No doubt about it, Nobody's Fool is endowed with a lot of cinematic smarts - from the star's poise to the director's wiles to a lambent cameo from the late Jessica Tandy. And those smarts, part trickster's magic and part craftsman's guile, work their transforming art to perfection - seldom has a shallow pool looked so refreshingly deep. [13 Jan 1995]

The problem is not that the director is working but that his latest film is working too hard. Way too hard – this thing is melodrama running a marathon.

From beginning to end, Jarmusch carries it off. His vision is stranger than paradise, and his talent is odder than hell. [16 Nov 1984]

This is a lovely, quirky and not a little poignant film from Agnès Varda.

Raiders of the Lost Ark (at the Eglinton) is a cinematic roller-coaster, thrilling and frightening in equal measure, a heart-pounding slide down greased lightning. [12 June 1981]

It is at once a singular piece of pop-cult art, delivered with the brash confidence of a filmmaker who has either been told “no” too many times or not enough, and a film that could not exist without the contributions of Cronenberg and a dozen of his contemporaries and acolytes (including Donnie Darko’s Richard Kelly), their midnight visions co-opted by Schoenbrun into one slickly nostalgic neon-lit nightmare.

Another angry, searching document about pedophile priests, Deliver Us from Evil makes for unexpectedly gripping drama.

This is a juicy, outré exercise that gets its kicks from booting its audience into deliberately uncomfortable corners and then leaving them there to stew.

With his breathy, antic delivery, pouring out his heart in staccato bursts, Cusack puts a nice loop on the sensitive teen theme. For his is an upbeat, mature brand of sensitivity, the healthy kind that makes fine discriminations, not nasty judgments.

An utterly ravishing portrait of listless luxuriance, a fantasy of decadent wealth and beauty.

The culminative effect of the cinematography is inconclusive as the character remains trapped in grief.

Happening is set in the sixties, but Diwan’s stark, unwavering direction, coupled with sparing costumes and cinematographer Laurent Tangy’s intimate lens, lend the film a sense of timelessness. The power of Happening is in the terrifying knowledge that Anne’s struggles could be happening to anyone, at any time.

In The Lost Daughter, Gyllenhaal isn’t interested in judgment, only truth. Every decision she makes is exactly the right one. Her three lead actresses have never been better, and casting Buckley as the young Colman is particularly inspired. It doesn’t matter that they don’t look alike – they share a crucial essence.

Here’s a layered, nuanced film whose only goal is to tell a story of real people and real heartache, not to act as a crass marketing plank for a series of hopeful sequels and spinoffs (hi and bye, Baywatch and CHIPS).

Argo is a movie of many parts, the sum of which can probably be best described as enjoyable Hollywood hokum.

Indeed, as the film unreels to its extraordinary climax - a scene that will make your skin crawl - Frears has the larger target right in his sights and, bang, pulls the thematic trigger, taking no prisoners.

Pure cinematic intoxication, a wildly inventive mixture of comedy and melodrama, tastelessness and swooning elegance, bodies with the texture of fresh peaches, and angular faces Picasso would have loved.

It is filmmaker Assayas who is the star here. France's most important contemporary director has created a work of almost magisterial calm.

Like Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut," Anderson's latest is enigmatic. But if you have eyes and can see, The Master it is unmistakably some kind of wonder. At least, it's an exhilarating demonstration of big-screen moviemaking in dreamlike colours and a sense-heightening 70-mm format.

Sinan’s not a particularly fascinating character (Demirkol’s deliberately low-energy performance is a bit too unvaried for me). But the film comes alive in its attention to detail.

An idiosyncratic masterpiece and one of the few films in history that gloriously earns the appellation Proustian. [25 Sep 1989]

It is tidy, it is easy and it is, by the end, far too flinty.

Authentic, fresh and utterly relevant.

Each of the three short stories making up Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s new omnibus film Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy could stand on its own as a work of top-tier drama. Yet when stitched together, with the themes of coincidence and kindness being the only real connective tissue, the narratives spin themselves into something just shy of cinematic profundity.

The doc, similar to the Oscar-winning The White Helmets but a subtler portrait of heroism, reveals accurate information as the first weapon of resistance.

This is the master at the top of his form, his erratic genius harnessed and everything clicking, everything flowing, a fresh creation from a mature artist.

In short, it's very much a charming kids' film, created by a master of animation.

Redemption, not crime, is the real theme here, for this handful of courageous men and women who have rescued their own lives, and just possibly may help save the blighted neighbourhoods in which they labour.