Peter Bradshaw

Top Hat reflects a transatlantic kind of universe, the Brit dimension absorbed into American waspy class, and sweetened with some mannered comedy; this was a Hollywood that loved PG Wodehouse.

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

Like Panahi’s recent films This Is Not a Film and Taxi Tehran, this is powerful because of its control, subtlety and diplomatic finesse.

It exerts an irresistible pull.

Spotlight never hits the heights of passion, but capably and decently tells an important story.

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.

In a calmly realist, non-mystic movie language, this director really can convince you that the living and the dead, the past and the present, the terrestrial and the other, do exist side by side.

The film features an acting cameo from Siegel’s assistant and protege Sam Peckinpah, who also worked on the script, and is known for its high-octane pulp thrills. It should also be praised for elegant satire.

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.

The dialogue is crackling ("Are you alone?" – "Isn't everyone?") and the set pieces, like the one in the antisemitic old people's home, are just superb. Polanski brilliantly shows that money and power are not what's motivating everyone after all. There's a lower stratum of sexual dysfunction and fear at work, which is difficult, if not impossible to understand:: the ultimate meaning of the chaotic "Chinatown" of the title. Unmissable.

It crept up on me at its own measured walking pace – and it incidentally has the best and cleverest last line of any film I have seen this year.

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

Brando’s charisma sells the climactic scenes with Willard; without his presence, the literary musings would be a little callow.

Abderrahmane Sissako's passionate and visually beautiful film Timbuktu is a cry from the heart.

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

It is a gut-churning film: and a radical dive into history, grabbing the past in a way a conventional documentary would not.

Much of the film immerses us in an unknowable, unrecognisable world under the skin, without shape, without what Vesalius wanted to show us in the 16th century. It is an uncanny spectacle.

It is a sombre and painful drama, enacted with reserve. There are no closeups, and it is fully one hour into the running time before we get even a medium shot of the female lead’s face. Even then there are shadows.

Music is where the film’s emotional meaning is unveiled.

Lovely performances, and more superb gags in one minute than most movies manage in 90. It's like drinking champagne.

The film, with its superb score by Mica Levi and sound design by Johnnie Burn, has undoubted power but might well revive the debate about conjuring slick movie effects from the horrors of history.

No other later horror film – and certainly none of the many sequels to this one – captured so well the strangeness of living through a long night of evil and emerging into bright sunlight, with its tacit promise of restorative justice or virtue, or just normality.

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.

Leviathan is acted and directed with unflinching ambition, moving with deliberative slowness and periodically accelerating at moments of high drama and suspense. It isn't afraid of massive symbolic moments and operatic gestures.

The Souvenir is an artefact in the highest auteur register. Its absence of tonal readability is a challenge. But there is also a cerebrally fierce, slow-burn passion in its austere, unemphasised plainness.

Goodfellas is a compelling, black-comic nightmare.

The Look of Silence — like The Act of Killing — is arresting and important film-making.

This movie, visually and dramatically superb in every way, moves with unhurried confidence across the screen, pausing to savour every bizarre bit of comedy or erotic byway, or note of pathos, on its circuitous path to the violent finale.