Peter Bradshaw

Exhibition is challenging, sensual, brilliant film-making.

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

[An] outrageously enjoyable petrolhead heist caper.

It’s a deeply intelligent and sympathetic rendering of real-life situations, using nonprofessionals playing approximations of themselves.

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.

Goodfellas is a compelling, black-comic nightmare.

What a glorious film this is, richly and immediately enjoyable, hitting its satisfying stride straight away. It's funny and visually immaculate; it combines domestic intimacy with an epic sweep and has a lyrical, mysterious quality that perfumes every scene, whether tragic or comic.

It sure as hell got under mine. Jonathan Glazer's sci-fi horror is loosely adapted, or atmospherically distilled, by Walter Campbell from the 2000 novel by Michel Faber. The result is visually stunning and deeply disturbing: very freaky, very scary, and very erotic. It also comes with a dog whistle of absurdist humour that I suspect has been inaudible for some American reviewers on the international festival circuit so far.

It is an intensely disquieting, utterly distinctive film and a superb final panel to his triptych.

There is something exacting and audacious in it, something superbly controlled in its composition and technique. The clarity of her film-making diction is a marvel – even, or perhaps especially, when the nature of the story itself remains murkily unrevealed.

The film is an enormously satisfying and affecting experience.

The Coens are back with a vengeance, showing their various imitators and detractors what great American filmmaking looks like, and they have supplied a corrective adjustment to the excesses of goofy-quirky comedy that damaged their recent work. The result is a dark, violent, and deeply disquieting drama, leavened with brilliant noirish wisecracks, and boasting three leading male performances with all the spectacular virility of Texan steers.

Django Unchained also has the pure, almost meaningless excitement which I found sorely lacking in Tarantino's previous film, Inglourious Basterds, with its misfiring spaghetti-Nazi trope and boring plot. I can only say Django delivers, wholesale, that particular narcotic and delirious pleasure that Tarantino still knows how to confect in the cinema, something to do with the manipulation of surfaces. It's as unwholesome, deplorable and delicious as a forbidden cigarette.

Seventy years on, this great romantic noir is still grippingly powerful: a movie made at a time when it was far from clear the Nazis were going to lose.

The film is thrillingly, unapologetically about decency and honour, about, as Laura heartrendingly puts it, controlling oneself.

This movie channels the paranoia and bad faith that’s in the air at the moment and converts it into a thriller of visceral hostility and overwhelming nihilism. It’s all killer, no filler.

In the past I have been agnostic and a nay-sayer about M:I, but the pure fun involved in this film, its silly-serious alchemy, and the way the franchise seems to strain at something crazily bigger with every film, as opposed to just winding down, is something to wonder at.

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

An unmissable, transcendentally beautiful classic. [28 Aug. 1998]

Where once Hamaguchi’s film-making language had seemed to me at the level of jeu d’esprit, now it ascends to something with passion and even a kind of grandeur.

Caché is Michael Haneke's masterpiece: a compelling politico-psychological essay about the denial and guilt mixed into the foundations of Western prosperity, composed and filmed with remarkable technique. It is one of the great films of this decade.

Not a romcom, not a romantic drama, but just … a romance, a brief encounter on a train without heartache, a strange and wonderful moment-by-moment miracle that never seems cloying or absurd.

The White Ribbon is a ghost story without a ghost, a whodunnit without a denouement, a historical parable without a lesson, and for two and a half hours, this unforgettably disturbing and mysterious film leads its viewers alongside an abyss of anxiety.

Only the hardest of hearts could fail to enjoy the great 80s action classic, rereleased for its 30th anniversary: with uproarious explosions, deafening shootouts and smart-alec tag lines following the bad guys getting shot.

Baumbach has landed a sizeable white whale in his tremendously elegant and assured adaptation.

Playing Falstaff might have been Welles’s creative and physical destiny: in the character he found a dignity and sensuality in his, by then, overweight form. The confidence and panache of his staging is a treat.

The Death Of Stalin is superbly cast, and acted with icy and ruthless force by an A-list lineup. There are no weak links. Each has a plum role; each squeezes every gorgeous horrible drop.

Abraham Lincoln's second term, with its momentous choices, has been brought to the screen by Steven Spielberg as a fascinatingly theatrical contest of rhetoric and strategy.