Happily, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has in Moonlight exactly the kind of small, smart film that the Awards should be recognizing more often. Whether it will actually win is another matter: Jenkins’s script and his direction are bracingly free of the sentimentality Oscar so loves.

One of the best fantasies ever made. [13 Mar 2009, p.R20]

This is like no movie you've seen before, a haunting mixture of horror, history and fantasy that works simultaneously on every level.

It’s all too common for history to remember victims as numbers, but Quo Vadis, Aida? counters this, offering instead an eye-opening and deeply felt personal portrait of tragedy.

Relentlessly dark but expertly rendered, it shares its cinematographer and quality of aggrieved compassion with another recent Romanian art house hit, "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu."

An exhilarating and furious indictment of class struggle, Parasite might be the masterpiece South Korea's Bong Joon-ho has been working toward his entire career.

A majestic feat of filmmaking, an intimate portrait of a family that also serves as a broad portrait of a changing nation.

The most successful film ever released in Japan, and co-winner of the top prize at this year's Berlin film festival, Spirited Away is a complete reversal of the Hollywood way with animation.

There's a giddy, absurd charm to the story, in which the strange setting only enhances the comfortable familiarity of the narrative and characters.

As a filmmaker, Questlove utilizes his celebrity connections more than he does original directorial vision, trading instead in long-established, standard documentary structure and form. Summer of Soul is polished, but it pales in stark comparison to the raw footage and energy of the Harlem Cultural Festival.

Far from the push-button catharsis offered by most Hollywood redemption tales, the work is sober and deliberate, a mix of visceral intensity and artful design.

One of the things that is admirable about Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea – and there are many admirable things about this quietly moving drama – is the way its initial enigma seems to need no explanation; yet, once deciphered, the film does not falter but moves only deeper into the emotional territory it charts.

A French rat as a master chef? Absurd. But a brilliant French chef with an American accent? C'est grotesque!

Unlike the book, the movie slides into idealistic Hollywood convenience (the state-run labour camps, for example, are paradise compared to the privately owned versions), but the story is driven by gritty realism and remarkable acting. [31 July 2009, p.R20]

Gravity, a weightless ballet and a cold-sweat nightmare, intimates mystery and profundity, with that mixture of beauty and terror that the Romantics called the sublime.

There is no psychology in L'Argent, no acting to speak of; every scene is a minimal sketch which drives the didactic story forward. This use of narrative may sound ordinary, but, in Robert Bresson's pure filmmaking, it becomes extraordinarily relentless. [20 July 1984]

Thoughtful yet incendiary, romantic yet skeptical, patently absurd yet at the same time brandishing a mirror that so clearly and unforgivingly reflects our own cracked reality, Anderson’s film arrives with the kind of casual, confident brilliance that feels deceptively effortless.

It has the staccato wit of a drawing-room comedy, the fatal flaw of a tragic romance and the buzzy immediacy of a front-page headline, all powered by a kinetic engine typically found in an action flick. And that's just the opening scene.

Sharply subverting the male gaze at every turn, Sciamma has created an unforgettable treatise on thwarted desire. It is so very easy to label a film incendiary, but Portrait of a Lady on Fire deserves the scalding honour. It will ignite every flame you might have.

In so many ways, The Whole Bloody Affair is the movie-est movie to ever be movie’d, with Tarantino generously trepanning his skull wide open in order to provide everyone a direct portal inside his cinema-addled brain.

It’s an astonishing, often challenging and sharp examination of race in the United States.

Weaving in footage from Lucian Bratu’s 1981 film Angela Moves On (a melodrama following a female taxi driver and set during the heart of Nicolae Ceausescu’s crushing reign in Romania), and capped off by an extended movie-within-a-movie contained in one static shot, Jude’s film is an ambitious experiment of the mad-science variety.

Aftersun cuts you in two with such emotional intensity, such impressive dramatic force, that I could only sit and fight back the inevitable tears.

With exuberant naturalism from its non-professional actors, and a standout performance from Kosar Ali as Rocks’s best friend, the film covers the highs and lows of female adolescence with compelling sensitivity.

More arduously, Riva is obliged to act out the physical decline while still registering a full spectrum of emotions. Remarkably, she does it all, even when reduced to communicating with her eyes alone. Hers is, in every sense of the phrase, a nakedly honest performance.

There's something about this story, and this war, that brings out the stripped-down conceptual artist in her (Bigelow): Against blank canvases of desert sand and rubble, explosive wires are linked to nerve ends, and everything that matters depends on the twitch of a muscle or a finger on a button.

Pulp Fiction is at least three movies rolled into one, and they're all scintillating.

Not everything about Zero Dark Thirty zips by. The middle hour of the film feels overstuffed with agency chiefs and national security advisors gazing on the feisty Maya with avuncular admiration.

Rarely, though, has cinema been so devoted to idealizing the importance of journalism than in Collective.

Much like Robert Altman during his forays into the genre, writer/director Asghar Farhadi isn't really interested in the answers. Instead, he keeps expanding the questions, until that singular title comes to seem a misnomer.

A powerful and affecting piece of work.

Mixing Chaplinesque delicacy with the architectural grandeur of a Stanley Kubrick film, director Andrew Stanton recycles film history and makes something fresh and accessible from it without pandering to a young audience.

It plays like documented fact, a kind of "7 Up" primer on life’s romantic vicissitudes.

Yes, hallelujahs are in order.

Technically awe-inspiring, narratively inventive and thematically complex, Dunkirk reinvigorates its genre with a war movie that is both harrowing and smart.

This is an oddball classic that leaves you weak with pleasure. [11 Mar 1988]

Performances are still the heart of Leigh’s work, and at the heart of this film is an extraordinary performance by Leigh’s frequent collaborator, the British actor Timothy Spall.

It is glorious.

There's fun to be had in watching these losers drift without a compass.

Movies have always been - at their most extravagantly appealing, sensually exciting and rationally disturbing-pieces of art with the power to bypass our defences. A few times in the history of movies, one caught glimpses of a power that could turn the screen experience into a hallucinatory celebration of irrationality, of pure feeling, and even, perhaps, of insanity. Apocalypse Now goes further in that direction more successfully than any movie ever has. [21 May 1979]

The most gripping war movie you'll see this year, We Were Here tells first-hand the story of how AIDS attacked San Francisco, killing more than 15,000. Whole peer groups were happy, healthy, and then dead in months.

Days of Heaven is so unapologetically beautiful, so calculatingly gorgeous, it is certain to arouse resentment in the minds of those who find visual hedonism a sin in movies, and to arouse suspicion, if not outrage, in those who require that movies have heart. [22 Sept. 1978]

This is a film containing oceans of truth, centuries of longing and vast feelings of open-hearted tenderness.

The [final] battle is vast, and undoubtedly required thousands of hours of matching puppetry, robotics and computer code, but it is not without tedium.

Perhaps this multilingual, almost-pre-AIDS idyll does not stretch credulity – the family is surely based on Aciman’s own internationalist clan – but it can try the patience.

A preening terrorist for the Me generation, his primary drive was vanity and his main professional asset an absence of empathy.

Ultimately, Blue Heron is an epic exploring the power and fissures of memory. But there is no chance that audiences will ever forget what Romvari has accomplished here.

This is hilarious, heartbreaking cinema – a work that will make you burst out laughing one moment, and leave you tearing your hair out the next.

Utterly magnificent and intoxicating.

Quiet and reverent, as if filmed entirely in hushed tones, Sciamma’s film is supremely confident in its every element.

There is no rookie-film handicap required in grading the excellence on display. There are no fireworks or twists or unnecessary frills here, nor should there be – this is simply perfect filmmaking from a voice that demands to be heard. The fall movie season is saved. Thank you, Greta Gerwig.

Mesmerizing.

From its joyful and exuberant opening half to a late-game moment of deep and sombre introspection, Lee’s version of American Utopia is thoughtful pop performance art captured with the propulsive power of cinema.

The director, though, reaches in and steals your heart right in front of your eyes, like a magic trick, and you have to admit you didn’t even see it coming.

This 70-minute movie is the most startling, breakneck comedy of the Marx Brothers' career... Next to Chaplin's "The Great Dictator", this is the purest satire of dictatorship on film. [20 Jan 1996]

As director Maren Ade builds one extended set piece after another, you will gradually spy her brilliant fusion of form and function: the languid pacing reproduces in the audience the feeling of Ines’s excruciating discomfort and desire to see her father shuffle out of the scene.

Whatever praise heads toward Sandler should be tripled in the direction of the Safdies.

Inside Llewyn Davis only really kicks into gear at its 55-minute mark. Unsurprisingly, this occurs with the arrival of Coen venerable John Goodman, playing an acerbic jazz hipster who has little truck with the folk idiom but a large appetite for heroin.

It is a work of great beauty that rewards continued visits.

An engrossing and stylistically exacting work of cinema, Tár teases our political (as in: identity) sentiments with such a ferocious artistic confidence that you will leave the theatre with questions, arguments, demands – but most of all a supremely fulfilling sense of satisfaction. Here is a film that not only starts a debate but almost ends it, too.

That's not to say that There Will Be Blood isn't something exceptional; it's just that the movie is jarringly erratic, ranging from moments of delicacy to majesty to over-the-top bombast.

Lee has forged a work of art in the classic sense -- art that delights and instructs.

A movie so pungent and filled with sweaty intensity that you can practically smell the rank body odour of the film's subjects as they hurl their bodies against each other in a frenzy of aggression or perform as if in a trance, soaked with perspiration.

How refreshing then to find a movie with an honest-to-gosh dysfunctional family at its core, a family utterly Tolstoyan in its unhappiness, utterly Dostoevskyan in its despair. [16 Jun 1995]

If watching a Jafar Panahi film is something of a political act, then it is also a soul-nourishing one.

Spotlight is not about fiery performances or thrilling set-pieces – it’s simply a tight and captivating look at professionals who excel at their jobs, and who legitimately care about making a difference. Sometimes, that’s more than enough.

Great describes The Band Wagon, which followed Singin' in the Rain by a year and has similar fun satirizing the excesses of show business. [18 Mar 2005, p.R33]

In set design, choreography, performances and music, The Wizard of Oz is a brilliant bauble of collective filmmaking, in what may have been Hollywood's greatest single year. [06 Nov 1998]

It’s a beautiful work of cinematic concentration that’s purely Apichatpong.

The adjective “inspirational” doesn't do justice to the quality of Schnabel's film.

The Class is simultaneously old school and new, familiar in its themes but unique in design and, at its best, riveting in execution.

The Coen brothers adaptation is impeccable, a perfect mirror of McCarthy's prose – sparse, suspenseful, probing and profoundly disturbing.

Baker mostly crafts a tiny adventure of absorbing wonder.

Sissako’s point, while never heavy-handed, is hard to miss: Traditional Muslims are among the world’s biggest victims of Islamic militarism.

Not Hitchcock's best, but far from his worst. [01 Mar 1997, p.11]

It's one modern film worthy of being called a contemporary classic. [2002 re-release]

If Apocalypse Now was criticized in the past as a series of impressive sequences that don't quite add up to a tidy story, the new additions put this in perspective. It's a filmed epic, not a filmed drama. [10 Aug 2001, p.R1]

Never hints at the quiet, revolutionary nature of empathy and autonomy in empowering young women to keep themselves safe.

The Zone of Interest is a knockout in all senses. It will pummel your heart, and flatten your soul. It cannot, must not, be missed.

The British crew here, headed by writer Barry Hines and producer/director Mick Jackson, accomplish what would seem to be an impossible task: depicting the carnage without distancing the viewer, without once letting him retreat behind the safe wall of fictitious play. Formidable and foreboding, Threads leaves nothing to our imagination, and Nothingness to our conscience. [02 Mar 1985]

One of those rare films that manages to be both terrifically entertaining and consistently thoughtful, it turns an apparently tame deception into a very rich metaphor.

Call it what you like – a modern Russian epic, a crime drama, a black comedy or a scream in the dark – Leviathan is a shaggy masterpiece.

Eventually, Toy Story 3 finds its way back to that theme of the power of childhood play. There are a few worrisome moments en route, though, when not only the characters but the filmmakers seem to have lost their way.

The director’s semi-autobiographical, 1980s-set story may be small – it mostly focuses on the turbulent relationship between Julie and Anthony as the former struggles to find her artistic voice and the latter battles various addictions – but her impulses and vision are grand.

This fictional "rockumentary" about a mediocre, aging heavy-metal band's last tour of America is surprisingly modest, subtle and funny. Not only is this the kind of satiric treatment rock music has been crying out for, it may be one of the most original film comedies in years. [20 Apr 1984]

No so-called serious gangster film has ever been more fun, or less dangerous, or more intrinsically feminist, than GoodFellas. Even "I Married the Mob" was scarier.

Animation seems an odd means of addressing such a grim tragedy, but it gives Maitland the creative freedom to effectively tell a suspenseful, harrowing and moving story.

The Secret Agent is not only mining the director’s own personal cinematic education – it is rich in homages to everything from The Parallax View and McCabe & Mrs. Miller to Shivers and, of course, Jaws – but also excavating an entire nation’s past.

As it dips into murder-mystery territory, then something more quiet and philosophical, Chang-dong writes a story both expected and surprising.

Take three hours out of your life, and enjoy one of the most fulfilling cinematic rides of the year.

Once in a rare while a film comes along that is boldly original, communicates an important idea in an elegantly simple fashion and happens to be highly entertaining. Such is the case with Moolaadé.

A miracle of a movie that could only exist due to everything going so very wrong.

Whether, in making Saint Omer, Diop has found the answers that she’s been searching for since 2016 remains an open question. But the truth of the film is that she has certainly compelled her audience to take a complicated, fraught, and harrowing journey of their own.

It’s a document of mutual care; a self-authored family archive magnified by the scope of its editor and platform; and a compassionately rendered adaptation of the ways in which we feel the tempo, intervals, duration and memory of time.

Arguably, Lost in Translation is the American answer to Wong Kar-wai's masterpiece, "In the Mood for Love," though less about history, more about infatuation.

One of the best, funniest, most surprising and likeable American films of the year. [27 Aug 1979]

Unusual for a Holocaust drama, the film offers no false hope of rescue or resurrection, but does insist that our bearing witness matters.

Phoenix, for long scenes, is onscreen by himself, lost in his thoughts and those of the operating system moulded to fit his psyche. With his wounded awkwardness and boyish giggles, he seems authentically vulnerable, but the character’s emotionally arrested development also begins to weigh the film down.