Xan Brooks

It’s a lovely slice of life, a heartfelt New York story – and judging from the brief burst of writing that we are permitted to hear, the postman can rest easy whether he is on stage or at work.

If only more nostalgic music documentaries could muster such a fun, fierce and full-blooded take on old, familiar material. One to One, against the odds, makes Lennon feel somehow vital again.

The film is at its most grimly compelling when it puts her on stage, pinned down by her accusers and fielding questions with a mix of wary contempt and sudden explosions of incandescent rage.

What the film-maker has built for us here is the cinematic equivalent of an Anderson shelter: basic, sturdy and unfussy. It’s there if we need it and have nowhere else to go.

On screen, the man play-acted the qualities of courage and resilience. Off it, he came to embody them too.

Time is of the essence; Eastwood’s 94 years old. He’s not prepared to be cross-examined or sidetracked by pesky minor details.

It’s a tense, tight fairground ride of a film.

Small Things Like These casts a powerful spell.

Anora deepens and darkens with each twist and turn and provides a violent corrective to so many Hollywood fairytales.

The material is sobering and the mountain of evidence needs unpicking. The film-maker handles his brief with the cold, hard precision of an expert state prosecutor.

Class and racial tensions come to the boil in this potent tale of disaffected youth in smalltown France.

Salles’s imperfect, hobbled film tells us that hope springs eternal and that joy is a given and that most happy families will find a way to survive.

It’s a lovely, mordant, tender affair; a lush September song in duet, performed with aplomb by Swinton and Moore as they stroll the secondhand bookstores or lounge by the pool they can’t be bothered to swim in.

The film itself never amounts to much more than a silly, self-satisfied crime caper, but the headline stars look as though they are enjoying themselves and their sense of fun, by and large, is infectious.

Babygirl rolls off the track looking almost as neat and anonymous as a box from Tensile’s upstate delivery warehouse.

It’s too skimpy and self-conscious, more a series of gestures than an organic whole. But Ortega frames his action with a delicious high style, interspersing tense standoffs with formal dance sequences. He gives the impression that all his characters are locked in a bizarre hothouse romance, even when they are chasing or attempting to kill one another.

Midway through, I was all set to file this as a posturing distraction, destined for a life as a high-camp curio. But it ground me down, won me over and by the closing credits, God help us, I was hoping for an encore.

It’s a likable exercise in nostalgia; a joyride through old haunts. Burton’s underworld caper contains plenty of second-hand spirit; what it craves is fresh blood. What it needs is some substance.

The film is fun, broad and exuberant, like a primetime Marxist sitcom, although it does feel indebted to a number of recent, better films around the same theme.

While it would have been good to have Nash’at properly cross-examine these men, his film’s careful approach pays handsome dividends. Hollywoodate teases back a corner of the curtain to reveal a Taliban regime stitched awkwardly over the bones of US occupation. It shows us the soldiers pining for the caves where they once hid, and mourning the glorious death that has somehow been snatched from their grasp.

Crisply scripted by Thomas Martin and directed by Finnegan with a pleasing, no-frills intensity, The Surfer feels resolutely old-school. It’s a low-budget, hard-hitting comic bruiser of a picture: a midlife-crisis movie dressed up as a 1970s exploitation flick.

It’s not The Exorcist, Sorcerer or The French Connection. But it makes for a worthy late addition to the great director’s armada.

The strong, credible performances oil the wheels during these clattering shifts of gear and serve to distract from its occasional moments of implausibility.

Richard Linklater’s latest is a jaunty action comedy that spins its machine-tooled high concept like a bicycle wheel – sometimes with shrewd intent, sometimes for pure fun.

Anderson’s short, sweet, neatly managed production follows the original tale pretty much to the letter.

May December also comes coloured by the lurid downlight of tabloid culture. It could be a pastiche of a psychological thriller, or a playfully misdirected daytime afternoon soap.

Killers of the Flower Moon is monumentally long (206 minutes) and moves at an unhurried pace, but it knows where it’s going and barely a second is wasted. It’s sinuous and old-school, an instant American classic; almost Steinbeckian in its attention to detail and its banked, righteous rage.

Tarik Saleh’s political saga turns progressively knottier and more claustrophobic, almost to a fault. But it’s also horribly tense, richly textured and showcases a terrific supporting performance from Fares as the tale’s shadowy Thomas Cromwell figure.

By the end, his getaway car is almost as riddled with holes as the plot itself.

It’s a thorough, measured, often illuminating portrait, aided by readings from Highsmith’s unpublished diaries and interviews with her ex-lovers.

Shinkai casts a spell in the moment, but the magic fades away.

Your standard vampire film would have put Cage centre stage. Renfield, God help it, elects to bury the lede and drive a stake through his heart.

This one almost makes it, but a boggy script slows it down.

Funny Pages spins a hilarious tale from the fringes of the underground comics scene, powered by a wonderfully sour performance by Daniel Zolghadri as Robert, a teenage cartoonist who strikes out on his own.

Bergholm gives us precision-tooled jump scares and creeping, clammy atmospherics; a malevolent mother and an insurrectionist child.

Clooney and Roberts try their best but they’re finally not much more than decoration themselves, the filmic equivalent of plastic figurines on a cake.

Three Thousand Years of Longing is guileless, open-hearted, like an antiquarian bookseller’s dream of The Thief of Baghdad. It’s so defiantly out of step with fashion that there’s finally something faintly glorious about it.

Along the way, the director, Arthur Harari, takes the exhausted true tale of the lone Japanese soldier and sculpts it into a captivating tragicomedy, a sharp-eyed study of zealotry and self-delusion, ridiculous and heartbreaking in about equal measure.

A quality cast tackle the script’s various twists and turns with aplomb. But the tale itself feels cumbersome and over-furnished, listing under the weight of its bolt-on subplots and endless reams of dialogue.

The respective charms of Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum receive a rigorous workout during the course of this caffeinated, overeager adventure romp – to the point where significant signs of wear and tear begin to appear.

At the risk of insulting Benedetta, it’s mostly good, clean, wholesome fun.

True Things is not a bad film, exactly. The actors play it like they mean it, while the drama itself carries a natural dry charge. But it’s unambitious, sometimes clunky and doesn’t wrong-foot us once.

Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon offers street-food for the senses, served with lashings of hot sauce. It’s hardly nutritious but it tastes fine in the moment, wolfed down on the run.

Old Henry is a determinedly low-aiming affair.

Vigas’s direction is efficient, pedestrian, entirely built for purpose. But he manages to keep the audience on-board throughout the tale’s twists and turns.

Its line of attack is remorseless, an ongoing rain of hammer blows, and yet it never feels especially dour or heavy. If anything, Chupov and Merkulova’s handling of the material is almost playful, choosing to frame Stalin’s Russia as nightmarish deadpan comedy.

Hallelujah is one for the fans, thorough and informative, like a set of cinematic liner notes, largely content to marvel at the majesty of its subject and the vibrant afterlife of his work.

I’m not convinced, on balance, that Gyllenhaal’s delicious drama is finally much more than a storm in a teacup. But what a cup, what a storm. When Hurricane Colman blows in from the sea, be sure your roof’s in good shape and that all the windows are fastened.

It’s not quite a documentary, yet nor is it exactly a narrative feature. It lives alone; the cinematic equivalent of a hermit on a mountaintop.

Adapted from Annie Ernaux’s autobiographical novel, the film plays its private trauma as a harrowing thriller, and showcases a superb performance from Anamaria Vartolomei as Anne Duchesne, the agonised student in the spotlight.

It’s pitiless and pitch-perfect, an existential tour-de-force with shades of Camus’s The Outsider.

British writer-director Edgar Wright takes a grab-bag of 1960s ingredients, paints them up and makes them dance to his tune. His film is thoroughly silly and stupidly enjoyable.

Kristen Stewart proves entirely compelling in the title role. She gives an awkward and mannered performance as Diana, and this is entirely as it should be when one considers that Diana gave an awkward and mannered performance herself, garnishing her inbred posh hauteur with studied coquettish asides.

Denis Villenueve’s slow-burn space opera fuses the arthouse and the multiplex to create an epic of otherworldly brilliance.

The central relationships can be a little schematic, while the plot slaloms in and out of plausibility. Still, the cast keeps it honest and there is much to relish in the film’s moody, meditative intensity.

The Hand of God, no surprise, is Sorrentino’s most nakedly personal film to date, almost to a fault in the way it jettisons the cool distance of The Great Beauty or Il Divo in favour of a sweaty, close-up evocation of youth. It’s a picture only Sorrentino could make. But that doesn’t necessarily make him the safest pair of hands.

It’s a brawny, brooding drama about the wreckage caused by men, beautifully framed in muted neutral tones as the camera circles the ranch-house with a deliberate, stealthy tread.

Let nobody fault Almodóvar’s ambition here. If this finally lacks the polished sweep and completeness of Pain and Glory, his previous feature, it compensates with an air of fraught intimacy and throws out a wealth of ideas, leaving some tantalising loose ends to be picked up and examined.

Dumont’s secular crisis-of-faith drama has much to say about the corrosive effect of our 24-hour news culture. But it is also indecisive and compromised and plays out as a prolonged admission of defeat.

Noé’s extraordinary film unfolds as a tale of murmured terrors and nameless dread, creeping softly around a cramped Paris apartment like a cinematic Grim Reaper.

The disparate ingredients do not always gel. But in fits and starts Bombay Rose casts quite a spell.

Mandibules is a rollicking, rambunctious tequila-dream of a movie.

The restored footage is an intriguing relic – an offcut, raw copy. There’s something pleasingly voyeuristic about the experience of being allowed behind the velvet rope to watch these blusterers hold forth, although I expect their charms may be limited to die-hard devotees.

Explicitly, his film shows how a hundred shades of grey combine to make a darkness. Implicitly, it warns that it could well happen again.

What a lovely, rousing, finally moving film this is.

What prevents Apples from becoming a simple Lanthimos copycat is its comparative kindness and its abiding direction of travel.

The tale drifts and falters when I wished it would have hit home with more conviction, but that may be partly the point. The struggle is endless, unwinnable. Everybody is compromised.

The World to Come is a ravishingly beautiful love story set in 1850s America, with painterly visuals that nod to the work of Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent.

Energetic and heartfelt, tipping towards tragedy, Sun Children crawls through the mud and emerges all the stronger. The quest is a red herring; the real treasure is the film.

What can’t be faulted is Noce’s sheer boldness and ambition. If Padrenostro winds up as a bit of a mess, it’s a beautiful mess, a glorious mess.

I wish that I enjoyed The Disciple as much as I admired it. The film is a labour of love insofar as it feels overthought and overburdened, with all the rough edges planed down.

It’s a film that understands that humour and horror are not always mutually exclusive and that even the worst moments in life carry an air of the absurd.

Viewed as an acting masterclass, the film is bruisingly impressive in its way. The principal actors raise the roof; each gets to do their big turn for the camera. But it feels a little schooled, a little staged, like a workshop at the Actors’ Studio.

I’m not convinced it amounts to any more than the sum of its parts, but the parts are intriguing – and some are possessed of real power.

About Endlessness contains moments of devilish wit, but at heart it is a sad, sweet picture, threaded with themes of estrangement and separation. Andersson isn’t exactly asking us to laugh at or pity these people. Instead, we’re being encouraged to wonder at their predicament – and perhaps relate it to our own.

While I confess that I found Ema to be a notch down on his best work, it’s still hugely distinctive and daring and may well be a grower.

I can state without hesitation that this is a monumental piece of work and one I’m deeply glad to have seen. I can also say that I hope to never cross its path again.

One watches Chalamet’s performance here with a simmering unease, willing him on but wondering if he is entirely fit for the task.

The Perfect Candidate is a simple story, told without frills or even much in the way of nuance. But it’s socked through with great power, conviction and an underlying hope for a better world.

The film is glossy, illuminating and frequently exciting. What it lacks is an emotional charge and a fine-grained texture. We need to invest in these people in order to understand their decisions – and care about the consequences of these.

No one in real life speaks the way they do in this film. No genuine drama is this crudely ordered drama, with its telegraphed turnabouts and conveniently-placed confessions, all building to a stage-managed plea for tolerance and unity.

The film’s prize asset ... is Meryl Streep.

What a gloriously daring and explosive film Joker is. It’s a tale that’s almost as twisted as the man at its centre, bulging with ideas and pitching towards anarchy.

It tells us that Seberg was wronged and that she looked really great in a bra – and not necessarily in that order.

It’s a solid, well-crafted piece of professional carpentry, like a heavy piece of Victorian furniture; built to last; built to be used. The longer you look at it, the more impressive it grows.

It’s an extraordinary picture, steely and unbending and assembled with an unmistakable air of wild-eyed zealotry. Ad Astra, be warned, is going all the way - and it double-dares us to buckle up for the trip.

Baumbach seeks to mine his material for laughs, no matter how desperate the situation becomes.

It’s handsome, it’s amusing, it knows exactly where it’s going. All that is missing is that crucial fifth gear.

West of Sunshine’s rough, down-at-heel Aussie vibe prompts one to set it alongside other recent bawlers and brawlers, such as Kriv Stenders’ Boxing Day or David Michod’s Animal Kingdom. But Raftopoulos is altogether more protective of his characters, shielding them from full-blown horror, clearly wishing them well even as they stumble and fall, and his film works best in tenderly framing a burgeoning father-son friendship.

Filho’s film is never less than heartfelt and strident, like a tale torn from life, or an episode of Jeremy Kyle played as stentorian opera. And this, I suspect, may be part of the problem. Crucially, Angel Face lacks shading, pacing and nuance.

Oh Lucy!’s plot feels overthought. The tone see-saws wildly. What prevents it collapsing are the warm, heartfelt performances, together with Hirayanagi’s obvious affection for her chief protagonist.

Our Souls at Night is your classic Hollywood weepie, so immaculately played that it confounds crass preconceptions.

Watching it is akin to be being waylaid by an expert raconteur. There is the curious sense that it has told this tale before; that every joke has been honed and rehearsed; every anecdote lovingly polished in advance.

What a peculiarly dodgy, conservative film this is – a lazy salute to a good queen and her faithful Indian servant. It’s a film about the Raj era that looks as if it was made back then, too.

Those familiar with McDonagh’s work will be unsurprised to learn that Three Billboards is a bold and showboating affair, robustly drawn and richly written; a violent carnival of small-town American life. Yet it has a big, beating heart, even a rough-edged compassion for its brawling inhabitants.

Suburbicon is too lightweight and mannered; it lacks proper fury. Watching it is like having your trouser-leg savaged by an energetic small dog.

Yes, Del Toro’s latest flight of fancy sets out to liberally pastiche the postwar monster movie, doffing its cap to the incident at Roswell and all manner of related cold war paranoia. But it’s warmer and richer than the films that came before. Beneath that glossy, scaly surface is a beating heart.

A less polished director might have become lost and confused along the film’s lengthy running-time. But Payne’s handling is perfect. He never puts a foot wrong, rustling up a picture that is as bright as a button and as sharp as a tack.

What an extravagantly muddled, borderline incontinent film this is. You might call it genre-hopping, except that this would imply some degree of intent and control.

Yes, 24 Frames is rigorously experimental; it demands patience and engagement. But this haunted ghost-film had me completely entranced.

The film is utterly gripping and endlessly disturbing.

Satrapi's disreputable little creepshow finally doesn't amount to a hill of beans. Maybe that's fine. The Voices provides an enjoyably trashy antidote to the traditional Sundance fare of soulful drama and crusading documentary.

The film is listing, overladen with cheap trinkets. Dogged, heartfelt acting works hard to prop it up.

[Clint Eastwood's] gripping, incurious film gives the impression of having not so much been directed as dictated. It stares so fixedly down the rifle sight that it is finally guilty of tunnel vision.

Full credit to the film-makers, who manage to map their digital bear against his human co-stars and marry Bond’s antique conceit to a high-concept story.

JC Chandor’s period crime drama is rigorous, resourceful and as smart as a whip...But its canny tactical struggle remains a joy to behold.

Anderson has all manner of fun with the tale's whirling, blurring trajectory. His film is like a jubilant spin painting in which the characters have been scattered and splattered to the furthest reaches of the frame.

Gone Girl, finally, may be no more than a storm in a teacup. But what an elegant, bone-china teacup this is. And what a fearsome force-10 gale we have brewing inside.

What a bold, beguiling and utterly unclassifiable director Andersson is. He thinks life is a comedy and feels it’s a tragedy, and is able to wrestle these conflicting impulses into a gorgeous, deadpan deadlock.

It’s a work of startling maturity from this incorrigible tearaway, a minor-key dream that finally turns towards darkness.

Pacino's Manglehorn is a subtle master class in neutral shading, with none of the garish flashes that sometimes bedevil his work.

There’s no doubt it makes for a jubilant ride, a galvanic first blast. But it remains a film which feels deeply thought rather than deeply felt; a brilliant technical exercise as opposed to a flesh-and-blood story.

While Benson treats his characters with care and respect, his depiction of grief can feel studied and not felt.

Schirman's film (produced by the team behind Man on Wire and Searching For Sugarman) is as gripping as any high-concept Hollywood thriller and as psychologically knotty as Greek tragedy.

Amalric's handling is cool, studied and perhaps a little self-conscious. But he does a good job of showing how adultery is a noose that tightens at the throat even before an actual crime is committed - at which point the film grows altogether less interesting.

In fits and starts, this is a stunning picture. At its best, Winter Sleep shows Ceylan to be as psychologically rigorous, in his way, as Ingmar Bergman before him.

A sweet yet suspect romantic drama.

A glorious jumping bean comedy that moves from the profane to the poignant in the blink of an eye.

The Lunchbox is perfectly handled and beautifully acted; a quiet storm of banked emotions.

Webb's film is bold and bright and possesses charm in abundance. It swings into the future and carries the audience with it.

The pungent, ponderous final chapter of Sono's "Hate" trilogy (following Love Exposure and Cold Fish) bows out with lots of bangs and plenty of whimper.

How ironic to realise that the greatest Mitt Romney campaign ad should arrive too late to save him.

Sattler's film leans on its actors too heavily. It heaps too many implausibilities upon their trembling shoulders. After an hour in Camp X-Ray, the strain starts to show.

What an astonishing achievement; what a beautiful movie.

Calvary boasts a sharp sense of place and a deep love of language. It's puckish and playful, mercurial and clever, rattling with gallows laughter as it paints a portrait of an Irish community that is at once intimate and alienated.

God Help the Girl comes loose and easy, verging on the slipshod. It's warm and generous, verging on the sentimental; a film that crystallises the best and worst of Belle and Sebastian's songwriting skills.

It's a professional old-school espionage outing, intricate as clockwork and acted with relish by the ever-watchable Hoffman. But it remains an oddly anonymous enterprise from this talented and distinctive director.

It is so laden with highly charged set pieces, so dappled with haunting ideas and bold flights of fancy that it finally achieves a kind of slow-burn transcendence.

Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac bludgeons the body and tenderises the soul. It is perplexing, preposterous and utterly fascinating.

The Wolf of Wall Street, for all its abundant appeal, is no Greek tragedy. It lacks the wildness of Taxi Driver, the jeopardy of GoodFellas and the anguish of Raging Bull. Far better to view this as a stylistic homage, a remastered greatest hits compilation, an amiable bit of self-infringement.

Crispian Mills's London-based horror-comedy is so spectacularly bungled that it leaves the viewer in a state of advanced petrification.

Even Cranston looks to be on auto-pilot here: he comes stomping through the action with a perma-scowl that suggests that his break from playing Walter White is little more than a busman's holiday.

It plays as cut-price Le Carré; a recording of a recording of superior films. The picture is fuzzy, and the plot becomes garbled.

This is a lazy, trashy film that barely goes through the motions.

Full credit to Hardy and Knight for making a film such as Locke. Low-budget film-makers could learn a lot from their method. And yet – having stripped away all but the bare necessities, having reduced the components to a car and a man – they make a classic error of overcompensation.

Child of God is a shocking tale of backwoods lunacy and one man's descent into hell. Perhaps the most shocking thing about it is that it's really rather good.

Under the Skin is perhaps best viewed as an icy parable of love, sex and loneliness.

The film has a ragged charm, a Tiggerish bounce, and a certain sweet melancholy that bubbles up near the end.

Its main focus is the sparky, shifting relationship between its two protagonists and its trump card the startling chemistry between its two main stars.

If the film finally doesn't tell us anything we did not already know, the approach makes a worn-out old tragedy feel supple and urgent.

This director, in the past, has shown herself to be an ace with the teasing, hanging ending and Night Moves saves the best for last.

Joe also stands as a reminder of what a terrific actor Cage can be when he is able to harness and channel his wilder impulses.

A gorgeous yet ultimately frustrating tribute to the Japanese airplane designer Jiro Horikoshi.

The film thrums with an ongoing existential dread. And yet, tellingly, Cuaron's film contains a top-note of compassion that strays at times towards outright sentimentality.

You'd need a heart of stone not to be won over by Wadjda, a rebel yell with a spoonful of sugar and a pungent sense of a Riyadh society split between the home, the madrasa and the shopping mall.

The kids are charmless, the adults bemused.

Buckle up; it's quite a ride.

The spirits fly in and out of The Lone Ranger at random. It's nice to see them come and go. I just wish they'd stay for longer.

The robust acting and sharp sense of the Bay Area milieu glides us nicely over the film's few soft patches.

Julian Roman Pölsler's bewitching debut manages to be at once a creepy sci-fi parable, a feminist Robinson Crusoe and a clear-eyed ode to the wonders of nature experienced in solitude. Walden pond with added wall.

Director, Eric Valette, is an exuberant market-stall trader, hawking knock-off ingredients.

This hoary, hackneyed old cop-opera...is served with such relish that the fun proves infectious.

The Congress contains tricks aplenty and ideas in abundance. The problem comes in herding these scattered, floating elements towards a satisfying whole.

Danish director Tobias Lindholm spins an exacting drama out of a crisis on this deft, verite-style account of Somali piracy in the Indian ocean. Full credit to A Hijacking for resisting the siren-call of Hollywood histrionics in favour of the nuts-and-bolts.

Mandy Lane feels bogus and compromised: an unreconstructed horror romp in the guise of a nerdish intellectual.

Perhaps this tells us nothing new about life on the inside in the US (there are rapes, riots and suicides), but it at least handles its brief with pace and precision.

Australian director Cate Shortland's drama is overflowing with such poetic visual touches, conjuring up a fairytale landscape of long shadows, wafting curtains and waving fronds.

It has been converted into a proficient, machine-tooled horror flick, stuffed full of shocks and buttressed with back-story. Mama got so flabby the second time around.

Full credit to Korine, who sustains this act of creative vandalism right through to the finish. Spring Breakers unfolds as a fever dream of teenage kicks, a high-concept heist movie with mescal in the fuel tank.

The plot is wildly silly and shot full of holes, maundering endlessly on its slow trawl towards the climax. But the cast at least play it like they mean it, and keep it honest for a spell.

I don't think it knows where it's going. I'm not even sure it cares.

Even Stallone's rumbling voiceover possesses the drooping tone of a lullaby – like 45rpm vinyl played at 33. And if you think that reference is retro, you should see the actual movie.

If Rise of the Guardians is finally never more than the sum of its parts, the parts themselves have real appeal.

All of which works terrifically well up to a point.

The themes may be contentious, but the handling is perfect. If there were ever a movie to cause the lame to walk and the blind to see, The Master may just be it.

Little White Lies unspools as glossy, high-grade tosh, a sun-dappled Big Chill, without the rigour or insight required to make you care about these people and wonder which bed they will eventually wind up in.

Sit in the front – and don't peer too hard – and Chicken With Plums casts an undeniable spell. It is bold, exotic and distinctive, particularly during the animated angel of death sequence.

The Dark Knight Rises may be a hammy, portentous affair but Nolan directs it with aplomb. He takes these cod-heroic, costumed elements and whisks them into a tale of heavy-metal fury, full of pain and toil, surging uphill, across the flyovers, in search of a climax.

Follow the film-maker. Let him lead you by the nose. Lanthimos knows exactly where he's going.

There is little in the film's pitch-black interior that wasn't tackled better – with more bite, wit and abandon – in "Happiness," "Welcome to the Dollhouse," or "Storytelling."

In keeping with the spirit of Sebald's writing, Gee's film is teasing, elegant and perhaps inevitably unresolved: an invitation as opposed to a destination.

If it's possible for a picture to be at once ideal and imperfect, then Damsels fits the bill.

The Hunger Games is that rarest of beasts: a Hollywood action blockbuster that is smart, taut and knotty. Ably filleted from the Suzanne Collins bestseller, it's a compelling, lightly satirical tale.

[Martel's] film is haunted, haunting and admittedly prone to the occasional longueur insofar as it runs to its own peculiar rhythm; maybe even its own primal logic.

A nightmarish triptych of loss, waste and grief that is nonetheless arranged with such visionary boldness that it dares us to look away.

Amazingly, Welles gets away with it. Citizen Kane may be the more weighty, rounded work, but Touch of Evil is a heap more fun.

The Invisible Man boasts a brilliantly chill and confident performance from (an almost entirely unseen) Claude Rains and a gloriously over-the-top supporting turn from Una O'Connor as his inquisitive landlady. Moreover, its tart, acid tone largely honours the spirit of the novel.

One could class The Walker as a thriller, in that it features a murder, a political scandal and a fraught chase that ends with a car crash. But these elements all seem a little rote and rudimentary. Instead, the film's real focus is on the character of Page and his perilous relationship with the world he inhabits.

No one would accuse it of breaking new ground, or finding fascinating new paths across its well-worn prison yard. But Sauvaire’s drama is lean and trim and unwavering in its task.

Midway through, the plot blows a gasket and the camerawork turns altogether crazed, joggling us about in the semi-darkness while the soundtrack rings to distorted screams. Expect pitch and yaw and lots of gore.

A Canterbury Tale may be the most loving and tender film about England ever made. It’s a picture that’s steeped in nature, in thrall to myth and history; a re-affirmation of the English character, customs and countryside from a time when many viewers may have wondered whether this underpinning had been kicked clean away.

It's not that Paperback Hero is a duff film, exactly. Just a little flimsy, a trifle slight, a mite schematic. The story turns dog-eared midway through. [03 Sep 1999, p.19]

The essential Hitchcock movie, the purest and most confident, a brilliant distillation of the themes that had fueled him ever since he sent the lodger creeping to his upstairs room.

Lean on Pete is at its potent, stirring best during the opening furlough, when it focuses on this makeshift hobo family as it criss-crosses the Pacific Northwest from one racetrack to the next.

This is a ramshackle, exuberant affair, peppered with larger-than-life inhabitants, ludicrous scenes and quotable dialogue that have long since grown worn from frequent use.

The film is fun and stirring; a robust portrait of youth at the crossroads and a bittersweet salute to the town at its centre.

Robert Wise's adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical still has a little soul in its bones, with its reactionary nature tempered by Ernest Lehman's supple screenplay, and its elephantine running-time eased by a set of songs that lodge in your system like hookworms.

On first release, Arthur Penn's 1976 western found itself derided as an addled, self-indulgent folly. Today, its quieter passages resonate more satisfyingly, while its lunatic take on a decadent, dying frontier seems oddly appropriate.

If anything, Robert Altman's self-styled "anti-western" looks even richer, stranger and more daring than it did when it first appeared back in 1971.

First Reformed is a deeply felt, deeply thought picture; impressive in its seriousness and often gripping in the way it frames itself as a debate and a sermon.

John Huston's hellfire burlesque is one of the great lost films of the 1970s and a movie to stand alongside his Maltese Falcon or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.