Peter Bradshaw

The film is a bit stagey sometimes, but ambitious and insightful. Tovey is excellent as he shows someone progressing from innocence to fear and then to loneliness.

Gloria is a sad, painful romantic story.

There is one especially lovely moment. At their first meeting, lovestruck Tony asks Maria if her kindness to him is just a joke. She replies: "I have not yet learned to joke that way. Now I never will." This is a real big-screen event.

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.

Into the Inferno is an intriguing, unnerving documentary.

It is a riveting, dreamlike evocation of this man’s tortured, unhappy life, whose transient successes bring him no pleasure of any kind.

A gripping documentary.

Perhaps no film can entirely compete with the simple fact of this novel/museum’s existence, but the movie circles around the dual conceptual artefact beguilingly.

Shaunak Sen’s documentary is a complex, thoughtful, quietly beautiful film about the ecosystem and human community.

The personae and performances of Pacino, Domingo and Myha’la complicate the psychopathic nastiness of the affair, and create something surreal and bizarre and often hilarious: a display of, not heartlessness, exactly, but a shrewd professional sense that pity and fear were emotions that could only benefit the kidnapper.

It might resemble other family dramas, but there’s a hum of something strange underneath, a sense that life is about surrendering to the infinite flow of events.

Beasts of the Southern Wild is a vividly poetic and maybe even therapeutic response to one of the most painful and mortifying episodes in modern American history, second only to 9/11.

There’s a fair bit of macho silliness here, but the panache with which director Joseph Kosinski puts it together is very entertaining.

Child’s Play bubbles with entertaining bad taste.

Mia Madre is a tremendously smart and enjoyable movie.

It is an agonisingly tough watch, crackling with tension.

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.

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.

An intriguing, bittersweet family study.

It is an introspective and downbeat film, but forceful and personal, with excruciating and all-too-real moments of mortification. And it can be weirdly moving, almost out of nowhere.

It’s an extraordinary planet that Cronenberg lands us down on, and insists we remove our helmets before we’re quite sure we can breathe the air.

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.

Dream Scenario is a cousin to Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich and Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, and very enjoyable; it is at once strangely light-hearted and heavy with menace.

There are plenty of genuine laughs in this movie, but each of them seems to dovetail into a banshee-wail of pain.

Hersh emerges as a tough, combative, peppery personality from this movie.

It is a disturbing and unsettling piece of work, a psycho-pathological moodboard of a film, in which guilt, horror and shame poison the atmosphere.

What an extraordinary story of sexism, violence, diplomatic bad faith and dishonesty on an international scale.

Bale brilliantly captures the former vice-president’s bland magnificence.

Gazer’s atmosphere of looming disaster and dreamlike oppression crowds in on you as the movie progresses; an intriguing, genuinely scary picture.

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

A sombre, relevant piece of work.

It’s a beguiling story and Bell and Bening are tremendous as the star-crossed lovers.

Caine's star-quality and absolute ease in front of the camera are fully formed.

This is a very entertaining account of an actor who appeared to ascend, singly, to a higher plane than all others of the Hollywood golden age.

It is engaging and sympathetically acted and layered with genuinely funny moments, mysterious and hallucinatory setpiece sequences, and is challengingly incorrect thoughts about the haves who fear the contagious risk of coming into contact with the have-nots.

Now this has been turned into a very entertaining lowlife crime comedy from director and co-writer Janicza Bravo, a film that preserves the fishy flavour of the online original – if perhaps only semi-intentionally – and has interesting things to say about the exhaustingly performative and self-promotional world of social media.

Our ­Beloved Month Of August is a real one-off: ­eccentric and singular and ­cerebral: an arthouse event, yes, but also witty and emotionally engaged. I found myself thinking about it for days afterwards – and smiling a very great deal. Try it.

The dazzle of the cast and the targeted in-jokes never take away from the film’s core messaging about the importance of believing in one’s own ability as an artist.

Playtime offers us an even clearer view of the contrast between Tati’s broad physical comedy as an actor and his superbly cerebral detachment as a director.

The film’s real ferocity is saved for the ideologues of terror.

What a performance from Erivo; it is genuinely moving when the Prince has to convince Elphaba what we, the audience, have always known: that she is beautiful.

Just as in Stacy Peralta’s classic 2001 documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, this gives its audience a sense of the almost pastoral innocence of skateboarding, its devotion to nothing more or less than having fun: a subversive urban vocation that is dedicated to the art of pleasure.

An unclassifiably brilliant gem of American independent film-making.

Sixty years on, the big-screen adaptation of the landmark play looks more conservative than revolutionary but Burton’s firepower is undimmed.

Marianne Ihlen emerges as someone of enormous gentleness and dignity.

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

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

Dark Waters is a movie that works marvellously well within its own generic terms, and perhaps after the fey disappointment of Todd Haynes’s previous, rather insufferable fantasy Wonderstruck, this tough, clear movie was what Haynes needed to clear his creative palate.

The film is at its most intriguing in its earlier half, when it simply takes you through the growing excitement within the scientific community as the reality of Crispr emerges.

The film is unafraid of emotion, unafraid of plunging into basic human ideas: the need for trust, and the search for love.

Contrived and possibly overheated though the film might be at times, there is real storytelling gusto to it, and Laurent punches it across with relish.

It is interesting that this new cut of the film gives a much fuller account of Harris’s ferocious consumption of cocaine, which I thought the film originally glossed over in favour of a more sentimentally traditional booze narrative when it came to discussing that picturesque concept of “hellraising” – although in both versions I liked Harris’s contemptuous refusal to be cowed or psychoanalysed: he indulged because he loved it.

Mario Martone’s beautifully shot and superbly composed film teeters on the edge of something special. And if it doesn’t quite achieve that, settling in the end for something more generically crime-oriented, it’s still very good.

There is such sensitivity and intelligence in the performances from Thompson and Negga and the cinematography from Eduard Grau and production design by Nora Mendis are both ravishing. It’s a very stylish piece of work from Hall.

We call our House of Commons proceedings Punch and Judy: but the climate-change deniers on Fox News are Punch on steroids. It's a chilling and depressing picture.

There is sweep and confidence in this movie

Opinions may divide about the extended coda that Fortuné gives her story but it is evidence that she is ambitious for something that eludes so many film-makers: an ending. It’s a stylish debut.

It’s a movie that is boldly anti-clerical, juxtaposing the spectacle of faith with a hidden reality of corruption and hypocrisy – although in the final act I sensed that it perhaps did not quite have the courage of its satirical convictions.

Binoche’s performance and the movie are elegant, ingenious and sexy.

The whole thing is underscored by barnstorming performances from Wong and Hawkins.

A very sombre picture of American crime and punishment.

This documentary includes witty and insightful interviews with MI stalwarts like Thompson and Hugh Grant; it is a great pleasure to watch and will send people back to Merchant Ivory films themselves, particularly perhaps their Quartet (1981) and The Golden Bowl (2000).

For fans of Black Widow and everyone else, this episode is great fun and Harbour could well ascend to spinoff greatness of his own.

It’s an exhilarating, alarming look at that much discussed subject: the Russian soul.

Cowboys is a film that relaxes into its ideas and themes, and the performances from Knight, Zahn and Bell – with Ann Dowd as the cop on Troy’s trail – are all tremendous.

Haugerud has something of Eric Rohmer, and perhaps a little more of Hong Sang-soo; a readiness to simply talk, and talk and talk some more. It’s surprisingly cinematic.

It contrives to be a very funny and recklessly provocative homage to Woody Allen, channelling his masterpiece Manhattan and brilliantly finding a fictional way to tackle his personal reputation head-on.

The nation of Ireland is vastly different now, but O’Shea shows this change was not inevitable, but the effect of courageous dissidents.

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.

What a rush of storytelling energy and style.

What a thoroughly likeable and funny film.

Everything rattles and zings like a pinball machine, and it’s a bracing, entertaining, richly satisfying experience.

Pamela B Green’s hectic, garrulous, fascinating documentary recovers the story of French film-maker Alice Guy-Blaché.

The movie's disturbing labyrinthine story of murder and betrayal now looks like a fable by David Lynch: and the witty, charged dialogue between the leads shows that no screen couple, before or since, had as much chemistry as Bogart and Bacall.

This deafening fantasia of internal and external combustion delivers outrageous action spectacle magnificently divorced from the rules of narrative or gravity. . . . I think we can include Isaac Newton among the people who are getting their asses kicked here.

An intriguing, disorientating 60s artefact.

What an uncanny, exhilarating experience.

A plumply overripe fruit of the counterculture, dripping with the juices of spiritual rebellion, semi-comic posturing, consciousness-raising and all-around freakiness.

Support the Girls is a shrewdly observed, day-in-the-life-style portrait of a woman under pressure. It’s way too early to be thinking about awards season, but Regina Hall could be in line for some silverware.

Blade is an entertainingly macabre and excitingly staged action horror, with a propulsive energy and a prototype “bullet time” sequence one year before the Wachowskis made it famous in The Matrix.

All Is True is sentimental, theatrical, likable – and unfashionable.

The Ones Below is an intimately disturbing nightmare of the upper middle classes, with tinges of melodrama and staginess, entirely appropriate for its air of suppressed psychosis.

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.

The intelligence of Kent’s direction and the humanity she reveals in both Clare and Billy give the film its arrowhead of power.

This a quasi-war movie set in peacetime; these men are fighting to the death, but not for nation or principle or ideology — or at least, not a conscious ideology: they are caught in larger economic currents.

A very entertaining madeleine for movie-going of the analogue age.

Wonderful entertainment.

It is about a homecoming that isn’t quite a homecoming, a reckoning with something not exactly there, an attempted reconciliation with people and places that can’t really be negotiated with.

It is a harrowingly effective film, though flawed by the actions of Weaving’s officer being unconvincingly motivated at the end, and perhaps born of an emollient screenwriting need to split the difference between the Irish avenger-hero and his enemies.

With production designer Paulina Rzeszowska and cinematographer Annika Summerson, Bailey-Bond creates something almost unbearably close and oppressive, like the bottom of a murky fish tank. It’s a very elegant and disquieting debut.

What emerges from Klayman’s film is how very important Brexit Britain is as a self-vivisecting research animal in Bannon’s experimental thinking.

The psychological thriller form has imposed on Dolan some discipline, and brought out his talent and energy.

Point Break is a freaky mix of Dog Day Afternoon and Big Wednesday; bank robbing meets surfing.

Pro-choice activists won with a campaign that declined to go negative, and, indeed, may have benefited from the attraction of its exuberant “Yes” motif. Now they face decades of vigilance to defend their gains.

While the 1960s swung, this spirited, good-natured but creakily old-fashioned picture lived in a different zeitgeist.

This is a richly intelligent drama, in which every word and every shot counts.

The film’s real power is in the accumulated testimony from others about the Netanyahus’ entitlement and paranoia.

Not a terribly profound film, but delivered with real brio.

Rare Beasts is a bold experiment in nerve-jangling confrontation: it has the structure and ingredients of romantic comedy but turns everything on its head.

Maybe any biopic risks naïveté in suggesting the agony of postwar Africa can be soothed by a love story about a handsome prince. But this movie has candour, heartfelt self-belief, and an unfashionable conviction that love conquers all - though not immediately.

Seriously bloody horrible in every particular, and uncompromisingly bleak to the very end, this looks to me like the best British horror film in years: nasty, scary and tight as a drum.

There is something interestingly non-argumentative and personal about this documentary. It is gentle and reflective, a paean to his own youth and idealism that have been preserved in the ice.

A valuable introduction to the movies and to the man.

What could have been a pretty dull film just for motorbike fans and devotees of the Isle of Man TT race, achieves real human interest and excitement due partly to a focus on one competitor: likable motormouth Guy Martin.

Ghost Stories is a barnstormer of an entertainment, a fairground ride with dodgy brakes.

Without Ronan’s performance, Brooklyn might have left a sugary taste. But she is the ingredient that brings everything together: her calm poise anchors almost every scene and every shot.

This is a powerful and important documentary, though I have one tiny qualification.

There is a lot of sound and fury in this Macbeth, but not without meaning. It’s not perhaps a very subtle version, and I felt that Kurzel should have perhaps worked more closely with Fassbender with the contours of his speeches, and shown the painful mind-changing and nerve-losing in the early stages. There is an operatic verve.

Moll has given us this audacious, witty and absorbing mystery thriller, a tale of adultery and amour fou with a gamey touch of the macabre.

The Light Between Oceans isn’t subtle – that swoony title should tip you off – and it’s a fair way from the realist grit of the less obviously commercial pictures Cianfrance has made previously. There’s more corn in the recipe here, a bit more ham and cheese. But he carries it off with forthright defiance and with strong, heartfelt, ingenuous performances from Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender.

Gary Oldman is terrific as Churchill, conveying the babyishness of his oddly unlined face in repose, the slyness and manipulative good humour, and a weird deadness when he is overtaken with depression.

It is a picture of something inexpressibly gentle and sad, something heartbreaking and absolutely normal, but something stirred up by a violent, alien incursion. Something lands with an almighty splash in this calm millpond of melancholy regret.

Jimmy Ellis’s story really is stranger than fiction.

It was a goofy, almost silly caper which could have gone wrong or turned out to be misjudged; instead it was a moment of secular grace, like something from a late Shakespeare play. The film does justice to this overwhelmingly moving event in British public life in a quietly affecting drama.

This is a heart-stoppingly suspenseful story. Conroy is a superb commentator on war and all its cruelties and absurdities.

It is an absorbing and moving tribute to the courage of the young victims of Utøya.

There is passion and compassion here, and Labaki’s film brings home what poverty and desperation mean, and conversely what love and humanity mean.

With natural sympathy and warmth, film-maker Carol Morley has created this likable, generous, imaginative response to the work of the neglected English artist Audrey Amiss.

The performances of Jonsson and Blyth are fierce and overwhelmingly convincing.

This film is a time capsule of the 1980s: an era that was crass and excessive in so many ways, but now seems weirdly exotic.

This is a heartfelt movie, a documentary unafraid to spread itself across its vast subject matter, and a fierce denunciation of the arrogant political classes, still in denial about one of the biggest tragedies in American history.

Donbass is a flawed, but vivid achievement.

The first world war is one of the 20th century’s oldest, grimmest tales of futility and slaughter. Dibb and his excellent cast put new passion into it.

Coppola tells the story with terrific gusto and insouciant wit, tying together images from the first scene and the last, so that the narrative satisfyingly snaps shut.

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

In the end, Cooper’s Maestro succeeds because it is candid about the sacrifices which art demands of its practitioners, and the sacrifices these practitioners demand of their families and partners

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.

Guillermo del Toro’s gothic fantasy-romance Crimson Peak is outrageously sumptuous, gruesomely violent and designed to within an inch of its life.

Vitalina Varela stars as herself in Pedro Costa’s bleak but beautiful film about a woman discovering the hidden life of her late husband.

It’s another really bold and distinct statement from Jenkin.

A valuable, meticulously observed and wonderfully acted social-realist feature about a family under pressure.

The Goonies has a rich and indomitable air of all-American innocence.

This is a big, muscular picture which aspires to the crowd-pleasing athleticism of Spike Lee’s sports icons; it’s very enjoyable and there’s a great turn from Washington.

Pugh’s pure force carries everything, and conveys the central paradox: to unlock this mystery, Lib is going to have to surrender to it, to believe in it, in order to gain Anna’s confidence and learn the child’s own awful secret. The wonder reverberates with the pangs of hunger and fear.

It is a movie packed with wonderful vehemence and rapture: it has a yearning to do justice to this existential adventure and to the head-spinning experience of looking back on Earth from another planet.

It’s a vehement movie, with a driving narrative force and a robust sense of time and place.

Craig is so dominant that sometimes it seems that Gene is almost not worthy of him. Craig is strangely magnificent.

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.

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.

The point is not motive, it isn't the elucidation of the human mind; it is more the simple juxtaposition of horror and bourgeois normality as a kind of Neurotic Realist motif: sinister, enigmatic, disquieting.

Welcome to New York proves thoroughly engrossing. Here is a work of ragged glory; dirty and galvanic. [Unrated Version]

It is wonderfully acted with unaffected naturalism by its cast of professionals and newcomers and plays an extravagant, almost shameless pizzicato on the audience’s heartstrings.

It might not be at the very zenith of what he can achieve but for sheer moment-by-moment pleasure, and for laughs, this is a treat.

Oppenheimer is poignantly lost in the kaleidoscopic mass of broken glimpses: the sacrificial hero-fetish of the American century.

Oprah Winfrey, Angela Davis and Morrison herself explore her work and legacy in this fascinating documentary completed shortly before the Nobel-winning author’s death.

It’s an action-thriller with punch; Bridges gives the characterisation ballast and heft and Pine and Foster bring a new, grizzled maturity to their performances.

Democracy has never looked so vulnerable.

Manzoor’s fight scenes, so amusingly executed by Kansara, effectively dramatise the terrible struggle that women are going to endure – especially the ongoing duel with that certain special in-law. This film delivers a spinning back kick of laughs.

Ken Loach's latest collaboration with screenwriter Paul Laverty is warm, funny and good-natured. It's a freewheeling social-realist caper – unworldly and at times almost childlike.

Atlantique may not be perfect, but I admired the way that Diop did not simply submit to the realist mode expected from this kind of material, and yet neither did she go into a cliched magic-realist mode, nor make the romantic story the film’s obvious centre. Her film has a seductive mystery.

[Berg] uses Jeff’s answering machine messages and archive 90s material, including the unmistakable, moody black-and-white MTV footage, to tell a very sad story with sympathy and urgency.

Gyllenhaal is terrific as a teacher and wannabe poet who exploits a child prodigy in this gripping psychological drama.

This movie is a time-capsule of Europe’s recent tragic past.

Green Border is a tough watch: a punch to the solar plexus. But a vital bearing of cinematic witness to what is happening in Europe right now.

This is a wonderfully sympathetic, deeply felt and tenderly funny family drama with a novelistic attention to details and episodes – a little like Alfonso Cuáron’s Roma, about growing up in a similar era in Mexico City. Cámara thoroughly inhabits the figure of Gómez: unselfconsciously inspiring and lovable.

The brio and ambition of The Italian Job can’t be doubted and Caine has enormous charisma.

As with I Am Love, Guadagnino has put together something utterly distinctive here, a cocktail of intense emotions, transcendent surroundings and unexpected detours. A real pleasure.

The "breathing" of the title becomes a cleverly recurrent motif, and Markovics's script circles around the themes of death and life in thoughtful and elegant ways: it is a well-carpentered screenplay which bears every sign of having been a labour of love, worked on fruitfully over many years.

Perhaps above everything else, Arnold returns us to the most potent fact about the Cathy and Heathcliff love affair: it is a love affair between equals, not between a woman with coquettish "erotic capital" and a man with property and status.

It is a thoroughly absorbing and moving film, especially when Hull has a dream about recovering his sight and seeing his children. The tone is sober, unflashy, and Hull’s reflections on God are presented without any hectoring or special pleading. Affecting and profoundly intelligent.

This trio of stories is elegant and amusing, with a delicacy of touch and real imaginative warmth.

The faces are the most intriguing thing. Loznitsa gives us a montage of inscrutability and repressed anxiety.

A fascinating case study in basic-level democracy.

For all its cheesiness, Notting Hill delivers a very great deal of pleasure.

[Gibney's] film does present Khodorkovsky in context in a way that I haven’t seen before. He was the oligarch smart enough – and ruthless enough – to do as well or better than anyone in the Yeltsin/Putin free-for-all years, and then his smartness and ruthlessness perhaps gave him a perspective on it all.

The Portuguese Nun (2009) was a gem of gentle comedy, and his new drama, The Son of Joseph, has the same droll innocence and lovability. With its carefully controlled, decelerated dialogue, it is weirdly moving in just the same way.

A very charming, beautifully wrought, if somehow depthless film - eccentric but heartfelt, and thought through to the tiniest, quirkiest detail in the classic Anderson style.

It is elegant, eccentric and needs some time to be indulged. ... And yes, it is six parts beguiling to one part exasperating. But ... it leaves you with a gentle, bemused smile on your face.

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

Nicole Kidman gives her best performance since "To Die For."

McCullin emerges as an unsentimental, plain-speaking, thoughtful man, disgusted at the inhumanity of war – and yet candid about how he is also personally and professionally drawn to its drama.

Girls of the Sun is a feminist war movie: impassioned, suspenseful, angry.

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.

Samani’s film-making language has consistency and urgency, and there is an interesting streak of atheism that goes alongside this movie’s spiritual aura.

Although no amount of revisionist gallantry can conceal how terrible Yoko Ono’s vocals are, this has a historical fascination as they were Lennon’s only full-length concert performances after the Beatles’ split.

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.

With its pale, washed-out colour palette, its eerily slow, almost somnambulist pacing and occasionally bizarre emotional demonstrations, Post Mortem is strangely gripping.

In this film, nothing about mega-celebrity looks fun.

I would have liked to hear more about Gena’s late mother and the family history generally, but this is an arresting portrait.

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 a film to remind you of the almost miraculously collaborative nature of cinema, but also the radiant personalities of individuals.

If there is a tonal uncertainty in this comedy, then that’s because there was a tonal uncertainty in the real-life events, and the movie nicely conveys how they were at one and the same time deadly serious and Pythonically silly.

Wells’s coolly indirect way with dialogue prevents the movie becoming insufferable in the way that it might have done in other hands. It is like a short story that insouciantly signs off before you’ve quite decided what it means.

Xavier Dolan’s It’s Only the End of the World is histrionic and claustrophobic: deliberately oppressive and pretty well pop-eyed in its madness – and yet a brilliant, stylised and hallucinatory evocation of family dysfunction.

It is all intensely controlled, although this is a drama that goes by the book, in all senses; there are no unabsorbed events to disorder the parable’s secular/religious alignment, and the Greeneian miracle it eventually conjures is arguably a little too pat. Yet it is also strangely moving.

Lin-Manuel Miranda gives us an unashamed sugar rush of showbiz rapture and showbiz solemnity in this heartfelt tribute to Broadway talent Jonathan Larson, played here by Andrew Garfield.

Kahn orchestrates the angry energy with an expert hand.

What a unique talent Giamatti is; it’s a pleasure to see him play a movie lead, his first for a while, and his prominence in this really good film is a signal that the cinema could be moving back to a more approachable world of authentic drama and analogue talent.

Kazan brings to the role a sweet and dignified vulnerability, keeping rigorously to plausible human behaviour.

Bryan Fogel’s documentary about the Khashoggi murder may not reveal anything substantially new, but it’s a fierce, forceful and highly illuminating film, set out with clarity and verve.

Richness, warmth and tenderness pulse from this lovely documentary.

It is a sombre and painful drama, enacted with reserve. There are no closeups, and it is fully one hour into the running time before we get even a medium shot of the female lead’s face. Even then there are shadows.

Comer’s vulnerability and idealism are authentic as are her determination and a dash of real ruthlessness . . . She carries everything with unselfconscious strength and style.

The film is forthright and intelligent on the difficulties and complexities involved in the discussion.

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.

The heart of the movie is the unexpectedly poignant relationship between Xavier and Logan: I’d be tempted to call them the Steptoe and Son of the mutant world, although in fact Logan goes into Basil Fawlty mode at one stage with his own pickup truck, attempting to trash it – perhaps to teach it a lesson. Logan is a forthright, muscular movie which preserves the X-Men’s strange, exotic idealism.

What an intriguing and unexpectedly watchable film. Bait is an experiment – and a successful one.

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.

It’s a kind of Martian’s-eye-view documentary about something that doesn’t actually exist; it is ice-cold and detached, almost without dialogue in the conventionally dramatic sense, other than the subdued exchanges which we, as audience, overhear rather than listen to. It accumulates its own kind of desolate force.

Chiwetel Ejiofor has made his debut as writer-director, and the result is exhilarating and rather inspiring – a story of success against the odds, of ingenuity and resourcefulness, of a father and son painfully coming to terms with each other.

It is a superbly shot, viscerally acted ensemble drama.

A peculiar, potent film.

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.

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

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

In the end, this is Lady Gaga’s film: her watchability suffuses the picture, an arrabbiata sauce of wit, scorn and style.

A very valuable film.

Mug is a strange, engaging film – well and potently acted and directed, a drama that puts you inside its extended community with a mix of robust realism and a streak of fantasy comedy.

Labyrinth of Cinema is indeed labyrinthine, a maze of jokes, film references, quirky back projections, bargain-basement effects and melodramatic confrontations. But at its centre is something deeply serious: a belief that, as the sole country to have experienced a nuclear strike, Japan has a terrifying exceptionalism. This awful truth is marked by a tonal cymbal-clash, both acidly comic and desperately sad.

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

It’s a very mysterious and even bizarre film in many ways, shot in what is becoming Nemes’ signature style: long takes, a persistent closeup on the lead character’s face, and a shallow focus that allows the surrounding reality to intrude only intermittently.

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.

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.

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

It is such a beguiling performance from Richard, natural, unaffected, unselfconscious, you find herself rooting for Ana, although what form success might take for her is a mystery. Very impressive work from Lang.

The cumulative effect is very pleasurable. The film has got some Python, Douglas Adams, Charlie Kaufman and also John Waters and Ed Wood Jr in it; it’s also possible that Dupieux has seen Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in Stanley Donen’s Bedazzled.

A piercingly emotional drama, acted with natural flair.

There is such tenderness and gentleness in this film.

Museum is an oddly genial, garrulous film in many ways – rather like Güeros – and it doesn’t behave quite like a heist thriller, nor exactly like a coming-of-age comedy.

This is a sharp, elegant, unsentimental picture in which Stewart plays a character who is often gloomy and downright unsympathetic.

It’s a richly detailed character study, immersing the audience in the life and mind of its imperious main character.

The film’s poetry resides in its thoughtful inactivity, its vernacular spirituality and its gentleness.

Hard Truths is a deeply sober, sombre, compassionate drama about a black British family, with flashes of fun and happiness that are emollient if not exactly redemptive.

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.

For me, the film is itself a bit of misfit, full of big stagey speeches, contrived moments and some overemphatic performances, but opened out with muscular style by Huston. The faces of Gable, Clift and Monroe together in closeup have a Mount Rushmore look to them.

Peck’s film, in which LaKeith Stanfield narrates a kind of heightened, fictionalised first-person account from Cole’s own writings and diaries, is devastatingly sad. It is the sadness of an artist who becomes estranged, not merely from his homeland, but from his art and his livelihood.

It is witty, daring and exuberant; like his hero, Hitchcock shows himself to be energetic and resourceful in dealing with changes in locale. [11 Apr 2008, p.10]

There are toe-curling culture clash moments.

In the course of a mammoth, horribly absorbing four-hour film from Charles Ferguson we are immersed in a world of milky TV news footage, big lapels, bulbous combovers, dirty tricks, sweat, jowls and guilt.

Woody Allen said that he could watch a Bergman movie and feel himself gripped as if by a thriller; that's how I felt watching this restored version of John Cassavetes's 1977 picture Opening Night.

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.

Some critics have expressed reservations about melodrama and overworked symbolism, but I found it gripping, with an edge of delirium.

There’s real energy.

It is an entirely outrageous film with a lot of bad-taste laughs along the way, and a bizarrely real dramatic impact when Reggie finally confronts Doug in the horrendous finale.

The stunts are still awe-inspiring, and there's plenty of laughs. They really were thinking big.

Rachel Weisz performs with enormous intelligence and restraint.

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

This film is a distinct, articulate pleasure.

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.

This intriguing documentary from Croatian film-maker Igor Bezinović is partly a comic opera and partly a chilling message from the past.

A terrifically enjoyable piece of old-fashioned storytelling and a beautiful-looking film: spectacular, exciting, funny and fun.

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.

This documentary is an invigorating, disturbing portrait of the arrogance and sinister self-importance of rich people, bullying politicians and their battalions of lawyers.

There is great sadness in this film – and great anger.

The movie is a distillation of the assassin’s life of watchfulness, survival and fear. At other times, it has a dreamlike quality: a floating hallucination. The Assassin baffles, but more often it quietly captivates and astonishes.

There’s lots of good stuff here, some witty reboots and reworkings of gags from the first film and sprightly update appearances from minor, half-forgotten characters currently residing in the “where-are-they-now?” file.

It’s an amusing, affectionate tribute.

This is a movie using non-professionals playing versions of themselves, and under Zhao’s patient, unintrusive directorial eye they appear to be inhabiting a kind of heightened documentary.

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.

This is a world of brutality and fear from which the movie averts its gaze at key moments, but the chill is unmistakable. The title appears to refer to a light which is inexorably fading.

Having watched this documentary, I now think the project could also be seen as a gigantic adventure in conceptual art, and this is not to denigrate it in any way.

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.

It is all unexpectedly potent, particularly in the absurdity and petulance and pain that Parsons crams into his performance. It’s a strange, compelling dose of unhappiness.

Hit Man comes close to fantasy and approaches screwball but keeps the realism. A hit is what it deserves to be.

It is a mysterious, digressive, long and baggily constructed film possessed of a distinctive richness and humanity, all about the balance between memory and forgetting which we all negotiate as we come to the end of our lives.

An entirely absorbing, coolly low-key movie.

It’s silly and poignant and funny.

The dual storylines are wrapped up together ingeniously with images and ideas slyly implanted at the very beginning. And there are some jump scares that had me Fosbury-flopping out of my seat with a yelp.

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.

Letts is a brilliant entrepreneur, an inter-disciplinary artist and eloquent speaker about what life was like in the punk era, and despite his (correct) refusal to see things in these tiresomely nostalgist or sentimental terms, there is a pang in recognising the spark of that time.

This is not animation which is there to exalt, or soothe, or celebrate human loveliness: it is animation which takes a fiercely miserable satirical stab at the world and itself, a language which is unreconciled, unaccommodated.

After Love is intelligent, compassionate, challenging film-making.

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.

This is a sombre, grieving movie which appears to gesture to the ghost-town ruin that is still in Detroit’s future.

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

An absorbing tale of feline ambition.