It is a movie made up of delicate brushstrokes: details, moments, looks and smiles.

The sheer silliness is inspired.

It is witty, daring and exuberant; like his hero, Hitchcock shows himself to be energetic and resourceful in dealing with changes in locale. [11 Apr 2008, p.10]

The film is very funny – but asks its audience to wonder if being funny, if wanting to make people laugh, and particularly if using comedy for family-bonding, really is the sign of being relaxed and life-affirming in the way people who are talented at comedy often assume.

A sombre, sobering work.

It’s a remarkable match-up between film-makers and actor and reaffirms the importance of that partnership, especially for a movie star stuck in a profitable rut. Sandler deserves more, and if he wants us to keep watching, then so do we.

If anything, Robert Altman's self-styled "anti-western" looks even richer, stranger and more daring than it did when it first appeared back in 1971.

Brilliantly written, terrifically acted, superbly designed and shot; it's a sweet, sad, funny picture about the lost world of folk music which effortlessly immerses us in the period.

No matter how ironic and artificial the script, there's a lovely sadness in the corners of Karina's eyes, which makes many of the films they did together more hers than his.

Stagecoach remains a tale for our times.

The camera’s gaze isn’t pitiless but there isn’t a scrap of sentimentality – just an unflinching willingness to look at all of life straight on, without blinking.

This glorious film is about the greatest mystery of all: how old people were once young, and how young people are in the process of becoming old.

No one but Blanchett could have delivered the imperious hauteur necessary for portraying a great musician heading for a crackup or a creative epiphany. No one but Blanchett has the right way of wearing a two-piece black suit with an open-necked white shirt, the way of shaking her hair loose at moments of abandon, the way of letting her face become a Tutankhamun mask of contempt.

Peedom and her team responded to disaster with a steady hand, in more than one sense, and fulfilled a rare opportunity to make a responsive documentary that is large, beautiful, captivating and exhibits deep respect for the people and environments it photographs.

This is a dark, uncompromising film, thrillingly original and distinctive, with a visionary passion. It is a movie against which all directors, and all moviegoers, will want to measure themselves.

What President does well is show that linear narrative is not necessarily the point in the fight for democracy. Victory might not be immediate, but the people’s hope for change will never die.

Peter Bogdanovich's 1971 ode to a Texan small town is still a masterpiece whichever way you look at it.

Hard to Be a God creates its own uncanny world: it is beautiful, brilliant and bizarre.

Sal is not ready for a new political world, whose dawn Lee sketches out here, in which it is not enough simply to refrain from making overtly racist gestures: omission or erasure is equally insulting.

Werckmeister Harmonies may be Tarr’s masterpiece.

Top Hat reflects a transatlantic kind of universe, the Brit dimension absorbed into American waspy class, and sweetened with some mannered comedy; this was a Hollywood that loved PG Wodehouse.

Attenborough matches the natural world’s grandeur with his own intellectual and moral seriousness.

Like Panahi’s recent films This Is Not a Film and Taxi Tehran, this is powerful because of its control, subtlety and diplomatic finesse.

8 1/2 is probably the most potent movie about film-making, within which fantasy and reality are mixed without obfuscation, and there's a tough argument that belies Fellini's usual felicitous flaccidity.

Spotlight never hits the heights of passion, but capably and decently tells an important story.

The more you look at it, the more perfect it seems. Hollywood doesn't make films like this now because public taste has changed. But it's doubtful if they could anyway.

It’s an impressive spectacle, if not a happy one.

Despite its earnest endorsement of the idea that there's no place like home ... well, frankly there are plenty of places like boring old home, but nothing's like Oz.

Peckinpah's marvellous elegiac western incorporates the themes of The Wild Bunch - the end of the old west, friendship and betrayal - but is more moving than his blood-soaked epic. That's mainly down to the two stars, leathery veterans Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott. [12 Aug 2006, p.53]

In a calmly realist, non-mystic movie language, this director really can convince you that the living and the dead, the past and the present, the terrestrial and the other, do exist side by side.

The film features an acting cameo from Siegel’s assistant and protege Sam Peckinpah, who also worked on the script, and is known for its high-octane pulp thrills. It should also be praised for elegant satire.

The Coens are back with a vengeance, showing their various imitators and detractors what great American filmmaking looks like, and they have supplied a corrective adjustment to the excesses of goofy-quirky comedy that damaged their recent work. The result is a dark, violent, and deeply disquieting drama, leavened with brilliant noirish wisecracks, and boasting three leading male performances with all the spectacular virility of Texan steers.

The dialogue is crackling ("Are you alone?" – "Isn't everyone?") and the set pieces, like the one in the antisemitic old people's home, are just superb. Polanski brilliantly shows that money and power are not what's motivating everyone after all. There's a lower stratum of sexual dysfunction and fear at work, which is difficult, if not impossible to understand:: the ultimate meaning of the chaotic "Chinatown" of the title. Unmissable.

It crept up on me at its own measured walking pace – and it incidentally has the best and cleverest last line of any film I have seen this year.

Brando’s charisma sells the climactic scenes with Willard; without his presence, the literary musings would be a little callow.

While minimal on plot, the film digs in its nails on the day-to-day struggles of poor people in America.

Abderrahmane Sissako's passionate and visually beautiful film Timbuktu is a cry from the heart.

The film is thrillingly, unapologetically about decency and honour, about, as Laura heartrendingly puts it, controlling oneself.

Paul Newman is at his charismatic best as convict Luke Jackson, fighting to maintain inner freedom despite the brutalities of a deep south chain gang. Much in the style of the old Warner Bros melodramas, the hardnut action here is lightened by a funny streak, as in the celebrated hard-boiled egg-eating contest. [31 Aug 2013, p.46]

It is a gut-churning film: and a radical dive into history, grabbing the past in a way a conventional documentary would not.

Much of the film immerses us in an unknowable, unrecognisable world under the skin, without shape, without what Vesalius wanted to show us in the 16th century. It is an uncanny spectacle.

It is a sombre and painful drama, enacted with reserve. There are no closeups, and it is fully one hour into the running time before we get even a medium shot of the female lead’s face. Even then there are shadows.

Music is where the film’s emotional meaning is unveiled.

In Annie Hall, Allen again writes, directs and stars with Diane Keaton in a remarkable recreation of a spent love affair, which is both sad and hysterically funny. A film which sticks close to the cutting edge of love, and darts about daringly trying to make philosophical sense of it, is bound to be flawed. This one is, because Allen tried to do in 93 minutes what Proust needed 11 volumes for: to resolve life, love and the passing of both.

The film, with its superb score by Mica Levi and sound design by Johnnie Burn, has undoubted power but might well revive the debate about conjuring slick movie effects from the horrors of history.

No other later horror film – and certainly none of the many sequels to this one – captured so well the strangeness of living through a long night of evil and emerging into bright sunlight, with its tacit promise of restorative justice or virtue, or just normality.

It wasn’t until I saw Threads that I found that something on screen could make me break out in a cold, shivering sweat and keep me in that condition for 20 minutes, followed by weeks of depression and anxiety.

Leviathan is acted and directed with unflinching ambition, moving with deliberative slowness and periodically accelerating at moments of high drama and suspense. It isn't afraid of massive symbolic moments and operatic gestures.

The Souvenir is an artefact in the highest auteur register. Its absence of tonal readability is a challenge. But there is also a cerebrally fierce, slow-burn passion in its austere, unemphasised plainness.

Goodfellas is a compelling, black-comic nightmare.

The Look of Silence — like The Act of Killing — is arresting and important film-making.

This movie, visually and dramatically superb in every way, moves with unhurried confidence across the screen, pausing to savour every bizarre bit of comedy or erotic byway, or note of pathos, on its circuitous path to the violent finale.

This is a gripping nightmare.

Where once Hamaguchi’s film-making language had seemed to me at the level of jeu d’esprit, now it ascends to something with passion and even a kind of grandeur.

It’s another very impressive serio-comic film from one of the most distinctive and courageous figures in world cinema.

The severity and poise of this calmly paced movie, its emotional reserve and moral seriousness – and the elusive, implied confessional dimension concerning Diop herself – make it an extraordinary experience.

The film specialises as much in a kind of ironic gallows humour as in laughter pure and simple, but bitterness is also avoided - which is a small miracle in itself considering the subject matter and the setting.

The point of the film is Sibil’s decades-long ordeal and she emerges with heroic and compelling dignity.

Thematically, The Killing anticipates themes, motifs and incidents to come in Kubrick’s oeuvre, most famously the notion of master plans undone by human fallibility, that are also to be found in the tales of fate and life’s absurdity of by his mentors Lang and Huston.

Sofia Coppola's second movie as a director is more than a breakthrough: it's an insouciant triumph. She conjures a terrifically funny, heartbreakingly sad and swooningly romantic movie from almost nowhere and just makes it look very easy - as well as very modern and very sexy. It is a funky little Brief Encounter for the new century.

The film is fun and stirring; a robust portrait of youth at the crossroads and a bittersweet salute to the town at its centre.

It’s a work suffused with emotional tones and shades, surprisingly not all of them sad even though the subject knew at the time of filming he had mere weeks left before he’d die of cancer.

Afterlife is an immensely suggestive picture about the role of memory, the function of cinema and the limits of our imagination.

By any standards, this would be an outstanding film, but for a debut it is remarkable.

I wished I liked it more. It is engagingly self-aware and excruciatingly self-conscious, wearing its hipness on its sleeve; it's ingenious and yet remarkably contrived. The film seems very new, but the sentimental ending is as old as the hills. There are some great moments.

Jane Schoenbrun unveils a very enjoyable display of transformative ecstasy and submissive rapture, treating us to a bizarre pop-cultural black mass of fiercely believed-in trash and kink.

This is such a beguiling, generous film from Gerwig. There is a lot of love in it.

It is strident, yes, and naive, too perhaps; but lyrical and passionate and visually dazzling.

A ripping, gripping yarn, a surprisingly erotic love story and, as it happens, a premonition of Herzog's Fitzcarraldo.

I last encountered the work of the Belgian artist and film-maker Johan Grimonprez in the documentary-reverie Double Take from 2009, which imagined an encounter between two Alfred Hitchcocks. Now in this fascinating and valuably informative film, he amplifies what he sees as the mood music that lay behind the assassination of the leftist Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in 1961.

The material is superb, Neil Innes’ music is tremendous and Gilliam’s animations are timelessly brilliant.

This animated documentary from Danish film-maker Jonas Poher Rasmussen is an irresistibly moving and engrossing story, whose emotional implications we can see being absorbed into the minds of the director and his subject, almost in real time.

An ambitious epic of tremendous sweep and scope, with trench-warfare battle scenes comparable to Kubrick's Paths of Glory.

Ex Libris rolls out like a collection of short films.... It’s like watching Wiseman skip along through the stacks of all accumulated human knowledge.

What makes this such a striking film is how the larger scope works perfectly in tandem with the very specific time and setting.

It's a film with jazz in its bones and rhythm to its beats.

This is clearly a very personal project for Avilés, and the heartbreak feels very real.

Polley tackles painful issues with candour and tact. She has a gripping tale to tell. It's a film that raises questions about the ownership of memory and ownership of narrative.

This is a survivor’s coming of age: tough, disillusioned, brilliant.

The Boy and the Heron is a gentler and slower though no less soulful addition to his canon.

Taxi grew on me. It is not as angry and painful as his previous work, the samizdat This Is Not a Film, but it is subtle, humorous and humane. It tells you more about modern Iran, I think, than you’ll discover on the news.

Every moment of Ida feels intensely personal. It is a small gem, tender and bleak, funny and sad, superbly photographed in luminous monochrome: a sort of neo-new wave movie with something of the classic Polish film school and something of Truffaut, but also deadpan flecks of Béla Tarr and Aki Kaurismäki.

Goldin shows that maybe there is always more bloodshed than beauty.

This family could be blown into pieces. And yet an irrepressible defiance and comic energy bubbles under every scene.

Peter Jackson has created a visually staggering thought experiment; an immersive deep-dive into what it was like for ordinary British soldiers on the western front.

Ozu shows how fragile and yet burdensome the institution of the family is.

What would Pretty Woman look like if it bore the smallest resemblance to the reality of sex work? Maybe something like this, Sean Baker’s amazing, full-throttle tragicomedy of romance, denial and betrayal.

The Favourite may have corrected Lanthimos’s tendency towards arthouse torpor. It is a scabrous and often hilarious film, made loopier by the nightmarish visions and wide-angle distortions contrived by the cinematographer Robbie Ryan.

The unmasking "reveal" at the beginning of the movie is a great coup, and the film continues to be very scary, helped by Carpenter's own theme: a trebly plinking of piano notes and that buzzy synth in low register.

There are moments of dramatic licence, but overall The Right Stuff is a terrific historical film about the space race: accurately reflective of a complex reality, beautifully filmed, and done with wit, energy and an impressive sense of balance. Top marks.

At one point, Michel Troisgros insists that cuisine is not cinema, but real life. But Wiseman continually spotlights the importance of close observation in ingredients, taste, preparation and presentation that enables the elevation of the material world into art; from creme brulee forensics, to the staff finicking with the tableware until the setting is just-so.

Bringing Up Baby is very funny. It leaves one in awe at the speed and timing of Grant and Hepburn, as well as their goofy, lopsided humanity...Don't trust the public to recognise a masterpiece.

It is deeply intelligent, intensely and painfully political, and yet attempts, and succeeds, somehow to transcend politics and perhaps even history itself.

This is a film with thrilling directness and storytelling force, a movie that fills its widescreen and three-and-a half-hour running time with absolute certainty and ease, as well as glorious amplitude, clarity and even simplicity – and yet also with something darkly mysterious and uncanny to be divined in its handsome shape.

La Chimera is a film that utterly occupies its own fictional space; it expresses its eccentric romance in its own fluent movie dialect. I was utterly captivated by this sad, lovelorn adventure.

Trier has taken on one of the most difficult genres imaginable, the romantic drama, and combined it with another very tricky style – the coming-of-ager – to craft something gloriously sweet and beguiling.

It’s such a delectable film: I’ll be cutting myself another slice very soon.

Echoing the cycle of crop cultivation, Shyne’s film inhabits the seasons of life, bookended by images of a funeral and the open sky. This vanishing way of life is imbued with a dose of melancholy, yet hope still remains for a better harvest in the future.