As the anger simmers, Kubrick’s camera remains detached, patrolling the trenches, pacing the courtroom. Terse and remorseless it may be, but the final flourish is perhaps the most fitting gracenote in all of cinema.

Pawlikowski is in complete control of the form, but this is no austere piece of work — he even finds time for a few good jokes. Accessible, humane and compassionate: what a treat this is.

This lesser known Kurosawa feature is worth a look, with outstanding performances and stunning cinematography.

The year’s most pleasant cinematic surprise. Once has enough heart, wit, verve and sheer songwriting genius to ensure you’ll see it far more times than its title suggests.

Less a black comedy than an indispensable reinvention of the so-called trauma plot, this grounded post-MeToo story is navigated with a light sprinkling of humour and the utmost grace.

Quiet, thoughtful and deeply human, this is one of Jarmusch’s finest and features Adam Driver’s best performance yet — although you do risk coming out with a new affection for modernist poetry.

This is not a film about boxing. This is a film about the human condition and about cinema itself.

It's easy to see why this has consistently entertained generations of audiences.

Impossible to recommend as a great Friday night out, yet agonisingly vital as thought-urging cinema.

Jarecki's film brilliantly illustrates the fallibility of memory, the slippery nature of 'facts' and even people's invention of events that may never have taken place.

Alec Guinness shines in this hilarious British comedy.

An extremely entertaining, brilliantly acted, highly diverting film which — like all hustles — delivers less than it promises. Still, it’s worth being taken for the ride.

A bleak and moving drama with reflective performance from Jack Nicolson.

The monochrome animation is stark and beautiful, and Marjane’s an appealing narrator. Often hilarious, sometimes tragic, this may be low-tech, but it’s high-class.

Day-Lewis and Pfeifer are on top form with Ryder giving the performance of her career.

A simultaneuosly touching and harrowing experience that puts the audience directly in the shoes of one man's experience of Vietnam.

Not particularly funny, or even very sunny, but it is Charlie Kaufman’s first whole screenplay, and as wonderful as it is weird.

A painful and poignant excoriation of the American dream.

Sum up the plot and it sounds interminable. Watch the film and it will spit you out elated, exhausted and cheering for an encore.

Already fêted, von Donnersmarck’s debut sets a closely focused, personal story against a more expansive backdrop of politics and power games -- a moving, enlightening tale of recent times.

This is not a film about narrative but loneliness and life on the road, which it captures with a mysterious brilliance.

This is how action movies should be made.

Its skating sequences are impressive, but it’s the intimate examinations of fracturing friendships and emerging adulthood that make Minding The Gap surprisingly resonant.

This magnificent, often anarchic pastiche of Russian literature’s portentous habits with a side order in Bergmanesque death wallowing actually finds Allen at his silliest. Which also means it is extraordinarily clever silliness, with designs deliberately stolen from Chaplin, Keaton and the Marx Brothers. It is film that explores comedy’s infinite variety via the medium of the existential philosophy of those big Russian sagas slumped in history like sulking teenagers.

With this touching story about a boy learning to play chess, Zaillian cuts an impressive debut, brining out strong performances from his cast most notably the young Pomeranc who is genuinely moving a the chess genius, even when he's not talking we are able to know what he's thinking, a rarity amongst child actors.

Even if you’ve skipped the Dardennes’ work until now, this is a talking-point movie — and an outstanding lead performance — you need to see. It’s a rare film of unforced simplicity that will stick with you for a long time. And it’s honest right to its perfectly judged ending.

Monumental stuff: a story about the deadly legacy of America’s colonial sins, both vast and intimate in scope. Exceptional filmmaking, by an exceptional filmmaker.

For Sama powerfully mixes the personal and the political to thought-provoking, emotional ends. The result is one of the best documentaries of 2019.