Peter Bradshaw

This is a fluent, watchable piece of work, though not quite as lucid as it might have been. A poignant tribute, at any rate, to the lost innocence of skateboarding.

A tense dramatic situation and a subtly magnificent central performance from Marion Cotillard add up to an outstanding new movie from the Dardenne brothers.

This is an utterly absorbing film, a story that Scorsese sees as a secret history of American power, a hidden violence epidemic polluting the water table of humanity.

The comedy co-exists with a dark view of life's brevity, and Kurosawa devises exhilarating setpieces and captivating images. Arthouse classics aren't usually as welcoming and entertaining as this.

A peculiar, potent film.

This is a heartfelt movie, a documentary unafraid to spread itself across its vast subject matter, and a fierce denunciation of the arrogant political classes, still in denial about one of the biggest tragedies in American history.

This is a wonderfully absorbing and moving family drama with a buttery, sunlit streak of sentimentality.

Barry Lyndon is an intimate epic of utter lucidity and command.

The pure craziness is a marvel.

There is a kind of solidity and force to the film in its opening act, but its interest dwindles and we get little in the way of either ambition or moment-by-moment humour.

Great Freedom is a formidably intelligent and well-acted prison movie and also a love story – or perhaps a paradoxically platonic bromance, stretching from the end of the second world war to the moon landing.

A grisly, gripping watch.

The film is gripping enough simply with the telling of George's lifestory. A genuine American classic.

The secret life of farm animals remains a secret, but a fascinating and even poignant one, in this strange and unexpectedly subtle film from the Russian documentary-maker Viktor Kossakovsky.

The Power of the Dog is a made with artistry and command: it is one of Jane Campion’s best.

There are some marvellous supporting performances. This film comes as close as possible to a distillation of pure happiness.

Editors Terry Rawlings and Peter Weatherley cut the film so cleverly so that we never have a clear notion of what the alien actually looks like until the very last shots.

Columbus is an engrossing and unexpectedly passionate film, although much of the passion is displaced outwards into a feeling for space, for mass, for building materials. It is a static passion, but not inert.

It is an ordeal of gruesomeness and tiresomeness that was every bit as exasperating as I had feared.

It all builds up to a remarkable coup de cinéma: a Buñuelian finale that is startling and moving. This is both an exploratory personal project and a thought-experiment of a film.

There is some stuffy, faintly reactionary stuff in this famed 1955 teen drama, but James Dean is truly extraordinary, and it has some brilliant scenes

This beautiful and compassionate film from first-time feature director Colm Bairéad, based on the novella Foster by Claire Keegan, is a child’s-eye look at our fallen world; already it feels to me like a classic.

A chilling and utterly brilliant film whose final, excoriating sequence is frankly sufficient on its own to justify the genius tag.

While the 1960s swung, this spirited, good-natured but creakily old-fashioned picture lived in a different zeitgeist.

A classic, not to be missed.

There is such artistry and audacity in this new film by the 30-year-old Chinese director Bi Gan. Long Day’s Journey Into Night, a hallucinatory experience whose sinuous camera movements take you on a long journey into memory and fear and a night full of dreams.

A wonderfully composed movie in which Ingmar Bergman is able to vary the tone from melancholy to gaiety in the most deeply satisfying way

It is an agonisingly tough watch, crackling with tension.