Peter Bradshaw

Once again, Romanian film-maker Radu Jude has given us a garrulous, querulous movie of ideas – a scattershot fusillade of scorn. It is satirical, polemical, infuriated at the greedy and reactionary mediocrities in charge in his native land and wobbling on an unstable cusp between hope and despair.

A luxuriously watchable and satirical suspense drama.

It is shot with fluency and energy; the dreamy chapter-heading inserts are striking, the final image is powerful, and of course Watson herself is a triumph.

Dreams of a Life is a painful film, a Christmas film with no feelgood message, but one which I think would in fact have interested Charles Dickens. Watching it is an almost claustrophobic experience, but a very powerful and moving one.

It is a fierce and impassioned denunciation of evil.

The Little Stranger is fluently made and really well acted, particularly by Ruth Wilson, though maybe a bit too constrained by period-movie prestige to be properly scary.

Well, point-by-point, clip-by-clip, this film remains brilliant. As ever, there is real evangelism in Cousins’s work and in My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock there is so much to learn and enjoy. You come away from it with your senses fine-tuned.

C’est Pas Moi amuses – and discomfits.

Snyder’s film may be exhausting but it is engaging. Justice is served.

The effect of it all is elegant and overwhelmingly stylish, yet maybe there’s not a superabundance of substance to go with the style. Kinds of Kindness feels heavier and longer than I expected, as if reaching for a meaningful resolution that might not be there. Yet absence and loss is perhaps the whole point.

It features an awful lot of very rich, clever, cordially self-satisfied collectors and connoisseurs; their pink, twinkly-eyed faces positively beam out of the screen, and surely Hoogendijk is inviting us to wonder how Rembrandt himself would have painted them.

Bottoms is actually a bizarrely violent film, and its plot is always teetering on the brink of pure incoherence, but it’s always funny, thanks to the goofy and winning comic presences of Sennott and Edebiri.

There’s real intimacy and emotional generosity to this psychological mystery from Joanna Hogg – a personal movie which appears to come from the same universe as her earlier Souvenir films – or one very much like it.

There are such great gags, and it is acted with such fanatical gusto by Barratt that it’s impossible not to root for this unlikeliest of heroes.

Mudbound is absorbing: the language, performance and direction all have real sinew.

With Red Rocket, Sean Baker has given us an adult American pastoral, essentially a comedy, and another study of tough lives at the margin, close in spirit to his lo-fi breakthrough Tangerine.

Maybe this film, concluding as it does on a distinctive note of euphoric sentimentality, does not add up to quite as much as the director thinks; but it intrigues, it exhilarates and it shows that Sorrentino is Italian cinema’s heir to Antonioni.

Like the luxury goods that in one scene we see being stolen, the performances are out of the top drawer, and it is a great pleasure to see Moore on such good form: no one cries more needily, and with more nakedly sinister intent, than her.

It’s a movie that rescues the tired zombie trope – without insisting on metaphor or satire.

This is a gripping nightmare.

It is quite a vision: mordant, satirical, brutal.

This is an absorbing story, acted with superlative delicacy and maturity by Chastain and Sarsgaard.

This documentary is a bit reticent on the subject of racism. It’s not a subject that Trejo addresses, other than to say that cops who used to pull him over now do so to get selfies. Yet it’s an amazing true-life success story.

An intensely angry and persuasive piece of film-making, though maybe letting Bill and Hillary off the hook, a little bit.

On the face of it, the film contains a soap-opera’s worth of secret feelings and tumultuous events, including the teenage lovers’ sensational escape from the town during a heavy storm. And yet Fukada maintains a cool distance.

Here’s a movie that tells us that the days of summer, like the boys of summer in Don Henley’s song, are going to get outlived by the love they inspire. It’s what happens in this thoroughly sweet-natured, charming and unassuming British film.

The Coens have given us a hilarious, beautifully made, very enjoyable and rather disturbing anthology of stories from the old west, once planned for television but satisfyingly repurposed for the cinema: vignettes that switch with stunning force from picturesque sentimentality to grisly violence.

The sheer sustained silliness of this spoof silent comedy is what finally compels admiration. It’s like chancing across a bunch of eerily gifted kids by the roadside putting on a bizarrely accomplished, very extended series of magic tricks and circus acrobatic stunts.

There is a great performance here from Sasha Lane and this is another step onwards and upwards for Andrea Arnold herself.

The Dictator isn't going to win awards and it isn't as hip as Borat. Big goofy outrageous laughs is what it has to offer.

There is a gentle and very happy sense of freedom and possibility aboard the Adamant, and there is enormous warmth, sympathy and human curiosity in this film.

[A] richly enjoyable documentary.

This movie rattles along with terrific energy and dash and the flashback sequences show that it’s actually far more daring and ambitious that you might expect. It’s a great duel between McKellen and Mirren.

It is highly diverting, elegantly contrived study of an unhappy family group and the cuckoo in its nest.

Nitram is a hypnotically disquieting movie.

It’s an engrossing, forthright adventure.

In the Fog is an intense, slow-burning and haunting drama.

There’s a rich confectionery of strangeness, sadness and fear to this very absorbing film.

The forthright, punchy screenplay shows Kinoy’s TV background, but there is a galloping energy to the whole drama.

Taxi grew on me. It is not as angry and painful as his previous work, the samizdat This Is Not a Film, but it is subtle, humorous and humane. It tells you more about modern Iran, I think, than you’ll discover on the news.

It is only with the explicit possibility of a supernatural explanation, combined with full-on psychiatric breakdown, that the movie loses its light touch and its plausible detail. Yet there’s always a hyper-vigilant twinge of fear.

It is a deeply unsettling meditation on sexuality and transgression.

It's a gem: gentle, eccentric, possessed of a distinctive sort of innocence – and also charming and funny.

[Black] creates some outrageously contrived and protracted shootouts and one or two good old fashioned action explosions. But he also keeps the dialogue cracking along.

The film coolly conveys the awakening-from-denial horror that their investigation spreads through the film industry and I admire the way it takes the macho cliched nonsense out of journalism in movies: these are not boozy guys being adorable and chaotic, but smart, persistent people doggedly doing their job.

“This isn’t a Mensa convention!” says one player. Is that disingenuous? Isn’t there, in fact, some advanced showbiz intelligence and surrealist savvy in the way Jackass is set up and edited? Either way, it has a horror-comedy impact.

Perhaps this one doesn’t take Seidl’s creative career much further down the road to (or away from) perdition, but it is managed with unflinching conviction, a tremendous compositional sense and an amazing flair for discovering extraordinary locations.

The folk singer and counterculture veteran Joan Baez is the subject of this intimate and painful documentary, which brings us to the brink of a terribly traumatic revelation that it can’t quite bear to spell out.

Korean director Park Chan-wook’s new film brings his usual effortlessly fluent, steely confidence and a type of storytelling momentum that can accommodate all kinds of digressions, set-pieces and the occasional trance-like submission to mysterious visions.

It is a vivid snapshot of a troubled private life at the apex of the US music scene.

Jed Rothstein’s very entertaining documentary is another horror story from the tulip-feverish world of tech startups.

About Elly confirms Farhadi's shrewd judgment of pace, dramatic technique and formal control of an ensemble cast.

The sleek, stark images of this film are hypnotic; the faces are compelling and the hallucinatory finale is rather inspired. An arresting piece of work.

Moment by moment, line by line and scene by scene, Challengers delivers sexiness and laughs, intrigue and resentment, and Guadagnino’s signature is there in the intensity, the closeups and the music stabs.

The endlessly prolific Takashi Miike returns with this superbly acted revenger's tragedy.

1976 is made with thrilling assurance, and the tension and Carmen’s spiritual crisis are superbly conveyed, with a nerve-jangling score by María Portugal. It’s a great example of Chilean antifascist noir.

This is a bleak, bold, extravagantly crazy story which is emotionally incorrect at all times.

It is an intriguing and empathic study, which could help all of us to understand.

The film is quiet, understated and gentle, allowing the audience to take pleasure in teasing out its narrative subtleties, and presented with wonderful freshness and clarity.

In the Earth brings us back to Wheatley’s classic world of occult loopy weirdness and cult Britmovie seediness, with a new topical dimension of pandemic paranoia, and what keeps you watching is its unreadable, almost undetectable thread of black comedy.

I’m not sure that Les Olympiades says anything too profound about any of its cast of characters, but Audiard achieves something very watchable and entertaining in anthologising them. This is a connoisseur date movie.

It is such a strange film in its way, stranger still if you are not accustomed to Weerasethakul’s work, and it needs a real investment of attention. But there is something sublime in it.

[A] highly entertaining and outrageously over-the-top Cinderella soap opera.

One for the fans, perhaps, and a vivid Gradiva-esque glimpse of the past.

On the most basic level, it is a warning of what inequality can cause in the future and what it is effectively causing right now. Perhaps there is something nihilistic here, but New Order very effectively persuades you that a real-life revolution might well be every bit as ugly, horrifying and un-Hollywood as this shows – and that it is on the way.

It is an absorbing, committed drama.

Zero Days is an intriguing, disturbing watch.

A terrifically enjoyable and exciting summer spectacular: savvy, funny, ridiculous in just the right way, with some smart imaginative twists.

It's a nice, if undemanding, Yuletide treat.

Calin Peter Netzer's Child's Pose is a gripping new drama from Romania and another demonstration of how that country's new wave is developing a distinctive kind of real-time slice-of-life cinema with characterisation in extreme, pitiless closeup.

Leila’s simmering rage at the contemptible mediocrity of her father and brothers, and the exhaustion of trying to save them from themselves, is the emotional energy that powers the movie, building to that climactic wedding scene. It is a great performance from Alidoosti, first among equals in a great ensemble cast.

Clara Sola is superbly filmed and composed with a very humid sense of atmosphere, and Araya’s performance is a miracle of sympathy and candour.

Love and sex, two things taken so casually for granted in so many different kinds of story, here become totemic articles of faith. Lady Chatterley still has the power to move.

Sheridan is emerging as a master of the Mexican standoff, the shootout, the stomach-turning crime scene, the procedural office politics, but he’s also adept at tuning into the vulnerability and strength of the women and men called in to uphold the law. Wind River is a smart and very satisfying movie.

There is something nightmarish and hallucinatory about this business and also in the terrible retribution exacted by Oreste, a grotesque mob chieftain. The film has a throb of something disturbing and transgressive.

The physical suspense is all but unbearable: a sexualised hunger, fear and need. Fingleton writes and directs with gusto and flair.