Peter Bradshaw

Little Richard emerges here as an exquisite figure, an aesthete and athlete: a butterfly who could never be broken on any wheel.

The comic material really isn't there, and the plot transitions feel forced and uncomfortable.

Bridge of Spies has a brassy and justified confidence in its own narrative flair.

It is a gripping film: horrible, scary and desperately sad.

It is an eerie, sad story whose meaning disappears over the vast horizon as if on a highway heading away through the desert.

It is commonplace to say that some films are scary and mad. But this really is scary and mad.

The movie is its own show of force in some ways, surely accurate in showing what the soldiers did, moment by moment, though blandly unaware of a point or a meaning beyond the horror.

[A] startling but sometimes frustratingly reticent and guarded documentary.

Kulumbegashvili’s style is confident, if derivative. Her technique now has to evolve away from these self-conscious influences.

What is very impressive about Raw is that absolutely everything about it is disquieting, not just the obvious moments of revulsion: there is no let up in the ambient background buzz of fear.

The story unfolds in a daring sequence of narrative leaps.

RMN is a sombre downbeat movie, whose sudden flurry of dreamlike visions at the very end is a little disconcerting. But it is seriously engaged with the dysfunction and unhappiness in Europe that goes unreported and unacknowledged.

Wardle tells a compelling story of the three happy boys who became three unhappy men, their faces shining with a kind of ecstasy in their youth, then muted with sadness and bewilderment in middle age.

This movie has the same desolate quality as Philip Larkin's poem The Building, and yet it is tender and lovable, too.

This is an utterly absorbing and outstandingly acted film.

A well made film, which slithers confidently in its slick of blood.

Somehow Lorentzen shows that it is not the Ochoa family who are the bad guys, but the whole rotten system.

Broad-brush American Fiction might be, but its approach to race and racism is oblique and unexpected, and it’s very funny about publishing’s literary ghetto.

Not an easy watch, and something in which you must make an investment of attention – but a fascinating piece of work.

A fascinating case study in basic-level democracy.

Hanks carries the film with his personality and his easy address to the camera, but this oddity of a film never quite comes to life.

In Fabric is indulgent, certainly, and I regretted the fact that the excellent Jean-Baptiste is not as centrally important to the film as I had assumed she would be. When she is gone, the voltage drops a bit. But it is just so singular, utterly unlike anything else around.

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.

Anne Hathaway detonates a megaton blast of pure unfunniness in this terrifying film.

It’s a disquieting parable of iniquity.

The fiercely charismatic, mesmeric gaze of Lupita Nyong’o holds the movie together, and I have to say that without her presence, the movie’s final spasm of anarchic weirdness might have lost its grip. She radiates a force-field of pure defiance.

It’s an absorbing drama given sympathy and life by two very high-calibre performers.

Chalamet gives it his all as the pudding-bowl-hairstyled young king. But so much of the poetry and the sense of loss has gone from this decaffeinated version of the story.

Some of the movie doesn't exactly convince, and some of the scenes have an actors-improv feel to them, but there's always plenty of humour and energy.

Taylor-Joy and Hemsworth are a great pairing and Taylor-Joy is an overwhelmingly convincing action heroine. She sells this sequel.

It is a film of style and surface, and these are cleverly created and maintained.

There’s an ingenuousness and innocence to Memoir of a Snail, a family-entertainment approachability that belies a strange intensity.

A Fantastic Woman is a brilliant film: a richly humane, moving study of someone keeping alive the memory and the fact of love.

The film is entirely ridiculous, often quite boring, with a script showing worrying signs of being cobbled together. But even as a longtime Von Trier doubter, I now have to admit it grows on you; there's a mawkish fascination and some flashes of real visual brilliance.

You, the Living is a very funny film - though in the darkest possible way. It is a silent comedy, but with words.

It is invigoratingly freaky and strange, with a Death-Valley-dry sense of humour somewhere underneath — though a little derivative sometimes. More than once, Carruth gives us a close-up on a hand ruminatively stroking a surface: very Malick. And the shots of creepy creatures swarming under the skin are very Cronenberg.

This is an amiably talky film, and yet I never for a moment considered that the central relationship was being presented with anything less than seriousness, and there is much dry comedy to be enjoyed.

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 Hate U Give is a fierce, dynamic movie with a terrific performance from Amandla Stenberg as Starr.

There are some nicely creepy moments, and director and co-writer Nick Murphy interestingly dramatises some of the neuroses feeding the appetite for ghostly phenomena – repressed sexuality, guilt and self-harm.

When the wisps of khat smoke clear away, it is perhaps not easy to decide exactly what is left behind, or to decide if khat is a cultural practice to be celebrated or rejected: but there are some marvellous images and moods in this misty, impressionistic study.

Perhaps a more unassuming genre director would have tightened this movie’s cables a little, so that it had more tension and less revulsion. At all events, it delivers some nasty shocks.

Glass Onion is never anything less than entertaining, with its succession of A-lister and A-plus-lister cameos popping up all over the place. And Johnson uncorks an absolute showstopper of a flashback a half-hour or so into the action, which then unspools back up to the present day, giving us all manner of cheeky POV-shift reveals.

This bizarre and sometimes scary film from Iceland has a way of keeping you off balance and on the edge of your seat.

The movie has a streak of sentimentality amid its melancholy and a certain formal theatricality: director Emma Dante has adapted the movie from her own stage play, but has opened it out very plausibly and cinematically.

The beauty and the pathos of the film are vivid in every frame.

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.

Benediction is not an easy experience and some of the caustic, brittle dialogue scenes with Sassoon’s celebrity acquaintances are grating – yet deliberately so. The sadness is overwhelming.

It’s not a reassuring film. But it has a chilling brilliance and relevance.

A gentle, exquisitely sad film.

This film is enigmatic and yet very digestible, deadpan in its comedy and so insouciant and casual in its form, you might almost think that Katz had written it in five minutes, filmed it in a week. There is real artistry here.

It’s acted with such terrific panache that not enjoying it is impossible.

Nitram is a hypnotically disquieting movie.

It is an attractive and sympathetic performance from Geirharðsdóttir as Halla.

Memories of Murder actually inspired a solution to its case; perhaps The Night of the 12th could do the same. Either way, it’s a brutally engrossing drama.

This is a film that swerves away from categorisation. It’s an 80-set picture that wears its period locations and its musical references lightly. It’s a city trader film where the main bad guy doesn’t do coke. And it’s a scary movie whose disturbing supernatural interludes happen almost incidentally, a sideshow to the emotional collapse.

It is crammed with unearned emotional moments and factory-built male characters whose dedication to their sport we are expected to find adorable and heroic by turns.

There is a reckless, ruthless kind of provocative brilliance in what Ben Hania is doing.

Cartol gives a very persuasive performance as Eve, whose inner life is always simmering and bubbling under, while she must maintain a facial blankness as cloudless and pristine as the towels and sheets.

Likable, watchable and has a nice supporting turn from Robert De Niro; I'm not sure I wouldn't rather watch this again than the macho acting in Russell's boxing drama "The Fighter."

Perhaps this movie is a little anticlimactic, but there is often an atmosphere of real fear, especially when Natalia is driven to the edge by her newborn’s incessant crying: a horrible moment which is not supernatural in the slightest.

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 whole film is like an incomplete fragment, intriguing if frustrating.

This is an exciting, forthright, energised – though very gruesome – film in which there is real human jeopardy and conflict. Non-zombies are more cinematic.

There is no law that says a movie like this has to be funny exactly, and it needn’t be something in the style of Booksmart – but there is something rather solemn about it.

Some entertaining moments can’t hide the fact that this latest product of the DC Comics universe doesn’t exactly fly past.

There are big scenes, big performances, big emotions here, and audiences will have to recalibrate their antennae for these, especially for the stunning shock that arrives around halfway through. The waves of emotion can get very high, yet they bring exaltation with them.

It has a seriousness, an unsentimental readiness to look reality in the face.

As with the previous Knives Out films, the characters are not, in fact, equally important and equally capable of murder. An inner core of suspects emerges and their guilt discloses itself incrementally at the end, as opposed to being withheld for a final reveal. What a treat though, with cracking turns from one and all and O’Connor the first among equals.

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 is a genuinely strange film, elusive in both tone and meaning, one which deploys the obvious effects and rhetorical forms of irony, while at the same time distancing itself from these effects and asking its audience to sympathise and even admire Lee, because she is not supposed to be the villain.

It’s an intriguing, startlingly restrained and even cerebral piece of work from Ferrara, an unimpeachably serious homage, with an assured lead performance from Willem Dafoe.

It is simultaneously exasperating and magnificent that he shows no interest whatever in asking the Mael brothers anything about their personal, emotional or romantic lives.

The movie’s ironies and cruelties clatter across the screen, but Komasa also allows the audience to consider who it is Chris really wants to train.

It is a fierce and impassioned denunciation of evil.

The mystery has been dialled down, the treacle dialled up, and what we are left with is basically Eat Pray Love 2.

There is a creepy, undead feel to this lumbering comedy set in the offices of Google, and Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn have a distinct Baron Samedi look in their eyes.

If I had a criticism of this film, it is that – like so many historians of spies and spying – the director gets a little overexcited about the archive details. Still, what a riveting story: a grim curtain-raiser to today’s tragedies.

The film appears to exist in the Venn diagram-overlap between twee and hipster, which isn’t for everyone – but let it grow on you, and there is a real sweetness and gentleness in its absurdity, a savant innocence and charm.

The film has its own kind of mad, migrainey energy and individuality, and Robert Pattinson gives a strong, charismatic performance.

The dreary details of post-heist calamity are as pertinent as the main event. It is this that attracts Reichardt’s observing eye and makes The Mastermind so quietly gripping.

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

I found something a little too subdued in this film, though the evocation of Tokyo itself is very uncliched, despite the emphasis on something that is the subject of so many touristy jokes: the loos. Not perfect, but engaging enough.

There is real emotional warmth and human sympathy in this otherwise somewhat flawed film, a docudrama experiment in getting actors to play some of the real people in a tragic news story from Tunisia.

The film’s final twist makes the story close with a satisfying click, though there is something a little smooth about it; for me it works against the story’s social-realist credentials and its evident ambitions for something more mysterious and spiritually resonant. Yet there is great pleasure to be had in those fervent, crowd-pleasing lead performances from Montenegro and de Oliveira.

In Passages the sex is the plot: the plot of all our lives.

It's an intriguing movie, in some ways, but its contrived and even bizarre final revelation depends on coincidences of almost Hardyesque proportions. It is not really believable, and yet if it is not taken literally, but as a cinematic prose-poem, it has undoubted force.

The film does not signpost the traditional twists and turns and dramatic reversals, but keeps a cool distance, letting us wonder if Sandra is guilty or not, and we are kept guessing until the end. It’s a lowkey, almost downbeat drama, but with something invigoratingly cerebral.

It is all ridiculously enjoyable, because the smirking and the quips and the gadgets have been cut back - and the emotion and wholesome sado-masochism have been pumped up.

The emphasis is more largely upon discipline and commitment in the service of art, a vocational self-immolation in which the transformation of pain into beauty is the whole point.

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

If ever a movie came from the heart, it was Giuseppe Tornatore's nostalgic Cinema Paradiso (1988) now getting a rerelease to celebrate its silver jubilee.

It is, perhaps, a little derivative and maybe finally fudges the dark mystery of the quest’s end point. But this is a film with thrilling ambition and reach.

It’s creative and experimental in just the right spirit, though with an asymmetric flaw. The film is a kind of diptych in which one of the panels is more fully achieved than the other.

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

You Hurt My Feelings is a movie about emotional pain, and there is something very astringent in it, a salty tang which isn’t really effaced by the later plot transitions whose emollient message is that we all fib a bit to our loved ones and it doesn’t mean we love them any the less.

Malick does succeed, to some degree, on his own terms; he attempts to give some (stylised) sense of this man’s inner life: his emotional and spiritual architecture. It is admirably serious but static.

It’s a comedy that doesn’t really have, or aspire to, any very tragic dimension, but it’s touching. The quirks are underpinned by a heartfelt solidity.

This is a well-intentioned film with some forthright performances, although there’s a fair bit of actorly shouting going on and the smiley spaciness of Bruni-Tedeschi can sometimes feel a bit affected.

What Richard Did is an engrossing and intelligent drama that throbs in the mind for hours after the final credits.

It balances what is with what might have been and what could still be, and, although the result is maybe a bit less substantial than Castro intended, there is a certain literary elegance in the way he sketches it out.

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.

There is something quietly magnificent in it. Moments like these in life are poignantly brief – but many never have them at all. It’s a lovely film.

An excellent brief documentary about a heroic grassroots political movement whose importance reveals itself more clearly in retrospect with every year that passes.

Here is a valuable and deeply felt documentary, celebrating the work of the sound designers, sound editors and Foley wizards in the cinema, and if it feels like a feelgood in-house promotional video for Hollywood technicians … well, they’ve got an awful lot to feel good about.

Directors Stephen Maing and Brett Story give a shrewd, fly-on-the-wall picture of the divisions within the union itself, with the working-class members and people of colour uneasy with the white college-grad contingent who are very gung-ho about protesting and getting arrested, not quite realising that for black people this is to risk death.

White God works as an ambiguous satire of power relations generally: eventually the lower orders will rise up. The film has a flair and a bite which I have found lacking in Mundruczó's earlier films.

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.

Last and First Men is an interesting if minor work, perhaps comparable to Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Homo Sapiens or Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity.

A valuable if slightly passionless and reticent movie.

It’s entertaining and amiable, but with a softcore pulling of punches: lightly ironised, celebratory nostalgia for a toy that still exists right now.

Buckley provides a vitamin boost in every scene.

It’s in uncompromising bad taste but made with lethal precision and discipline.

For a film renowned for its violence, Garcia unfolds at a leisured, almost lugubrious, pace with scenes allowed to unspool at a length that would never be allowed in any Hollywood thriller today.

[Room 237] raises very interesting ideas about how we view a film, about what happens if we take the act of viewing down to a deeper, molecular level, and about how a movie's significance and effect need not be those intentionally willed by the director.

It is a record of the past, but an almost unbearable warning of agony yet to come.

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.

It’s a fierce, stark, almost primitive parable of cruelty and power.

The Beast may not add up to a cogent or thoroughgoing critique of all the ideas it invokes, but it’s such a luxurious cinematic experience; it’s created with such elan and attack, and the musical score amplifies its throb of fear.

Director Marielle Heller and screenwriters Noah Harpster and Micah Fitzerman-Blue have adroitly set up the tightrope that Tom Hanks has to walk across, stretching it between irony and belief, and the result is a really entertaining and touching film.

This is a very unhurried film (I wondered if it might have been better to lose 20 or so minutes) but it has a distinctive language of its own, and a feel for the city.

Despite the bone-chilling cold of its location in Murmansk in Russia’s remote north-west, there’s a wonderful human warmth and humour in this offbeat romantic story of strangers on a train.

A sad, sweet movie.

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.

An intriguing and drily comic film.

The film never behaves as if it is anything other than a realist coming-of-age drama but there is something else going on.

Utterly distinctive and all but unclassifiable, a musique concrète nightmare, a psycho-metaphysical implosion of anxiety, with strange-tasting traces of black comedy and movie-buff riffs. It is seriously weird and seriously good.

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

Victor Kossakovsky’s Aquarela is an absorbing and disturbing spectacle, a sensory film about the climate crisis, and it begins with what might be the soundtrack to the end of the world – a persistent tinkling, crackling, trickling.

It is a gentle, heartfelt relationship drama about – and for – intelligent adults.

There is no doubting the verve and style of Eklöf’s film-making – and the brutality from people on an open-ended holiday from ordinary human empathy.

If Assayas's film finally falls just shy of being great art itself, it is at least handsomely staged and played with conviction.

It’s a nifty little tale of jeopardy and the eternally fascinating idea of breaking away from your parents: part frightening, part liberating.

A superbly realised picture which moves with the power and the gigantic, deliberative slowness of a wartime North Sea convoy. [14 May 1999, p.107]

It is a mesmeric melodrama, mixing sensuality with a teetering anxiety, balancing on a cliff-edge of disaster.

This is a fluent, confident and deeply felt movie: unmistakably, if not exactly nakedly, autobiographical.

This beautiful and hypnotic documentary shows the agony and the ecstasy of herding sheep up into Montana's Beartooth mountains for the summer pasture.

This is a crazy, dishevelled, often hilarious film, in which lightning flashes of wit and insight crackle periodically across a plane of tedium.

There is something very heartfelt and committed about Andrea Arnold’s film: a poignancy and intimacy.

A gripping documentary.

Never was a title more misleading. This is sophisticated pleasure.

The direction from Eric Lartigau keeps things moving along fast and furious: preposterous it may be, the movie is carried off with some style.

What a delicate, elegant marvel these movies have been.

A toxic cloud of anger, suspicion and sadness hangs over this documentary.

It’s an extremely watchable movie, beautifully and even luxuriously appointed in its austere evocation of smalltown America – though maybe a little self-conscious in its emotional woundedness.

It is a smart, supremely watchable and entertaining film, and Close gives a wonderful star turn.

There's no mistaking its chilling charisma and style. [11 Jun 1999, p.15]

A lead performance of pure sociopathic intensity is what makes this serial-killer horror stand out.

The performances are exhaustingly unsubtle and undirected and the film’s failure to hit the comic note early on has the added disadvantage of undermining the avowedly serious moments of solidarity and body-positivity at the end.

This is a never-say-die story and its cheerful optimism makes it a calorific Christmas treat.

As with all documentaries about art, we are left uneasily wondering if the galleries of the world are full of “wrong attributions” or straight-up fakes.

Enthralling, mysterious and intimately upsetting – a terrible demonstration of how poverty creates a space which irrational fear must fill.

There is sweep and confidence in this movie

The film might occasionally feel a bit self-conscious, but in a way this is a by-product of the film’s experimental nature; trans people are engaging with this fictional literary text in which trans identity has a poetic reality, a visionary reality, precisely that reality which is here found to be empowering.

The title is appropriate: it’s garrulous, elegant, bristling with classy performances from an A-list cast, and Deborah Eisenberg’s screenplay has a theatrical intimacy. It’s loosely and waywardly plotted, perhaps as a result of having gone through many drafts, though maybe not enough. It is slightly unfocused and uncertain as to where its emotional centre really lies – though there is a charm and a big dramatic finale.

The Sessions can be sugary, but it's likable.

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

Ava is made with superb technique and real style.

I found something a little unfocused and even slightly indulgent or redundant in the way the images are put together (accompanied by a clamorous musical score by Evgueni Galperine) without making it clear to the viewer what we are looking at and where. Yet the film is so striking, especially on the big screen, almost itself a kind of land art.

The film drifts along to a strangely implausible non-denouement with impermanent effects; she has all the backstory with work and family and he is weirdly blank in ways that don’t feel entirely intended.

The overwhelming sense of vocation necessary for such a life is almost awe-inspiring, although Paik’s own jokey, opaque persona seems to exist as a rebuke to any reaction as bourgeois as that.

A powerful, personal piece of work.

The double act of McKellen and Coel has the onscreen chemistry of the year.

This is rich and valuable testament to Chilean courage.

Seydou and the others are not exactly masters of their fate, or captains of their souls, to quote WE Henley’s Invictus. They are swept along by power and inequality, but Garrone shows that their humanity and compassion are still buoyant.

A period piece, still reasonably funny.

The Fever is a calm and quiet and subtle film, a little inert perhaps, but deeply engaged with the hidden lives of Brazil’s indigenous people. There is poetry in it.

The pure work-in-progress energy of all this is exhilarating, and if the resulting movie is flawed in its final act, then this is a flaw born of Jia’s heroic refusal to be content making the same sort of movie, and his insistence on trying to do something new with cinema and with storytelling.

Kahn orchestrates the angry energy with an expert hand.

Flux Gourmet is sometimes funny and always exotic, and every moment has his distinctive authorial signature. But I am starting to wonder if his style is becoming a hipster mannerism with less substance, and a less live-ammo sense of actual danger.

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

As it begins to explain more and more about what drives its leading character, the film becomes less and less interesting and the stridently melodramatic finale, as well as being highly unlikely in ordinary plot terms, feels a little bit self-exculpatory.

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.

Here is a film with its heart in the right place, an anatomical correctness coexisting with heartfelt, forthright conviction and an admirable belief in the virtue of simplicity and underplaying.... But this restraint sometimes sags into a kind of absence, and means the film itself is a bit rhetorically underpowered.

With ambition and reach, and often a real dramatic grandeur, Scorsese’s film has addressed the imperial crisis of Christian evangelists with stamina, seriousness and a gusto comparable to David Lean’s.

A fascinating film.

Entirely riveting. It made me nostalgic for the BBC’s Young Scientists of the Year programme, which ran from 1966 to 1981. Can’t we revive it?

It certainly has its moments of poignancy and sadness and McGregor’s droll tones as the longsuffering cricket provide some grace notes of fun.

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.

Perhaps there is nothing very new in this film, but it’s a very civilised experience.

The second part of Denis Villeneuve’s monumental Dune adaptation lands with a sternum-juddering crash; it’s another shroom of a film, an epic sci-fi hallucination whose images speak of fascism and imperialism, of guerrilla resistance and romance.

A really absorbing and powerfully acted drama, guided with a distinctive kind of Zen wisdom by Sayles.

Fukunaga brings flair, muscular storytelling, directness and a persuasively epic sweep to this brutal, heartrending movie.

Youth is a great theme of Linklater’s, but presented without any great directional moralising or emotional narrative. Being young just is. This is a film of enormous charm.

The Venerable W does not explicitly debate the existence of evil as such, but it certainly argues that nationalism, ignorance, arrogance, dogmatic religion and fear are its constituent elements. This is a sombre, pessimistic but necessary film.

There is no reason for this new Naked Gun to exist other than the reason for the old ones: it’s a laugh, disposable, forgettable, enjoyable.

No one could doubt the technical mastery of this movie and its formal audacity. But for all that, I found something unliberating in its mercurial restlessness.

The performances from Sakura Ando, Eita Nagayami and the boys have a calm frankness and integrity. As for the story itself, it is arguably a little contrived with a thicket of mystery that perhaps didn’t need to be so dense. But this is a film created with a great moral intelligence and humanity.

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.

This is an interestingly unsentimental film, without the coming-of-age cliches, and one from which the three leads emerge stronger and happier than before.

What strikes you is not simply its energy and vitality and its Dickensian storytelling appetite, but its fierce unsentimentality.

If it is an exercise in style … well, what style. With its retro-chic connoisseurship and analogue era rock, this is a brilliant haute-hippy homage.

This is a lavishly produced, very enjoyable innocent pleasure.

Gives us an amazingly candid and rather shocking study of the legendary fashion designer, and his apparent physical and mental deterioration at the age of 60.

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

It is a sombre, realist study of what day-by-day, moment-by-moment abuse actually looks like.

This is grownup film-making, more savoury than sweet, seductive, oblique and carried by a wonderfully smart and emotionally generous performance from Juliette Binoche – who delivers the material superbly, material which from almost anyone else would sound dyspeptic or absurd.

The movie is intensely acted, with a sense of interior longing possibly inspired by Terrence Malick, but it is also sometimes contrived and straining self-consciously for dramatic mood and moment.

Whatever its flaws, this movie provides fans of French star Léa Seydoux with a treat.

Berger orchestrates marvellously tense, explosively dramatic scenes and with cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine and production designer Suzie Davies contrives some spectacularly strange and dream-like tableaux.

The story unfolds intriguingly within an intimate, almost claustrophobic environment. There is perhaps something ultimately undeveloped about it, but the film is a well acted, well presented piece of work.

The performances are persuasive and watchable, especially Mikkelsen, the guys’ alpha-leader, who ruinously makes being drunk look pretty acceptable until it is too late.

The film is maybe a little callow, but it’s an undoubtedly impressive and accomplished debut.

This movie might itself make a modest contribution to rewriting the history of white South Africa.

It’s appropriate that this absorbing, tender documentary has been driven by a surge of fan loyalty and love.

The film ends with a terrifying question about the fate of one of the women. It spreads an existential chill.

This is an engaging and thoroughly worthwhile movie.

Coppola’s portrait is absorbing, especially in Priscilla’s child phase, and if it is less distinctive in its final section, as Priscilla becomes more briskly disillusioned and realistic about what to expect, then that is to be expected.

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

It’s a film that mixes small screen zeitgeist fragments and madeleine moments, a memory quilt of a certain time and place, juxtaposing Jerry Rubin and Allen Ginsberg with Richard Nixon and George Wallace, John and Yoko in concert with ads for Tupperware – all inspired by the fact that John and Yoko did an awful lot of TV watching in their small New York apartment of that time, with John in particular thrilled by the American novelty of 24/7 television.

The meta gets better in Lawrence Michael Levine’s dizzying but gripping comedy Black Bear, which is a recurring nightmare – or rather, an entertainment in two acts about the messy business of making a personal film based on actual events.

Émilie Dequenne is the young actor who made a powerful debut in the Dardenne brothers' prize-winning film "Rosetta" in 1999, and what a superb performance she gives now in this inexpressibly painful drama.

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

With his new film, Charlie Kaufman again proves that if you want something to make you feel trapped in a terrifying claustrophobic nightmare for ever and ever ... well, he’s your guy.

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.

Perhaps Fox and the film itself don’t quite put us inside his anguish at first getting the diagnosis and then his decision to go public, but his courage is the more moving for being understated.

It’s a film whose tone and meaning can’t be nailed down.

This is a tender tribute.

Out of agony and chaos, Chinese film-maker Lou Ye has created something mysterious, moving and even profound – a kind of multilayered docu-realist film, evidently inspired by a real-life situation in film production.

You may find yourself wondering why we are going over this ground again, but it’s an engaging film, and there is always something mesmeric in McCartney’s face: cherubic, and yet sharp and watchful.

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.

The director may want to confront these issues head on – the racism and violence just below the surface. Indeed, raising it above the surface is the point. But much of the drama and humanity get blitzed by the molotov cocktails.

I have taken some time to acclimatise to her distinctive, affectlessly sentimental film-making, but it is growing on me, and Kajillionaire is intriguing.

A strongly intended and conceived film, but without the passion of the earlier work.

The stunts are wildly impressive, especially the motorbike riders who sail through the air in a ball of flame, and the gunplay is unique, although I have never found the term “balletic” quite right for something so brutal and quick. It is all so bizarre that you have to enjoy it.

There’s plenty of rock’n’roll fighter-pilot action in this movie, but weirdly none of the homoerotic tension that back in the day had guys queueing up at the Navy recruitment booths set up in cinema foyers. Weirder still, it is actually less progressive on gender issues than the original film.

This is a watchable enough film

There is a simplicity and clarity of purpose here that I responded to and the Dardennes have got excellent performances from their young leads.

Jafar Panahi has here created a quietly engaging quasi-realist parable, part of his ongoing and unique creative cine-autobiography, full of intelligence and humility and a real respect for women and for female actors. It is gentle, elusive, and redolent of this director’s mysterious Iranian zen.

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

The slightly slushy tone of celebration rather obtusely fails to engage with the nihilist, pessimist nature of Tatsumi's work. Anyway, an intriguing event.

A deeply humane and emotionally literate piece of work.

Izaac Wang’s reserved, undemonstrative performance is what sets the film’s non-sucrose tone: he only really smiles in a goofy video of his much younger self. It’s a cool, downbeat and satisfying piece of work.

The action of After Yang, bizarre and exotic as it is, meditates on what it is to be human and how that may in the future be modified, but it also addresses loss in the present day: our anguished and futile human instinct that death must surely be fixable.

Whether or not you have seen the original film, there is a terrific performance here from Moore, and an equally good one from Turturro, who may be entering into his own golden years of bittersweet character work.

An arrestingly bizarre experience.

The film declines to offer up its meaning, or its reason for being, and asks us to think about something outside the passage of time.

After all those false dawns, non-comebacks and semi-successful Euro jeux d'esprit, Allen has produced an outstanding movie, immensely satisfying and absorbing, and set squarely on American turf: that is, partly in San Francisco and partly in New York.

It is hauntingly sad.

Pure evil permeates this brief, 80-minute film, whose cold visual brilliance reminds me of the recent movies of Paweł Pawlikowski. It wasn’t until some time after it had finished that I grasped one of the reasons it was so oppressive: there are no women in it at all. There is a chill of political fear.

Perhaps Good Luck to You, Leo Grande does not aspire to a piercingly profound analysis of sex and the human condition. It is, however, an amusing, compassionate and humane drama acted and directed with terrific panache.

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

There is charm and delicacy here and Magimel and Binoche perform impeccably, though I wasn’t entirely sure they go together as the ingredients of a love story.

It is not exactly a horror film, despite some spasms of disquiet, but an uncanny evocation of how, when left utterly on our own, we spiral inwards into our memories, dreams and fears.

The movie stunningly replicates that sense of inside and outside that must be felt by witnesses to any historic moment: the private debate, the enclosed conflict, and the theatre of confrontation unfolding beyond. What a dynamic piece of cinema.

The school is no more dysfunctional than any other institution and a lot more intelligent and self-questioning than many. A very engaging film.

Very real issues are suffused with an oppressive, unearthly, compelling unreality.

Schrader has carpentered a strong and vehement film, hypnotically watchable and squalid with nightmarish flashbacks and a typically apocalyptic ending that grows plausibly enough out of what has gone before. There’s a horrible, queasy urgency to this high-stakes game.

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.

Twenty-five years on, the story is still charming and beguiling.

This Dracula isn’t from Coppola’s great 70s/80s period, but it has a melodramatic and operatic energy and draws on the look and feel of Hollywood’s pre-Code salaciousness and the silent movie madness of Nosferatu – though the expressionist shadows are blood-red, not black.

It borders on cliche a little, but there is compassion and storytelling ambition here.

Kapadia’s film is a gripping account of Maradona’s playing career until the mid-90s, though it is flawed by a lack of new material of the sort he had for his previous film about Amy Winehouse.

Here is a really well-made, old-fashioned anti-war epic in a forthright and robustly enjoyable style from director and co-writer Arthur Harari.

It’s a beguiling film: subtle, sensuous and delicate.

The story is told with stark and fierce plainness: unadorned, unapologetic, even unevolved. Loach’s movie offends against the tacitly accepted rules of sophisticated good taste: subtlety, irony and indirection.

It is an intriguing movie that lives in the mind for hours after the lights have come up.

This is such a vivid, lovable triple-decker performance from Milonoff, Kauhanen and Leino.

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

I have to admit, in all its surreal grandiosity, in all its delirious absurdity, there is a huge sugar rush of excitement to this mighty finale, finally interchanging with euphoric emotion and allowing us to say poignant farewells.

Donbass is a flawed, but vivid achievement.

Stephen Schible’s documentary portrait follows the musician in the calm and introspective period forced on him – but it also shows him participating in post-Fukushima demonstrations.

[A] sublime classic.

It’s a film which needs an investment of attention, but there is a great observational intelligence and sympathy at work.

With a sly dreaminess, Vikander steals the movie from the two males.

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.

It is gripping and absorbing in its way, although perhaps too conscious of its own metaphorical properties and opinion may divide as to whether its expressionist element works. Yet there is no doubt as to its power, and its severity.

Audiard’s storytelling has an easy swing to it, his dialogue is garrulous and unsentimental, and the narrative is exotically offbeat.

C’est Pas Moi amuses – and discomfits.

It’s a terrific performance from Hawke.

A bold, intelligent, romantic film with all the lineaments of a classic, and a score by Vangelis as instantly hummable as the music for Jaws.

I was disappointed with a film whose crises and dilemmas seem laborious and essentially predictable; it does not fully work as sci-fi or satire or comedy.

The combustion engine gave humanity the new experience of speed; now the movie camera gave us a dizzying new speed of perception and creation.

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

The landscape has a certain gaunt beauty and so does Dickey’s performance.

It’s a film that ostentatiously concerns itself with contemporary, zeitgeisty issues such as digital culture and the internet, and whether this is undermining the world of reading and books. But strip out the strained speechifying on that subject and it could have been made at any time in the last 40 years.

This is an immersive experience, like being plunged back into the 70s. There is passion there. No matter how chaotic or bleary things get, no one is in any doubt that the music counts.

Holding Liat is a valuable work, not least for showing us that Israel and Netanyahu are not synonymous.

It’s a real flight of fancy.

The performance is austere and challenging, it takes us through the grim events, their aftermath and the long endgame of King’s life, but without the emollient or lenient notes that a Hollywood treatment might attempt. It is a requiem of a sort, and a sombre indication of all that has not yet healed, or been fixed.

What an uncanny, exhilarating experience.

One for Hardwicke, and everyone else, to forget.

Bronstein is brilliant at conveying mounting panic and a terrible, all-consuming sadness.

Finally, inevitably, at the end of the protracted tale, we get to the question of which of the two is the “real” monster. The answer, in this high-minded and eventually rather sanctified romance, would appear to be – neither of them.

The habitual calm and gentleness of Mahamat Saleh Haroun’s film-making here has a sharp edge and an overtly political point – as well as a flourish of violent destruction and despair that blindsided me.

It’s a poignant and compelling Venn diagram of passion and heartache.

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.

A Simple Life is a tear-jerker, but thoughtful and intelligent, with an anti-sentimental dimension.

Deeply strange and politically incorrect, ­baffling, and often funny.

It is a tough, muscular film with the grit of crime, but a heartbeat of compassion.

It is an elegant if slight piece of work, touching and intriguing by turns, but hampered structurally in that it relies on two separate flashback sections.

In its trashiness – and, yes, its refusal of serious substance – The Substance should really be put out on VHS cassettes and watched at home in homage to the great era of home entertainment pulp and video-store masterpieces of weirdness and crassness.