Ian Nathan

A flawed work held together by Alwyn’s tender presence.

Despite moody flashbacks to the Nazi takeover, Hirschbiegel draws a blank. Elser remains an enigma, a great what-if whose German torturers cannot comprehend acted alone.

Vallée’s post-traumatic stress comedy is more scientific than genuinely moving. Nevertheless, Gyllenhaal continues his post-Nightcrawler upgrade with another vivid performance in the key of strange.

For all the special effects and half-starved A-listers, this is a sodden beast. Perhaps there’s a reason that Melville only told half the story.

Charming in that neurotically adorable way Charles Schulz established over many years, this is a fond continuation of the Snoopyverse.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

On one level a fascinating refraction of the Amanda Knox trial into an examination of perception, on another an increasingly trying hall of mirrors.

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.

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.

Lavish and sporadically powerful, Jolie's POW biopic may have just enough gravity to entice the Academy, but struggles to bring truth to an unbelievable truth.

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

A persuasive, warts-and-bolts depiction of warfare from the guts of a tank yoked to an overwrought, sub-Private Ryan account of innocence under fire — so a hit and a miss.

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

Weightless, but not without its enchantments, this is Woody Allen coasting. But where better to coast than the loveliest coast of all?

For all its chilled intelligence and topical ambition this is a bloodless adaptation, but worth seeing for Hoffman’s deft and ghostly presence.

What begins as a thrilling pastiche of comic-book formula gets bogged down in its own scientific prattle — not that you ever stop adoring Johansson’s magnificent heroine.

An uneven debut from John Slattery that nonetheless shows flashes of flair and a jet-black sense of humour.

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.

For all it boasts in ingenious style, this genial American yarn lacks the delicious bile of Jenuet’s early days.

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

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

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

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

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.

With Eastern Promises and Dirty Pretty Things, screenwriter Steven Knight has proved his ear for London's darker rhythms. Here, though, there's little to raise the pulse.

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.

Good intentions, vivid setting and TLJ on top form do not make up for a lack of anything truly compelling.

However exotic the locations and starry the stars, there’s no escaping this is The Devil’s Advocate of online gambling. Fold.

Already a hit in America, 42 is a well-told but square biopic doing justice to Jackie Robinson rather than exploring him.

The CG does its part of the bargain, but even more than the brighter, breezier original this is a pale imitation of Potter.

Del Toro is giving scope to a boyhood lust for mayhem, the multi-million-dollar equivalent of kicking over sandcastles and torturing insects. There is something infectiously juvenile in that.

Despite DiCaprio’s prize performance, purists will fume, but even as lit-crashing razzle-dazzle entertainment Luhrmann’s adaptation is a candelabrum too far.

Don’t let its commercial nosedive in the US tell the whole story. Cloud Atlas is a tough sell, but a rewarding journey all the same. It’s an adventure into the very concept of storytelling: magical, enthralling and thrilling as much as bewildering, pompous and potty. In other words, up in the clouds.

Hitchcock for dummies: brisk, jolly, well-played but oversimplified.

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.

An uneven mix of impressively executed, violent clichés about good ol' boys defending the American right to flout the law.

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

As earnestly as they have tried to continue the formerly excellent spy series, everything Gilroy and crew concoct only serves to mock the excellence and passion with which Greengrass delivered his films.

Family dysfunction to make Jeremy Kyle blush, but thanks to McConaughey's oily power and Friedkin's unflinching purpose it's a compelling beast.

Buffeted by a lack of suspense, threadbare characters, and a very poor script, the stunning visuals, gloopy madness, and sterling Fassbenderiness can't prevent Prometheus feeling like Alien's poor relation.

With so many films adapted from novels, it's nice to see cinema paying homage to unheralded greats of literature like Sebald. While this one often struggles to do justice to his sense of grandeur and poetry, it'll be manna for fans of the German's work.

A sequel confident in what it's about - bigger, better, funnier, without stretching the joke.

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

There's no question it's stunningly mounted, and Wasikowska makes a much stronger Jane than Alice, but the romance is overripe and the climax underdone.

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.

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

A diabolical treat with Rourke and De Niro in fine form.

Not one to let slow-building tension and mystery get in the way of wild flourishes of extremism and shock, Ken Russell hit upon a story that more or less handled his structural excesses and tendency toward blasphemy.

Unfortunately, half the time this feels more like an Omen parody than a chance to give it a great send off.

For much of its slowburn build there is a classy, intelligent thriller at work, something closer in tone to The Odessa File. Still, you must remain guarded to how over the top and quasi-horror events will finally turn.

It picks up in the last hour, though this is a very minor compensation in an otherwise long and listless film.

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

What a peculiar but effective children’s adventure movie this is.

Genuinely creepy, satirical and occasionally daft horror tales with a distinctly moral bent.

One for the die hards. The saving grace here is a knowing sense of humour so lacking in its predecessor, For Your Eyes Only.

In the grand pantheon of Sinbad movies, those pleasurable Arabesques of silly beasts, big swords and scantily clad maidens, this lower league Ray Harryhausen stop-motion thriller squeezes between the better Eye Of The Tiger and the worse Seventh Voyage.

This sprawling epic rewards patience with an emotional pay-off and non-triumphant ending that reminds us all too starkly of the sacrifices made during war.

Pointless re-make. One of (the once great) Carpenter's worst.

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.

Forgettable, innocent, old fashioned fairy tale with not nearly as much sexual chemistry as is required.

The jingoism is blindingly awful, but by the time of the showdown, the film has descended into an unaware parody of itself.

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

Bond meets Star Wars in one of the series' sillier outings.

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.

Michael Caine as a Nazi and Donald Pleasance as Himmler...what more could you want?

About the dumbest movie Clint Eastwood ever put his name to.

Highly-evolved it ain't, but this Stone Age slacker is a lot of fun.

This gritty sci-fi is undeservedly neglected and underrated.

Well-paced and stunningly shot.

A tormented movie about torment; loopy, over-reaching and occasionally suspicious. Simultaneously, it is a daring artistic endeavour.

It's not the plot that disappoints, it's the poor dialogue between action sequences. Sadly another film to file under not as good as the book.

Running at just over four hours, it is as spectacular, lush and extravagant as the studio would have liked its audience to believe. But it also has moments of mind-numbing boredom as the plot,– slowed by extraneous dialogue, drags from Egypt to Rome.

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.

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.

A stunner of unrelenting tension interrupted by action, violence and gore.

Classic War caper with a few too many plot contrivances but high on adventure.

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

A bit silly really but it has a bizarre mix of a cast and some tension in places.

The effects may have dated, as have the Cold War themes, but the almost real time adventure still has some tension to offer.

The tale from the past is very nostalgic, heartwarming and mouth-watering and all, as Idgie and Ruth cook up a storm, are kindly to their black domestics and stand up to piggy men while events fitfully progress to a courtroom climax. And Masterson is a peach. But the best bits belong to Bates as her dreary Evelyn raises her consciousness, lowers her weight and starts speaking her mind. It's a nice, pleasant celebration of friendship, but without much meat to chew on.

Despite the always-good Harvey Keitel, this is just embarassing sci-fi nonsense.

It’s ragged round the edges, but then Fritz Kiersch is working with a budget Roger Corman would laugh at, and he does a good job.

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

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

As a direct tribute to the dignity of the solider facing attacks on both their bodies and their souls it puts things in a salutary context.

Smart and satirical but very dated, obviously.

Derivative sci-fi hokum but some imaginative touches here and there.

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

A modernised Bond is dragged kicking and screaming into the 70s.