Tim Robey

Starting her film with an aphorism of William Blake’s – “The bird, a nest; the spider, a web; man, friendship” – she not only does justice to the human end of this equation, but looks out for a rare spectrum of the animal kingdom into the bargain.

The film is heroically unabashed about the power of love, expressed through extraordinary photography (by Jamie D Ramsay, who lifted Living), and a quartet of stars bouncing off each other to hit stratospheric acting highs. It shimmers, and it aches.

Where Part I had a shimmering poignancy as a tragic love story, this is busy and dazzling: Hogg has never made a funnier piece of work or come to us with such fresh provocations.

Music has a vital role all the way through, inspiring the film’s rhythm and flow, its time jumps and nomadic shifts in location, its very destiny.

How Jarmusch takes this match-stick house of nothings and fills it with such calm and wisdom is a mystery with only one real answer: he’s an artist.

It’s beautifully organised, and there’s no way you could possibly watch it without learning all kinds of stuff.

The Alto Knights certainly has the off-screen pedigree you’d hope for. Nicholas Pileggi (Goodfellas, Casino) wrote the script, named after an infamous Manhattan social club. But the circuitous shaping feels off, a problem Barry Levinson’s direction is too flaccid to fix.

One of the rawest, toughest, most emotionally scalding portraits of a marriage ever put on screen.

Paddington was uncommonly charming and Paddington 2 is very nearly as good.

Re-entering Mike Leigh’s stomping ground in Hard Truths is both a solace and, in the best possible way, a slap in the face. It’s also an impressively funny ordeal, in that unmistakably morose way no one has ever mastered better than Leigh.

Hansen-Løve and Huppert cup a single life in their hands and ponder the mixed blessing of freedom from a philosophical position: the trade-off between self-sufficiency and aloneness that Nathalie finds herself negotiating.

It’s wonderful.

Poitras sets the saga on a low simmer, while the Social Network-like score throbs away.

Childlike vulnerability hasn’t been something Hopkins has opened up to show us in a long, long while, but he seems ready for this role, hungry to do it, and you may not be prepared for how deep he goes. Zeller’s writing, and his shockingly naked acting, peak at the bitter end.

The film thrives on unsettling images of overgrowth and rot, such as the dead flower that drops at Kerr’s touch, and the beetle that crawls obscenely out of the mouth of a cherub statue.

Subtle but assured to the end, Granik’s film is all undertow, but it irresistibly grabs you.

It has a straight-down-the-highway momentum, interesting stakes, and more textured character work than you can shake a stick at.

The star of Brooklyn is Fiona Weir – not a person who appears on screen at any stage, but the woman who cast it.

If proof were needed that Barry Jenkins’s directing achievement was far from a one-off, it pulses and dances through every sequence of his follow-up, If Beale Street Could Talk, in all its gorgeous romantic melancholy and sublimated outrage.

The film often rings hollow.

OK, McQuarrie may not have De Palma’s sweat-drop precision, John Woo’s craziness or the impish wit of Brad Bird, but his mastery of logistics here is easily sufficient to make it the blockbuster of the summer.

Agnes Varda's exquisite New Wave masterpiece, about an hour and a half in the life of a gorgeous, possibly dying chanteuse. [30 Apr 2010, p.31]

It’s flat-out hilarious – find me a funnier screen stab at Austen, and I’m tempted to offer your money back personally. Gliding through its compact 92 minutes with alert photography and not a single scene wasted, it’s also Stillman on the form of his life.

As parable, the film’s slippery quality catches you off guard in the best way. And it summons profound love for a character – a village idiot it would never let you describe that way – without congealing even slightly into sentimentality. It clings on to Lazzaro like the only hope in a benighted world.

It's so rare in British cinema to see the "L" in "LGBTQ+" up there in such bold type, which makes Blue Jean not only a biting look at this historical moment but a riveting act of redress.

Mightily clever in its rather theatrical structure, but bracingly cinematic in its formal approach, the movie has a bold, ambiguous final act.

It ought to be a triumph. Somehow, though, it lacks the flooding emotional force Donoghue gave it on the page.

A masterly reconstruction of a Brooklyn bank siege on August 22, 1972, built around arguably Al Pacino's finest screen performance.