Kim Newman

How to sum up? You have to make synapse-spark connections, interpret events to your own satisfaction, pick up visual cues (a long stretch of the film is dialogue-free) and be happy with not knowing all the answers (you know, like in life — but not in most motion pictures). A perfectly judged, strikingly beautiful film, but also a lunatic enterprise which invites — even welcomes — befuddlement as much as wonder. A true original.

The first film to be adapted from rather than into a Nintendo cartridge, Super Mario Bros, is a shrill, hectic and tiresome fantasy with little story, less excitement and no imaginable audience.

Shot in a grainy grey and white helps to give the film an amateurish and at the same time realistic feel, particularly as it's based on true events. With standout performances from Lo Bianco and Stoler, this is a forgotten gem that's waiting to be rediscovered.

Measured in pace, yet thoroughly gripping and completely accessible. The title soft-sells the picture, but it's among the best of this or any year. And Manville should clear some shelf space for well-deserved awards.

Improv comedy at its best: subtle, hilarious, excruciating and affecting in equal measure.

The strength of the piece is that it realises which aspects of its genre have been seen too many times, always coming back to Nelson's blank but expressive stare as he watches terrible things the director doesn't need to shove in our faces.

Superbly Vincent Price!

A classy French-Belgian horror with an unusual female perspective on monstrous taboos. Shocking but not sensationalist, this is a strong cannibal movie worth chewing over.

44 Inch Chest gets by on the quality of its performances.

By turns funny, vaguely creepy and too cool for school, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night is certainly unusual — but also seductive and strange enough to stick in the memory like a fever dream.

Cultural clashes all over the place in this sweet and gently comedy.

Skyfall is pretty much all you could want from a 21st Century Bond: cool but not camp, respectful of tradition but up to the moment, serious in its thrills and relatively complex in its characters but with the sense of fun that hasn't always been evident lately.

Von Trier is a burr under the hide for many viewers, and the unconverted won't be convinced. But it's audacious, beautiful, tactful filmmaking and perhaps the perfect match for "The Tree Of Life" on a bipolar double bill.

The main problem is that the supposed good guys are all such reprehensible toads it’s impossible to care whether they get to bring down Willem Dafoe’s charismatic, polo-necked super-crook.

This was controversial at the time and that put alot of people off, believing that the film was probably all hype, but this is a respectful and complex work of fiction around the concepts of the biblical character and his life.

West’s frightfilms are playful — a stereotype is inverted as guys wander half-naked to their doom like stereotypical slasher starlets — but run to serious scares. X is a properly satisfying shocker.

Bogart and Cagney are gloriously dark in this gangster tour-de-force.

Humane and harrowing, highly recommended. This one will stay with you.

Contrary to pre-release nay-sayers, Daniel Craig has done more with James Bond in one film than some previous stars have in multiple reprises. This is terrific stuff, again positioning 007 as the action franchise to beat.

It stands as a hugely enjoyable, occasionally chilling, musical.

A delightful animation for adults, its lack of sentiment makes it an anti-Marley.

Unclassifiable odd masterpiece.

Effective melodrama with some satisfying emotional confrontations, particularly from Lana Turner.

A successful mix of literary adaptation, meta-fictional discourse and inside-showbiz comedy. Both funny and clever.

This is a harsh, unsentimental science fiction film, though the performances suggest small surviving flames of empathy and yearning amid the tough, practical attitudes.

The Endless is a demanding, rewarding picture with moments of unusual terror and awe, offering a science fiction/horror scenario on a literally cosmic scale which boils down to a study of a complicated sibling relationship.

Managing to be cynical and heartwarming at the same time, this is an almost perfect satire on the American Institution of beauty pageants.

A competent, atmospheric remake, but, considering the quality of Murnau's masterwork, is it necessary?