Peter Bradshaw

Here is an impossibly elegant, poised historical vignette whose brevity and control can hardly contain its characters’ personal and historical pain.

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.

Only God Forgives will, understandably, have people running for the exits, and running for the hills. It is very violent, but Winding Refn's bizarre infernal creation, an entire created world of fear, really is gripping. Every scene, every frame, is executed with pure formal brilliance.

Birdman is a delicious and delirious pleasure.

The sheer silliness is inspired.

This animated documentary from Danish film-maker Jonas Poher Rasmussen is an irresistibly moving and engrossing story, whose emotional implications we can see being absorbed into the minds of the director and his subject, almost in real time.

It is a demanding film, without a doubt – but a passionate one.

The Innocents is a nightmare unfolding in cold, clear daylight.

[A] sublime classic.

Stanwyck supplies a bravura double performance, a showcase for her brilliant versatility.

The unhurried pace, extended dialogue scenes and those sudden, sinister inter-titles ("One Month Later", "4pm") contribute to the insidious unease. Nicholson's performance as the abusive father who is tipped over the edge is a thrillingly scabrous, black-comic turn, and the final shot of his face in daylight is a masterstroke...Deeply scary and strange.

Andersson’s films are endlessly rewatchable. To view them is to abolish gravity.

RoboCop looks more than ever like Verhoeven’s masterpiece, a classic of 80s Hollywood and apart from everything else a brilliant commentary on the city of Detroit; hi-tech RoboCop is a harbinger of the decline of the automotive industry and the ruin-porn wasteland to come.

It is arguably the best film about the first world war, and still has a reasonable claim to being Stanley Kubrick's best film.

It’s a deeply sweet, happy, gentle film.

It wasn’t until I saw Threads that I found that something on screen could make me break out in a cold, shivering sweat and keep me in that condition for 20 minutes, followed by weeks of depression and anxiety.

Villeneuve is superb at juxtaposing the colossal spectacle with the intimate encroachment of danger and a mysterious dramatic language that exalts the alienness of every texture and surface.

It is a brilliant, subversive account of class relations and the changing times.

So Long, My Son is a piercingly, profoundly moving picture that peels and exposes the senses.

The material is superb, Neil Innes’ music is tremendous and Gilliam’s animations are timelessly brilliant.

A neglected 1976 gem from a neglected Hollywood genius. May was known for her comedy but here proves absolutely fluent in the language of mobster lowlife, with an edge of caustic, disillusioned humour, and strange yet shockingly real outbursts of violence in which cafe owners and bus drivers are suddenly roughed up.