Nitram is a hypnotically disquieting movie.

It is an attractive and sympathetic performance from Geirharðsdóttir as Halla.

Memories of Murder actually inspired a solution to its case; perhaps The Night of the 12th could do the same. Either way, it’s a brutally engrossing drama.

This is a film that swerves away from categorisation. It’s an 80-set picture that wears its period locations and its musical references lightly. It’s a city trader film where the main bad guy doesn’t do coke. And it’s a scary movie whose disturbing supernatural interludes happen almost incidentally, a sideshow to the emotional collapse.

It is crammed with unearned emotional moments and factory-built male characters whose dedication to their sport we are expected to find adorable and heroic by turns.

There is a reckless, ruthless kind of provocative brilliance in what Ben Hania is doing.

While some of the in-your-face attempts to combine YouTube videos with animation are jarring at best and annoying at worst, the cautionary stabs about unregulated big tech that come alongside are no bad thing, nestled within the framework of a brightly coloured kids movie. It’s also genuinely funny, a credit not only to the hit-a-minute script but also to a finely picked cast of comic actors

Blessed with the fresh eyes of newly landed Englishman Yates (and genius cameraman William Fraker), the movie makes San Francisco fresh and alive, but also completely remakes and modernises the bleak, sleazy gangster demimonde in which Bullitt does his hunting.

Cartol gives a very persuasive performance as Eve, whose inner life is always simmering and bubbling under, while she must maintain a facial blankness as cloudless and pristine as the towels and sheets.

Likable, watchable and has a nice supporting turn from Robert De Niro; I'm not sure I wouldn't rather watch this again than the macho acting in Russell's boxing drama "The Fighter."

It’s a quietly devastating film.

There’s plenty of white-knuckle footage from the archive, as well as reflections of old muckers. Fiennes says that in his darkest, diciest moments in peril he imagined his heroes – the father and grandfather he never met – watching over him.

Perhaps this movie is a little anticlimactic, but there is often an atmosphere of real fear, especially when Natalia is driven to the edge by her newborn’s incessant crying: a horrible moment which is not supernatural in the slightest.

Perhaps this one doesn’t take Seidl’s creative career much further down the road to (or away from) perdition, but it is managed with unflinching conviction, a tremendous compositional sense and an amazing flair for discovering extraordinary locations.

The whole film is like an incomplete fragment, intriguing if frustrating.

There are many things working well in Rockwell’s debut, Taylor’s performance chief among them, but the end result doesn’t match her character’s formidable strength.

This is an exciting, forthright, energised – though very gruesome – film in which there is real human jeopardy and conflict. Non-zombies are more cinematic.

A little of the intimacy is gone, and I have to admit to not being 100% sold on the cowboy-inflected songs, which feature quite a bit of dime-store sentimentality. But Springsteen is undoubtedly magnetic, his voice a honeyed growl.

So there are two films here: one is frightening and poignant and the other tender but slight. The first one will haunt me even if the second will fade.

A wide-eyed tribute to human ingenuity that packs enough snark to pull itself out of the black hole of earnestness, even if its fuel runs out partway through.

It’s tender and poignant, but might be a bit cloying were it not for Norton, who underplays it beautifully with a performance of tremendous depth and empathy.

It has a seriousness, an unsentimental readiness to look reality in the face.

As with the previous Knives Out films, the characters are not, in fact, equally important and equally capable of murder. An inner core of suspects emerges and their guilt discloses itself incrementally at the end, as opposed to being withheld for a final reveal. What a treat though, with cracking turns from one and all and O’Connor the first among equals.

There is such simplicity and clarity here, an honest apportioning of dignity and intelligence to everyone on screen: every scene and every character portrait is unforced and unembellished. The straightforward assertion of hope through giving help and asking for help is very powerful.

This is a genuinely strange film, elusive in both tone and meaning, one which deploys the obvious effects and rhetorical forms of irony, while at the same time distancing itself from these effects and asking its audience to sympathise and even admire Lee, because she is not supposed to be the villain.

If you want a genuinely Millerian cinematic experience, the best way to go is to get hold of Salesman, a 1968 documentary made by Albert and David Maysles, along with Charlotte Zwerin. 

With its unabashed focus on bodies, luring us in with their nudity before hacking them into tiny pieces, the back-to-basics slasher X arrives as a bold rebuke to all things staid and dignified.

It is simultaneously exasperating and magnificent that he shows no interest whatever in asking the Mael brothers anything about their personal, emotional or romantic lives.

It is a fierce and impassioned denunciation of evil.

This extraordinary documentary by director Sebastien Lifshitz, who has made many films about the LGBTQ+ experience (Wild Side, Bambi, Open Bodies), achieves a remarkable degree of intimacy with its young subject and her family.

Knock Down The House is far more effective when it is about the people and the process, not landing quips.

This long, exciting second world war thriller (based on a true-life incident involving art conservationist Rose Valland, who appears briefly in its opening sequence) has particular present-day relevance in view of the mindless destruction of art works and ancient ruins by Islamic State and our responses to these iconoclastic barbarities.

If I had a criticism of this film, it is that – like so many historians of spies and spying – the director gets a little overexcited about the archive details. Still, what a riveting story: a grim curtain-raiser to today’s tragedies.

From behind the camera, Ha Le Diem attempts to protect Di by reasoning with kidnappers, but is pushed away; she admits to the young girl later that she did not anticipate the tradition could be so brutal. The decision to leave in such details is particularly thought-provoking, fracturing the supposed neutrality of documentary film-makers.

The film appears to exist in the Venn diagram-overlap between twee and hipster, which isn’t for everyone – but let it grow on you, and there is a real sweetness and gentleness in its absurdity, a savant innocence and charm.

The film has its own kind of mad, migrainey energy and individuality, and Robert Pattinson gives a strong, charismatic performance.

Impressively made though some of the acting lets it down: Robbie's a real scene-stealer. [04 Mar 2006, p.53]

The dreary details of post-heist calamity are as pertinent as the main event. It is this that attracts Reichardt’s observing eye and makes The Mastermind so quietly gripping.

This is a bleak, bold, extravagantly crazy story which is emotionally incorrect at all times.

I found something a little too subdued in this film, though the evocation of Tokyo itself is very uncliched, despite the emphasis on something that is the subject of so many touristy jokes: the loos. Not perfect, but engaging enough.

There is real emotional warmth and human sympathy in this otherwise somewhat flawed film, a docudrama experiment in getting actors to play some of the real people in a tragic news story from Tunisia.

The film’s final twist makes the story close with a satisfying click, though there is something a little smooth about it; for me it works against the story’s social-realist credentials and its evident ambitions for something more mysterious and spiritually resonant. Yet there is great pleasure to be had in those fervent, crowd-pleasing lead performances from Montenegro and de Oliveira.

In Passages the sex is the plot: the plot of all our lives.

Never has grotesque wealth looked so unenviable, or its removal been so entertaining, as in this garishly watchable riches-to-rags documentary.

Eid proves a dolefully expressive lead, and Wolfgang Thaler’s ever eloquent camerawork is as fascinated by the discovery of bullet shells in the sand – a clue, and a warning – as it is by the punishingly craggy landscape.

It's an intriguing movie, in some ways, but its contrived and even bizarre final revelation depends on coincidences of almost Hardyesque proportions. It is not really believable, and yet if it is not taken literally, but as a cinematic prose-poem, it has undoubted force.

Compared to the CGI chaos that tends to engulf DCEU and MCU movies, especially in crossover teamups, the clean zip of Pixar animation feels exhilaratingly rare, like a lost language rediscovered.

All said, there are less educational ways to raise your blood pressure for two hours, and the masochistic Twitter-refreshers nourishing themselves with a steady drip of maddening headlines will have plenty to fume over. Starting with the sniggering title, this torturous rehashing of yesterday’s history all seems to be for them.

Despite the desultory nature of the film, it is sure to hammer home some key points.

It is all ridiculously enjoyable, because the smirking and the quips and the gadgets have been cut back - and the emotion and wholesome sado-masochism have been pumped up.

Xala means sexual impotence, and the film, culled from his own novel, is a brilliantly funny, ironic satire about post-colonial Senegal. [21 Dec 2000, p.13]

The emphasis is more largely upon discipline and commitment in the service of art, a vocational self-immolation in which the transformation of pain into beauty is the whole point.

If ever a movie came from the heart, it was Giuseppe Tornatore's nostalgic Cinema Paradiso (1988) now getting a rerelease to celebrate its silver jubilee.

It is, perhaps, a little derivative and maybe finally fudges the dark mystery of the quest’s end point. But this is a film with thrilling ambition and reach.

Brute Force was the first important assignment of leftwing director Jules Dassin.

It’s creative and experimental in just the right spirit, though with an asymmetric flaw. The film is a kind of diptych in which one of the panels is more fully achieved than the other.

The man himself would have tried to hoodwink you into thinking he was a decent guy. Bugsy the movie follows suit.

There is a great performance here from Sasha Lane and this is another step onwards and upwards for Andrea Arnold herself.

You Hurt My Feelings is a movie about emotional pain, and there is something very astringent in it, a salty tang which isn’t really effaced by the later plot transitions whose emollient message is that we all fib a bit to our loved ones and it doesn’t mean we love them any the less.

Luxuriating in a wealth of archival material that encompasses radio and TV interviews, privately recorded conversations from reel-to-reel tapes (Armstrong could swear like a sailor), and good old-fashioned newspaper clippings (remember them?), this documentary about the great Louis Armstrong is a real keeper.

Dunning recounts spellbinding tales that led to the gradual downfall of his expansive Mile Hill Farm, and the destruction of his two marriages.

The film is beautifully shot in saturated colour by Robby Muller, the cinematographer of Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas and many other remarkable looking films, but has one of those minimalist screenplays that drives one mad since nobody says anything which makes much sense at all. Its direction seems to ask us to look past the characters for significance, while enjoying their offbeat lifestyles. [07 Dec 1989]

Malick does succeed, to some degree, on his own terms; he attempts to give some (stylised) sense of this man’s inner life: his emotional and spiritual architecture. It is admirably serious but static.

It’s a comedy that doesn’t really have, or aspire to, any very tragic dimension, but it’s touching. The quirks are underpinned by a heartfelt solidity.

What Richard Did is an engrossing and intelligent drama that throbs in the mind for hours after the final credits.

Although the treacly soundtrack overpunches on the sentiment at times, this is undeniably moving stuff – especially scenes where some of the doctors see footage of patients they helped save, still very much alive and thriving today.

It balances what is with what might have been and what could still be, and, although the result is maybe a bit less substantial than Castro intended, there is a certain literary elegance in the way he sketches it out.

Stolevski’s film-making is deft. He weaves a social consciousness into his narrative without retreating to mawkish parables of resistance and redemption.

The Force Awakens is ridiculous and melodramatic and sentimental of course, but exciting and brimming with energy and its own kind of generosity. What a Christmas present.

There is something quietly magnificent in it. Moments like these in life are poignantly brief – but many never have them at all. It’s a lovely film.

An excellent brief documentary about a heroic grassroots political movement whose importance reveals itself more clearly in retrospect with every year that passes.

Last Men in Aleppo is one of the most difficult documentaries you’ll see this year.

Private Property’s vicious form of prurience may make some queasy, and is hardly the type of movie that could get made today without great backlash, but there’s definitely more going on here than mere time-capsule curiosity.

Here is a valuable and deeply felt documentary, celebrating the work of the sound designers, sound editors and Foley wizards in the cinema, and if it feels like a feelgood in-house promotional video for Hollywood technicians … well, they’ve got an awful lot to feel good about.

Directors Stephen Maing and Brett Story give a shrewd, fly-on-the-wall picture of the divisions within the union itself, with the working-class members and people of colour uneasy with the white college-grad contingent who are very gung-ho about protesting and getting arrested, not quite realising that for black people this is to risk death.

White God works as an ambiguous satire of power relations generally: eventually the lower orders will rise up. The film has a flair and a bite which I have found lacking in Mundruczó's earlier films.

Freaks is filled with poignancy; it offers a premonition of eugenics, as well as a provocative comparison with the alienated condition of women and the freakish nature of all showbiz celebrity. It is a work of genius.

The deepest appeal of this 74-minute study in insolence is that Cagney is cock of the walk.

With its really smart deep dives into cultural criticism, this is a seasonal stocking overflowing with spooky fun.

Lean on Pete is at its potent, stirring best during the opening furlough, when it focuses on this makeshift hobo family as it criss-crosses the Pacific Northwest from one racetrack to the next.

Last and First Men is an interesting if minor work, perhaps comparable to Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Homo Sapiens or Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity.

A valuable if slightly passionless and reticent movie.

It’s entertaining and amiable, but with a softcore pulling of punches: lightly ironised, celebratory nostalgia for a toy that still exists right now.

It is a thing of beauty: too beautiful perhaps, running a real danger of prettifying poverty.

Buckley provides a vitamin boost in every scene.

It’s in uncompromising bad taste but made with lethal precision and discipline.

For a film renowned for its violence, Garcia unfolds at a leisured, almost lugubrious, pace with scenes allowed to unspool at a length that would never be allowed in any Hollywood thriller today.

Finders Keepers pays as much attention to the comedy of the story as the humanity. What could easily be a silly saga or a simple indictment of the culture of fame becomes something diabolically more insightful and uplifting.

[Room 237] raises very interesting ideas about how we view a film, about what happens if we take the act of viewing down to a deeper, molecular level, and about how a movie's significance and effect need not be those intentionally willed by the director.

There’s real intimacy and emotional generosity to this psychological mystery from Joanna Hogg – a personal movie which appears to come from the same universe as her earlier Souvenir films – or one very much like it.

It’s a fierce, stark, almost primitive parable of cruelty and power.

The Beast may not add up to a cogent or thoroughgoing critique of all the ideas it invokes, but it’s such a luxurious cinematic experience; it’s created with such elan and attack, and the musical score amplifies its throb of fear.

Director Marielle Heller and screenwriters Noah Harpster and Micah Fitzerman-Blue have adroitly set up the tightrope that Tom Hanks has to walk across, stretching it between irony and belief, and the result is a really entertaining and touching film.

This is a very unhurried film (I wondered if it might have been better to lose 20 or so minutes) but it has a distinctive language of its own, and a feel for the city.

Despite the bone-chilling cold of its location in Murmansk in Russia’s remote north-west, there’s a wonderful human warmth and humour in this offbeat romantic story of strangers on a train.

A sad, sweet movie.

It is only with the explicit possibility of a supernatural explanation, combined with full-on psychiatric breakdown, that the movie loses its light touch and its plausible detail. Yet there’s always a hyper-vigilant twinge of fear.

With a Brechtian approach that compels the viewer to question both their own ethical assumptions and tacit complicity in a worldwide consumerist culture that exploits people all over the planet, 7 Prisoners is deeply uncomfortable but utterly compelling viewing.