Peter Bradshaw

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

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.

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

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

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

Editors Terry Rawlings and Peter Weatherley cut the film so cleverly so that we never have a clear notion of what the alien actually looks like until the very last shots.

This superbly composed film comes as close to perfection as it gets.

This film is such a rush of vitality. It rocks.

It is strident, yes, and naive, too perhaps; but lyrical and passionate and visually dazzling.

The Fabelmans left me with a floating feeling of happiness.

I was utterly absorbed by this movie’s simple storytelling verve and the terrific lead performances from Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone who are both excellent – particularly Stone, who has never been better.

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

London Road was a mighty success on stage. Now it is a unique triumph on the movie screen.

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

DiCaprio’s performance is excellent; his Romeo is transformed and astonished by the real thing; he has play-acted at love until now, and he hasn’t realised how vulnerable it would make him. Danes looks more mature than he does (though in fact six years younger) and she is such a smart, stylish player, even at this age. The Luhrmann R+J is a tonic and a delight.

Ingmar Bergman's dark masterpiece effortlessly sees off the revisionists and the satirists; it is a radical work of art that reaches back to scripture, to Cervantes and to Shakespeare to create a new dramatic idiom of its own.

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

The unmasking "reveal" at the beginning of the movie is a great coup, and the film continues to be very scary, helped by Carpenter's own theme: a trebly plinking of piano notes and that buzzy synth in low register.

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

Boyega carries the film with a compelling authority of his own.

This is visionary cinema on an unashamedly huge scale: cinema that's thinking big. Malick makes an awful lot of other film-makers look timid and negligible by comparison.

The movie hits its stride immediately with a taut, athletic urgency and it contains some superb images – particularly the eerie miracle of Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane, with Malcolm’s soldiers holding tree-branches over their heads in a restricted forest path and turning themselves into a spectacular river of boughs. This is a black-and-white world of violence and pain that scorches the retina.

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

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

This Superman alludes explicitly to its origins in the Depression-era comics, and Clark has a quaint 30s habit of using the phrase “Swell!” from his boyhood. Maybe now this movie looks quaint in the same way. But there’s still a surge of adventure and fun.

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

There is simply no other film which demonstrates so perfectly what it feels like to be young and in love.

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.

La Chimera is a film that utterly occupies its own fictional space; it expresses its eccentric romance in its own fluent movie dialect. I was utterly captivated by this sad, lovelorn adventure.

West Side Story is contrived, certainly, a hothouse flower of musical theatre, and Spielberg quite rightly doesn’t try hiding any of those stage origins. His mastery of technique is thrilling; I gave my heart to this poignant American fairytale of doomed love.

McDormand is perfect in the role.

A wonderfully composed movie in which Ingmar Bergman is able to vary the tone from melancholy to gaiety in the most deeply satisfying way

The detailed sound design is inspired: the ghostly whine of a phone receiver left off the hook seems to intuit the couple’s inner anxiety – and so does the insistent two-tone blip-blip of Julian’s computer. [Director's Cut]

In a calmly realist, non-mystic movie language, this director really can convince you that the living and the dead, the past and the present, the terrestrial and the other, do exist side by side.

Graduation is an intricate, deeply intelligent film, and a bleak picture of a state of national depression in Romania, where the 90s generation hoped they would have a chance to start again. There are superb performances from Titien and Dragus.

Gary Oldman’s superb livewire performance is now virtually an authentic testament of the man himself. Alfred Molina’s morose, self-hating Halliwell is also utterly convincing: Bennett’s script cleverly conveys their long years of bickering domesticity.

This is a jewel of American cinema.

The film allows you to ponder not just the mother-child bond – strong enough to confront fascism – but the way everyone has to let their children be influenced by strangers; the unintended upbringing of being out in the world. What an emotional experience.

It is brilliant and audacious, with one of the most extraordinary final sequences in modern cinema, and all in a manner which Hollywood in the succeeding decade would learn to call "high concept".

No other later horror film – and certainly none of the many sequels to this one – captured so well the strangeness of living through a long night of evil and emerging into bright sunlight, with its tacit promise of restorative justice or virtue, or just normality.

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

This engrossing film is a time capsule of London itself – the faces not so very different from those you would see in the 40s or 50s.

This new Star Trek is fast-moving, funny, exciting warp-speed entertainment and, heaven help me, even quite moving - the kind of film that shows that, like it or not, commercial cinema can still deliver a sledgehammer punch.

This is a movie of virtuoso nihilism and scorn.

This is terrific film-making – enough to bring a rush of blood to the head.

This is stylish, energised new wave film-making.

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

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

Céline Sciamma’s beautiful fairytale reverie is occasioned by the dual mysteries of memory and the future: simple, elegant and very moving.

Writer-director Emerald Fennell (a showrunner for TV’s Killing Eve) lands a stiletto jab with her feature debut, and Carey Mulligan is demurely brilliant as the appropriately named Cassandra.

I felt wrung out at the end of this film. How incredible must it have been for those who were there in person.

Sublime moments, of which the most extraordinary must still be Everett Sloane, playing Kane's former business manager Mr Bernstein, remembering the girl in the white dress on the Jersey ferry: "I only saw her for one second and she didn't see me at all – but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl." I'll bet a week hasn't gone by when I haven't thought about that line and pictured the girl so clearly that she has become a false memory of the movie itself.

Beanpole is moving, disturbing, overwhelming.

This is a movie about disguise, denial, alienation and the terrible toll taken on the people who make a stand that their fearful or resentful contemporaries see as odd, eccentric or foolhardy – but will later sheepishly admit were entirely right.

Clayton brilliantly uses slow dissolves to create ghostly superimpositions, and the harmless squeals of bath-time fun, or squeakings of a pencil, suggest uncanny screams.

There is genuine fear in its nightmarish tableaux: the breast-feeding woman holding an egg in the ruined churchyard is like a detail from Hieronymus Bosch. And that final sequence, with the eponymous Wicker Man, is inspired.

The cynicism and indifference to suffering is truly horrible, and a kind of insidious evil rises from the screen like carbon monoxide, and also a terrible sadness.

Coppola’s epic storytelling sweep is magnificent: there is an electric charge in simply the shift from New York to California to Sicily and back to New York.

Its effects are essentially theatrical – but they are powerfully achieved, and the performances from Hopkins and Colman are superb. It is a film about grief and what it means to grieve for someone who is still alive.

Anyone who says voting is a waste of time needs to watch this film.

The severity and poise of this calmly paced movie, its emotional reserve and moral seriousness – and the elusive, implied confessional dimension concerning Diop herself – make it an extraordinary experience.

Euphoric, sad and thoughtful all at once, this strange and wonderful film is rounded off with a gloriously well-crafted apocalyptic vision and a chilling intimation of divine retribution for earthly wrongdoing. The Coens have finished the noughties as America's pre-eminent film-makers.

No one but Blanchett could have delivered the imperious hauteur necessary for portraying a great musician heading for a crackup or a creative epiphany. No one but Blanchett has the right way of wearing a two-piece black suit with an open-necked white shirt, the way of shaking her hair loose at moments of abandon, the way of letting her face become a Tutankhamun mask of contempt.

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.

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

This is a powerful, superbly crafted film with a story to tell, avoiding war porn in favour of something desolate and apocalyptic, a beachscape of shame, littered with soldiers zombified with defeat, a grimly male world with hardly any women on screen. It is Nolan’s best film so far.

As with McQueen’s previously premiered Small Axe film, Lovers Rock, there is real fervour and real meaning here: it is film-making with visceral commitment and muscular storytelling.

The Dead of Winter has an old-school barnstorming brashness, some edge-of-the-seat tension, a mile-wide streak of sentimentality, a dash of broad humour and a horrible flourish of the macabre.

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

A brilliant idea, brilliantly executed; hilarious, surreal and, yes, in its weird way, genuinely exciting.

The crystalline black-and-white cinematography exalts its moments of intimate grimness and its dreamlike showpieces of theatrical display. It is an elliptical, episodic story of imprisonment and escape, epic in scope.

An enormous pleasure. The performances are so fresh and natural – yet so subtle and delicately judged. The direction is superb in its control and the cinematography creates a gripping docu-realist vision.

It’s impossible not to be swept along and caught by the details: the pompous army officer falling into the barrel, the anarchist (played by a young Klaus Kinski) watching an old couple affectionately cuddling on the train, Zhivago himself suddenly shocked at his own haggard reflection in the mirror. Lean was hunting big game, and catching it.

It takes its audience on a dizzying swirl, like a waltz, or a champagne-induced headspin.

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

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

This is an extraordinary record. But be warned. Once seen, these images cannot be unseen.

Trier has taken on one of the most difficult genres imaginable, the romantic drama, and combined it with another very tricky style – the coming-of-ager – to craft something gloriously sweet and beguiling.

This wonderfully sweet, sad and funny film simply delivers more moment-by-moment pleasure than anything else around.

Chernov is armed only with a camera, to the astonishment of many soldiers he encounters, and the film was constructed by editing his footage together with that of solders’ helmet cameras and drone material. Chernov shows us how drones are now utterly ubiquitous in war, delivering both the pictures and the assaults.

Somehow, it doesn’t look like something that happened 50 years ago – but rather an extraordinarily detailed futurist fantasy of what might happen in the years to come, if we could only evolve to some higher degree of verve and hope.

There is a wonderful reach and flair in Kieślowski’s film-making.

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.

It’s still a very entertaining and spectacular movie, with a rush of nostalgia to go alongside the exhilaration of fun.

For my money, Bigelow says more about the agony and tragedy of war than all those earnest, well-meaning movies that sound as if they've been co-scripted by Josh and Toby from The West Wing.

The pleasure of the music is overpowering.

The film is gripping enough simply with the telling of George's lifestory. A genuine American classic.

The glorious vigour and strength of this film is presented with such theatrical relish and flair: its energy flashes out of the screen like a sword.

The power of this film creeps up on you by stealth; its dramatic idiom is admittedly mannered in the Leigh style but shy of caricature, and designed consistently to abrade the audience's consciousness without irritating – fingertips down the blackboard, not fingernails.

Its austere beauty, artistry and wrenching sadness are undimmed after 30 years, and there is nothing distant or still about it.

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

The metaphorical properties of The Matrix are part of what makes it so seductive, along with the no-filler-all-killer action.

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

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

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.

I would have loved to hear a discussion on a wider range of issues, particularly #TimesUp, but with a film this much fun, it seems churlish to ask for anything else.

It’s a thoroughly enjoyable film, a crescendo of paranoid trippiness building to an uproarious grossout in its final moments.

Notorious has fascinating echoes of other Hitchcock movies such as Rebecca and Psycho. A must-see or must-see-again.