Peter Bradshaw

Freaks is filled with poignancy; it offers a premonition of eugenics, as well as a provocative comparison with the alienated condition of women and the freakish nature of all showbiz celebrity. It is a work of genius.

The icy message may be that love is not a consolation as we face death. Rather the reverse. Love will give your death meaning, but make it no less unbearable.

With music by Zbigniew Preisner, it is an almost supernatural contrivance: brooding on coincidence, fate and the insoluble mystery of other people’s lives, with some cosmic parallels and existential echoes that recall his earlier film The Double Life of Véronique. And all in a tone somehow both playful and laden with gnomic seriousness.

The elements of silliness and deadly seriousness are nicely balanced and although I wasn’t absolutely sure about the ending, which has maybe too neat a bow tied on it, this is just very enjoyable and I was on the edge of my seat, not knowing whether to flinch or laugh, though I did both.

Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy are joined by Caine as a hilarious Scrooge in this irresistibly sweet musical adaptation of Dickens’ festive tale.

Attenborough matches the natural world’s grandeur with his own intellectual and moral seriousness.

A deeply humane and emotionally literate piece of work.

FW Murnau's classic 1927 silent is one of the first movies with a really substantial feature-length narrative: an exuberant pioneer picture conceived on a big canvas, blazing an inspirational trail for just about everything Hollywood has done since. [06 Feb 2004, p.15]

What makes the film so compelling is the ferocious ingenuity with which Moodysson ratchets up the fear and astonishment that accompany Lilya's all too believable descent.

Hitchcock's superbly insouciant crime caper from 1955 must surely be one of the last movies in which the American super-rich are indulged so extravagantly and adoringly – the kind of people who stub their cigarettes out in fried eggs.

The Force Awakens is ridiculous and melodramatic and sentimental of course, but exciting and brimming with energy and its own kind of generosity. What a Christmas present.

It's beautiful and strange, with its profoundly disturbing ambient sound design of industrial groaning, as if filmed inside some collapsing factory or gigantic dying organism.

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

As buoyant and elegant as bubbles in a glass of champagne, Frank Capra's sublime 1934 comedy, written by long-time collaborator Robert Riskin, survives triumphantly because of its wit, charm, romantic idealism and its shrewd sketch of married life.

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

A film that needs to be seen on the big screen.

The story unfolds in a daring sequence of narrative leaps.

The strange, dreamlike tension of the film escalates with each new confrontation, each new tailing, each new beating, with Gutman and Cairo shot from a queasy low angle, and the nightmare culminates in a gripping series of closeups on each strained face.

McQueen’s compositional sense is a marvel; the movie’s period and location is evoked with masterly skill, and the romance is wonderful. What a cure for lockdown depression.

This is a film with thrilling directness and storytelling force, a movie that fills its widescreen and three-and-a half-hour running time with absolute certainty and ease, as well as glorious amplitude, clarity and even simplicity – and yet also with something darkly mysterious and uncanny to be divined in its handsome shape.

Despite its earnest endorsement of the idea that there's no place like home ... well, frankly there are plenty of places like boring old home, but nothing's like Oz.

The film creates space for Hinds and Manville to give substantial, intimate, complex performances of the kind that most movies (of whatever sort) do not allow their leads, and Manville in particular is very moving.

This rich and mysterious film is a real achievement.

[Hara's] sad dignity and emotional generosity are compelling.

There is a freshness and emotional clarity in Payal Kapadia’s Cannes competition selection, an enriching humanity and gentleness which coexist with fervent, languorous eroticism and finally something epiphanic in the later scenes and mysterious final moments.

This inspirationally lovely and gentle film has a real claim to be Miyazaki’s masterpiece, or first among equals in his collection, with a simple hand-drawn design whose innocence only becomes more beguiling with repeated viewings, along with its bright, expansive, Gershwin-esque musical score.

A gentle, exquisitely sad film.

Hollywood here looks diabolically seductive.