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.

What a strange confection White is – an opera of male agony and outrageously implausible picaresque adventure. Yet it succeeds amazingly on its own melodramatic terms.

The point of the film is Sibil’s decades-long ordeal and she emerges with heroic and compelling dignity.

Sofia Coppola's second movie as a director is more than a breakthrough: it's an insouciant triumph. She conjures a terrifically funny, heartbreakingly sad and swooningly romantic movie from almost nowhere and just makes it look very easy - as well as very modern and very sexy. It is a funky little Brief Encounter for the new century.

By any standards, this would be an outstanding film, but for a debut it is remarkable.

I wished I liked it more. It is engagingly self-aware and excruciatingly self-conscious, wearing its hipness on its sleeve; it's ingenious and yet remarkably contrived. The film seems very new, but the sentimental ending is as old as the hills. There are some great moments.

This is such a beguiling, generous film from Gerwig. There is a lot of love in it.

It is strident, yes, and naive, too perhaps; but lyrical and passionate and visually dazzling.

A ripping, gripping yarn, a surprisingly erotic love story and, as it happens, a premonition of Herzog's Fitzcarraldo.

I last encountered the work of the Belgian artist and film-maker Johan Grimonprez in the documentary-reverie Double Take from 2009, which imagined an encounter between two Alfred Hitchcocks. Now in this fascinating and valuably informative film, he amplifies what he sees as the mood music that lay behind the assassination of the leftist Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in 1961.

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

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.

An ambitious epic of tremendous sweep and scope, with trench-warfare battle scenes comparable to Kubrick's Paths of Glory.

The Last Jedi gives you an explosive sugar rush of spectacle. It’s a film that buzzes with belief in itself and its own mythic universe – a euphoric certainty that I think no other movie franchise has. And there is no provisional hesitation or energy dip of the sort that might have been expected between episodes seven and nine.

This is clearly a very personal project for Avilés, and the heartbreak feels very real.

Polley tackles painful issues with candour and tact. She has a gripping tale to tell. It's a film that raises questions about the ownership of memory and ownership of narrative.

This is a survivor’s coming of age: tough, disillusioned, brilliant.

The Boy and the Heron is a valuable new addition to this unique film-artist’s canon, about confronting a terrible sadness and finding a way to replace it with wonder and joy.

Taxi grew on me. It is not as angry and painful as his previous work, the samizdat This Is Not a Film, but it is subtle, humorous and humane. It tells you more about modern Iran, I think, than you’ll discover on the news.

Every moment of Ida feels intensely personal. It is a small gem, tender and bleak, funny and sad, superbly photographed in luminous monochrome: a sort of neo-new wave movie with something of the classic Polish film school and something of Truffaut, but also deadpan flecks of Béla Tarr and Aki Kaurismäki.

Goldin shows that maybe there is always more bloodshed than beauty.

This family could be blown into pieces. And yet an irrepressible defiance and comic energy bubbles under every scene.

Peter Jackson has created a visually staggering thought experiment; an immersive deep-dive into what it was like for ordinary British soldiers on the western front.

Ozu shows how fragile and yet burdensome the institution of the family is.

What would Pretty Woman look like if it bore the smallest resemblance to the reality of sex work? Maybe something like this, Sean Baker’s amazing, full-throttle tragicomedy of romance, denial and betrayal.

The Favourite may have corrected Lanthimos’s tendency towards arthouse torpor. It is a scabrous and often hilarious film, made loopier by the nightmarish visions and wide-angle distortions contrived by the cinematographer Robbie Ryan.

The unmasking "reveal" at the beginning of the movie is a great coup, and the film continues to be very scary, helped by Carpenter's own theme: a trebly plinking of piano notes and that buzzy synth in low register.

It is deeply intelligent, intensely and painfully political, and yet attempts, and succeeds, somehow to transcend politics and perhaps even history itself.