Tim Robey

The intergenerational debate underlying Graduation does throw novel wrinkles into the mix.

As a writer, Kaurismäki has a precious knack for jokes that work beautifully in any language.

The film’s strength is its plainness and melancholy, as it sketches the history of a marriage – ardent, in times gone by, and still movingly dedicated.

It’s not an experience to relish, exactly, but it’s still one that’s fully capable of blowing you away.

It seethes with frustration on its subjects’ behalf – that for all the impact their stand has had, they still face a many-headed hydra on the road to real democracy.

Dramatic fragments, blasted our way, dance before us for the next two hours, rotating and glinting, colliding and connecting, like a puzzle in zero gravity. As a transition into flinty, supercharged genre filmmaking, it gets by on no more than electric confidence, high-fiving technical virtuosity, and a cast to die for. It’s very satisfying.

Perturbing truths about old age nestle inside an outwardly sentimental shell — it’s a less cosy or placid prospect than it seems.

For the usually irrepressible Miike, it’s remarkably controlled, even restrained. And yet it involves 200 bodyguards being annihilated every which way, in a sustained frenzy of blistering choreographic skill that Hollywood won’t top all year.

Franco is more skilled at getting us to think: not only about memory loss, but everything we choose to forget and can’t, and how these distinctions make us who we are.

As a demonstration of slighted masculinity being given an inch, taking a mile, and chewing it up with breakneck fury, the film could hardly be more timely or disconcerting. But it understands the ignition point of rage – not just its ugly momentum.

In emulating the two-strip Technicolor process, it creates a look that’s scratchy and primitive, but also, through the peculiar alchemy of Maddin’s craft, eerily rich and dreamlike, with the depth of an oceanic abyss.

The film needs no excess melodrama even at its bleakest, because the visual language Sharrock has constructed is inhospitable enough. It’s his concentration on these faces, in the 4:3 ratio of Nick Cooke’s gravely beautiful cinematography, that gives it all a redemptive glow.

It’s the silent allegiances of sisterhood, a near-underground network operating to safeguard women’s rights, which exercise Haroun’s imagination throughout this excellent piece.

The film’s stark realism and bruising impact are enough in themselves, but the risk, and the real artistic payoff, is its bold sensory plunge into this Hadean inferno.

Moonage Daydream, a wildly creative tribute to everything Bowie achieved over four and a half decades, sets a sky-high bar as cinematic fan-service, and it leaves you buzzing.

Baker’s tingling delicacy of touch makes it a subtly distinctive experience: it’s a film I already looked forward to revisiting while tiptoeing through it the first time.

Vogt gives us a brilliantly slippery handle on the rules of this rather twisted game, but also makes it real, in that it’s coming from a place of authentic terror, anxiety and loneliness in Ingrid’s head. Intellectually exciting though his film’s gambits are, they feel like acts of tremendous imaginative empathy – lightbulbs in the dark.

Despite borrowing cleverly from the best, It Follows still manages to feel like no other example in recent years - tender, remarkably ingenious and scalp-pricklingly scary.

There's hardly a shot in Polanski's debut that isn't laced with purpose. [12 Jan 2013, p.10]

Like the 69-year-old Stallone hoisting his frame gingerly into play, Creed takes a while to move. But by the end, it’s genuinely moving.

Take one high-concept format, two big stars and lots of songs... this romcom isn’t perfect, but you can’t help rooting for the main couple.

While it’s fair to say that Transit isn’t aiming for a torn-from-the-headlines specificity about the issues of today, it could be accused of dodging some racial questions, and some of its Petzoldian gambits – including a love triangle that remixes Casablanca with sepulchral dabs of Vertigo – dampen its dramatic charge.

The believability of this fractured family is clinched by Machoian’s casting.

The Mustang could have held more surprises, but as a landscape study – “Prison, with horses” – it’s ruggedly stunning.

This is a grand success – perhaps a new populist benchmark in what to do with a flagging franchise, and a witty, light-on-its-feet prequel.

Everything builds with implacable skill up to, but not quite including, the finale, which is played for a table-turning punchline that feels more crowd-pleasing than strictly satisfying.

If films were gestures, this one would be a perfectly timed shrug, with the smile to match.

While it’s fully grounded as a family portrait, overlaid on it still is that type of cosmic optimism which makes Mills’s work so lovely. I’m not even sure we fully deserve it, but it would be sheer masochism to turn it down.