John Bleasdale

A masterful dissection of social inequality and the psychology of money.

Alfonso Cuarón returns to his childhood for inspiration with the meticulously beautiful Roma, an autobiographical black and white thank you letter full of warmth and love.

The Producers is so effusively inappropriate and so damned funny it is one of the highest examples of low comedy.

Not since Jane Campion’s The Piano has a costume drama presented such a gorgeous view of love from a woman’s point of view.

Wells’ debut is a frankly astonishing work which will leave a lasting impression.

Scorsese’s direction always keeps us uncomfortably close to Travis’ subjectivity, whether we’re prowling night time Manhattan or gazing into a glass of Alka-Seltzer until the whole world disappears into the healing hiss.

In arguably a career-topping performance, Timothy Spall plays the cantankerous painter as a complex, grunting, snarling and utterly single-minded creature.

At the heart of Marriage Story are two career-best performances from Driver and Johansson. There is sensitivity, wit and intelligence in abundance, and in one barnstorming scene the kind of raw emotional nudity that’s rarely captured on screen: it’s the painful core of the movie which the laughter might ease but can’t erase.

For all its postmodern smarts, La La Land has a heart as big as its Cinemascope screen. This is primarily down to the two leads, without their performances it would only be an empty, if impressive, exercise in dizzying technical skill and style.

A quietly devastating portrayal of family and theft in contemporary Japan.

Although Tamhane's film recalls Franz Kafka in its nightmarish vision of inhumane bureaucracy, Court is neither faceless nor surreal. Rather, the absurdity and numbness are all too human and as such even more frightening.

One More Time with Feeling is a bold poem in itself, a portrait of the artist struggling to understand the essentially incomprehensible.

Memoria is gloriously weird and it has that most magical quality of making you look at things in a totally different way.

It's triumph is its determined optimism, even if it admits that is probably a fantasy. It's a tale of the fallen who, like Moonee's favourite tree, keeps on growing regardless.

Sissako's film is at turns funny, poetic and deeply moving.

Glazer’s film is richly daring. It is both meticulous and brutal; aloof and involved; ferocious and cool. It is poetry and cinema, but it is also guilty and it knows that it is.

Zvyagintsev's pessimism is leavened both by his comedy and his sense of beauty. Mikhail Krichman's cinematography captures the sublime grandeur of the landscape against which the nasty, brutish and short lives are played out.

Although Goodfellas doesn’t aspire to the grandeur of Coppola’s mob, Scorsese’s New Yorkers have their own vitality, even if – or perhaps because – the threat of violence is never far away.

Oppenheimer's first film maintained a passive detachment, allowing the killers to re-enact their own atrocities and metaphorically hang themselves with their own words. The Look of Silence takes a far harder line, probing the killers more deeply and confronting them in an attempt to shake some sense of remorse out of them.

Saint Omer is a deeply intellectual film – Medea is referenced several times as a frame of understanding – but it’s also heartfelt. There is a compassion to the dispassion: an empathy.

Son of Saul is not simply a good film, it feels like an urgent and important one, a warning from history.

Goldin’s career and Poitras’ latest asserts the primacy of the artist as a participant in the world. Something which will make us see the world differently starting from the very walls from which the art might hang: the rooms in which the films are seen.

Hit the Road is damned near to being a masterpiece – if it isn’t simply one already. There are scenes of broad comedy, musical sequences and a wholly tragic episode that plays out in a long wide-shot. The wonderful cast inhabit their roles so fully it’s hard to believe this is not a bona fide family.

The Favourite has ribaldry and intelligence to burn, a deliciously entertaining period piece that feels liberated by its period, rather than restrained and invigorates like a glass of wine thrown violently in your face.

Though the film tries for ironic detachment – twelve chapters with a prologue and epilogue – it ultimately can’t wink away its own heartfelt compassion and sympathy, even as it refuses to provide any trite solutions.

The two-part The Souvenir can be seen very much as one whole, and as such is one of the very best achievements in recent British cinema.

Green Border is a powerful and necessary film.

This is the refined work of an artist at the peak of his powers, and, dare we say it, a masterpiece.

The whole set-up risks being all too winsome, but Jarmusch has always been a quiet punk: his most radical assertion is believing, despite everything, in the essential goodness of people.

Chaplin’s humour is shot through with darkness, loneliness and violence, like chili pepper in chocolate.

Although a couple of narrative twists late on threaten to drum us into melodrama, Chazelle never misses a beat and the film builds to a cathartic crescendo.

Barry Lyndon is a rich cinematic experience which fully deserves to once more be seen on the big screen and enjoy its status as one of Stanley Kubrick’s greatest achievements.

Petzold's Phoenix is a high-concept premise executed as a heart-wrenching character piece.

Anomalisa might be bizarre, surreal and far out, but it always feels paradoxically real, grounded and deeply true.

About Dry Grasses is part-Chekovian comedy of yearning and male ego, and part-tragedy of a country which stymies the growth of its own citizens.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is a multi-layered piece with such swathes of great dialogue that it will no doubt reward - if not demand - multiple viewings. It's also another item of evidence pointing toward a filmmaker getting into his stride.

With a richness of characterisation usually reserved for hefty novels, each shot in Winter Sleep glows like a symbol, whilst each digression is almost a short story in itself.

Foxtrot is a bold and imaginative portrait of the confines of family.

Sweet Country is a hoarsely angry film, a powerful denunciation of the racism and violence on which modern Australia was eventually founded.

Despite treading some familiar territory, British director David Mackenzie's new film Hell or High Water proves itself a brilliantly executed, sharply written genre gem.

This is Barbie on absinthe.

Birdman is a rich, startlingly clever and multi-layered collage, with Iñárritu creating a meta-universe of mirrors and performances upon performances.

Importantly, Spielberg instinctively knows exactly when to keep his camera still and allow what's in front of it to take precedence.

Made up of a series of related but not necessarily connected vignettes, each filmed with a static camera, they resemble New Yorker cartoons scripted by Samuel Beckett.

The Banshees of Inisherin is a beautifully-shot and deftly-played comedy. It is at once masterful, surprisingly poignant, and profound. Its portrait of a friendship faltering ultimately proves how vital friendship actually is: how vulnerable and naked we are without it.

It's witty, smart and brilliantly played, plumbing the sub-aqueous depths of our psyches, our histories and desires.

Zvyagintsev is masterfully compiling a cinematic record of suffering, and the indifference surrounding and facilitating it, which will live on.

Just as we learn to grudgingly like Lizzie, we also see the value in her work as it slowly comes together, emerging from the kiln with new colours and finally being displayed among her family and friends.

Maidan is a stunning piece of political cinema and a documentary of quietly moving power and beauty.

Hawke's performance is his most mature to date, a masterpiece of a man who cannot work himself out and yet is compelled to try.

This is a rich and complex take on guilt and anger.

Whereas Senna had that one moment of horrible impact, this latest tale is the story of one long car crash.

Kröger manages well with moments of pure cinema in between, and a particularly out-there moment of noise and mayhem which threatens to crush the film and the audience in an audiovisual avalanche. There’s an immersive strangeness that only David Lynch has snuck into mainstream cinema.

Shines out as a rough diamond, a masterpiece of British cinema undeniably worthy of its classical title.

Behemoth is a stunning and moving denunciation of the situation in Inner Mongolia, where the mining industry is permanently changing the landscape.

Ultimately, Decision to Leave is like a beautiful airport novel of a film. It is far cleverer than it needs to be and is so acted with sly charisma.

Starless Dreams is a fascinating and humane view of the marginalised and forgotten. The girls' voices rise as a startlingly powerful chorus, questioning, challenging and demanding we listen.

The film reveals its twists and turns with a delicate hand and always manages to stay one step ahead of the audience, even as most of those watching will surrender to the hypnotic erotic charge that runs through the film.

It shows the desperation, the pain and the suffering, but it also reveals the spirit and fortitude of those tasked with caring for the sick.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is bold, beautiful and brutal. It’s Tarantino’s best film since Kill Bill, perhaps even since Pulp Fiction.

After the Storm is undoubtedly one of Kore-eda's best.

In one truly magic moment, Buster Keaton – who had fallen on hard times and was largely forgotten – joins Calvero for his final gala performance. It is a cinematic meeting to be cherished and makes up for the maudlin and wordy melodrama that precedes it.

Over the years, Phoenix has given us some of the most memorable portraits of dark flawed men from Commodus to Johnny Cash. Here, he is excellent, utterly convincing as a man who has been hammered by the world and so has decided to hammer it back.

With Custody, Legrand has created a family drama that plays out as social realism, but it is as intense as a thriller and, with no generic get outs, far more terrifying than Kubrick's The Shining.

Network is an outstanding satire that has become more rather than less relevant with each passing year. It is bitingly funny, whip smart and as mad as hell.

With The Postman's White Nights, Konchalovsky offers up an intimate and moving pastoral.

Avi Belkin’s Mike Wallace Is Here harvests a vast archive of interviews and b-roll footage to create a fascinating profile of a combative, conflicted figure, who nevertheless substantially changed the face of how news was reported.

Eggers has created a film of disturbing horror, absurdist comedy and probing psychodrama which defies the generic boundaries as it breaks through them. The Lighthouse is a saltwater gothic masterpiece.

The final few minutes will baffle some, infuriate others, but it will also be the wildness of the imagination which will have you pondering Evil Does Not Exist long after it has ended.

Morgen presents a sense of Bowie as a man who is in search of himself and who, through philosophy and a bold commitment to art, finds his wisdom.

With this near-perfect midnight movie, [Glazer] has given us a work of unsettling and riveting brilliance.

Polsky keeps Red Army driving forward and the result is a film as fast-paced and bloody-minded as the sport it celebrates.

A unique and beautiful boxing movie.

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ timely documentary on the Nobel Prize-winning novelist is a persuasive argument for rereading Morrison if you’ve already read her works – and if you haven’t, an imperative to get to it.

Linklater’s Hit Man is an Aperol Spritz with enough fizz and prosecco to cover the taste of the strychnine. This could be one of the brightest dark comedies of recent times.

Lanthimos has broadened his scope and has created a marvellously bleak, bizarre comedy.

Rams is a truly remarkable, eccentric work.

Laverty and Loach have created another hard-hitting, powerful film, spiked with humour and moments of rare but profound humanity.

At almost three hours, Puiu's latest is as long as most family events are, but the observations made are brilliantly bright and there is love here, after all.

Like the Barry Lyndon of martial arts movies, every shot has been composed, lit and executed with such care and attention by Hou and his cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-Bing that The Assassin is totally absorbing in its spectacle, from the meticulous details of the interiors to the astonishing, breathtaking locations, from forests and waterfalls, to mountainsides and in one unforgettable moment cliff tops.

Covino’s brilliant comedy is original and smartly entertaining: a celebration of male friendship in all its ups and downs.

Iran is a complex and bureaucratic country, but it is also the role of social media and so-called ‘fake news’ that lend A Hero a contemporary relevance, even as it feels like an ancient morality tale.

Gnecco has both breadth and subtlety. His Neruda is a complex and fascinating character study, a man fastidiously vain of his status but unconvinced by his own performance even as he enraptures a nation.

Each set piece is orchestrated with aplomb - a raid on a tunnel under the border being a particular stand out - but Sicario is kept grounded in reality. Villeneuve keeps his focus tight on his small group of characters and though the plot is complex, it fits the Byzantine intricacies of the problem and the obscure motivations of the operators.

Blade Runner 2049 is not a perfect film. The pace occasionally puts the plod in the procedural and some story elements are introduced only to drift away to the land of possible sequels. But Villeneuve has created a genuinely thoughtful piece of sci-fi which escapes the gravitational pull of its inspiration to become something - to paraphrase Dr. Eldon Tyrrell - more Blade Runner than Blade Runner.

Despite some imperfections, Arrival is a close encounter with the best of intelligent, thoughtful science fiction.

Dhont’s second film is a touching and empathetic treatment of male friendship, superbly acted and beautifully filmed.

Carell, in a rare but not unique departure into drama, proves himself as accomplished at tragedy as he is at comedy.

Larraín is as good at navigating the treacherous waters of internal White House politics as he is capturing the moments of intense, if numbed, private suffering.

Andersson packs his film with thought-provoking deadpan humour.

An acutely observed and frequently heartbreaking documentary.

It seems ridiculous to call a film that is only 73-minutes long an epic, but that is what The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet feels like. Though it should be made clear, by epic there’s nothing grandiose; there is nary a special effect to be seen and hardly a cast of thousands. But at the same time, Argentine filmmaker Ana Katz’s sixth feature encompasses a life and very nearly the end of the world.

Kurzel is a master at building tension of a tragedy foretold.

Although the narrative risks becoming arbitrarily episodic towards the end, Neon Bull is a genuine celebration of its characters and their grounded physical life as well as their obstinate ability to dream.

Doing these usually faceless public servants justice is vitally important. But Totally Under Control somehow feels unfinished.

Baumbach writes his dialogue with a sharp pencil and the film bursts with non-sequiturs, put downs and hilarious lines.

Nothing particularly unusual or dramatic happens for the first hour of the film, and yet it is so beautifully done and engaging that the whole thing is riveting to watch.

Mulubwa’s performance gives I Am Not a Witch its furious heart, but Nyoni weaves her spells subtly and has produced a film of intensity, satire and grace.