After Love is a technically proficient, sincere exploration of its thorny, complicated themes and gripping realist drama of the highest order.

F for Fake is a sometimes maddening, always brilliant disruption of the conventional documentary.

Heralded as one of the most blisteringly influential films of all time, Eisenstein’s propaganda film has left an indelible scar on the establishment of film as art.

Tinge Krishnan’s Been So Long is a musical delight of heart-warming songs, sardonic British humour, and fantastic performances.

A pitch dark noir whose eponymous anti-heroine (Joan Crawford) is surely one of the most compellingly flawed women of the genre.

Its emotional dilemmas, depictions of trauma, revenge and fractured family ties are handled with such skill and sense of purpose, it is truly exemplary film-making.

Chaplin’s humour is shot through with darkness, loneliness and violence, like chili pepper in chocolate.

With 12 Years a Slave, McQueen has not only created his finest work to date, but also a potential modern masterpiece.

Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther is the film that will change everything. When you see it, you know that from here on in, everything will be different. Whilst a Marvel story through and through, fitting perfectly into the MCU post-Captain America: Civil War, Black Panther stands alone as a masterpiece of filmmaking.

Balloon never uses its characters as proxies for political discussion; Tseden’s concern is firmly with his characters as human beings. His method is rooted in realism, favouring intimate, often handheld camera work whose immediacy is juxtaposed against often stunningly beautiful compositions and dreamlike landscapes.

Inspirational and moving, Step is full of heart, with a kicking beat: highly recommended.

A haunting, Aesop-like parable of good and evil, The Night of the Hunter is well worthy of classic status thanks to its wonderfully realised cast of Southern players, Walter Schumann’s dexterous original score and Cortez’s enrapturing, expressionistic visuals.

It’s a sweet, small story that deals comfortably in big emotions when required, whilst also taking time to speculate on the nature of art and the difficulties of navigating adolescence. One of the greatest triumphs of Miyazaki’s movie, however, is how well-defined each of its characters truly are.

A film that wields its simple premise with devastating impact.

This is a film about the ordinariness of love.

This film will draw you in and demand a second viewing.

Cited as a key influence by such contemporary directorial talents as Martin Scorsese and Wes Anderson, this most epic of dramas has lost almost none of its bite, wit and aesthetic beauty over the past 69 years, and stands proudly as one of the greatest cinematic works from the legendary filmmaking duo.

A quietly devastating portrayal of family and theft in contemporary Japan.

This is political cinema at its best; intelligent, thought-provoking and utterly absorbing. Bakri is a star in the making and delivers an electrifying performance.

Director Ben Mullinkosson noted the cinematic potential of the volatile dynamic between his two cousins and, in Don’t Be A Dick About It, renders it lovingly to create a charming and often hilarious documentary-comedy hybrid.

The Banshees of Inisherin is a beautifully-shot and deftly-played comedy. It is at once masterful, surprisingly poignant, and profound. Its portrait of a friendship faltering ultimately proves how vital friendship actually is: how vulnerable and naked we are without it.

Suffice to say, There Is No Evil is a deeply felt study of the effects of state violence on the individual. While the cost of resistance is high, the price of compliance may well be greater.

Past Lives, a film about love, friendship and fate, is an astonishing debut from South Korean-Canadian director Celine Song, and a devastatingly romantic one at that.

Saint Omer is a deeply intellectual film – Medea is referenced several times as a frame of understanding – but it’s also heartfelt. There is a compassion to the dispassion: an empathy.

Oppenheimer's first film maintained a passive detachment, allowing the killers to re-enact their own atrocities and metaphorically hang themselves with their own words. The Look of Silence takes a far harder line, probing the killers more deeply and confronting them in an attempt to shake some sense of remorse out of them.

In one sense, Il buco is a testament to human hubris, contrasting the self-satisfaction of our own temporary structures with the unknowable depth of nature’s works.

Zvyagintsev is masterfully compiling a cinematic record of suffering, and the indifference surrounding and facilitating it, which will live on.

Birds of Passage is an enthralling, powerful statement and lamentation on the drugs trade’s inevitable encroachment upon on indigenous peoples and how gangsters casually destroyed them.

A lovingly observed, pitch perfect coming-of-age comedy, Gerwig's warm, astute account of the end of adolescence is a stunning solo debut.

Hit the Road is damned near to being a masterpiece – if it isn’t simply one already. There are scenes of broad comedy, musical sequences and a wholly tragic episode that plays out in a long wide-shot. The wonderful cast inhabit their roles so fully it’s hard to believe this is not a bona fide family.

Caniba offers no trite explanations or condemnations of Sagawa. Instead, we are offered a small window into his reality.

Dolan is a director who thinks hard about the possibilities of cinema and explores them with verve and ingenuity, but it is in his latest film that everything has come together.

It was the film that introduced the world at large to master director Akira Kurosawa and his frequent, infinitely watchable star Toshiro Mifune.

Ferrara's Welcome to New York is a savage work that's easily one of the best films of the year. [Unrated Version]

The Argentinian director’s follow-up to 2019’s Lux Æterna is a typically difficult watch, subjecting us to the grinding indignities of old age, but it also a deeply moving study of lifelong love and loyalty to the bitter end.

The Childhood of a Leader is a dark, enigmatic piece of work that hovers between visionary greatness and petty domestic triviality. Corbet's inaugural stint behind the camera marks a stunning debut.

The magical realms of Justino’s stories are echoed in the real world, where spaces are enclosed but liminal, defined by uneasy boundaries that are easily breached.

Gnecco has both breadth and subtlety. His Neruda is a complex and fascinating character study, a man fastidiously vain of his status but unconvinced by his own performance even as he enraptures a nation.

Revolving around the omnipresent theme of grief (and adapted from Daphne du Maurier’s short story), the film composes a ghostly melancholic reflection on this profound human emotion.

As a fictionalised account of what was once described as the worst European genocide in the post-war period, Quo Vadis, Aida? is wrenching and vital in its bitter grief. As a study of political and diplomatic inertia in the face of contemporary global human tragedies, it could not be more urgent.

Both Vanderbeque and Duret give star turns here: utterly believable as brother and sister, each performance informs the other as they try to survive each day.

Not only is the film a compellingly told tale of suspense and terror, but it's crafted with such precision and sense of timing that one can cry "Masterpiece!" without being shamefaced or wondering if a hyperbole-induced crime against all good sense has just been committed.

Scorsese’s direction always keeps us uncomfortably close to Travis’ subjectivity, whether we’re prowling night time Manhattan or gazing into a glass of Alka-Seltzer until the whole world disappears into the healing hiss.

Once we start to understand Ayka’s life and reasons for behaving how she does, the film gains tragic dimensions and its humanist voice grows into a desperate cry.

Yes, it is pretentious. But pretension is also about ambition and this is cinema that is willing to kick out the lights.

Weighed down by existential questions, Lucky carries the burden of life’s unanswered questions on his sun-lined face; it’s a fearless portrayal of someone facing the finality of their life.

Zvyagintsev's pessimism is leavened both by his comedy and his sense of beauty. Mikhail Krichman's cinematography captures the sublime grandeur of the landscape against which the nasty, brutish and short lives are played out.

Arguably Andrei Tarkovsky’s finest masterpiece, the Russian director’s 1979 film Stalker is the culmination of a career-long preoccupation with memory, trauma and the relationship between subjective perception and physical reality.

Glazer’s film is richly daring. It is both meticulous and brutal; aloof and involved; ferocious and cool. It is poetry and cinema, but it is also guilty and it knows that it is.

From its first moments, The Red Turtle is a captivating ultra-sensory experience; sounds are crisp and images are hand-drawn perfection.

For all the moral degradation of its characters, Graduation is uncompromising in its vision of the cost of parental responsibility.

The Favourite has ribaldry and intelligence to burn, a deliciously entertaining period piece that feels liberated by its period, rather than restrained and invigorates like a glass of wine thrown violently in your face.

The whole set-up risks being all too winsome, but Jarmusch has always been a quiet punk: his most radical assertion is believing, despite everything, in the essential goodness of people.

Eternal Beauty, whilst it is not entirely devoid of cliché, provides a much-needed, deeply human alternative to the noisy and tragic narratives about hallucinatory derangement, terror, and victimisation that we may have come to expect from films about madness.

Blade Runner 2049 is not a perfect film. The pace occasionally puts the plod in the procedural and some story elements are introduced only to drift away to the land of possible sequels. But Villeneuve has created a genuinely thoughtful piece of sci-fi which escapes the gravitational pull of its inspiration to become something - to paraphrase Dr. Eldon Tyrrell - more Blade Runner than Blade Runner.

Featuring a breakthrough lead turn from Oscar Isaac as a struggling folk singer, the Coens have returned to the high watermark of such classic efforts as Miller's Crossing and Barton Fink.

An ambitious, clever, and inventive psychogenic fugue, Censor is rough around the edges and shot on a shoestring, sure, however Bailey-Bond has compelling and vital comments to make on art, media consumption, politics, and society.

Tsai's Stray Dogs is a masterpiece of social-realism, a distinctive and beguiling study of society's displaced and marginalised that plays to the beat of its own drum and refuses to conform to cinema's own commodification.

Just over fifty years after A Man for All Seasons won six Oscars including Best Picture and Best Actor for Paul Scofield, Fred Zinnemann’s adaptation of Robert Bolt’s stage play has found unique points of modern relevance.

Drunk on the visual majesty of Rome, just as Fellini once was, this is arthouse cinema at its most effortlessly entrancing, with life and art blending into one magnificent whole.

Betty Blue, in either of its forms – whether it be the 121-minute theatrical version or the 185-minute director’s cut – takes a bad situation and makes it true-blue and beautiful.

The sumptuous colours, outstanding choreography and toe-tapping tunes are nothing but first-rate.

Elliot explores the film’s central themes of loneliness, mental illness, love and friendship, all with a deft balance of humour, sadness and subtlety.

Girlhood's non-patronising and credible representation of class, race and gender is a rare and perceptive illustration of the intricacies of social inequality.

Pain and Glory is a study of acceptance, revelation and reconciliation; it is about cinema’s relationship with the past and its power to reshape and cohere memory as a means of coming to terms with it.

Snowpiercer evolves steadily, growing richer with every step and slowly feeding us morsels of information - enriching this ludicrous premise with enough magic and wonder to suspend our disbelief entirely.

The delight is in the audacity and surprise of the film.

The total effect of these sequences is the feeling of hanging out with Dylan and his entourage. This is perhaps Don’t Look Back‘s greatest trick – convincing its audience that the Dylan we see here is anything other than a column of air: elusive, shifting and perpetually enigmatic.

The vision of the black American experience might be grim, but it is never miserablist or despairing. The songs, the traditions, the love and the community are still there, even if the world seems to be undeniably on fire.

It's how the film handles grief and alienation which makes Marina's story so compelling.

The two kids are effortlessly real and emotionally complex, but profoundly simple, and Miyazaki’s unique masterpiece embraces that childlike existence.

A documentary of tremendous urgency and compassion, The Fight is essential viewing for anybody who wants to understand the present political moment.

Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods is not only his best recent film, but also one of the most vital of the year.

About Dry Grasses is part-Chekovian comedy of yearning and male ego, and part-tragedy of a country which stymies the growth of its own citizens.

Phoenix has created a masterful performance for a film which itself feels like a masterpiece: a cracked masterpiece.

It’s an offbeat masterpiece that reveals the dark heart of Britain through the perennial tension between social progress and the burden of the past.

Nina Forever is a brilliant, intelligent and emotionally rewarding debut feature.

Veteran Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar’s latest feature, Parallel Mothers, is as much about his enduring fascination with motherhood as it is the capacity to heal through our connections to the past.

Birdman is a rich, startlingly clever and multi-layered collage, with Iñárritu creating a meta-universe of mirrors and performances upon performances.

The Force Awakens barrels back into Lucas' 'lived-in' universe with inextinguishable energy and boundless joie de vivre.

Director Marielle Heller takes viewers on a hilarious tour of New York’s memorabilia dealers, blending a mixture of heist comedy with a sensitive character study of Israel herself: “bitter as a root”, to use her own expression, but not without a certain irascible charm.

Over the years, Phoenix has given us some of the most memorable portraits of dark flawed men from Commodus to Johnny Cash. Here, he is excellent, utterly convincing as a man who has been hammered by the world and so has decided to hammer it back.

Sabaya does not shy away from the horrendous circumstances it finds, exhibiting bitterly raw emotion, fear and heartbreak very frankly.

Taking its cues from the cinema of Dario Argento and Italian horror, In Fabric, gives audiences the best British horror film since Don’t Look Now.

Made with defiant conviction, this is a fearless, unflinching, but above all compassionate piece of documentary filmmaking that cares deeply about the people whose plight it tells. Enough is enough, it is time for change.

It’s full of epic bombast, (he even claims that it is based on a true story) jolting you out of complacency with shock, colour and music.

The two-part The Souvenir can be seen very much as one whole, and as such is one of the very best achievements in recent British cinema.

A highly original and utterly enthralling film that touches on staggeringly expansive themes - more typically expected in the work of master auteur and persistent award-winner Terrence Malick, than from animations.

Although Goodfellas doesn’t aspire to the grandeur of Coppola’s mob, Scorsese’s New Yorkers have their own vitality, even if – or perhaps because – the threat of violence is never far away.

Genre film or not, Davis’ depiction of profound grief is tremendously effective, elicited by McQueen’s audacious direction.

Precision, energy, and innovation move the components of John Wick, but the synergy that comes from their singular motion transcends mechanistic clockwork into vital, aesthetic flow.

What Denis’ film is concerned with is the visceral bodily experience and the claustrophobia of living in the middle of the infinite. If outer space is a cold and vast external of nothingness, then there is also an interior space of bodies, living, writhing, and fluid.

It seems ridiculous to call a film that is only 73-minutes long an epic, but that is what The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet feels like. Though it should be made clear, by epic there’s nothing grandiose; there is nary a special effect to be seen and hardly a cast of thousands. But at the same time, Argentine filmmaker Ana Katz’s sixth feature encompasses a life and very nearly the end of the world.

What we are left with instead is a story of astonishing tenderness; a study of love as a tempering salve to the sublime of history’s passing.

Brilliantly acted, shot with precision and style, this is a deconstruction of the ‘nuclear family’ that cries out for a second or third viewing.

Although many rightly claim it to be the greatest sports movie of all time, Raging Bull’s praise should not merely be confined to one genre, as it is unquestionably one of the finest pieces ever committed to film.

While Tarantino's recent output combines a strong craftsmanship and a deep reverence to their genre forefathers, it's Pulp Fiction which still wields that adrenalised needle of originality straight into the heart.

Fiennes doesn’t do anything radical in her handling of the footage or the approach, but with a subject like Grace Jones a simple approach is still spellbinding.