Robbie Collin

Moonlight, the new film from Barry Jenkins, is a nuclear-fission-strength heartbreaker. It’s made up of moments so slight and incidental they’re sub-molecular – but they release enough heat and light to swallow whole cities at a stroke.

A raucous and blood-splattered social satire.

Every individual scene feels filled with the lucid detail of a formative recollection or a recurring dream.

The film has the heft of Shakespearean tragedy, but a more generous cosmic outlook. Maternal love goes a long way. [14 Mar 2015, p.10]

A science-fiction thriller of rare and diamond-hard brilliance.

Thanks to both its mesmerising cast and McQueen’s flawless command of atmosphere and mood, it pulls off what I can only describe as a kind of cinematic jiu-jitsu – heaving you back to that precise moment in history, then lifting your soul out of your skin in one seamless move.

This madcap urban warfare thriller has heists, showdowns and two of the best car chases in years.

Rocks would rather reckon with – and in the end, celebrate – youthful potential itself, and its extraordinary ability to flower in even the most unpromising soil.

Christopher Nolan’s astonishing new film...is a work of heart-hammering intensity and grandeur that demands to be seen on the best and biggest screen within reach. But its spectacle doesn’t stop at the recreations of Second World War combat. Like all great war films, it’s every bit as transfixing up close.

Beyond the troughful of fun tics, Spall makes Turner tenderly and totally human — the effect of which is to make his artistic talents seem even more extraordinary still.

Robert De Niro is sensational in Scorsese's history-making mob masterpiece.

This is a humane and heart-wrenchingly beautiful film from Docter; even measured alongside Pixar’s numerous great pictures, it stands out as one of the studio’s very best.

Wilder’s intoxicating script, co-written with IAL Diamond, flows like finest brandy, and Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine shine as two essentially good souls trapped in a tangle of office politics.

Stuhlbarg, who’s a treasure throughout, gets a fatherly monologue towards the film’s end that’s so observantly and tenderly performed, you can barely catch your breath. It’s one beautiful moment in a film that’s filled with them – gone in a heartbeat, but leaving the kind of ripples that reach across a lifetime.

Marriage Story may often resemble a tug of war between its stars, but it’s on both of their sides.

La La Land wants to remind us how beautiful the half-forgotten dreams of the old days can be – the ones made up of nothing more than faces, music, romance and movement. It has its head in the stars, and for a little over two wonderstruck hours, it lifts you up there too.

Shoplifters is compassionate, socially conscious filmmaking with a piercing intelligence that is pure Kore-eda. This is a film that steals in and snatches your heart.

Alfred Hitchcock is at the height of his skin-prickling powers in this brisk spy story, seasoned with oodles of humour and a dash of kink. [14 Jun 2013]

The film’s sweetness and bitterness are held so perfectly in balance, and realised with such sinew-stiffening intensity, that watching it feels like a three-hour sports massage for your heart and soul.

It is the most arrhythmia-inducingly tense film I have seen in years: by the end, I felt as if I’d spent the last two hours being dangled by my ankles over a crocodile pit.

This is instant A-list Coens; enigmatic, exhilarating, irresistible.

The film wields its intelligence and style with total effortlessness, and its every move holds your gaze like a baton’s quivering tip.

Though it delves into the worst extremes of human ugliness, German’s film is exhilarating, moving, funny, beautiful and unshakeable – a danse macabre that whirls you round and round until the bitter end.

This cracking campaigning documentary makes a galvanising case for action – and without lobbing its audience overboard with an anchor weight of hopelessness yoked to their heels.

There’s no tidy moral to take away, because a story like this shouldn’t end in comfort. Instead, your skin’s left prickling by its deft deconstruction of the business of secret-keeping, and its perceptive setting out of the courage and diligence it takes to overturn it.

The recurring fungal and archeological imagery suggest a conception of consciousness as a kind of mushroom patch, with human experience blooming from and feeding on the experiences that came before, all the way back to its unknowable cosmic beginnings.

There’s zero latitude in the spare, naturalistic script for actorly showboating – but the performances, as captured by French cinematographer Hélène Louvart’s searching, empathic camera, are quietly tremendous.

“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”, Theodor Adorno famously wrote. Glazer’s film gives us the prosaic instead, refashioning it into the darkest, most vital sort of art it might be possible for us as a species to produce.