Peter Bradshaw

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.