The documentary of the year may also be its most hair-raising thriller.

Skip work to see it at the first opportunity.

A film rich in paradoxes. Much of the film's style is dreamy, from the snow-covered Ontario landscapes suggestive of a blanket of forgetfulness, to Julie Christie's pale, intoxicating beauty, to the ambient musical score.

This is a tremendously entertaining trip through the births of both America and the musical form, with each institution given a lightly revisionist torque by Miranda, who approaches the material with a scholar’s dedication to detail and a showman’s slick wit.

Yes, The Father is a familiar story and a universal one. Yet Zeller has been uniquely inventive in the way he evokes the unreliability of memory and the subjectivity of experience in the senile – and the healthy.

Foxtrot is an admirably precise yet dreamlike film, probing the trap in which contemporary Israel finds itself. It is deliberately designed, superbly filmed and affectingly acted by Lior Ashkenazi and Sarah Adler as the stricken Feldmanns.

The story is both fresh and archetypal; the landscape both hard and delicate – and beautifully observed. Memories and premonitions are intriguingly inserted into the action and the performances...are note perfect.

In some ways, it’s almost a silent film – characters only speak when necessary, with Foster and McKenzie (a remarkable find, who is bound to generate Lawrence comparisons) telling the story with their eyes. But Granik’s attention to family dynamics, and the pained feelings of those living outside America’s rigid expectations, speak louder than words.

Yes, The King's Speech is a lively burst of populist rhetoric, superbly performed and guaranteed to please even discriminating crowds.

Parallel Mothers’ twin purposes merge into something just shy of profound. It is a moment, and movie, that just might save your soul, too.

Scenic, well-paced and rich in dialogue and character, the film is Coen brothers for the squares, and maybe the best middle-of-the-seat drama of the summer.

Disney has historically peopled cartoons aimed at children with violent, gruesomely animated villains. For all its delicious whimsy, Up is no exception.

So much of Poor Things, both in its conception and maturation, feels self-satisfyingly provocative instead of imaginatively profound.

The year's best man is a lady. [17 Dec 1982]

Black Panther fights constantly and bitterly against the familiar constraints of Disney's superhero industrial complex. At every turn, the expectations of the genre, the bland sameness that breeds cinematic comfort for the millions who line up to fill Marvel's coffers, are met by the director with resistance and creative intensity.

The mesmerizing and lingeringly paced Cemetery of Splendour, picks up where Freud left off.

Nothing short of mesmerizing.

Life is Sweet is sweet indeed - and comic and quirky and, on those occasions when the tone deftly shifts, just a little sad... Leigh's work, and the quotidian life it depicts, is sometimes slim but never insubstantial, occasionally sweet but never a sugary confection. And always worth celebrating. [24 Jan. 1992]

Todd Douglas Miller’s documentary about the first moon landing is dead brilliant, sure to enrage conspiracy theorists while thrilling most everyone else.

Both a triumph of design and cinematic engineering and, at the same time, long, repetitious and naive.

Few directors working today make films with the grace and magisterial power of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's best work.

Yun, a veteran Korean actress, gives a splendidly layered performance.

Jenkins creates many remarkable scenes, particularly as the male characters discuss the racist realities with which they live.

Yes, at its best, Birdman soars, swoops and flutters with life and invention, but it parrots more than it speaks. You long for a writer as reliably, elegantly witty as Tom Stoppard, whose dramas are typically “backstage,” or if not Stoppard, at least a verbal speed-puncher like Armando Iannucci, or if not Iannucci, someone as relentlessly inventive and obsessive as Charlie Kaufman to make you feel like somebody is trying to say something, rather than a writing team filling in the intelligent-sounding words to support the boisterous performances and the virtuosic camera dance.

Gillian Armstrong's adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's 1868 novel is lively and thoughtful and beautifully formed. [21 Dec 1994]

Coming out of the Toronto International Film Festival last month, critics were touting McCarthy as an Oscar nominee. Her work is nuanced and insightful, though it may not be showy enough for Academy voters.

The particularly imaginative handling of the shifts between the human and the more ethereal animal incarnations represent the film’s most rewarding aspect.

What has been crafted with The Body Remembers When The World Broke Open is the multitudinous reality of past and present, absent and material; a world-affirming space of narrative realization that speaks to those who exist within the efforts and “now” of survival.

Amadeus needs an additional 20 minutes running time like "The Magic Flute" needs a drum solo. Though the production is gussied up with more frills and decoration than a Viennese dessert trolley, Forman is generally workmanlike in his visual style and very uneven with his handling of actors.

Perhaps the bravest thing here is Banderas’ reserved performance: Selfish, hypochondriacal and sadly cocooned, his fictional film director is not a flattering portrait of an aging auteur.

The drama is an intricately constructed and intensely felt work that transcends the easy “coming-of-age” genre label that is so tempting to slap onto it.

An unforgettable portrayal of the unglamorous gangster life, which is often short and never sweet.

Right from its opening frame, there’s a lyrical, dreamlike quality to Payal Kapadia’s debut feature.

A ghoul's dinner of undigested indelicacies pilfered from other horror feasts; the undeniable ability of the chef, director David K. Lynch, has been utilized to create a cream sauce in which the victuals cook without ever cooking together. [18 Sep 1979]

Return to Seoul is not a dour, sombre thing – it is intense, electric and confrontational.

The racial context is incisive; the retelling is tense, tight and chilling. These kinds of stories are emotionally wrenching to watch but can’t be told too often.

The movie’s moral centre, is the island’s doctor, who in one of the film’s most powerful moments reflects on all the autopsies he’s performed. “It’s the duty of every human being to help these people,” he says. That’s about as close as director Gianfranco Rosi gets to a political message.

Unlike many of his action-cinema contemporaries, McQuarrie excels at creating clear lines of sight for his set pieces, and cutting them together to ensure maximum tension.

Compelling, disturbing.

Watching a film knowing it will be the last time you see a true talent immortalized on screen is a wildly moving experience. And with Ma Rainey – a film that is stacked with talent, chemistry and life – fans of Boseman couldn’t ask for a better goodbye.

Simply but smoothly animated, and featuring no dialogue whatsoever, director Pablo Berger’s film is a charming fable that rides the line between sentimentality and schmaltz just right.

If everyone in One False Move keeps making mistakes, there are no false moves from the technicians or actors; the only flaw is the slight taint of convenience that attends the plotting of so many contemporary thrillers. But the taint is superficial - it's eventually overwhelmed by the smell of corruption, the odour of pain, and the stench of hopelessness. [4 Sept 1992]

Director Morgen is a bit messy with his timeline and his relentless insect photography really bugged me. But the biggest nit to pick is with Philip Glass's intrusive, crazily grandiose score.

Even when his touch is light, the Swedish filmmaker is masterful at capturing youth’s contracted perception of time and amplified emotions: Every slight could mean the end of the world, and every joy feels limitless.

The entire production entertainingly coalesces into part concert doc, part cultural artifact, part “gotcha!” stunt, and part meditation on the fickle, fleeting nature of creativity.

A portrait of America that is devastating and freeing, bursting with sorrow and empathy.

Director Maria Sodahl tracks the couple’s story over the course of only one Christmas break, but the film is more a chronicle of one family’s entire existence. Skarsgard, by the way, is typically excellent – it’s just that he mostly, and graciously, cedes the screen to Hovig, who is given much more to do and handles it with aplomb.

The feeling is like a warm homecoming.

That it’s unsettling not just because of the contentious moral context underlines just how radical any realistic depictions of female desire and sexual experience still are.

Lincoln is directed by Steven Spielberg but, to his great credit, few will mistake this for a Steven Spielberg film. Rather, it's a Tony Kushner film, the playwright who conjured up the wordy but intricately layered script; and it's a Daniel Day-Lewis film, the actor who so richly embodies the iconic title role.

Ultimately, your nautical mileage may vary as to whether Chandor and Redford achieve the philosophical and emotional impact they intend, but in a movie that is a demonstration of the importance of trying, they definitely try.

Both Colm’s initial rejection of Padraic and Padraic’s final crazed reaction are not the stuff of realism or reason but of fairy tales and nightmares, yet Gleeson and Farrell make the film a delight.

Adapted with great warmth and wit, and with as much of Austen’s crackling dialogue as his own, Stillman shapes lean Austen descriptions such as “He is as silly as ever” into superb character bits for the preposterous twit Sir James Martin (Tom Bennett).

A terrifying, pitch-black kind of horror movie that takes up residence in your mind for days, even weeks later – but it is also a family film.

Listen to Me Marlon is an offer so intimate that no film fan should refuse.

Though not as memorable as the series on which it is based, it does the job as big-screen entertainment.

A fantastic film.

The whole ensemble has a hoot with this material, and their joy is contagious.

At first startling, even disengaging, that strange style eventually dovetails with the awful substance.

The S in Robert S. McNamara stands for Strange, which is an unusual middle name and perhaps an apt description of the man at the centre of documentary filmmaker Errol Morris's gripping character study, The Fog of War.

Ledger proves what we've suspected all along -- this is his picture, and he steals it brilliantly.

Might be the best Spider-Man film ever made.

This excellent British film is an eerie, thoroughly engrossing thriller about the disappearance of a youngster and the events that follow when a policeman goes to a small, privately owned island to investigate. [23 Jan 1988]

There is as much wit as there is wretchedness, the director having no trouble finding the human comedy scratching beneath the title tragedy.

Their excitement is infectious and the entire endeavour both mind-bending and tremendously human: Near the end, Peter Higgs, the recent Nobel Prize-winner and one of the scientists who first predicted the particle back in 1964, is seen in Switzerland watching the data results come in, while a tear trickles down his cheek.

An astonishing multimedia diary.

It may well be the ultimate family picture of this or any year. [22 Nov 1996, p.D2]

Reportedly, after seeing the film, rapper Eminen is anxious to play a wheelchair athlete in a coming movie.

When it came to describing what was happening to him, Ebert was forthright, clear-eyed and admirably free of neurosis and self-pity.

As much as The Shape of Water's disparate parts shouldn't work – and as much as its "originality" is sourced from the thousands of other fables del Toro has consumed over his lifetime – it does, in the end.

Haneke is best known for "The Piano Teacher." His latest, Caché (or Hidden) is a quieter but equally provocative attack. It's less in your face, more in your head and under your skin.

Turning the stately game into something few can resist – a smart and lively comedy of manners.

The deeper that Resurrection goes, the more that Gan’s vision delicately, meticulously, and, of course, slowly envelopes you, no matter your level of comprehension.

One of the most original, good-hearted comedies in a long time, Rushmore is the sort of movie where the strangest sequences of discords somehow keep managing to reach giddily improbable resolutions.

There’s voyeurism, fetishism, bondage, lingerie and high-flown naughtiness galore, but that’s hardly the movie’s most conspicuous achievement. Also at work in this transfixing account of a sado-masochistic relationship on the ropes (so to speak) are a probing intelligence, a catalogue of inspirational cinematic references and – perhaps most impressive – a big, sad, beating heart.

There are those trying to position "Gone Girl" as the date-and-debate movie of the season, but it isn’t half the unsettling thriller Force Majeure is.

Like newfangled Western revisions of ramen itself – sprinkled with corn niblets and topped with melty hillocks of shredded Swiss cheese – Tampopo is an exercise in hybridity.

The reason Diane (the film) exists is not to propose and then solve a mystery, but to engage with Diane (the person).

Ten may strain your patience but that's the high-stakes gamble of this provocative project.

Room is a film of tiny little miracles.

Huller is asked to play a wonderful mess of contradictions – and the actress pulls off the job marvelously, all steel nerves and darting eyes.

Mostly, Nebraska impresses for its sure rhythms and artful balance of comedy and melancholy, resulting in Payne’s most satisfying film since "About Schmidt."

Overtly passionate, ebulliently funny and ideologically subtle, Like Water for Chocolate is strong drink - hot and sweet. It toasts life not as it is but as it should be. [09 Apr 1993]

Into the Spider-Verse was almost a chore to keep up with, albeit a joyful one. Its superb sequel, Across the Spider-Verse, keeps up that momentum, goes further with the artistry and is perhaps even more rewarding. Like any great sequel free from the legwork of setting things up, this one is more contemplative and soulful.

Heavenly Creatures is a devilishly clever and damnably accurate reflection of that duality - twinning the mystique of adolescence with the mystery of murder, it's a wonderfully natural recording of an awfully unnatural act. [20 Jan 1995]

With his trademark spare, unfussy direction and jumping into the story approach, Eastwood subtly establishes the themes of faith, loss and love and then he raises the drama to a different level.

The Babadook is too deliberately calibrated to prove truly terrifying.

David Cronenberg's gelid masterpiece.

By the end, Sachs has raised urgent questions about immigration, classism, gentrification, loyalty, family and nascent sexuality – but he’s done so utterly organically, via 10 square feet of city. Lovely.

Cholodenko casts much better than she writes. Yet, alas, even a talented veteran like Moore can't sell a hoary line like, "Sometimes you hurt the ones you love the most." Maybe if she'd set it to music – nope, sorry, that's already been done.

It is our tour guide that makes Cave of Forgotten Dreams an often thrilling experience. His producer, Erik Nelson, has joked Herzog is the first filmmaker to use 3-D for good, instead of evil. There is no question that the technology enhances our visit, giving perspective and shape to the jagged Chauvet Cave – an open mouth the size of a football field.

Soderbergh has bathed the Depression in lovely, golden-brown hues - so lovely, so golden, that the flick seems to be unfolding from inside the delicious core of a burnished bran muffin. [20 August 1993]

The ensuing story about life and love is made visually compelling by exquisitely crafted animation, much of it drawn in the bold and refreshing ligne claire style pioneered by the Belgian cartoonist (and Tintin creator) Hergé. That counterintuitive contrast with the mysterious, unspoken tale only makes this unusual film all the more intriguing.

Society would do well to remember that, in large part, the most effective redress to the tragedy of AIDS came directly from the people with AIDS. Lest we forget, director David France is intent on reminding us.

Yet for all that the director's unflinching vision, the cast's excellent performances and Mikhail Krichman's unerring cinematography impress themselves upon the viewer, there is something out of balance in Loveless.

The accurately titled EPiC is the greatest concert documentary ever made.

Barbara is intriguing because the script subtly plays off that expectation, not denying it so much as expanding it, showing us that the grey world can contain, and even embrace, contradictory colours.