Peter Bradshaw

Birdman is a delicious and delirious pleasure.

The law about movie characters needing to be sympathetic is defied in this horribly fascinating true-crime black comedy.

As buoyant and elegant as bubbles in a glass of champagne, Frank Capra's sublime 1934 comedy, written by long-time collaborator Robert Riskin, survives triumphantly because of its wit, charm, romantic idealism and its shrewd sketch of married life.

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.

This inspirationally lovely and gentle film has a real claim to be Miyazaki’s masterpiece, or first among equals in his collection, with a simple hand-drawn design whose innocence only becomes more beguiling with repeated viewings, along with its bright, expansive, Gershwin-esque musical score.

In acting terms Tom Hulce's shrieking, giggling Wolfie was easily outclassed by F Murray Abraham's brooding Iago-like villain, but Forman's distinctive central European locations, painterly night-time exteriors and period crowd scenes still look terrific. [2002 Director's Cut]

Chahine conducts his big cast with uproarious energy, immediacy and freshness; he has tremendous stylised set pieces, including a railway-carriage rock'n'roll number performed by a group gloriously credited as Mike and his Skyrockets.

As ever, Almodóvar has made a film about pleasure, which is itself a pleasure: witty, intelligent and sensuous.

It's beautiful and strange, with its profoundly disturbing ambient sound design of industrial groaning, as if filmed inside some collapsing factory or gigantic dying organism.

It had a miraculously literate script whose every line deservedly became a quotable classic and the film boasts a once-in-a-lifetime combination of perfect performances from Paul McGann and Richard E. Grant as the loafing actors heading for a terrible bucolic weekend, Ralph Brown as drug-dealing Danny and Richard Griffiths as predatory Uncle Monty.

The implacable forces of nature, nurture and destiny are what this movie grapples with; it is a really emotional and absorbing drama about adoption with terrific performances (many from nonprofessional first-timers) and compelling soundtrack musical cues.

This is a great documentary about people who are serious about music and serious also about art, and what it means to live as an artist.

Shaunak Sen’s documentary is a complex, thoughtful, quietly beautiful film about the ecosystem and human community.

There is a wonderful reach and flair in Kieślowski’s film-making.

The sleek, stark images of this film are hypnotic; the faces are compelling and the hallucinatory finale is rather inspired. An arresting piece of work.

Mulholland Drive is as brilliant and disquieting as anything Lynch has ever done. It is psychotically lucid, oppressively strange, but with a powerfully erotic and humanly intimate dimension that Lynch never quite achieved elsewhere. It is a fantasia of illusion and identity, a meditation on the mystery of casting in art as in life: the vital importance of finding the right role.

Fire at Sea is masterly film-making.

Over two-and-a-half hours, you get a lot of deafening bangs for your buck, and the tourist location stunts are impressive - but there isn’t as much humour in the dialogue as before.

F for Fake is a minor work in some ways, but there is fascination and poignancy in seeing Welles's elegant retreat into this hall of mirrors.

A pioneering glory of the new wave.

This is Boseman’s final performance on screen, and what a glorious performance to go out on. It is a head-butting confrontation of the galácticos: Davis and Boseman are each the immovable object and irresistible force.

This is a suspense classic that leaves teeth-marks.

A stirring classic.

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.

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

It is an intensely disquieting, utterly distinctive film and a superb final panel to his triptych.

Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland is an utterly inspired docu-fictional hybrid, like her previous feature The Rider. It is a gentle, compassionate, questioning film about the American soul.

There is something, for me, unrevealing about the drama, and almost sentimental about the final moments. But Hovig and Skarsgård are both very good.