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.

In an era where films such as "Moonlight" and "If Beale Street Could Talk" have received accolades for their capacity to reimagine expressions of black life on film, Ross contributes to this new canon by staring down the assumption of what type of black lived experiences mass audiences are capable of acknowledging.

A masterpiece, but of a unique kind... A gorgeously filmed, supremely well-acted, intricately written film noir about now.

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

Poised, delicate, powerful, hovering between poignancy and pealing laughter, it is a feast formed by skill and serendipity.

Le Havre, offers the director's usual humour, pitch-perfect acting and compassionate message, with a Gallic twist that should win new converts.

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]

But Turteltaub surprises us. He has the kind of unerring comic touch - easily able to carry his audience from smart dialogue to heart-tugging emotion to something awfully close to slapstick - that should serve the movie world well.

This is where the movie excels. In the classic neo-realist tradition, it's scant in plot yet rich in mood and character, offering us a revealing hint here, a poignant glimpse there, with each revelation filtered through Michelle Williams's superbly muted performance, all the more moving for being so restrained.

A movie in which TV show host Bob Eubanks tells a joke at once anti-semitic and homophobic, a movie in which a town turns into a vermin-ridden, crime- crazed black hole - this is the happiest surprise of the holiday season? What gives? [22 Dec 1989]

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

You don't need to have seen a lot of art films to love The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky. All it takes is compassionate curiosity and perhaps some lingering memory of the world as a child experiences it.

British humour at its eclectic best, a deliciously heady mix of dry wit and ribald farce.

Tense, immersive and excellently assaulting, Good Time is hella time.

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

The 15:17 To Paris, like "Sully," "American Sniper" and (to a lesser extent) "Gran Torino" before it, combines such conceptions of late style: both harmonious and intransigent, resolute and difficult, defined by lively contradiction.

One caveat: At the risk of sounding sexist, let me say A Prophet is an unreservedly male film. Female characters are few and far between, and when they do appear, they pretty much fall into either one of two categories – les mamans ou les putains.

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.

Reservoir Dogs sizzles - it's dynamite on a short fuse, and you watch it with mesmerized fascination, simultaneously attracted and repelled by the explosion you know will come.

Dreamgirls is one of the best movie musicals in memory.

It's a masterpiece of exposition and compression. An allegorical examination of a transitional period in U.S. history. [01 Sept 1988]

What keeps the energy percolating is DiCaprio’s performance, in the loosest and most charismatic turn of his career.

A riveting, impossible-to-shake masterwork that leaves the audience spooked, not by its telling but by its commitment to abstract themes of grief, solitude and coming of age.

With this complex characterization, Bening looks like a shoo-in for a best-actress nomination come Oscar time, but she is also amply supported here with two performances that nicely capture the insecurities of earlier stages of womanhood.

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

An experience that is sometimes unbearable and always riveting. [14 Oct 1988]

Take nothing seriously - not the action, not the gore, not the plot, not the theme. Instead, view Desperado as it's meant to be seen - a comedy - and you're in for an unalloyed treat; heck, you're in for one of the funniest flicks of the year.

If the word masterpiece has any use these days, it must apply to the film Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, a mature, philosophically resonant work from Turkey's leading director, 53-year-old Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Climates, Distance, Three Monkeys).