Peter Bradshaw

Love Life is an inexpressibly tragic and painful human drama about complicated lives, a movie that interleaves the utter desolation with a dry understated comedy and a sense of emotional tangle and chaos, a film that moreover blindsides its leading female character – and us, the audience – with an entirely unexpected coda section.

It is hauntingly sad.

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

This is a fervent film, heartfelt and shot with passion and sweep.

It is bewildering. I’m not sure I understood more than a fraction and of course it can be dismissed as obscurantism and mannerism. But I found The Image Book rich, disturbing and strange.

Pinocchio is a thoroughly bizarre story; Garrone makes of it a weirdly satisfying spectacle.

The Painted Bird is a brutal kind of ordeal, but eerie, unearthly and even beautiful sometimes: a bad dream that leaks into waking reality.

For all its tendency to soap opera, it has a lovely happy-sad sweetness.

It’s an outstanding documentary.

This is a celebratory film, and it’s easy to agree with its praise for Fauci’s intellectual heroism, especially when reactionary anti-science charlatanism is running rampant across the internet and the political right. But the documentary maybe doesn’t nail the historical paradox at its centre: Fauci has been vilified twice in his life, from different directions.

Brando tends to upstage and upend the whole picture in his way.

It’s impossible not to enjoy this big-hearted and sweet-natured British family movie.

Martinessi shrewdly combines subtlety, melancholy, satirical observation and candour about sex.

Honey Boy is a fluent, heartfelt, tightly structured and well acted personal story.

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

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.

This film has a horribly ingenious premise and there is something chilling in the central concept.

Overall, it is a highly watchable spectacle, leaving a sizzling streak of rubber on the tarmac.

With icy provocation, Israel’s ruling classes are presented as decadent and indifferent to the slaughter and suffering of Gaza. But the film is also in some ways a sympathetic study of a people haunted by the antisemitic butchery of 7 October.

This movie really brings some gobsmackingly weird and outrageous spectacle, with moments of pure showstopping freakiness. Eventually it loses a bit of focus and misses some narrative targets which have been sacrificed to those admittedly extraordinary set pieces.

F for Fake is a minor work in some ways, but there is fascination and poignancy in seeing Welles's elegant retreat into this hall of mirrors.

The film may not be perfect, but its courage – and relevance – are beyond doubt.

Mass is performed with impeccable intelligence and sensitivity, although sometimes it feels like an exercise in award-winning acting. But I admit it: the final, unexpected dialogue scene, though arguably as stagey and showy as everything else, does deliver a punch.

The film, with its superb score by Mica Levi and sound design by Johnnie Burn, has undoubted power but might well revive the debate about conjuring slick movie effects from the horrors of history.

Deadpool is neurotic and needy – and very entertaining. An innocent pleasure.

Fastvold’s film is distinctive in that she shows us how physical constraint and violence are part of the fabric of living.

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.

Arrival is a big, risky, showy movie which jumps up on its high-concept highwire and disdains a net. And yes, there are moments of silliness when it wobbles a little, but it provides you with spectacle and fervent romance.

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

The film moves more freely because of its willed unconcern with the historical implications of the Munich hostage massacre; modern audiences may feel the contemporary context makes it naive or obtuse. But it’s a muscular, well-made picture with the tang of cold sweat.

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.

Fallen Leaves is another of Kaurismäki’s beguiling and delightful cinephile comedies, featuring foot-tapping rock’n’roll. It’s romantic and sweet-natured, in a deadpan style that in no way undermines or ironises the emotions involved and with some sharp things to say about contemporary politics.

There’s no doubting the force of this drenchingly sad story.

The secret life of farm animals remains a secret, but a fascinating and even poignant one, in this strange and unexpectedly subtle film from the Russian documentary-maker Viktor Kossakovsky.

Crash is still creepy, still menacing, still hypnotic, and it is still dedicated, in its freaky way, to the ideal of eroticism, to just drifting from erotic scene to erotic scene without much need for story. But Crash is no longer so contemporary. [4K re-release]

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

Hong makes all of this look as easy and fluent as breathing.

The physicality of this picture is exciting.

This movie gets a real gallop on, due to the sheer warmth of its performances.

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.

Watched again now, I can respond more strongly to the heartfelt directness and empathy.

Here is a documentary for anyone who’s ever suffered from impostor syndrome or ever fantasised about going back in time to their school days, to reverse all those heartbreaks and humiliations. In other words: all of us.

It is an eccentric and entertaining movie soap-opera.

Exhilarating and moving. This is a very satisfying love story.

Maria is the most persuasive and seductive of Larraín’s trilogy of great women at bay, after Jackie about Jackie Kennedy, and Spencer about Princess Diana.

It’s a heartfelt, funny, satisfying film.

Apart from anything else, it’s a spectacular action movie that begins with a shot that had me gasping: a Hong Kong protester on a rooftop is cornered by police and, in an attempt to escape, he tries climbing down the unstable scaffolding on the front of the building, with other protesters at street level screaming their alarm. The result is heartstopping.

Solo: A Star Wars Story is a crackingly enjoyable adventure which frankly deserves full episode status in the great franchise, not just one of these intermittent place-holding iterations

Loach and Laverty fervently argue that through solidarity and a recognition of real interests, British people can naturally show empathy to immigrants and refugees.

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

It’s a transparently personal project and a coming-of-age film in its (traumatised) way, a moving account of how, just for one day, two young boys glimpse the real life and real history of their father who has been mostly absent for much of their lives – and how they come to love and understand him just at the moment when they come to see his flaws and his weaknesses.

Tim Roth is excellent as David: impassive and enigmatic, withholding the truth about himself, but radiating in repose a sadness and a swallowed pain.

There’s no doubting the shiver of pure fear that runs through this movie from beginning to end.

The hippo, as a German tour guide tells us at the very beginning, may look fat and placid and rather cute, but it’s fast-moving, aggressive and dangerous to humans; perhaps the film itself, so mysteriously distended with huge digressions and non-narrative scenes, is as exotically fleshy and strange as a hippo. Yet it has bite. And the hippos themselves are entrancing.

Why Don’t You Just Die! is an accomplished film that makes the very most of its limited sets, without seeming constricted or stagey.

Trapero creates a cinematic eco-system that moment by moment, scene by subtle scene, completely enfolds you.

It’s an intriguing, disturbing, amusing twist on something which in many ways could be a conventional horror-thriller from the 1970s or 1980s, or even a bunny-boiler nightmare from the 90s.

This is a strong, fierce, heartfelt movie.

It is captivating and agonising all over again to see how dazzling Diana was, how simple and spontaneous she was compared with both the stuffy royals but also the secular celebrity class – how she instinctively knew to work with the press when it was still essentially sympathetic, but how panicky and dysfunctional she became when this same press became boorish and predatory.

What does the ending of Ash Is Purest White mean — and what does its middle or beginning mean? I’m not sure. It feels like a gripping parable for the vanity of human wishes, and another impassioned portrait of national malaise.

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

It certainly provides that rarest of things: relaxing enjoyment. In all its uncompromising goofiness, 22 Jump Street brings onstream a sugar-rush of entertainment.

Here is a film about a very complicated and painful kind of coming of age, or maybe a meditation on “coming of age” as something that never actually happens; it also examines the illusory dividing line between childhood and adulthood, innocence and experience, present and past.

Empire of Light is a sweet, heartfelt, humane movie, which doesn’t shy away from the brutality and the racism that was happening in the streets outside the cinema.

It is a real love story, and the movie amusingly and touchingly takes us through the final stages and out the other side.

It’s possible to read Friendship as a plausible, if far-detached character study, a cringe-comedy Single White Male heading for disaster. Then it swerves away, following its nose towards something weirder.

The film occasionally hits a rather loud note of passive-aggressive piety, but it is very persuasive.

In the Aisles is a poignant and richly sympathetic film.

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.

Danny Boyle’s T2 Trainspotting is everything I could reasonably have hoped for - scary, funny, desperately sad, with many a bold visual flourish.

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.

It’s still entertaining and charming in its innocent idealism.

Memories of Murder is a great satire of official laxity and arrogance, and its final scene is very chilling.

The movie rattles cleverly and exhilaratingly along, adroitly absorbing the implications of pathos and loneliness without allowing itself to slow down. It is tempting to consider this savant blankness as some kind of symptom, but I really don’t think so: it is the expression of style. And what style it is.

A powerful, personal piece of work.

They really were amazing personalities: almost like children, although they came to be depressed that their work was not inspiring governments to work on evacuation protocols.

Machoian, who is also the editor, composes each scene with studied care and Oscar Ignacio Jiménez’s clear, crisp cinematography and framing is beautifully achieved. This is a compelling portrait of a toxic marriage.

There’s a strong basis of originality here, and the warmth and good nature of the movie carries it along.

It’s always supremely watchable, but rarely, if ever, commits itself to genuine jeopardy or suspense. Instead of edge-of-the-seat moments, there are gags and clever touches and excellent performances.

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

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.

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

At its best, Malick's cinematic rhapsody is glorious; during his uncertain moments, he appears to be repeating himself. But what delight there is in this film.

As for Violet, Emily Blunt brings to the role genuine sympathy, and she continues to thaw out the ice-queen hauteur of her earlier movies.

A very touching and insightful film.

It’s almost too perfectly contoured as a Hollywood narrative.

A drama suffused with gonzo energy and the death-metal chaos of emotional pain, cut with slashes of bizarre black humour.

It buzzes with uncomplicated enjoyment.

Much of the film immerses us in an unknowable, unrecognisable world under the skin, without shape, without what Vesalius wanted to show us in the 16th century. It is an uncanny spectacle.

Albert Serra’s bizarre epic is a cheese-dream of French imperial tristesse, political paranoia and an apocalyptic despair. It is a nightmare that moves as slowly and confidently as a somnambulist, and its pace, length, and Serra’s beautiful widescreen panoramic framings – in which conventional drama is almost camouflaged or lost – may divide opinion. I can only say I was captivated by the film and its stealthy evocation of pure evil.

Otto Preminger's fiercely austere courtroom drama was strong stuff in 1959.

A superlative performance from Gemma Arterton is at the centre of this almost unbearably painful and sad film from writer-director Dominic Savage.

This is a tough, muscular, idealistic drama that packs a mighty punch, and Shannon and Garfield are excellent.

What could have been simply bizarre, sentimental or contrived here becomes an utterly absorbing love story.

There is a fair bit of sentimentality here, but an awful lot of affection and energy as well.

Utterly bizarre and entirely ridiculous – and yet effective, an imaginative Guignol festival, like the goriest of soap operas, in which one wrong move opens a portal to hell.

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.

It is a really powerful film and Brady’s final dialogue scene exerts a lethal grip.

This film is a very sly, subversive and disturbing black tragicomedy about a universal secret addiction.

Egilsdóttir carries the drama, and her overwhelming feeling of relief makes sense of that gigantic landscape.

A classic, not to be missed.

It hardly needs to be said that subtlety is not really among this film’s attributes - but it is fierce, angry, engaged, and intensely, sensually alert to every detail of its own pleasure and pain.

Herzog and Oppenheimer are back (and Oppenheimer gets a co-directing credit) with another nimbly curious and fascinating film on a similar topic: meteorites. This is a rare example of modern documentary film-making that uses voiceover – that inimitable Herzog growl.

It's tremendously good fun, though lighter in tone than Ealing's two scabrous masterpieces Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Ladykillers, and not quite matching their elegant perfection; I've never been able to rid myself of the feeling that, however superbly set up, the aftermath of the heist itself is ever so slightly lacking in tension.

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.

In some ways, If Beale Street Could Talk is a portmanteau movie with great performances from KiKi Layne, Regina King and Brian Tyree Henry, a succession of scenes from interrelated lives, constellated around the main narrative arc and supercharged with an ecstasy of sadness and knowledge.

It’s a supernatural chiller about our fear of death - and our longing for death as an end to this fear. This brutally effective and convulsively disturbing story is something to compare with WW Jacobs’s classic Edwardian ghost story The Monkey’s Paw or maybe even Franz Kafka’s stage-play The Guardian of the Tomb.

Could Nasheed be the political Prospero to save the island – and the planet? Well, now he is out of power, and the Copenhagen summit was a disappointment. Perhaps his advocacy will help to bring the climate change issue back into political fashion.

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.

The weird oppression and seediness of the times is elegantly captured, and Hoss coolly conveys Barbara's highly strung desperation.

It has the ruminative lightness, almost weightlessness, the watercolour delicacy and reticence of the emotions, the sense of the uncanny, the insistent play of erotic possibility and that Murakami keynote: a cat.

It’s an uncompromising midnight movie.

[An] engrossing, unnerving but unexpectedly sympathetic drama of family dysfunction.

Brings a new urgency to an old subject: the ivory trade, which is threatening the world’s elephants. This threat has not been cancelled or brought under control, as I had assumed. The film persuasively argues that it is all but out of control: so much so that elephants are in danger of being wiped out in the wild in just a matter of years.

This film is a deeply felt, tremendously acted tribute to courage.

Well, Caine and Jackson and their ineffable class give this film some real grit: it’s a wonderful last hurrah for Jackson and there is something moving and even awe-inspiring in seeing these two British icons together.

This is a tremendously crafted, impeccably intelligent film.

The film’s freakiness and wooziness might have been a bit grating were it not for the glacial authority that Ferrara brings to every scene and shot – centred, of course, in the craggy gravitas of Dafoe himself.

I would have liked (in a spirit of devil’s advocacy) to hear from an economist about the measurable benefits or otherwise of this brutal approach, and perhaps to ponder the climbing global population. These reservations hardly diminish the film’s force.

It is effortlessly and unassumingly funny – and terrifically smart.

James Erskine’s film showcases the unforgettable Holiday voice: her elegantly casual, almost negligent readings of melodies, with a sensual moan or purr that was on the verge of a sob.

It’s a tremendously engaging and likeable superhero ride, in which the classiest of casts show they know exactly where to take it seriously – and where to inject the fun.

All The Money In The World is not perfect; there is a touch of naïveté and stereotyping in its depiction of the malign Italians with their one, redemptive nice-guy gangster. But with the help of Plummer’s tremendous villain-autocrat performance, Ridley Scott gives us a very entertaining parable about money and what it can’t buy.

There’s a fair bit of posturing and radical chic happening in this movie and it’s sometimes a little glib. But the droll double-act chemistry between Paterson and Swinton is unexpectedly great, especially considering the enigmatically childlike and lovably humourless demeanour that Swinton often projects.

This is a tender tribute.

The anarchic spirit of agitprop pulses from this scrappy, smart, subversive film.

Temple's film is refreshingly free of cliché. A very heady experience.

It is a well made, well controlled film, and its sullenly monomaniac quality – perhaps partly a function of the star doing the writing and directing – is entirely appropriate for the subject matter.

There’s an unexpectedly huge amount of old-fashioned fun to be had in Disney’s spectacular new origin-myth story.

This film may not have all that much new material but it piercingly asks the right questions about Chaplin’s elusive reality.

It’s an intriguing, stimulating, exhilarating movie, which really does address – with both head and heart – the great issue of our age, AI.

There are some pretty broad emotional strokes here and maybe a fair bit of grandstanding. But it’s made with some style.

The movie sweeps ambitiously across Europe and the Middle East and shows us a complex world of pain.

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

It’s a powerful, immersively detailed film, with three outstanding performances.

The film is very funny – but asks its audience to wonder if being funny, if wanting to make people laugh, and particularly if using comedy for family-bonding, really is the sign of being relaxed and life-affirming in the way people who are talented at comedy often assume.

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.

Like Solaris, his earlier meditation on the future, Tarkovsky's 1979 film Stalker is mysterious and compelling though in my view not, like Andrei Rublev, in the realms of greatness: a vast prose-poem on celluloid whose forms and ideas were to be borrowed by moviemakers like Lynch and Spielberg.

Dolan's energy and attack is thrilling; his movie is often brilliant and very funny in ways which smash through the barriers marked Incorrect and Inappropriate.

Some massive laughs, a huge Stephen Merchant cameo and the most impressive school play on film since Wes Anderson’s Rushmore are all on offer in this very funny teen – or rather tween – comedy.

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.

In its unexpected way, this film speaks to the new agony of banishment now being felt by millions of Ukrainians, and to the profound unease and concern and impotence spreading westward across Europe.

It’s impossible not to be carried along by the delirious rush of silliness in this knockabout screwball comedy.

However grotesquely culpable Chuck has been, you find yourself wanting to hug him. It’s a clever comic trick to bring off.

Akira’s strangeness is very startling and sometimes bewildering. But there is a thanatonic rapture to its vision of a whole world ending and being reborn as something else.

It's a tough, absorbing and suspenseful drama, excellently acted by its three non-professional leads.

With its sheer warmth and likability, this good-natured documentary won my heart.

This is a teenage movie that could in other hands have been precious; instead it has delicacy and intelligence.

Although this film can be a bit hokey and uncertain on narrative development, the puppyish zest and fun summoned up by Curtis and Boyle carry it along.

The drama mimics Anne’s own sense of denial, her own refusal to remember or imagine the catastrophe. What we get instead are clinical inspections functioning as chilling parodies or inversions of that sexual intimacy that has upended her life.

This is a bracing guide to a brilliant individual who declined to conform.

The second Lego Movie is even better than the original: a sophisticated new adventure that gives us a new look at how the universality of the Lego universe was more gendered than we thought.

It’s a film you have to feel your way into, like a ruined church or a haunted house.

It’s a huge aspartame rush of a film: a giant irresistible snack, not nutritious, but very tasty.

It’s a disquieting parable of iniquity.

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.

This is an engrossing, well-acted story – disturbing but also tender and sad.

It is dense with fear and sadness.

Columbus is an engrossing and unexpectedly passionate film, although much of the passion is displaced outwards into a feeling for space, for mass, for building materials. It is a static passion, but not inert.

Incredible But True has a wacky premise that Dupieux very possibly had no idea how to develop. And yet I found myself laughing quite a lot of the time. The sheer silliness and zen pointlessness is entertaining.

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.

Mr Jones is a bold and heartfelt movie with a real Lean-ian sweep.

It’s a great comic turn from Apte who deserves to be better known.

Elsie Fisher is magnificent as a vulnerable teenager facing trouble at school and at home in Bo Burnham’s gripping drama.

The President is a striking movie - and a bold and challenging change of directorial pace from Mohsen Makhmalbaf.

Patel turns it into a very exciting and stylish movie. His previous acting work didn’t obviously point to a kickass action career, although his performance in The Green Knight might have given us a hint. He’s evolved.

A tough, sinewy drama about a whole community that wants to look away from others’ differences and its own culpability.

With this startling and sombre documentary, Mexican film-maker Rodrigo Reyes has conducted an experiment in verbatim cinema, or what you might call witness cinema.

Film-maker James Ashcroft has created a scary and intimately upsetting psychological horror based on a story by New Zealand author Owen Marshall set in a care home, a film whose coolly maintained claustrophobic mood and bravura performances make up for the slight narrative blurring towards the end.

I myself found it as extravagant and engrossing and doggedly mysterious as anything he has done recently, with luxuriously self-aware performances from Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, and an undertow of darkness often overlooked by yeasayers and naysayers.

There is no moment where Byrne dramatically opens up, either on stage or off, but perhaps that’s not the point. It’s a treat for Byrne fans, and could well make converts.

This is a long film, but there is something so horribly compelling about its unhurried slouch towards the precipice.

It is superlatively well performed and well directed with a real narrative grip.

You can even forgive the franchise for cheating the issue of Spock’s death, though another death seems forgotten relatively quickly. The original cast members bring a certain gravitas.

Ithaka shows us how time and experience have lent perspective to it all, affectingly focusing on Assange’s elderly father John Shipton, and Assange’s fiancee Stella Moris (now his wife), who have doggedly fought for Assange’s rights as an investigative journalist and publisher.

A sad, sweet movie.

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.

In many ways this is a study in anger, and it is an austere and angular picture. Krieps gives an exhilaratingly fierce, uningratiating performance.

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.

It is another powerful, absorbing picture from Campillo and a fitting swan song for Laurent Cantet.

Monge has created a satisfying drama of doomed obsession, the gambler’s thrill that staves off, for a few moments, a weariness with life. It’s a film with, as they say, something of the night about it.

The implacable forces of nature, nurture and destiny are what this movie grapples with; it is a really emotional and absorbing drama about adoption with terrific performances (many from nonprofessional first-timers) and compelling soundtrack musical cues.

What is great about Colman’s performance is that it is always teetering on the brink of some new revelation about Leda: her face is subtly trembling with … what? Tears? Laughter? A scowl of scorn?

There are some plausibility issues in Room, but this is a disturbing and absorbing film, shrewdly acted, particularly by Larson. It lets the audience in; it does not just let the nightmare stun them into submission. You make a real emotional engagement.

The Desolation of Smaug is a cheerfully entertaining and exhilarating adventure tale, a supercharged Saturday morning picture: it's mysterious and strange and yet Jackson also effortlessly conjures up that genial quality that distinguishes The Hobbit from the more solemn Rings stories.

It’s all operatically mad, and the city-destroying final confrontation is becoming a bit familiar, but Whedon carries it off with such joy and even a kind of evangelism.

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.

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

Charming and intriguing tale of undeclared love, full of haunting set pieces that stayed in my mind for hours afterwards. [11 June 1999, p.15]

This is a very impressive debut.

Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep give excellent performances, though not exactly a stretch in either case, and both with a tiny, tasty touch of cheese. Their characterisations are luxuriously upholstered, effortlessly fluent, busting with relatability.

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.

Hoskins’ bullish, black-comic Napoleonism makes this movie: pugnacious, sentimental, a cockney Cagney.

It’s a movie made dense and vehement with Julie’s passion for bikes and her angry sense of a death wish which is going to strike her, ahead of anyone else.

Interestingly, it has the crowd-pleasing energy of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator films. There is real sinew here.

As if from nowhere, a first-time British film-maker has appeared with a tremendously accomplished, subtle and supremely confident feature, authorially distinctive and positively dripping with technique.

The Boy and the Heron is a valuable new addition to this unique film-artist’s canon, about confronting a terrible sadness and finding a way to replace it with wonder and joy.

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.

Here, the pipeline destroyers are the good guys; an interesting genre twist though one which arguably defangs the film, just a little, removing the addictive flavour of cruelty and chaos, yet not making it any the less gripping and ingenious.

The film’s old-fashioned charm and sweet-natured Yuletide spirit has held up, although it interestingly seems attractive now more for these softer-edged qualities than for the straight-ahead SNL-type Will Ferrell comedy that it seemed to promise back in 2003.

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.

The tired old trope "erotic thriller" does no justice to how confrontationally and explicitly sexual this movie is — nor how thrilling, nor how menacing and complex.

It crept up on me at its own measured walking pace – and it incidentally has the best and cleverest last line of any film I have seen this year.

I’ve never been sure exactly how profound this movie is, and it sometimes teeters on the edge of complacency, but it has a trance-inducing strangeness and Swinton is insouciantly magnetic at all times.

It’s a really valuable work, beautifully edited and shot, with a wonderful performance by the veteran actor Lance Henriksen: a sombre, clear-eyed look at the bitter endgame of dementia.

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 dizzying, headspinning film, replete with violence, alienation and tech-porn. I confess I find it too opaque to make the kind of investment that would qualify me as a real fan. But it should be seen.

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

This is substantial and rewarding.

The intriguing thing about Black Panther is that it doesn’t look like a superhero film – more a wide-eyed fantasy romance: exciting, subversive and funny.

I still can’t be convinced that Megalopolis is anything other than an (honourable) failure. But Figgis’s documentary is an absorbing success.

It all builds up to a remarkable coup de cinéma: a Buñuelian finale that is startling and moving. This is both an exploratory personal project and a thought-experiment of a film.

May December is delivered with a cool, shrewd precision by Todd Haynes, Julianne Moore carries off her dysfunctional queenliness very watchably and Natalie Portman has a great scene where she gives a lecture on acting to Gracie’s children’s high school drama class.

There is humanity and complexity in this welcome movie, as well as muscular power and unreconciled anger.

It’s a complex drama, a realist film teetering on the edge of the uncanny, whose very title points the way towards the idea that there are shades of grey in every judgment we make.

There’s a very entertaining daftness and theatre nerdery to See How They Run (the title sounds uncomfortably like Run For Your Wife) as director Tom George takes the same approach to The Mousetrap that Ken Russell took to The Boyfriend: playing up the artificiality of it all. The comedy is shallow in the right way, and Rockwell’s bleary world-weariness contrasts nicely with Ronan’s saucer-eyed idealism.

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.

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

Their faces are vivid and Pennetta’s film somehow returns you to the simple, fundamental fact: these are real people whose lives carry on outside the movie screen’s perimeter.

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

It is the very preposterousness of Eyes Wide Shut which is the key to the achievement it represents: it has a singular excessiveness - at once gamey, florid and enigmatically deadpan - which underpins this picture's rich, sensuous style.

This has elegance, vigour and charm.

An ambitious, respectful account of the life and work of Yukio Mishima, the prolific Japanese author who made a romantic cult of Japan's lost world of martial glory and spartan warrior-manhood.

What a lovely film Paterson is.

Maybe a little unexpectedly, Amazon Studios have given us a very watchable and classily upscale espionage drama-thriller in the spirit of John le Carré.

It's a richly conceived treat.

This is a sensually imaginative dive into the life of the Wuthering Heights author: it is a real passion project for O’Connor, with some wonderfully arresting insights.

Iron Man 3 is smart, funny and spectacular.

John Schlesinger’s winsome adventure from 1965 still has verve and ambition, a romantic satire of swinging London.

Heretic is gruesome and bizarre and preposterous, the third aspect made palatable by Grant’s dapper performance of evil.

The keynotes are anger, confusion and despair, and to some degree the film could have been opaque or contrived but its malaise ultimately finds expression in a truly horrible #MeToo moment, one of the most brutally plausible and unsettling I have seen in any film recently.

It is as if Noé has somehow mulched up the quintessence of dance, coke and porn together and squooshed it into his camera. If that sounds horrible, then yes it is, but also, often, demonically inspired.

Here it seems that Death Row Records was simply a criminal organisation, of which rap music was a byproduct. The talent it somehow nurtured in this way looks even more tragically fragile.

It is elegantly shot and very well acted. A definite frisson.

This tender and sweet animation from film-makers Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han is an involving, poignant study of early childhood; how fragile it is, and how strong you feel yourself to be to have outlived or surpassed it.

The transgressive threat approaches and recedes like thunder, leaving us with a study in loneliness.

A deafening explosion of energy, gruesome violence and chaos.

This is an engaging and thoroughly worthwhile movie.

Joyland is such a delicate, intelligent and emotionally rich film. What a debut from Sadiq.

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

This is a highly enjoyable and bracing piece of work from Wash Westmoreland.

It is very intelligent and humane, and what a great performance from Collias.

It is an intricate and often brilliant drama, with restrained and intelligent performances; there is an elegantly patterned mosaic of detail, unexpected plot turns, suspenseful twists and revelations.

Mahershala Ali gives a heartfelt performance in this elegant and rather melancholy sci-fi mystery with which Irish film-maker Benjamin Cleary makes his impressive feature debut.

It’s a stark, fierce, wonderfully acted film.

Francofonia is a fascinating essay and meditation on art, history and humanity’s idea of itself.

There’s a terrific charm and sweetness in this debut from Iraqi film-maker Hasan Hadi.

What an enjoyable spectacle it is.

It’s another film to leave you sighing over New York’s lost 70s heyday of gritty reality and creativity and danger.

All Quiet on the Western Front is a substantial, serious work, acted with urgency and focus and with battlefield scenes whose digital fabrications are expertly melded into the action. It never fails to do justice to its subject matter, though is perhaps conscious of its own classic status.

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 most distinctive things about the film are possibly Caron's personae-montage at the beginning, which showcases her virtuoso dance moves, and the final fantasy sequence, which resolves (a little hurriedly) the emotional obstacles to their love. An exotically contrived romance.

It’s a terrific performance from Hawke.

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.

Somehow in its pure uproariousness, it works. It’s just a supremely watchable film, utterly confident in its self-created malleable mythology. And confident also in the note of apocalyptic darkness.

As ever, Almodóvar has made a film about pleasure, which is itself a pleasure: witty, intelligent and sensuous.

Basically, there is a contentment and calm here, an acceptance and a Zen simplicity that is a cleansing of the moviegoing palate, or perhaps the fiction-consuming palate in general. It is a film to savour.

Swinton’s delivery has a theatrical style – it very much feels as if we could be watching a stage show – and there is something frozenly despairing about it; it is the voice of someone who is unwilling to relinquish her dignity or rationality and just give in to an aria of sadness.

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

There are fierce and overwhelmingly authentic performances here from first-timers in Julien Colonna’s terrific mob drama.

The status-anxiety, fame-vertigo, sexual satiety and that all-encompassing fear of failure which poisons every triumph are displayed here with an icy new connoisseurship, a kind of extremism which faces down the traditional objection that films like this are secretly infatuated with their subject.

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