Peter Bradshaw

Exhibition is challenging, sensual, brilliant film-making.

The pure energy and likability of this film make it such a pleasure.

[An] outrageously enjoyable petrolhead heist caper.

It’s a deeply intelligent and sympathetic rendering of real-life situations, using nonprofessionals playing approximations of themselves.

The face-off between two of the biggest legends in American pop culture, Sinatra and Brando, is something to be relished, although the roles are perhaps a little too atypical for each for the pairing itself to be legendary as the individuals. But still, what a joy it always is.

Goodfellas is a compelling, black-comic nightmare.

What a glorious film this is, richly and immediately enjoyable, hitting its satisfying stride straight away. It's funny and visually immaculate; it combines domestic intimacy with an epic sweep and has a lyrical, mysterious quality that perfumes every scene, whether tragic or comic.

It sure as hell got under mine. Jonathan Glazer's sci-fi horror is loosely adapted, or atmospherically distilled, by Walter Campbell from the 2000 novel by Michel Faber. The result is visually stunning and deeply disturbing: very freaky, very scary, and very erotic. It also comes with a dog whistle of absurdist humour that I suspect has been inaudible for some American reviewers on the international festival circuit so far.

It is an intensely disquieting, utterly distinctive film and a superb final panel to his triptych.

There is something exacting and audacious in it, something superbly controlled in its composition and technique. The clarity of her film-making diction is a marvel – even, or perhaps especially, when the nature of the story itself remains murkily unrevealed.

The film is an enormously satisfying and affecting experience.

The Coens are back with a vengeance, showing their various imitators and detractors what great American filmmaking looks like, and they have supplied a corrective adjustment to the excesses of goofy-quirky comedy that damaged their recent work. The result is a dark, violent, and deeply disquieting drama, leavened with brilliant noirish wisecracks, and boasting three leading male performances with all the spectacular virility of Texan steers.

Django Unchained also has the pure, almost meaningless excitement which I found sorely lacking in Tarantino's previous film, Inglourious Basterds, with its misfiring spaghetti-Nazi trope and boring plot. I can only say Django delivers, wholesale, that particular narcotic and delirious pleasure that Tarantino still knows how to confect in the cinema, something to do with the manipulation of surfaces. It's as unwholesome, deplorable and delicious as a forbidden cigarette.

Seventy years on, this great romantic noir is still grippingly powerful: a movie made at a time when it was far from clear the Nazis were going to lose.

The film is thrillingly, unapologetically about decency and honour, about, as Laura heartrendingly puts it, controlling oneself.

This movie channels the paranoia and bad faith that’s in the air at the moment and converts it into a thriller of visceral hostility and overwhelming nihilism. It’s all killer, no filler.

In the past I have been agnostic and a nay-sayer about M:I, but the pure fun involved in this film, its silly-serious alchemy, and the way the franchise seems to strain at something crazily bigger with every film, as opposed to just winding down, is something to wonder at.

Love letters to the past are always addressed to an illusion, yet this is such a seductive piece of myth-making from Branagh.

An unmissable, transcendentally beautiful classic. [28 Aug. 1998]

Where once Hamaguchi’s film-making language had seemed to me at the level of jeu d’esprit, now it ascends to something with passion and even a kind of grandeur.

Caché is Michael Haneke's masterpiece: a compelling politico-psychological essay about the denial and guilt mixed into the foundations of Western prosperity, composed and filmed with remarkable technique. It is one of the great films of this decade.

Not a romcom, not a romantic drama, but just … a romance, a brief encounter on a train without heartache, a strange and wonderful moment-by-moment miracle that never seems cloying or absurd.

The White Ribbon is a ghost story without a ghost, a whodunnit without a denouement, a historical parable without a lesson, and for two and a half hours, this unforgettably disturbing and mysterious film leads its viewers alongside an abyss of anxiety.

Only the hardest of hearts could fail to enjoy the great 80s action classic, rereleased for its 30th anniversary: with uproarious explosions, deafening shootouts and smart-alec tag lines following the bad guys getting shot.

Baumbach has landed a sizeable white whale in his tremendously elegant and assured adaptation.

Playing Falstaff might have been Welles’s creative and physical destiny: in the character he found a dignity and sensuality in his, by then, overweight form. The confidence and panache of his staging is a treat.

The Death Of Stalin is superbly cast, and acted with icy and ruthless force by an A-list lineup. There are no weak links. Each has a plum role; each squeezes every gorgeous horrible drop.

Abraham Lincoln's second term, with its momentous choices, has been brought to the screen by Steven Spielberg as a fascinatingly theatrical contest of rhetoric and strategy.

It’s fair to say Washington has never quite topped this performance. It’s an unparalleled treat to watch him messing with the bewildered Hoyt at their first meeting at a diner, and then to watch the two men striding out to the car, filmed from a low camera angle. It is all thrillingly ominous.

This is a genuinely bizarre, startling, freewheelingly lo-fi and funny indie picture with the refreshing bad-taste impact of Todd Solondz or Robert Crumb.

Freaks is filled with poignancy; it offers a premonition of eugenics, as well as a provocative comparison with the alienated condition of women and the freakish nature of all showbiz celebrity. It is a work of genius.

The icy message may be that love is not a consolation as we face death. Rather the reverse. Love will give your death meaning, but make it no less unbearable.

With music by Zbigniew Preisner, it is an almost supernatural contrivance: brooding on coincidence, fate and the insoluble mystery of other people’s lives, with some cosmic parallels and existential echoes that recall his earlier film The Double Life of Véronique. And all in a tone somehow both playful and laden with gnomic seriousness.

The elements of silliness and deadly seriousness are nicely balanced and although I wasn’t absolutely sure about the ending, which has maybe too neat a bow tied on it, this is just very enjoyable and I was on the edge of my seat, not knowing whether to flinch or laugh, though I did both.

Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy are joined by Caine as a hilarious Scrooge in this irresistibly sweet musical adaptation of Dickens’ festive tale.

Attenborough matches the natural world’s grandeur with his own intellectual and moral seriousness.

A deeply humane and emotionally literate piece of work.

FW Murnau's classic 1927 silent is one of the first movies with a really substantial feature-length narrative: an exuberant pioneer picture conceived on a big canvas, blazing an inspirational trail for just about everything Hollywood has done since. [06 Feb 2004, p.15]

What makes the film so compelling is the ferocious ingenuity with which Moodysson ratchets up the fear and astonishment that accompany Lilya's all too believable descent.

Hitchcock's superbly insouciant crime caper from 1955 must surely be one of the last movies in which the American super-rich are indulged so extravagantly and adoringly – the kind of people who stub their cigarettes out in fried eggs.

The Force Awakens is ridiculous and melodramatic and sentimental of course, but exciting and brimming with energy and its own kind of generosity. What a Christmas present.

It's beautiful and strange, with its profoundly disturbing ambient sound design of industrial groaning, as if filmed inside some collapsing factory or gigantic dying organism.

Bellocchio shows us a brutal convulsion of tyranny, power and bigotry with echoes of the Dreyfus affair in France, and later, horrific events.

As buoyant and elegant as bubbles in a glass of champagne, Frank Capra's sublime 1934 comedy, written by long-time collaborator Robert Riskin, survives triumphantly because of its wit, charm, romantic idealism and its shrewd sketch of married life.

The film itself is terrifically accomplished and horribly gripping, with golden-age movie pastiche and dashes of Psycho and The Wizard of Oz.

A film that needs to be seen on the big screen.

The story unfolds in a daring sequence of narrative leaps.

The strange, dreamlike tension of the film escalates with each new confrontation, each new tailing, each new beating, with Gutman and Cairo shot from a queasy low angle, and the nightmare culminates in a gripping series of closeups on each strained face.

McQueen’s compositional sense is a marvel; the movie’s period and location is evoked with masterly skill, and the romance is wonderful. What a cure for lockdown depression.

This is a film with thrilling directness and storytelling force, a movie that fills its widescreen and three-and-a half-hour running time with absolute certainty and ease, as well as glorious amplitude, clarity and even simplicity – and yet also with something darkly mysterious and uncanny to be divined in its handsome shape.

Despite its earnest endorsement of the idea that there's no place like home ... well, frankly there are plenty of places like boring old home, but nothing's like Oz.

The film creates space for Hinds and Manville to give substantial, intimate, complex performances of the kind that most movies (of whatever sort) do not allow their leads, and Manville in particular is very moving.

This rich and mysterious film is a real achievement.

[Hara's] sad dignity and emotional generosity are compelling.

There is a freshness and emotional clarity in Payal Kapadia’s Cannes competition selection, an enriching humanity and gentleness which coexist with fervent, languorous eroticism and finally something epiphanic in the later scenes and mysterious final moments.

This inspirationally lovely and gentle film has a real claim to be Miyazaki’s masterpiece, or first among equals in his collection, with a simple hand-drawn design whose innocence only becomes more beguiling with repeated viewings, along with its bright, expansive, Gershwin-esque musical score.

A gentle, exquisitely sad film.

Hollywood here looks diabolically seductive.

This is fiercely powerful storytelling, simple and muscular in one way, but also conveying nuance and sophistication in its depiction of character.

I can still remember my 19-year-old self's awe at how Jake provokes a gorgeous, reluctant smile from the incandescently beautiful Moriarty. Throughout university, I was obsessed with this film, and watched it about once a month.

Lauren Greenfield’s film about the Philippines’ former first lady Imelda Marcos reveals a grotesquely self-pitying, wholly unrepentant and very rich woman.

Some of the scenes in the LA art world are a bit broad. But this is a terrifically absorbing thriller with that vodka-kick of pure malice.

Brilliant.

This is an unrepentantly cynical take on the hope-and-change promised to the US in 2008; this year's election race makes it look even bleaker, an icily confident black comedy of continued disillusion.

I enjoyed this more than either of the two earlier filmed versions, with Gene Wilder in 1971 and Johnny Depp in 2005. It supplies the chocolate-endorphins.

Blue Is the Warmest Colour really is an outstanding film and the performances from Exarchopoulos and Séydoux make other people's acting look very weak.

A tense dramatic situation and a subtly magnificent central performance from Marion Cotillard add up to an outstanding new movie from the Dardenne brothers.

Utterly beguiling, funny and romantic.

Sofia Coppola's second movie as a director is more than a breakthrough: it's an insouciant triumph. She conjures a terrifically funny, heartbreakingly sad and swooningly romantic movie from almost nowhere and just makes it look very easy - as well as very modern and very sexy. It is a funky little Brief Encounter for the new century.

This film has mystery and passion, it climbs mountainous heights and rewards you with the opposite of vertigo: a sort of exaltation.

It’s a strange film in many ways, affectless and directionless, coolly refusing the usual dramatic beats and climactic moments, and as unreflective as MOR rock.

Vortex tells us something else about old age, something which a severe and high-minded movie like Michael Haneke’s Amour would not grasp: death is chaotic, like life. It ends with things undone and in messy disarray. This is a work of wintry maturity, and real compassion.

This searing film bears a terrible witness to this great crime.

It's a movie that you feel you're not so much watching on screen as having beamed directly into your skull from some malign, alien planet of horror.

Werckmeister Harmonies may be Tarr’s masterpiece.

This quietly amazing film is conceived in terms of pure minimalist intimacy.

I Saw the TV Glow is claustrophobic, unwholesome and brilliant.

Quite simply, I just defy anyone with red blood in their veins not to respond to the crazy bravura of Tarantino’s film-making, not to be bounced around the auditorium at the moment-by-moment enjoyment that this movie delivers.

1917 is Mendes’s most purely ambitious and passionate picture since his misunderstood and under-appreciated Jarhead of 2005. It’s bold, thrilling film-making.

This heart-meltingly romantic and sad movie from Korean-Canadian dramatist and filmmaker Celine Song left me wrung out and empty and weirdly euphoric, as if I’d lived through an 18-month affair in the course of an hour and three-quarters.

Sutherland and Christie are an overwhelmingly convincing married couple.

A pioneering glory of the new wave.

Barry Lyndon is an intimate epic of utter lucidity and command.

A pleasure.

Spacious, shrewdly detailed and conceived with compassion and wit, it unfurls at an unhurried walking pace, spreading itself across a very American urban landscape.

I was utterly absorbed in this teeth-clenchingly exciting story and the “heist” sequence itself stands up really well – as well as anything I’ve seen.

The panoramic intelligence of this film is a wonder.

That entertainment enchanter JK Rowling has come storming back to the world of magic in a shower of supernatural sparks - and created a glorious fantasy-romance adventure.

The resulting adventure – bizarre, mysterious and moving – is about lost youth and the recovery of innocence through writing and memory. It is also one of those vanishingly rare films where child actors have to carry almost the entire drama.

A ripping, gripping yarn, a surprisingly erotic love story and, as it happens, a premonition of Herzog's Fitzcarraldo.

Hereditary is basically a brilliant machine for scaring us, and Collette’s operatic, hypnotic performance seals the deal every second she’s on the screen.

The movie is perfectly composed with a light touch that is the work of a certain kind of gravity and sophistication.

Cleverly, it gives us enigmatic backstory hints that may or may not help explain the sudden direction change the film takes in its third act, leading to a denouement of toxic ingenuity. And of all it driven by the sensuality and rage of Pugh’s performance.

Every second of this noir masterpiece is gripping, and the chemistry between Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor is utterly thrilling.

It is deeply intelligent, intensely and painfully political, and yet attempts, and succeeds, somehow to transcend politics and perhaps even history itself.

A chilling and utterly brilliant film whose final, excoriating sequence is frankly sufficient on its own to justify the genius tag.

In its simplicity and punch, this is a film that feels as if it could have been made decades ago, in the classic age of Planet of the Apes or The Omega Man.

This is Herzog's journey to the heart of darkness, a film that specifically echoes his earlier offerings The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and his South American odyssey Aguirre, Wrath of God.