythms of Zinnemann’s direction, we feels we are staring through a window into the shadowy recesses of history.

For a kids film this is pleasingly dark with Gilliam delivering as much classical fairy tale as knockabout comedy.

Haunting and idiosyncratic, Jarmusch’s vampire marriage preaches to the converted, but he’s in fine voice nonetheless.

A superbly mounted, powerfully performed, if slightly underfed Apes sequel. That Reeves is set to direct Untitled Of The Planet Of The Apes next is cause for much celebration. This guy’s fur real. No pun intended.

Superb performances, exquisite direction and that Ennio Morricone score create an authentic 1920s Chicago feel and a hugely entertaining crime drama.

Deliciously cruel to children, Roeg remains true to Dahl's underlying sense of real horror.

Exceptionally well-rendered and emotive war drama.

There are no gothic extravagances in Kathryn Bigelow's bone-dry, style-rich, noir-steeped vampire western. Instead it comprises a fascinatingly modern take on blood sucking mythology, shedding tradition to examine the creatures as human counterparts.

As the drama circles their inaction, this trio of excellent performances fills the screen with a form of spiritual exhaustion, and the film slumps into noir’s typically happy-clappy comeuppance of failure, betrayal and ruin. But the mood has caught on, and the film, stamped with a stunning visual emptiness, haunts the memory for long after its sour close.

However familiar the terrain, this is a vivid, heartbreaking and captivating character piece and travel movie in one, guided by an outstanding Wasikowska.

A war film without the war but with some interesting observations nonetheless.

Get this — Matthew McConaughey is currently the most exciting acting talent at work in movies. Next up, the simple business of a Christopher Nolan.

It is the Road Warrior (as it was subtitled for the American release) that remains the definitive Max movie, hard as nails, hell for leather, it lands like a punch to the jaw. Don't drive angry? Yeah, right.

Definitely a Disney classic but misses out much of the darker side of J.M.Barrie's fantasy tale.

Defying rote heroics and sidestepping those solemn Frodoisms lurking in the role, Lawrence seeks out the complex, human and earthy in Katniss, still the beating heart and total triumph of these movies.

A mighty accomplishment, and possibly the bravest Britflick yet made.

The sustained furore of humour, visual panache and headlong momentum makes for dazzling cinema.

Michael J. Fox is a revelation as the mouse that roared, whilst the score, the direction, and the rest of the cast turn a risky film into a solid addition to the Nam canon.

At times it feels as if five different films are going on at once, but Schumer’s whip-smart delivery and no-holds perkiness keeps it all in place. Just as her director wilfully mines his own life for laughs, there is a whole lot of Amy in Amy.

Joan Allen, Tom Noonan and Dennis Farina contribute to the class in a truly underrated chiller.

Easily, almost nonchalantly, best in franchise, Rogue Nation dispenses with the dead weight of realism or relevance for state-of-the-art thrill-making in a classical mould. The series has finally found its voice.

Perfectly tense atmosphere and performances, with the sparks flying between Bogart and Bacall.

Well-paced and stunningly shot.

Less vibrant than the original, but equally thoughtful and funny.

The genuinely witty and endearing Disney animation that everyone forgets.

Oscar heralds will no doubt dub it "The Hurt Locker" for snipers, but the fitting combo of Clint Eastwood and Bradley Cooper have created a thrilling Iraq war story that manages to both honour the necessities of heroism and ruminate on what heroism might cost a man.

In typical Rob Cohen fashion, it does exactly what it says on the tin. But that's all it needs to be the visceral rollercoaster ride we all expect.

Whilst paranoid in a very 1950's way and a little downbeat at times this is very enjoyable.

Trying too hard and generally too trying. Seek out Howard Hawke's Bringing up Baby instead and be done with it.

A well-rigged whodunit based on the bestseller by Scott Turrow, that pretends to investigate the various political manipulations that haunt your average district attorney’s office but is in truth about the wages of sin.

It's nowhere close to "E. T." - what is? - but amongst the hullabaloo of summer, Super 8 is something to cherish: a beautifully made homage to better times, and better movies.

Although, beyond the calling of its plot, this set of likable characters do come intelligently alive and there is real directorial skill in the growing tension of the finale — this is not just a mater of blindly going through the motions. Violently out of fashion, perhaps, but inspirational in its own tidy way.

The songs and set pieces are still fresh and infectious and most of the child cast are mesmerisingly good. I defy anyone not to be caught up in the charm and nostalgia.

For those who delight in the Coens' divinely abstract take on reality, this is pure nirvana (cross Blood Simple with Raising Arizona if you must), yet beyond the hysterical black comedy, scattered violence and groovy dialogue, there sounds the same song to human goodness which enriched Fargo.

Disjointed but it still rocks.

Delightful, athletic stuff with some unusual - but wonderful - location shooting. New York never looked better.

More story-led than the original with a high enough body count to make it a satisfying action movie.

Old-fashioned comedy with superb performances and insightful glimpses into the world of newspaper journalism.

Unshowy to a fault, Hytner delivers a fine, moving comedy of English manners between a writer and his eccentric tenant, which slowly deepens into an exploration of human bonds.

No less lovely than former films, in many ways lovelier, but Brave is boutique Pixar: less ambitious, more succinct, excellence at a lower ebb.

Brutal story-line which is about as close to an explicit allegory as the western has ever come.

For sheer old-fashioned, childhood rekindling adventure you really can't go past it - just don't take the rose-tinted glasses off.

A truly great Western from Clint that is bleakly atmospheric and charming in turns.

Stories about love in a world gone mad don't come any more gorgeous, or any more sweepingly epic, than this.

By smuggling canvasses out of Nazi Paris, she was “midwife” to Pollock and Rothko. “Art,” the doc claims, “was a mirror of her own strangeness.”

Action-packed, gorgeous, and faithfully whimsical: Hergé thought Spielberg the only director capable of filming Tintin. He was onto something.

A splendidly detailed and rousing caper movie.

The Canadian horror maestro scrapes away the surface of Hollywood to discover a magnificently Cronenbergian outbreak of tortured families, reprehensible behaviour and extreme violence.

Okay, so it does cloy in places, but there is truth in its fractures and its seals, a soft-shimmering landscape of real people.

Ostensibly a haunted house story, it manages to traverse a complex world of incipient madness, spectral murder and supernatural visions ...and also makes you jump.

An unknown treasure of a fantasy film and well worth a look for fans of the genre.

While it's all grand opera, and driven by sweeping gestures and pompous, overwritten dialogue, it is prone to plain silliness - especially in granting us the big showdown at the close. But the sheer dynamism of the action, coupled with Hans Zimmer's lavish score and the forcefield of Crowe, still makes this a fiercesome competitor in the summer movie stakes.

If director Chuck Workman maps a familiar rise and fall of rule-breaking brilliance it is vindicated by the great raconteur and in-depth praise from an impressive roster.

Roald Dahl's immortal, sugar-coated morality play finds Gene Wilder as disturbing and fault-ridden but compelling as the book described. Okay, so its pacing may be slightly off (taking nearly 40 minutes to arrive at the factory gates), but this is still a Golden Ticket if ever there was one.

It doesn't have the dark edge of Joe Dante's other works, but brilliant performances by Martin Short and Meg Ryan make it a joy from start to finish.

One of the least famous of Clint's Western this is an enigma of the genre with ambiguity and psychological depth all over the place.

A resonant film which has a speudo-cult status as everyone has seen it late one night on TV and it's never left them.