Peter Bradshaw

Birdman is a delicious and delirious pleasure.

The sheer silliness is inspired.

This animated documentary from Danish film-maker Jonas Poher Rasmussen is an irresistibly moving and engrossing story, whose emotional implications we can see being absorbed into the minds of the director and his subject, almost in real time.

It is a demanding film, without a doubt – but a passionate one.

The Innocents is a nightmare unfolding in cold, clear daylight.

[A] sublime classic.

Stanwyck supplies a bravura double performance, a showcase for her brilliant versatility.

The unhurried pace, extended dialogue scenes and those sudden, sinister inter-titles ("One Month Later", "4pm") contribute to the insidious unease. Nicholson's performance as the abusive father who is tipped over the edge is a thrillingly scabrous, black-comic turn, and the final shot of his face in daylight is a masterstroke...Deeply scary and strange.

Andersson’s films are endlessly rewatchable. To view them is to abolish gravity.

RoboCop looks more than ever like Verhoeven’s masterpiece, a classic of 80s Hollywood and apart from everything else a brilliant commentary on the city of Detroit; hi-tech RoboCop is a harbinger of the decline of the automotive industry and the ruin-porn wasteland to come.

It is arguably the best film about the first world war, and still has a reasonable claim to being Stanley Kubrick's best film.

It’s a deeply sweet, happy, gentle film.

It wasn’t until I saw Threads that I found that something on screen could make me break out in a cold, shivering sweat and keep me in that condition for 20 minutes, followed by weeks of depression and anxiety.

Villeneuve is superb at juxtaposing the colossal spectacle with the intimate encroachment of danger and a mysterious dramatic language that exalts the alienness of every texture and surface.

It is a brilliant, subversive account of class relations and the changing times.

So Long, My Son is a piercingly, profoundly moving picture that peels and exposes the senses.

The material is superb, Neil Innes’ music is tremendous and Gilliam’s animations are timelessly brilliant.

A neglected 1976 gem from a neglected Hollywood genius. May was known for her comedy but here proves absolutely fluent in the language of mobster lowlife, with an edge of caustic, disillusioned humour, and strange yet shockingly real outbursts of violence in which cafe owners and bus drivers are suddenly roughed up.

The silence of Jeanne Dielman is the film’s weather and its atmosphere. It is a silence of terrible loneliness, and a silence in which a storm is gathering.

It is even better than the first film, and has the greatest single final scene in Hollywood history, a real coup de cinéma.

As with so many of Denis’ films, the point is to contrive an overwhelmingly powerful mood and moment, an almost physiological sensation, this one incubated in the vast, cold reaches of space. It throbbed and itched with me long after the film was over.

It is extremely pleasurable to watch, and shows every sign of having been extremely pleasurable to make.

There are some marvellous supporting performances. This film comes as close as possible to a distillation of pure happiness.

Peter Jackson has created a visually staggering thought experiment; an immersive deep-dive into what it was like for ordinary British soldiers on the western front.

It is a tremendously engaging story which does something that very few movies do: mention money. Something very palpable is at stake, the jeopardy is real and it’s a question of survival.

The movie's blazing energy is still astounding; the vérité street-scenes are terrific and Scorsese's pioneering use of popular music is genuinely thrilling.

One Battle After Another is at once serious and unserious, exciting and baffling, a tonal fusion sending that crazy fizz across the VistaVision screen – an acquired taste, yes, but addictive. The title itself hints at an unending culture war presented as a crazily extreme action movie with superbly managed car chases and a final, dreamlike and hypnotic succession of three cars through the undulating hills. And is the central paternity crisis triangle an image for an ownership dispute around the American melting-pot dream?

Blade Runner 2049 is a narcotic spectacle of eerie and pitiless vastness, by turns satirical, tragic and romantic.

Very few films can make you scared and excited at the same time. Just like the lighthouse beam, this is dazzling and dangerous.

This is a suspense classic that leaves teeth-marks.

Copa 71 is a revolutionary political parable that goes beyond football.

Fire at Sea is masterly film-making.

Something in its mandarin blankness and balletic vastness, and refusal to trade in the emollient dramatic forms of human interest and human sympathy. Kubrick leaves usual considerations behind with his readiness to imagine a post-human future.

By any standards, this would be an outstanding film, but for a debut it is remarkable.

The “fascist” staging could have been hackneyed, but Loncraine carries it off superbly as the showcase for action-thriller noir.

The co-directors created from Rumer Godden's novel an extraordinary melodrama of repressed love and Forsterian Englishness - or rather Irishness - coming unglued in the vertiginous landscape of South Asia.

This is an unmissable commentary on Hollywood's rejection of its silent past: a kind of Sobbin' in the Rain.

It’s a tremendous film that was ahead of its time on LGBT issues and, in some ways, is ahead of ours.

This is a pellucid and gentle film, made with the simplicity and grace of a children's tale and yet its humour, emotional clarity and directness speak directly to adults and children alike - and the pre-teen principals shoulder an adult burden of performance.

There’s plenty for nostalgists and completists to swoon over. . . . Such a pleasure.

Roman Polanski's sensational 1962 debut...is an example of how a superlative director makes a film from the simplest materials.

The law about movie characters needing to be sympathetic is defied in this horribly fascinating true-crime black comedy.

Hard to Be a God creates its own uncanny world: it is beautiful, brilliant and bizarre.

What an addictive romantic drama it is, mixing sentimentality with pure rapture.

The greatest ever making-of documentary.

Ray's language of cinema is a kind of miraculous vernacular, all his own. It has mystery, eroticism and delight.

Paul Greengrass and his cinematographer Barry Ackroyd have created an intestinally powerful and magnificent memorial to the passengers of that doomed flight. It is the film of the year. I needed to lie down in a darkened room afterwards. So will you.

An arrestingly bizarre experience.

This beautiful and compassionate film from first-time feature director Colm Bairéad, based on the novella Foster by Claire Keegan, is a child’s-eye look at our fallen world; already it feels to me like a classic.

It remains breathtakingly good. There is a miraculous, unforced ease and naturalness in the acting and direction; it is classic movie storytelling in the service of important themes.

It is all entertainingly absurd and yet the pure conviction and deadpan focus that Fassbender and Fincher bring to this ballet of anonymous professionalism makes it very enjoyable. And there are moments when the veneer of realism is disquieting.

This is an utterly absorbing and outstandingly acted film.

What is still amazing is how brief an instant it was; in just a few years, the Beatles and their music would evolve into something completely different. A few years after that, they would break up, while still only in their 20s. An amazing split-second of cultural history.

It’s a glorious celebratory montage of archive material, live performance footage, Bowie’s own experimental video art and paintings, movie and stage work and interviews with various normcore TV personalities with whom Bowie is unfailingly polite, open and charming.

It is a brilliant film, but there is nothing sweet about it.

It is a very disturbing parable of the insidious micro-processes of tyranny.

This is a film that carries you along and there is an added savour in seeing those cherubic faces which have since settled into middle age.

Pure evil is all around in this unnervingly subtle, sophisticated movie; an eerie oppression in the air.

Before Midnight is intimate and intelligent, and also undemanding in the best possible way,

It’s a compelling, visually exquisite piece of work.

There is such simplicity and clarity here, an honest apportioning of dignity and intelligence to everyone on screen: every scene and every character portrait is unforced and unembellished. The straightforward assertion of hope through giving help and asking for help is very powerful.

This film succeeds, not because it solves the mystery, but because it deepens it still further. It is contrived and speculative, but ingenious and impassioned at the same time.

Eisenstein's film still has a hypnotic urgency.

It comes from the age of Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange, but none of those movies can match the sheer hardcore shock of the Australian New Wave nightmare Wake in Fright from 1971.

It’s all so inventively bizarre that you could treat it simply as a black comedy, but in the final 15 minutes there is an amazing crescendo of emotion.

Reinvented by Wilder and co-screenwriter co-writer IAL Diamond, Some Like It Hot is effortlessly fluent, joyous and buoyant: a high-concept comedy that stays as high as a kite, while other comedies flag. "Nobody's perfect" is the last line. Wilder, Lemmon, Curtis and Monroe come pretty close.

The Wild Pear Tree is a gentle, humane, beautifully made and magnificently acted movie.

It is a creamily sensuous, richly observed piece of work, handsomely detailed and furnished: the clothes, the hair, the automobiles, the train carriages, the record players, the lipstick and the cigarettes are all superbly presented. The combination of all this is intoxicating in itself.

Lovely performances, and more superb gags in one minute than most movies manage in 90. It's like drinking champagne.

At times it feels novelistic, a densely realised, intimate drama giving us access to domestic lives developing in what feels like real time. In its engagingly episodic way, it is also at times like a soap opera or telenovela. And at other times it feels resoundingly like an epic.

It is about grief and about the shock of grief and the stabbing fear which, in its terrifying way, gives you a clarified view of your own existence. A film to wonder at.

This, the film says, is what it really feels like to be on the receiving end of the law in a case like this: a calm, professional, technocratic but relentless display of overwhelming power.

Get Out is very creepy, very funny and as pitiless as a surgeon’s scalpel.

For a film as over-the-top as this, it might be counterintuitive to talk about subtlety, but Stewart is genuinely that; her line readings are coolly calibrated, quizzical, restrained, sometimes infinitesimally double-taking at the bizarre or outrageous things happening in front of her.

This film is a gruelling experience and Dirk Bogarde’s coup de grâce is the most horrible effect of all.

Mitchell brings off some sensational setpieces of fear and suspense. I can’t remember when I was last so royally freaked out in the cinema.

LA film-maker Anna Biller achieves an ecstasy of artificiality in this amazing retro fantasy horror, delivered with absolute conviction.

It had a miraculously literate script whose every line deservedly became a quotable classic and the film boasts a once-in-a-lifetime combination of perfect performances from Paul McGann and Richard E. Grant as the loafing actors heading for a terrible bucolic weekend, Ralph Brown as drug-dealing Danny and Richard Griffiths as predatory Uncle Monty.

This film opens up the storytelling throttle with a throaty growl, delivering the doomy romance of an old-fashioned western and the thrills of a mob drama.

With remarkable confidence, [Wells] just lets her movie unspool naturally, like a haunting and deceptively simple short story. The details accumulate; the images reverberate; the unshowy gentleness of the central relationship inexorably deepens in importance.

The mystery of other people’s lives, the unbridgeable gulf between us all – even, or especially, between married couples – is the subject of this outstanding drama from first-time film-maker Aleem Khan.

It’s a gorgeously and grippingly made picture and Tang Wei is magnificent.

It is an absorbing and satisfying drama, and Hurt’s Merrick is very powerful.

François Ozon’s lustrously beautiful and superbly realised monochrome version of Albert Camus’s novella L’Etranger has an almost supernaturally detailed sense of period and place. It amounts to a passionate act of ancestor worship in honour of a renowned French artwork, though by making changes that bring a contemporary perspective on the book’s themes of empire and race – changes that include a critique of the original text – this adaptation perhaps loses some of its source material’s brutal, heartless power and arguably some of the title’s meaning.

Both Culkin and Eisenberg are excellent and this is such a pleasure.

It is not free of plot-holes...but what a supremely stylish and watchable picture it is.

A movie with incomparable bite and strength.

For its control of narrative, its photography of the vanished suburban California of the 1940s, and for its compelling central performance from Crawford, Michael Curtiz’s noir thriller is utterly gripping.

Mike Leigh brings an overwhelming simplicity and severity to this historical epic, which begins with rhetoric and ends in violence. There is force, grit and, above all, a sense of purpose; a sense that the story he has to tell is important and real, and that it needs to be heard right now.

This glorious film is about the greatest mystery of all: how old people were once young, and how young people are in the process of becoming old.

There is such pure delicious pleasure in this film, in its strangeness, its vehemence, its flourishes of absurdity, carried off with superb elegance.

Happy As Lazzaro itself is a weightless enigma, an unfathomable promise of happiness, gently tugging you upward, like a balloon on the end of a string.

The film, with its transcendentally beautiful visuals...is a rich and rewarding experience. [1 Sept. 2011]

This is an utterly absorbing film, a story that Scorsese sees as a secret history of American power, a hidden violence epidemic polluting the water table of humanity.

Every frame of this film is brilliantly contrived, particularly the underwater nightmare at the end. A gripping, complex chiller.

It is a beautifully acted, exquisitely considered chamber drama of subtlety and nuance: spellbindingly tender and utterly involving

Interview With the Vampire is still horribly exciting, shocking and funny.

An absorbing and nourishing documentary.