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.