Peter Bradshaw

Beasts of the Southern Wild is a vividly poetic and maybe even therapeutic response to one of the most painful and mortifying episodes in modern American history, second only to 9/11.

Persona is a film to make you shiver with fascination, or incomprehension, or desire.

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

The elusiveness of the film is precisely the point: it is as beautiful and mysterious as a poem and its formal elegance and conviction are unarguable. What makes it a must-see, however, is the generous, unselfconscious passion of Jacob's performance as a young woman - two young women - in love.

Korean director Park Chan-wook’s new film brings his usual effortlessly fluent, steely confidence and a type of storytelling momentum that can accommodate all kinds of digressions, set-pieces and the occasional trance-like submission to mysterious visions.

This film is making a wheezing, spluttering sound: the sound of a profitable YA franchise running out of steam.

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.

Both Culkin and Eisenberg are excellent and this is such a pleasure.

Atlantique may not be perfect, but I admired the way that Diop did not simply submit to the realist mode expected from this kind of material, and yet neither did she go into a cliched magic-realist mode, nor make the romantic story the film’s obvious centre. Her film has a seductive mystery.

It comes from the age of Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange, but none of those movies can match the sheer hardcore shock of the Australian New Wave nightmare Wake in Fright from 1971.

The visual brilliance of this film combines with shroomy toxicity and inexplicable moral grandeur: what a stunning experience.

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

I have to say that Clift's plot is far less compelling than Lancaster's and something of the zip goes when Frank Sinatra disappears from the action, sent to the stockade. But what a punch this movie still packs.

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.

The Salesman is a well-crafted, valuable drama.

It is an invigorating and enlivening film.

Get Out is very creepy, very funny and as pitiless as a surgeon’s scalpel.

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.

It is an overwhelming story, and despite everyone knowing the ending, it is as gripping as a thriller: Kapadia has fashioned and shaped it with masterly flair.

This intriguing documentary from Croatian film-maker Igor Bezinović is partly a comic opera and partly a chilling message from the past.

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.

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

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

This is a movie using non-professionals playing versions of themselves, and under Zhao’s patient, unintrusive directorial eye they appear to be inhabiting a kind of heightened documentary.

Two hours in this director’s company is a pleasure.

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.

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.

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