Peter Bradshaw

As with so many of Denis’ films, the point is to contrive an overwhelmingly powerful mood and moment, an almost physiological sensation, this one incubated in the vast, cold reaches of space. It throbbed and itched with me long after the film was over.

It is an interesting new Nosferatu for our age of pandemic fear, with some beautiful images and striking moments, particularly in the eerie moonlit hallucination sequence at the beginning, which makes the rest of the story feel slightly literal and self-conscious.

The Blue Trail is a generic mashup: it partly has the bittersweet tone of many films about defiant old people, and partly it has something far more subversive and disquieting. The mix of tones is interesting, like chewing cake and cheese at the same time.

It’s a diverting scenario, though maybe it doesn’t quite have the “danger – high voltage” thrill of Morris’s other works.

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

Gladstone’s performance is looser, more open, less reserved. Simply put: she does more acting, and gives strength and substance to a dense, knotty family drama which though maybe anticlimactic in the final act – and too reliant on a handgun plot-point – is fluent and heartfelt.

Till is a fierce portrait of courage and a sombre study of the human cost involved in resisting this kind of barbarity.

It is about grief and about the shock of grief and the stabbing fear which, in its terrifying way, gives you a clarified view of your own existence. A film to wonder at.

This is a candid, sober, well-acted debut by the first-time director Ruthy Pribar.

Zero Days is an intriguing, disturbing watch.

There is something clotted and heavy about this film, with sadly not enough of the humour for which Peele justly became celebrated in his double-act days with Keegan-Michael Key. It’s not the positive response I wanted to have.

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.

This tricksy, exasperating and strangely unenlightening film, with its pointless fictional narrator played by Alan Cumming, purports to tell the story of Orson Welles’s mysterious “lost” masterpiece, The Other Side of the Wind. But in jokily trying to imitate the jabbering chaos of this film’s production history, it fails to give a clear, informative account.

Flawed or not, it is a compelling thought experiment.

It's a guilty-pleasure romp of a documentary, filmed at last year's Cannes film festival, all about the gorgeous, deadly and heartbreaking business of cinema itself.

This is a sympathetic and very contemporary study.

The movie is fundamentally silly, with tiringly shallow characterisation and broad streaks of crime-drama intrigue, which only underline the fact that not a single word of it is really believable.

It’s a one-note drama of simmering resentment. That note is sustained with impressive conviction.

The film’s rather abstract conversation doesn’t convey much in the way of urgency or specificity. But there is a sustained moral seriousness in Polley’s work, a willingness to confront pain.

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

At its worst, it feels like an insufferable vanity project. But it’s pugnaciously well-acted, flavoured with vinegary insights and rage-filled denunciations, and a hilarious set piece of scorn about how awful film critics are.

It’s a very strong performance from Kendrick, who disturbingly conveys the tiny and not so tiny symptoms of emotional abuse.

There’s a lot to admire in the performances from Garner, Henwick, Yovich and Weaving.

What is invigorating about The Story of Film is that each new clip, each new comment, is an exercise in back to basics, an exercise in looking, and looking again and looking harder – something that’s even more difficult when it feels like we’re drowning in content.

But what a triumph this film was for Chapman, who gave a convincing, touching performance as the bewildered everyman who decides to make a stand, and in his battle with the evil empire makes a Luke Skywalker-style discovery about his lineage. Life of Brian is an unexpectedly earnest, sweet-natured hymn to the idea of tolerance.

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.

It is actually Assayas’s best film for a long time, and Stewart’s best performance to date.

It is more of a holiday romance and the well-intentioned performances lead nowhere.

What emerges is Ailey’s lifelong seriousness and his vocational purpose in dance.

This debut feature from Australian film-maker Shannon Murphy, adapted by Rita Kalnejais from her stage play, is well acted, heartfelt, beautifully filmed.

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

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 movie finishes on an unresolved chord, as if we have left the story months or years before the actual scandalous denouement. But it is arguably faithful to the mood of messy bewilderment and frustration that governs the ongoing situation.

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

It is a film so awe-inspiringly wooden that it is basically a fire-risk. The cringe-factor is ionospherically high.

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.

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

The film is interestingly candid about the toxic, driving force of envy behind a musical career – something many music biopics omit – but in the end, however initially startling and amusing, Robbie-as-chimp feels like a distraction from his all-too-human unhappiness and talent.

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

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.

It’s a watchable though slightly sentimentalised story and Mikkelsen gives it seriousness and force.

The reggae soundtrack throbs and crunches and shudders in concert with the raw energy of Henzell’s storytelling and Cliff’s performance, but this doesn’t preclude a shrewdly self-aware debate about representation.

Introduction, like so many of Hong’s films, occupies a delicate middle ground between whimsy and poetry, between inconsequentiality and epiphany, between lightweight and light. My feeling is that Introduction is closer to the former in each case, and I wanted to hear more about and more from Young-ho’s troubled father. But there is an unmistakable and mature film-making language on display: a simplicity and charm.

This is a pellucid and gentle film, made with the simplicity and grace of a children's tale and yet its humour, emotional clarity and directness speak directly to adults and children alike - and the pre-teen principals shoulder an adult burden of performance.

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

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

It is well-acted, disciplined and intimate as a play. But for me it is marred by an early, unsubtle moment of overt supernatural creepiness, which signals a retreat from ingenuity and restraint.

The most powerful thing about the film is the "audition" scene at the beginning in which the prisoners have to introduce themselves in two ways: sorrowingly, and then angrily. It is a brilliant sequence, and the rest of the film doesn't quite match it.

It’s a great piece of Hollywood confectionery, and you might well find yourself choking up a little at the end.

The film dissolves in silliness and whimsy, but not before it’s given us some surreal spectacle.

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

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.

This is a Hail Mary pass that Gosling just about manages to catch.

I would have loved to hear Kennedy on the tricky subjects of fusion cuisine or cultural appropriation. But there’s more than enough here to get your teeth into.

Squibb is however really good: no other casting is conceivable, and it is good to see her get the lead turn she deserves.

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.

For a film as over-the-top as this, it might be counterintuitive to talk about subtlety, but Stewart is genuinely that; her line readings are coolly calibrated, quizzical, restrained, sometimes infinitesimally double-taking at the bizarre or outrageous things happening in front of her.

Among Jarecki's interviewees is David Simon (author of The Wire) who is incandescent with contempt for the system.

The movie still looks very good, and you'd need a heart of stone not to love the cat. [Review of re-release]

It is an absorbing, intriguing, bewildering work: often spectacular and beautiful, like a sci-fi supernatural disaster movie or an essay on nature and politics, but shot through with distinctive elements of fey and whimsical comedy.

Apples is intriguingly deadpan and sometimes funny, though I couldn’t help feeling that it is also contrived, and even a bit flippant in a middleweight-arthouse mode, not quite as profound as it thinks but certainly displaying some impressively choreographed mannerisms of dysfunction.

It is forthright, powerful, composed and directed with clarity and overwhelming force, yet capable of great subtlety and nuance.

This is a bitter, jagged, disaffected drama, pessimistic about China, pessimistic about the whole world. One characters asks another if he ever feels like travelling abroad. "Why would I?" he replies. "Everywhere is broke. Foreigners come here now." Jia Zhang-ke's movie gives us a brutal unwelcome.

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.

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

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

What a strange and intriguing film.

It is heartfelt, but its periodic attempts at thriller-style bouts of excitement are redundant, and I wondered sometimes if the film-makers were sure what exactly their story was.

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.

This is a deadpan comedy which strides off down its own confident, eccentric path, and actually the whole heist trope is subverted from the outset by the purely un-tense way the robbery is shown.

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

As ever with Miike, the sheer profusion of material, the torrent of wacky creativity, means that there is always something to hold the attention. It’s bizarre and very unwholesome. But weirdly inspired.

The Immigrant is certainly different: but Gray seems to run out of ideas and the film is shapeless and unsatisfying.

The important thing is to be disturbed.

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

As horror it is ridiculous, as comedy it is startling and hilarious, and as a machine for freaking you out it is a thing of wonder.

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.

Now we have 28 Years Later, an interesting, tonally uncertain development which takes a generational, even evolutionary leap into the future from the initial catastrophe, creating something that mixes folk horror, little-England satire and even a grieving process for all that has happened. And there are some colossal cameo appearances.

Eventually, the drama closes in on itself and attains the logic of a dream, though a dream that dissipates quickly on waking.

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.

The movie needed some more detachment – and brevity – but Wahlberg shows once again he has the comedy chops.

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

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.

He lived until recently in bohemian chaos in one of the "artist apartments" in Carnegie Hall, and cares nothing for money or vanity. That's real class.

The film really comes to life in the actual hip-hop scenes; the musical sequences have originality, comedy and freedom. The rest of the time, the film looks worryingly like a late 90s-early 00s cool Britannia geezer-gangster romp.

It is a sharp, smart picture, with English eccentricity, sly quirk and political subversion, that represents a brilliant and almost unique engagement with contemporary history in 80s British cinema.

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.

It is a beautifully shot, and very nicely acted beginning to something: but finally frustrating.

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

Tremendously acted by Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb with exactly the right absence of sympathy, although Cox arguably loses his nerve on this score in the film’s dying moments.

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

This beautiful and compassionate film from first-time feature director Colm Bairéad, based on the novella Foster by Claire Keegan, is a child’s-eye look at our fallen world; already it feels to me like a classic.

In its engaging and eccentric way, Hong’s film-making is diverting and intriguing and then it capriciously concludes, leaving things up in the air, yet without making you feel shortchanged. Perhaps this one is slighter than his recent work, but it has a comic charm.

This is a great-looking movie with a sure sense of time and place; it is obviously a personal, and in fact, autobiographical work about Assayas's own youth. But for all its flair, I came away dissatisfied at its colossal self-indulgence and creamy complacency, and the way historical perspective and meaning are permitted to dissolve in its sunlit nostalgia.

It’s a heartfelt, funny, satisfying film.

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

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

The movie has rather silly, Bourne-style thriller graphics, which are unnecessary: it has an important story to tell.

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

A sombre, relevant piece of work.

An absorbing tale of feline ambition.

Perhaps that final meeting in Lasker-Wallfisch’s front room does not offer closure. Nothing could. An amazing and dramatic historical tableau nonetheless.

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

It’s refreshing for a film-maker to opt for subtlety, and there are good performances from Riley, Martin and Farthing.

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.

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

He [Sorkin] can also become fantastically ponderous, bloated with finger-waggingly self-important liberal patriotism. Sadly, that is the tone with this exasperatingly dull, dramatically inert and faintly misjudged re-creation of the “Chicago Seven” trial in the US, which Sorkin has written and directed.

The final half-hour seems to be a neo-western style melee which seems to go on for ever. Odd … and unrewarding.

It’s a movie bristling with ideas and ingenuity.

[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.

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

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

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.

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

It’s a script which shows every sign of having had plenty of rewrites, though perhaps it could have done with a few more.

Porumboiu gives us a knotty, twisty, nifty plot that’s quite involved but hangs together well, and there’s an amusing juxtaposition of gloomy, rainy Bucharest and the sunny terrain of La Gomera. We also get a neat and unexpected coda.

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.

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.

Talk to Me is freaky and confrontational and hilariously crass; it crashes through its plot progressions with tactless verve.

In its scale and seriousness, Occupied City allows its emotional implication to amass over its running time. The effect is mysterious and moving.

It’s a disquieting parable of iniquity.

This movie, visually and dramatically superb in every way, moves with unhurried confidence across the screen, pausing to savour every bizarre bit of comedy or erotic byway, or note of pathos, on its circuitous path to the violent finale.

It would be really obtuse not to marvel at the exuberance, energy and vivid moment-by-moment immediacy of this movie: Sorrentino is a film-maker who is always on the move, on the attack.

I felt that we were not permitted much access to the character’s innermost thoughts, and so some of the film’s romance, and its fatalism, did not have the piercing impact as the visual masterstrokes. But there’s no doubting Diao’s style.

It is a good idea and there are good moments in the film, especially at the very beginning when Anna and Aleks have a bizarre encounter with the old woman herself, Rita Concannon, strikingly played by Olwen Fouéré. But then things begin to slide. There are however some resonant ideas here.

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

All this is acted with smouldering intensity and authenticity, particularly by Filipovic, although it’s possible to wonder if there is anything unexpected to come in the third act, or if we can roughly guess where it’s all heading.

Photographer and film-maker Anton Corbijn is the very best person to direct this very enjoyable documentary about design outfit Hipgnosis and its dynamic co-founders Aubrey “Po” Powell and Storm Thorgerson.

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

Donbass is a flawed, but vivid achievement.

This an enjoyably strange spectacle, perhaps best appreciated by taking it less seriously than its creators intended.

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.

What is so distinctive about this Iñárritu picture is its unitary control and its fluency: no matter how extended, the film’s tense story is under the director’s complete control and he unspools great meandering, bravura travelling shots to tell it: not dissimilar, in some ways, to his previous picture, Birdman. The movie is as thrilling and painful as a sheet of ice held to the skin.

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

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.

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.

Kid Like Jake is an earnestly intended, seriously acted film, painful in various intentional and unintentional ways.

Erotic languour turns gradually into fear and then horror in this gripping and superbly controlled psychological thriller from 1969.

This movie lodged in my mind a little more than Hong’s earlier films, perhaps because it is less contrived and it features a genuinely funny and complex opening scene.

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.

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.

Julian Schnabel has made a heartfelt if straightforwardly reverent film about the last years in the life of Vincent van Gogh – acted by with all the integrity and unselfconscious ease that you would expect from this great actor.

The sheer tactlessness of its racial confrontation has a forthright quality and a not entirely intentional documentary realism, especially in the scenes shot on location in Sparta, Illinois (standing in for a fictional Mississippi town).

Intriguingly, but finally a bit frustratingly, Perry is running four ideas at once, a kind of cine-quadriptych with the plurality signalled by the title.

It's a likable film played with gusto and heart — though fundamentally a little sentimental and predictable.

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

I’m not sure how much, if anything, Coppola’s re-edit does for the third Godfather film, but it’s worth a watch.

Enjoyable and well-crafted as it is, this movie can’t quite decide what to do with the tougher, darker side of Richard Williams.

This film finally flinches from its own menacing implications and dark suspenseful power with a rather feeble ending of empowerment and solidarity. A very 21st-century loss of nerve.

[An] attractive and sympathetically acted movie in a classic New Wave style.

There’s something exciting about a film that immerses you in the life of a creative artist, and so it proves with this documentary about Howard Ashman.

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.

It is a film that does not proceed in the narrative style and the title seems to suggest that we should think of it as a different art form entirely: a constellation of themes, ideas, tropes, moods in which the personae relate to each other as concepts rather than characters.

Mud is an engaging and good-looking picture with two bright leading performances from Sheridan and Lofland.

This is a big, bold picture with the vivid presences of Davis, Lynch, Atim and Mbedu giving it some real voltage.

There is something winning in this calm, walking-pace drama – and the landscape is amazing.

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.

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.

None of this, arguably, is inaccurate. But it’s all very smooth: a slick Steadicam ride through a historic, tumultuous moment.

This is a hothouse flower of pure orchidaceous strangeness, enclosed in the studio’s artificial universe, fusing cinema, opera and ballet.

Into the Inferno is an intriguing, unnerving documentary.

This movie is an absorbing serio-comic flourish.

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

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

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

As for Malek’s performance, his line readings and screen presence are very distinctive, but I have to say the moments when he has to present anguished emotion to the camera do not quite work, and feel eccentric.

It is an amusing and gruesome premise, which writer-director Damian McCarthy stretches out into a convoluted, bizarre extended narrative.

The effect is tender, sympathetic, diverting and often very elegant and indirect. But it withholds from us the full, real pain of damaged love.

A huge amount of talent here, including Joanna Lumley and Eddie Izzard. Sadly it goes nowhere.

There are some nice moments and sweet showtunes, but Encanto feels like it is aspiring to exactly that sort of bland frictionless perfection that the film itselfis solemnly preaching against, with a contrived storyline which wants to have its metaphorical cake and eat it.

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

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

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

A calm and interesting introduction to an important dissident author.

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.

What distinguishes North Circular is the overwhelming importance of music: there’s a musical tradition here that is not simply commemorative and static, but vital and evolving, and given a fresh burst of creativity by the emerging status of women in Ireland.

It’s a fierce, thoughtful drama.

Down By Law is effortlessly laidback, superbly elegant. Jarmusch made it look easy.

The fight against fascism is a serious business, now more than ever, and it is right that Kurzel treats it seriously, but this means his movie feels constrained tonally and the finale is weirdly protracted and even anticlimactic. Yet The Order maintains a drumbeat of tension to the last.

It’s a simplistic film in some ways, with a naive ending – but there is energy and vigour, too.

It’s comedy-drama that is not funny enough to count as a comedy and not plausible enough to count as a drama. You’re going to need a very sweet tooth for it – sweeter than the one I have.

Extraction is a little bit hokey and absurd, and the very end has an exasperating cop-out – but it has to be admitted that, in terms of pure action octane, Russo and Hargrave bring the noise.

The bulky physical presence of Del Toro himself gives the film its momentum and force.

What is interesting about Sauvage is that it shows how savagely boring Leo’s life is, quite a lot of the time.

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.

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

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.

These are brilliant impersonations, the kind that can only be achieved by exceptionally intelligent actors; the superb technique of both is matched by their obvious love for the originals.

It is possible to come away from the film less than convinced, but very impressed by the sheer force of Petzold’s film-making talent (recently so stunning in his drama Transit) but which has been here deployed for something which is a bit flimsy and silly.

Garrel struggles to unearth anything new. The mechanics of the relationships on show fail to lead anywhere unexpected while the dialogue is often flat and on-the-nose.

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.

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

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

An enjoyable double-act – but not an infallible one.

It isn’t that Rosi has removed the context, it is more that he has supplied a new context, a more universalised, humanistic context of the spirit – with some artistic licence. But I felt that his earlier films give us a more intimate access to people’s lives than Notturno does, for all its intelligence, empathy and stoicism.

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.

Breillat’s movie rolls along capably enough while the affair is in progress, but it’s tested to destruction when things go wrong. She is not good at delivering the iciness crucial to the story’s third act, happier as she is with the sunny, languorous sexiness of the amour fou.

It is an uncompromising and exasperating 70-minute cine-collage placed before us on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, composed of fragments of ideas, shards of disillusionment.

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.

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

It’s a documentary that should be shown in all film schools.

Verhoeven just presents us with the raunchiness, using the religiosity as set dressing.

Profile is a pretty conventional thriller with pretty conventional stereotypes.

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

Much but not all of this movie’s good work is undone by its silly and unconvincing ending.

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

Pleasure doesn’t take a doomily disapproving line on porn, and real pornstars and agents are given cameos. Yet neither is it necessarily celebratory or porn-positive. The people in charge are overwhelmingly male and Thyberg shows how the power relations in the business are really the same as they ever were.

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.

Nimona is likable and engaging entertainment that finds its way through self-created chaos to some humane life-lessons.

The effect of this movie by the Australian director Warwick Thornton is cumulative, subtle, almost stealthy.

The whole movie is lit in that fascinatingly artificial honeyglow light, and it runs smoothly on rails – the kind of rails that bring in and out the stage sets for the lucrative Broadway touring version.

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

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

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.

The result is something appreciably sillier and more eccentric than the original ... It’s certainly far from the sophistication and gloss for which Hazanavicius became famous ten years ago with his silent pastiche The Artist; it’s closer to his spy spoof series OSS 117. But it’s likeable and goofy.

Writer-director Sandhya Suri has made a tense, violent and politically savvy crime procedural set in India: a film about sexism, caste bigotry and Islamophobia that doubles as a study in the complex relationship between two female cops, a cynical veteran and a wide-eyed rookie.

Hitchcock's 1926 silent melodrama offers a gripping prehistory not just of his own work, but the Hollywood thriller itself.

An intriguing, bittersweet family study.

As Chiara, Rotolo’s face dominates the screen in closeup for much of the film, and she manages to look very young and yet very worldly wise at the same time. Another very impressive achievement from Carpignano.

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

It’s a time-honoured and perfectly enjoyable setup, and the first act, when the new reality dawns on clueless Bradley, is watchable. But the plot twists are derivative and the action then becomes dependent on weird stabs of grisliness that are not convincing or consistent with the characterisation.

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

Claire Ferguson’s documentary is a powerful, valuable addition to the Holocaust testimony genre.

It’s a strange, violent dream of disorder, drained of ideological meaning.

The film’s relative failure to engage with the more quotidian details of Colvin’s behind-the-scenes existence is a shame, because it is here that some real clues to her personality might have been found.

Infinite Football is an austere 70-minute experience, but the eccentric idealism of Laurențiu Ginghină lingers in the mind.

This is a documentary that discreetly does not concern itself much with Peterson’s personality, and concentrates on the music, which is entirely worthwhile.

What DAU. Natasha shows is the bizarre way that, in totalitarian societies, the normal and the abnormal, the banal and the grotesque, and the human and the inhuman live together side by side.

Ozon has made a decent and valuable film, though it often seems like the drama part of a docudrama: some of the scenes feel like respectful re-enactments that could have gone into a documentary.

This feels like something LaBute wrote in an afternoon on the notes app on his smartphone while thinking about something else.

Martin Eden is a sad story of a sad man who lacks the capacity for happiness and who is astonished to find that artistic success is as compromised as any other kind. But there is a kind of thrill in tracing his progress from rags to riches to annihilation.

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

The rapport between Law and Lively allows the movie both to relax and pick up the pace. Morano puts together good fight scenes, robust stunt work and tasty car chases. It’s destined to be viewed on a million long-haul flights, but it works perfectly well as a thriller.

Hepburn is in the boho-gamine mode, and this has a brittle charm, (arguably more than in Breakfast At Tiffany's four years later) but there is something unconvincing in the May-to-December pairing of 28-year-old Hepburn and 58-year-old Astaire and also something grumpy and not particularly classy about the way this film shrieks with laughter at silly modern women filling their empty heads with trendy Parisian intellectualism.

The film lets you appreciate Hadid’s delicate and complex situation.

The result is a rather stagey film whose back projections look quaint, with 3D apparently used to foreground items of furniture, such as table-lamps, giving rise to some eccentric camera-angles. But the set-up is ingenious and the "kill" scene genuinely thrilling. [2013 3D Release]

I was sometimes captivated but often frustrated by this epic essay-film, a meditation on Germany and his own family history that is stark, fierce, austerely cerebral and almost four hours long.

There are watchable moments, undoubtedly, and it is extraordinary to watch Houston’s sensational performance at the 1991 Super Bowl, singing The Star Spangled Banner with such passion: perhaps the greatest moment of her professional life. Her enigma remains unsolved.

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.

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

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.

All good stuff from Depp, although by sending up Trump’s 1980s period, it feels a little off the money, and this is a figure who has already somehow absorbed derision into his skin and made himself immune to it.

This is a tremendously crafted, impeccably intelligent film.

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

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.

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.

I’m not sure that I was completely on board with this film, which appears to have smoothly carpentered its narrative in the edit. Is it almost too good to be true?

The result is a film with urgency and heartfelt sympathy, but one which I couldn’t help thinking may have been better served as a documentary to focus more directly on the issues involved.

It is another highly sympathetic performance from O’Connor, who converts the British reticence of his earlier roles into Dusty’s strength and quiet vulnerability.

It’s a celebration of her musicality and extraterrestrial scariness, and a reminder that films about female singing stars need not be gallant tributes to tragically doomed fragility.

It's a fascinating story.

I watched this film with translucently white knuckles but also that strange climbing nausea that only this topic can create.

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

For its sheer silliness and towering pointlessness, Julia Ducournau’s gonzo body-horror shaggy-dog story deserves some points.

Billy Wilder's distinctive, irreverent slant on the world's greatest "consulting detective" holds up reasonably well 32 years on; you wouldn't expect anything directed by Wilder and scripted by his long-time associate IAL Diamond to be anything less than funny and watchable, and this is both.

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

It’s a melancholy, interesting film, slightly opaque, a cine-journal about the way youth is clouded by experience.

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

I can't help thinking that the most interesting things happen in the precredit sequence - the fraught childhood, Blanche's sinister "accident" - but it's still vivid, barnstorming stuff.

An elegantly horrible coming-of-age.

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

It is a very grueling spectacle, often brilliant, sometimes slightly redundant and perhaps not able to maintain the storytelling rush of its first act. But it is always weirdly plausible in its pure strangeness and in the oddly poignant moments

It all bounces along amiably enough, due to the high-octane work of Boyega, Foxx and Parris. Perhaps they deserve to be in a more serious film or in a comedy that was skewed more to grownups. Well, it’s a film with its own peculiarly unexpected innocence and charm.

The issues involved here might have been discussed a little more extensively and the provenance and context of the TV interview archive material could have been labelled more clearly. But this is a decent film.

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.

It's a likable film, though not a sensational development in Tim Burton's career.

Simón has an instinctive and almost miraculous way of just immersing herself within extended freewheeling family scenes – her camera moving unobtrusively in the group, like another teenager at the party, quietly noticing everything.

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

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.

Meadows is clearly not interested in lifting the biographical lid on anyone, just getting alongside the band, and picking up on their energy, vulnerability and excitement. He has no agenda; he just loves the Stone Roses, and it's a great, heartfelt tribute.

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

With his two early features, "Distant" (2002) and "Climates" (2006), Ceylan has showed himself a superb film-maker. This is his greatest so far.

As a straight procedural, this might have worked if Egoyan did not try the audience's patience and insult their intelligence with how utterly implausible his drama is. But line by line, scene by scene, it is offensively preposterous and crass.

A drama with interesting moments, but also some false notes and a wildly bizarre ending.

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

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.

The film has charm as well as a certain deja vu for audiences, although for me it didn’t quite have the distinction of Marnie.

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.

Plaza’s natural toughness gives this film some texture, but the truth is she isn’t in it much. You can spend very, very long stretches of the running time longing for her to re-emerge. So, when she doesn’t, it feels bland.

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

It’s still a tremendous spectacle: all four of the musketeers are very attractive characters, particularly the noble and agonised Civil as D’Artagnan.

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.

This is a dark reminder that even childbirth, that most universal human experience, can be clouded by sectarianism and suspicion.

Bones And All is an extravagant and outrageous movie: scary, nasty and startling in its warped romantic idealism.

This film is terrifically acted by its central trio: three intensely and unselfconsciously physical performances in which their bodies are frequently on show, sensual but fragile.

Villeneuve is superb at juxtaposing the colossal spectacle with the intimate encroachment of danger and a mysterious dramatic language that exalts the alienness of every texture and surface.

This is a tear-jerker that does not shrink from using plangent piano chords on the soundtrack to tell you when to feel sad, but it also has something interesting to say about intergenerational wealth.

The ideas here were far more interestingly rehearsed in movies like Tropical Malady and his Palme-winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. A diverting footnote to the main body of work, no more than that.

Gray has given us tough, sinewy and memorable New York movies in the past such as The Yards and We Own the Night, but this is weighed down with a sentimental and self-regarding staginess.

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