Peter Bradshaw

Out of agony and chaos, Chinese film-maker Lou Ye has created something mysterious, moving and even profound – a kind of multilayered docu-realist film, evidently inspired by a real-life situation in film production.

The reggae soundtrack throbs and crunches and shudders in concert with the raw energy of Henzell’s storytelling and Cliff’s performance, but this doesn’t preclude a shrewdly self-aware debate about representation.

The combustion engine gave humanity the new experience of speed; now the movie camera gave us a dizzying new speed of perception and creation.

Youth is a great theme of Linklater’s, but presented without any great directional moralising or emotional narrative. Being young just is. This is a film of enormous charm.

The double act of McKellen and Coel has the onscreen chemistry of the year.

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.

This superbly composed film comes as close to perfection as it gets.

This film is such a rush of vitality. It rocks.

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

The Fabelmans left me with a floating feeling of happiness.

I was utterly absorbed by this movie’s simple storytelling verve and the terrific lead performances from Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone who are both excellent – particularly Stone, who has never been better.

It’s a great piece of Hollywood confectionery, and you might well find yourself choking up a little at the end.

London Road was a mighty success on stage. Now it is a unique triumph on the movie screen.

A really absorbing and powerfully acted drama, guided with a distinctive kind of Zen wisdom by Sayles.

DiCaprio’s performance is excellent; his Romeo is transformed and astonished by the real thing; he has play-acted at love until now, and he hasn’t realised how vulnerable it would make him. Danes looks more mature than he does (though in fact six years younger) and she is such a smart, stylish player, even at this age. The Luhrmann R+J is a tonic and a delight.

Ingmar Bergman's dark masterpiece effortlessly sees off the revisionists and the satirists; it is a radical work of art that reaches back to scripture, to Cervantes and to Shakespeare to create a new dramatic idiom of its own.

I have to admit, in all its surreal grandiosity, in all its delirious absurdity, there is a huge sugar rush of excitement to this mighty finale, finally interchanging with euphoric emotion and allowing us to say poignant farewells.

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.

With his two early features, "Distant" (2002) and "Climates" (2006), Ceylan has showed himself a superb film-maker. This is his greatest so far.

Boyega carries the film with a compelling authority of his own.

This is visionary cinema on an unashamedly huge scale: cinema that's thinking big. Malick makes an awful lot of other film-makers look timid and negligible by comparison.

The movie hits its stride immediately with a taut, athletic urgency and it contains some superb images – particularly the eerie miracle of Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane, with Malcolm’s soldiers holding tree-branches over their heads in a restricted forest path and turning themselves into a spectacular river of boughs. This is a black-and-white world of violence and pain that scorches the retina.

Claire Ferguson’s documentary is a powerful, valuable addition to the Holocaust testimony genre.

This is a hothouse flower of pure orchidaceous strangeness, enclosed in the studio’s artificial universe, fusing cinema, opera and ballet.

This Superman alludes explicitly to its origins in the Depression-era comics, and Clark has a quaint 30s habit of using the phrase “Swell!” from his boyhood. Maybe now this movie looks quaint in the same way. But there’s still a surge of adventure and fun.

There is something quietly magnificent in it. Moments like these in life are poignantly brief – but many never have them at all. It’s a lovely film.

There is simply no other film which demonstrates so perfectly what it feels like to be young and in love.

This is a deadpan comedy which strides off down its own confident, eccentric path, and actually the whole heist trope is subverted from the outset by the purely un-tense way the robbery is shown.

La Chimera is a film that utterly occupies its own fictional space; it expresses its eccentric romance in its own fluent movie dialect. I was utterly captivated by this sad, lovelorn adventure.

West Side Story is contrived, certainly, a hothouse flower of musical theatre, and Spielberg quite rightly doesn’t try hiding any of those stage origins. His mastery of technique is thrilling; I gave my heart to this poignant American fairytale of doomed love.

McDormand is perfect in the role.

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

The detailed sound design is inspired: the ghostly whine of a phone receiver left off the hook seems to intuit the couple’s inner anxiety – and so does the insistent two-tone blip-blip of Julian’s computer. [Director's Cut]

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.

Graduation is an intricate, deeply intelligent film, and a bleak picture of a state of national depression in Romania, where the 90s generation hoped they would have a chance to start again. There are superb performances from Titien and Dragus.

Gary Oldman’s superb livewire performance is now virtually an authentic testament of the man himself. Alfred Molina’s morose, self-hating Halliwell is also utterly convincing: Bennett’s script cleverly conveys their long years of bickering domesticity.

This is a jewel of American cinema.

The film allows you to ponder not just the mother-child bond – strong enough to confront fascism – but the way everyone has to let their children be influenced by strangers; the unintended upbringing of being out in the world. What an emotional experience.

It is brilliant and audacious, with one of the most extraordinary final sequences in modern cinema, and all in a manner which Hollywood in the succeeding decade would learn to call "high concept".

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.

Perhaps that final meeting in Lasker-Wallfisch’s front room does not offer closure. Nothing could. An amazing and dramatic historical tableau nonetheless.

This engrossing film is a time capsule of London itself – the faces not so very different from those you would see in the 40s or 50s.

This new Star Trek is fast-moving, funny, exciting warp-speed entertainment and, heaven help me, even quite moving - the kind of film that shows that, like it or not, commercial cinema can still deliver a sledgehammer punch.

This is a movie of virtuoso nihilism and scorn.

This is terrific film-making – enough to bring a rush of blood to the head.

This is stylish, energised new wave film-making.

A Fantastic Woman is a brilliant film: a richly humane, moving study of someone keeping alive the memory and the fact of love.

It’s a documentary that should be shown in all film schools.

Céline Sciamma’s beautiful fairytale reverie is occasioned by the dual mysteries of memory and the future: simple, elegant and very moving.

Writer-director Emerald Fennell (a showrunner for TV’s Killing Eve) lands a stiletto jab with her feature debut, and Carey Mulligan is demurely brilliant as the appropriately named Cassandra.

I felt wrung out at the end of this film. How incredible must it have been for those who were there in person.

Sublime moments, of which the most extraordinary must still be Everett Sloane, playing Kane's former business manager Mr Bernstein, remembering the girl in the white dress on the Jersey ferry: "I only saw her for one second and she didn't see me at all – but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl." I'll bet a week hasn't gone by when I haven't thought about that line and pictured the girl so clearly that she has become a false memory of the movie itself.

Beanpole is moving, disturbing, overwhelming.

This is a movie about disguise, denial, alienation and the terrible toll taken on the people who make a stand that their fearful or resentful contemporaries see as odd, eccentric or foolhardy – but will later sheepishly admit were entirely right.

Clayton brilliantly uses slow dissolves to create ghostly superimpositions, and the harmless squeals of bath-time fun, or squeakings of a pencil, suggest uncanny screams.

There is genuine fear in its nightmarish tableaux: the breast-feeding woman holding an egg in the ruined churchyard is like a detail from Hieronymus Bosch. And that final sequence, with the eponymous Wicker Man, is inspired.

The cynicism and indifference to suffering is truly horrible, and a kind of insidious evil rises from the screen like carbon monoxide, and also a terrible sadness.

Coppola’s epic storytelling sweep is magnificent: there is an electric charge in simply the shift from New York to California to Sicily and back to New York.

Its effects are essentially theatrical – but they are powerfully achieved, and the performances from Hopkins and Colman are superb. It is a film about grief and what it means to grieve for someone who is still alive.

Anyone who says voting is a waste of time needs to watch this film.

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.

Euphoric, sad and thoughtful all at once, this strange and wonderful film is rounded off with a gloriously well-crafted apocalyptic vision and a chilling intimation of divine retribution for earthly wrongdoing. The Coens have finished the noughties as America's pre-eminent film-makers.

No one but Blanchett could have delivered the imperious hauteur necessary for portraying a great musician heading for a crackup or a creative epiphany. No one but Blanchett has the right way of wearing a two-piece black suit with an open-necked white shirt, the way of shaking her hair loose at moments of abandon, the way of letting her face become a Tutankhamun mask of contempt.

What DAU. Natasha shows is the bizarre way that, in totalitarian societies, the normal and the abnormal, the banal and the grotesque, and the human and the inhuman live together side by side.

It is a mesmeric melodrama, mixing sensuality with a teetering anxiety, balancing on a cliff-edge of disaster.

This is a powerful, superbly crafted film with a story to tell, avoiding war porn in favour of something desolate and apocalyptic, a beachscape of shame, littered with soldiers zombified with defeat, a grimly male world with hardly any women on screen. It is Nolan’s best film so far.

As with McQueen’s previously premiered Small Axe film, Lovers Rock, there is real fervour and real meaning here: it is film-making with visceral commitment and muscular storytelling.

The Dead of Winter has an old-school barnstorming brashness, some edge-of-the-seat tension, a mile-wide streak of sentimentality, a dash of broad humour and a horrible flourish of the macabre.

After all those false dawns, non-comebacks and semi-successful Euro jeux d'esprit, Allen has produced an outstanding movie, immensely satisfying and absorbing, and set squarely on American turf: that is, partly in San Francisco and partly in New York.

A brilliant idea, brilliantly executed; hilarious, surreal and, yes, in its weird way, genuinely exciting.

The crystalline black-and-white cinematography exalts its moments of intimate grimness and its dreamlike showpieces of theatrical display. It is an elliptical, episodic story of imprisonment and escape, epic in scope.

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.

It’s impossible not to be swept along and caught by the details: the pompous army officer falling into the barrel, the anarchist (played by a young Klaus Kinski) watching an old couple affectionately cuddling on the train, Zhivago himself suddenly shocked at his own haggard reflection in the mirror. Lean was hunting big game, and catching it.

It takes its audience on a dizzying swirl, like a waltz, or a champagne-induced headspin.

Bones And All is an extravagant and outrageous movie: scary, nasty and startling in its warped romantic idealism.

A bold, intelligent, romantic film with all the lineaments of a classic, and a score by Vangelis as instantly hummable as the music for Jaws.

This is an extraordinary record. But be warned. Once seen, these images cannot be unseen.

Trier has taken on one of the most difficult genres imaginable, the romantic drama, and combined it with another very tricky style – the coming-of-ager – to craft something gloriously sweet and beguiling.

This wonderfully sweet, sad and funny film simply delivers more moment-by-moment pleasure than anything else around.

Chernov is armed only with a camera, to the astonishment of many soldiers he encounters, and the film was constructed by editing his footage together with that of solders’ helmet cameras and drone material. Chernov shows us how drones are now utterly ubiquitous in war, delivering both the pictures and the assaults.

Somehow, it doesn’t look like something that happened 50 years ago – but rather an extraordinarily detailed futurist fantasy of what might happen in the years to come, if we could only evolve to some higher degree of verve and hope.

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

But what a triumph this film was for Chapman, who gave a convincing, touching performance as the bewildered everyman who decides to make a stand, and in his battle with the evil empire makes a Luke Skywalker-style discovery about his lineage. Life of Brian is an unexpectedly earnest, sweet-natured hymn to the idea of tolerance.

It’s still a very entertaining and spectacular movie, with a rush of nostalgia to go alongside the exhilaration of fun.

For my money, Bigelow says more about the agony and tragedy of war than all those earnest, well-meaning movies that sound as if they've been co-scripted by Josh and Toby from The West Wing.

The pleasure of the music is overpowering.

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

The glorious vigour and strength of this film is presented with such theatrical relish and flair: its energy flashes out of the screen like a sword.

The power of this film creeps up on you by stealth; its dramatic idiom is admittedly mannered in the Leigh style but shy of caricature, and designed consistently to abrade the audience's consciousness without irritating – fingertips down the blackboard, not fingernails.

Its austere beauty, artistry and wrenching sadness are undimmed after 30 years, and there is nothing distant or still about it.

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.

The silence of Jeanne Dielman is the film’s weather and its atmosphere. It is a silence of terrible loneliness, and a silence in which a storm is gathering.

It is even better than the first film, and has the greatest single final scene in Hollywood history, a real coup de cinéma.

As with so many of Denis’ films, the point is to contrive an overwhelmingly powerful mood and moment, an almost physiological sensation, this one incubated in the vast, cold reaches of space. It throbbed and itched with me long after the film was over.

It is extremely pleasurable to watch, and shows every sign of having been extremely pleasurable to make.

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

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.

It is a tremendously engaging story which does something that very few movies do: mention money. Something very palpable is at stake, the jeopardy is real and it’s a question of survival.

The movie's blazing energy is still astounding; the vérité street-scenes are terrific and Scorsese's pioneering use of popular music is genuinely thrilling.

One Battle After Another is at once serious and unserious, exciting and baffling, a tonal fusion sending that crazy fizz across the VistaVision screen – an acquired taste, yes, but addictive. The title itself hints at an unending culture war presented as a crazily extreme action movie with superbly managed car chases and a final, dreamlike and hypnotic succession of three cars through the undulating hills. And is the central paternity crisis triangle an image for an ownership dispute around the American melting-pot dream?

Blade Runner 2049 is a narcotic spectacle of eerie and pitiless vastness, by turns satirical, tragic and romantic.

Very few films can make you scared and excited at the same time. Just like the lighthouse beam, this is dazzling and dangerous.

This is a suspense classic that leaves teeth-marks.

Copa 71 is a revolutionary political parable that goes beyond football.

Fire at Sea is masterly film-making.

Something in its mandarin blankness and balletic vastness, and refusal to trade in the emollient dramatic forms of human interest and human sympathy. Kubrick leaves usual considerations behind with his readiness to imagine a post-human future.

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

The “fascist” staging could have been hackneyed, but Loncraine carries it off superbly as the showcase for action-thriller noir.

The co-directors created from Rumer Godden's novel an extraordinary melodrama of repressed love and Forsterian Englishness - or rather Irishness - coming unglued in the vertiginous landscape of South Asia.

This is an unmissable commentary on Hollywood's rejection of its silent past: a kind of Sobbin' in the Rain.

It’s a tremendous film that was ahead of its time on LGBT issues and, in some ways, is ahead of ours.

This is a pellucid and gentle film, made with the simplicity and grace of a children's tale and yet its humour, emotional clarity and directness speak directly to adults and children alike - and the pre-teen principals shoulder an adult burden of performance.

There’s plenty for nostalgists and completists to swoon over. . . . Such a pleasure.

Roman Polanski's sensational 1962 debut...is an example of how a superlative director makes a film from the simplest materials.

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

Hard to Be a God creates its own uncanny world: it is beautiful, brilliant and bizarre.

What an addictive romantic drama it is, mixing sentimentality with pure rapture.

The greatest ever making-of documentary.

Ray's language of cinema is a kind of miraculous vernacular, all his own. It has mystery, eroticism and delight.

Paul Greengrass and his cinematographer Barry Ackroyd have created an intestinally powerful and magnificent memorial to the passengers of that doomed flight. It is the film of the year. I needed to lie down in a darkened room afterwards. So will you.

An arrestingly bizarre experience.

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.

It remains breathtakingly good. There is a miraculous, unforced ease and naturalness in the acting and direction; it is classic movie storytelling in the service of important themes.

It is all entertainingly absurd and yet the pure conviction and deadpan focus that Fassbender and Fincher bring to this ballet of anonymous professionalism makes it very enjoyable. And there are moments when the veneer of realism is disquieting.

This is an utterly absorbing and outstandingly acted film.

What is still amazing is how brief an instant it was; in just a few years, the Beatles and their music would evolve into something completely different. A few years after that, they would break up, while still only in their 20s. An amazing split-second of cultural history.

It’s a glorious celebratory montage of archive material, live performance footage, Bowie’s own experimental video art and paintings, movie and stage work and interviews with various normcore TV personalities with whom Bowie is unfailingly polite, open and charming.

It is a brilliant film, but there is nothing sweet about it.

It is a very disturbing parable of the insidious micro-processes of tyranny.

This is a film that carries you along and there is an added savour in seeing those cherubic faces which have since settled into middle age.

Pure evil is all around in this unnervingly subtle, sophisticated movie; an eerie oppression in the air.

Before Midnight is intimate and intelligent, and also undemanding in the best possible way,

It’s a compelling, visually exquisite piece of work.

There is such simplicity and clarity here, an honest apportioning of dignity and intelligence to everyone on screen: every scene and every character portrait is unforced and unembellished. The straightforward assertion of hope through giving help and asking for help is very powerful.

This film succeeds, not because it solves the mystery, but because it deepens it still further. It is contrived and speculative, but ingenious and impassioned at the same time.

Eisenstein's film still has a hypnotic urgency.

It comes from the age of Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange, but none of those movies can match the sheer hardcore shock of the Australian New Wave nightmare Wake in Fright from 1971.

It’s all so inventively bizarre that you could treat it simply as a black comedy, but in the final 15 minutes there is an amazing crescendo of emotion.

Reinvented by Wilder and co-screenwriter co-writer IAL Diamond, Some Like It Hot is effortlessly fluent, joyous and buoyant: a high-concept comedy that stays as high as a kite, while other comedies flag. "Nobody's perfect" is the last line. Wilder, Lemmon, Curtis and Monroe come pretty close.

The Wild Pear Tree is a gentle, humane, beautifully made and magnificently acted movie.

It is a creamily sensuous, richly observed piece of work, handsomely detailed and furnished: the clothes, the hair, the automobiles, the train carriages, the record players, the lipstick and the cigarettes are all superbly presented. The combination of all this is intoxicating in itself.

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

At times it feels novelistic, a densely realised, intimate drama giving us access to domestic lives developing in what feels like real time. In its engagingly episodic way, it is also at times like a soap opera or telenovela. And at other times it feels resoundingly like an epic.

It is about grief and about the shock of grief and the stabbing fear which, in its terrifying way, gives you a clarified view of your own existence. A film to wonder at.

This, the film says, is what it really feels like to be on the receiving end of the law in a case like this: a calm, professional, technocratic but relentless display of overwhelming power.

Get Out is very creepy, very funny and as pitiless as a surgeon’s scalpel.

For a film as over-the-top as this, it might be counterintuitive to talk about subtlety, but Stewart is genuinely that; her line readings are coolly calibrated, quizzical, restrained, sometimes infinitesimally double-taking at the bizarre or outrageous things happening in front of her.

This film is a gruelling experience and Dirk Bogarde’s coup de grâce is the most horrible effect of all.

Mitchell brings off some sensational setpieces of fear and suspense. I can’t remember when I was last so royally freaked out in the cinema.

LA film-maker Anna Biller achieves an ecstasy of artificiality in this amazing retro fantasy horror, delivered with absolute conviction.

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.

This film opens up the storytelling throttle with a throaty growl, delivering the doomy romance of an old-fashioned western and the thrills of a mob drama.

With remarkable confidence, [Wells] just lets her movie unspool naturally, like a haunting and deceptively simple short story. The details accumulate; the images reverberate; the unshowy gentleness of the central relationship inexorably deepens in importance.

The mystery of other people’s lives, the unbridgeable gulf between us all – even, or especially, between married couples – is the subject of this outstanding drama from first-time film-maker Aleem Khan.

It’s a gorgeously and grippingly made picture and Tang Wei is magnificent.

It is an absorbing and satisfying drama, and Hurt’s Merrick is very powerful.

François Ozon’s lustrously beautiful and superbly realised monochrome version of Albert Camus’s novella L’Etranger has an almost supernaturally detailed sense of period and place. It amounts to a passionate act of ancestor worship in honour of a renowned French artwork, though by making changes that bring a contemporary perspective on the book’s themes of empire and race – changes that include a critique of the original text – this adaptation perhaps loses some of its source material’s brutal, heartless power and arguably some of the title’s meaning.

Both Culkin and Eisenberg are excellent and this is such a pleasure.

It is not free of plot-holes...but what a supremely stylish and watchable picture it is.

A movie with incomparable bite and strength.

For its control of narrative, its photography of the vanished suburban California of the 1940s, and for its compelling central performance from Crawford, Michael Curtiz’s noir thriller is utterly gripping.

Mike Leigh brings an overwhelming simplicity and severity to this historical epic, which begins with rhetoric and ends in violence. There is force, grit and, above all, a sense of purpose; a sense that the story he has to tell is important and real, and that it needs to be heard right now.

This glorious film is about the greatest mystery of all: how old people were once young, and how young people are in the process of becoming old.

There is such pure delicious pleasure in this film, in its strangeness, its vehemence, its flourishes of absurdity, carried off with superb elegance.

Happy As Lazzaro itself is a weightless enigma, an unfathomable promise of happiness, gently tugging you upward, like a balloon on the end of a string.

The film, with its transcendentally beautiful visuals...is a rich and rewarding experience. [1 Sept. 2011]

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.

Every frame of this film is brilliantly contrived, particularly the underwater nightmare at the end. A gripping, complex chiller.

It is a beautifully acted, exquisitely considered chamber drama of subtlety and nuance: spellbindingly tender and utterly involving

Interview With the Vampire is still horribly exciting, shocking and funny.

An absorbing and nourishing documentary.

This gripping thriller, part of the BFI's Bogarde retrospective, daringly smashed through 1961's homosexual taboos, but has weathered best as a study of blackmail and paranoia.

No-one but Scorsese and this glorious cast could have made this movie live as richly and compellingly as it does, and persuade us that its tropes and images are still vital.

This movie looks and feels superb, it is pure couture cinema. But there is also a excess of richness and bombast and for all its sleekness I felt that the spark of emotion was being hidden, and there is a kind of frustration in the operatic sadness.

The pure craziness is a marvel.

Interestingly the story, despite the classic music-biopic tropes that Mangold did so much to popularise, does not conform to the classic rise-fall-learning-experience-comeback format. It’s all rise, but troubled and unclear. You might not buy Chalamet’s Dylan at first; I didn’t, until that Guthrie bedside scene. There is amazing bravado in this performance.

The Beast may not add up to a cogent or thoroughgoing critique of all the ideas it invokes, but it’s such a luxurious cinematic experience; it’s created with such elan and attack, and the musical score amplifies its throb of fear.

It is a movie made up of delicate brushstrokes: details, moments, looks and smiles.

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.

There is such tenderness to this film. I was overwhelmed by it.

A stirring classic.

It is a masterpiece of black-comic bad taste and a positive carnival of transgression. The secret is the deadpan seriousness with which everything is treated.

The Exorcist is diabolically inspired: it’s still capable of making you jump and yelp.

The visual brilliance of this film combines with shroomy toxicity and inexplicable moral grandeur: what a stunning experience.

No Time To Die is startling, exotically self-aware, funny and confident, and perhaps most of all it is big: big action, big laughs, big stunts and however digitally it may have been contrived, and however wildly far-fetched, No Time To Die looks like it is taking place in the real world, a huge wide open space that we’re all longing for.

Shallow Grave is persistently cynical and uningratiating, a tale of nasty, greedy, stupid people who don’t realise that the finders-keepers rule doesn’t apply to a suitcase full of cash whose criminal owners will not merely want it back but want to create the specific circumstances in which Juliet, David and Alex will be unable to testify against them in a court of law.

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.

It is an eerie, sad story whose meaning disappears over the vast horizon as if on a highway heading away through the desert.

Persona is a film to make you shiver with fascination, or incomprehension, or desire.

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

It has a claim to be the last movie with the authentic spirit of the Ealing comedies; although with a longer perspective we can also see how it’s also indirectly influenced by producer David Puttnam in its high-minded spirit of Anglo-American amity.

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

Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Loveless is a stark, mysterious and terrifying story of spiritual catastrophe: a drama with the ostensible form of a procedural crime thriller. It has a hypnotic intensity and unbearable ambiguity which is maintained until the very end.

Brilliantly written, terrifically acted, superbly designed and shot; it's a sweet, sad, funny picture about the lost world of folk music which effortlessly immerses us in the period.

This Is Not a Film is a compelling personal document, a quietly passionate statement of artistic intent, and an uncompromising testament to his belief in cinema.

It’s deeply silly but uproariously entertaining. At the end, I almost felt guilty for enjoying it all quite so much - almost.

The idea of sacrifice permeates everything, along with the cruelty and horror. This is Cimino's masterpiece.

It's still luminous, 52 years on.

Peter Bogdanovich's 1971 ode to a Texan small town is still a masterpiece whichever way you look at it.

It is an overwhelming story, and despite everyone knowing the ending, it is as gripping as a thriller: Kapadia has fashioned and shaped it with masterly flair.

In its scale and seriousness, Occupied City allows its emotional implication to amass over its running time. The effect is mysterious and moving.

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

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.

It is a wildly silly, wildly entertaining adventure which periodically gives us a greatest-hits flashback montage of the other seven films in the M:I canon - but we still get a brand new, box-fresh Tom-sprinting-along-the-street scene, without which it wouldn’t be M:I.

Citizenfour is a gripping record of how our rulers are addicted to gaining more and more power and control over us – if we let them.

Sal is not ready for a new political world, whose dawn Lee sketches out here, in which it is not enough simply to refrain from making overtly racist gestures: omission or erasure is equally insulting.

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

It could be the finest hour for both of its lead actors.

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

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.

Some elements seem grotesquely dated, but this restoration of the 1939 classic finds the film as powerful and mad as ever.

The excellence of Katherine Ross as Mrs Robinson’s daughter, Elaine, is often overlooked. A hugely pleasurable film.

Akira Kurosawa's 1950 masterwork is a chilling, utterly memorable dissection of the nature of human communication.

The tunes are gold, and as Jane approaches a local creek, resplendent in her gorgeous yellow gown, we get one of the most famous visual gags in the history of the musical.

It exerts an irresistible pull.

This is a dark, uncompromising film, thrillingly original and distinctive, with a visionary passion. It is a movie against which all directors, and all moviegoers, will want to measure themselves.

The happiness and innocence in this film are beyond compare.

There’s a real tragic power in this almost unbearably brutal and shocking movie from writer-director Jasmila Žbanić.

As horror it is ridiculous, as comedy it is startling and hilarious, and as a machine for freaking you out it is a thing of wonder.

Tarantino has created another breathtakingly stylish and clever film, a Jacobean western, intimate yet somehow weirdly colossal, once again releasing his own kind of unwholesome crazy-funny-violent nitrous oxide into the cinema auditorium for us all to inhale.

Phoenix is the key to it all: a performance as robust as the glass of burgundy he knocks back: preening, brooding, seething and triumphing.

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

Spirited Away is fast and funny; it's weird and wonderful. Mostly wonderful.

The Northman is a horribly violent, nihilistic and chaotic story about the endless cycle of violence, the choice between loving your friends and hating your enemies – which turns out to be no choice at all, and the thread of fate down which masculinity’s delicious toxin drips. It’s entirely outrageous, with some epic visions of the flaring cosmos. I couldn’t look away.

For one star to get an award, a handful of defeated nominees have to swallow their pain, as the spotlight moves away from them. For one star to deliver the shock of the new, another one has to receive the shock of the old. A Star Is Born turns that transaction into a love story.

This film has what its title implies: a heartbeat. It is full of cinematic life.

Utterly distinctive and all but unclassifiable, a musique concrète nightmare, a psycho-metaphysical implosion of anxiety, with strange-tasting traces of black comedy and movie-buff riffs. It is seriously weird and seriously good.

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.

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.

It’s a movie that will live with me for a long time.

It is not a new direction for this film-maker, admittedly, but an existing direction pursued with the same dazzling inspiration as ever. It is also as gripping as a satanically inspired soap opera, a dynasty of lost souls.

It is a passionate drama of fear and rage.

What is so distinctive about this Iñárritu picture is its unitary control and its fluency: no matter how extended, the film’s tense story is under the director’s complete control and he unspools great meandering, bravura travelling shots to tell it: not dissimilar, in some ways, to his previous picture, Birdman. The movie is as thrilling and painful as a sheet of ice held to the skin.

Part of the film's brilliance is its stunning and unforgiving transmission of the great truth that for most of us, death is not a single, flatline moment, but a gradual, insidious process of deterioration.