A tense, knotty puzzle ... It’s a drama that moves like a thriller.

Somehow Lorentzen shows that it is not the Ochoa family who are the bad guys, but the whole rotten system.

The Report is an angry, urgent film that rarely raises its voice, smartly conveying inhumanity and injustice without unnecessary drama. I found it thrilling.

What emerges from Klayman’s film is how very important Brexit Britain is as a self-vivisecting research animal in Bannon’s experimental thinking.

It’s a bruising movie, being sold on the promise that it’s “scary as hell”, a quote that I worry will mislead expectant horror fans. The scariest thing about The Lodge is how human it all is.

The brio and ambition of The Italian Job can’t be doubted and Caine has enormous charisma.

There are toe-curling culture clash moments.

I would have liked (in a spirit of devil’s advocacy) to hear from an economist about the measurable benefits or otherwise of this brutal approach, and perhaps to ponder the climbing global population. These reservations hardly diminish the film’s force.

The King of Staten Island is not structurally perfect. There is a rather contrived crisis the purpose of which is to bring Claire, Scott and Ray together at last, but there is charm and gentleness in this new stepfamily. Powley’s performance and the final shots of the Staten Island ferry brought back happy memories of Joan Cusack in Mike Nichols’s 80s classic, Working Girl. There are a lot of laughs here.

Child’s Play bubbles with entertaining bad taste.

Although this film can be a bit hokey and uncertain on narrative development, the puppyish zest and fun summoned up by Curtis and Boyle carry it along.

Mr Jones is a bold and heartfelt movie with a real Lean-ian sweep.

Two hours in this director’s company is a pleasure.

What could have been a pretty dull film just for motorbike fans and devotees of the Isle of Man TT race, achieves real human interest and excitement due partly to a focus on one competitor: likable motormouth Guy Martin.

An unclassifiably brilliant gem of American independent film-making.

Her film reaches the audience-friendly highs of a studio comedy while retaining an indie sensibility, both in its visuals and its tone, and coupled with the script’s rooted awareness of the moment we’re now in, it feels fresh, a film that will be rewatched and quoted, held on a pedestal by those who understand its necessity.

Morris handles a delicate balancing act with an expected ease, the work of a satirist with so much to say yet with an awareness that saying less leads to so much more.

A film that displays most of the faults of his kind of on-the-hoof film-making - and all the virtues.

I would have loved to hear Kennedy on the tricky subjects of fusion cuisine or cultural appropriation. But there’s more than enough here to get your teeth into.

This is a film with a hopeful message about people, and their ability and willingness to learn – and to get along.

Woody Allen said that he could watch a Bergman movie and feel himself gripped as if by a thriller; that's how I felt watching this restored version of John Cassavetes's 1977 picture Opening Night.

It’s appropriate that this absorbing, tender documentary has been driven by a surge of fan loyalty and love.

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.

Honeyland really is a miraculous feat, shot over three years as if by invisible camera – not a single furtive glance is directed towards the film-makers.

It is 80 minutes of pure woodwork-musicianship-upcycling erotica for a very specialist but passionate market.

A powerful, personal piece of work.

A smart, often ingenious, new film ... What’s most exceptional about the end result is just how deftly [the director] weaves the enraging horror of a racially motivated police shooting into a zippy genre piece.

Having watched this documentary, I now think the project could also be seen as a gigantic adventure in conceptual art, and this is not to denigrate it in any way.

Wells’s coolly indirect way with dialogue prevents the movie becoming insufferable in the way that it might have done in other hands. It is like a short story that insouciantly signs off before you’ve quite decided what it means.

Zulu is a brilliantly made dramatisation of Rorke's Drift, and it does a fine job of capturing the spirit for which the battle is remembered.

In the Aisles is a poignant and richly sympathetic film.

Oprah Winfrey, Angela Davis and Morrison herself explore her work and legacy in this fascinating documentary completed shortly before the Nobel-winning author’s death.

Atlantique may not be perfect, but I admired the way that Diop did not simply submit to the realist mode expected from this kind of material, and yet neither did she go into a cliched magic-realist mode, nor make the romantic story the film’s obvious centre. Her film has a seductive mystery.

It is a really strange film, beginning in a kind of ethno-anthropology and documentary style, becoming a poisoned-herd parable or fever dream and then a Jacobean-style bloodbath. It is an utterly distinctive film-making, executed with ruthless clarity and force.

As ever, Almodóvar has made a film about pleasure, which is itself a pleasure: witty, intelligent and sensuous.

There is such tenderness and gentleness in this film.

A luxuriously watchable and satirical suspense drama.

Porumboiu gives us a knotty, twisty, nifty plot that’s quite involved but hangs together well, and there’s an amusing juxtaposition of gloomy, rainy Bucharest and the sunny terrain of La Gomera. We also get a neat and unexpected coda.

The movie is saturated with emotion and colour, though its novelistic depth brings with it the slightly effortful running time of two hours and 20 minutes.

Port Authority is vehement, urgent and sensual – not perfect, and I would have liked to have seen more extended dance sequences. But it is made with storytelling gusto and heart.

Tragedy and slapstick run through the film and it is very funny.

Kapadia’s film is a gripping account of Maradona’s playing career until the mid-90s, though it is flawed by a lack of new material of the sort he had for his previous film about Amy Winehouse.

The richness and strangeness of the comedy is somehow simply down to Dujardin’s frowningly serious and haughty face.

As ever with Miike, the sheer profusion of material, the torrent of wacky creativity, means that there is always something to hold the attention. It’s bizarre and very unwholesome. But weirdly inspired.

This is rich and valuable testament to Chilean courage.

For me, the film is itself a bit of misfit, full of big stagey speeches, contrived moments and some overemphatic performances, but opened out with muscular style by Huston. The faces of Gable, Clift and Monroe together in closeup have a Mount Rushmore look to them.

The film remains fascinatingly warped: an extended study in decaying flesh, set to a score mordantly trying to break into Hooray for Hollywood.

It must be added that Giant, in spite of its length, seldom seems long – its story is too eventful, its effects too picturesque, and its director too skilful for that even over so long an expanse of time. It may not be a great film but it is certainly an awesome one.

Marianne Ihlen emerges as someone of enormous gentleness and dignity.

Like Your Name, it’s thrillingly beautiful: Tokyo is animated in hyperreal intricacy, every dazzling detail dialled up to 11, but it’s less of a heartbreaker.

True to its animated predecessors, Super-Pets pulls off what other superhero entries have struggled to summon from the CGI universe: lighthearted fun and self-aware humor woven with real evergreen themes – the fear of change, learning to love friends through transitions, trusting that love will remain through the seasons.

The most distinctive things about the film are possibly Caron's personae-montage at the beginning, which showcases her virtuoso dance moves, and the final fantasy sequence, which resolves (a little hurriedly) the emotional obstacles to their love. An exotically contrived romance.

Beneath the bro-friendly, fantasy-art trappings, Onward finds a little bit of that old Pixar magic.

Otto Preminger's fiercely austere courtroom drama was strong stuff in 1959.

Throughout, Costa’s voiceover adds shape but doesn’t intrude excessively and lets the powerful compilation of original and archive footage, material shot on the ground in the middle of riots and by drones soaring hundreds of feet above Brasilia, tell the story.

Sarandon’s force and confidence are undeniable, and she easily holds her own against Burt Lancaster.

Wilder takes the Broadway play, as well as the genteel camaraderie familiar from the British POW films, shakes it all up, makes it tougher, funnier, cruder and subtler.

Salt of the Earth has humour, genuine feeling and great sincerity: it's a film about hope.

Is this outrageous comedy sexy or revolting? Elliott proves – though this feels like the least of his achievements – that a film can be both.

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

Maybe in the end it's just an exuberant collection of great scenes – but what Big Wednesday has is heart.

The transgressive threat approaches and recedes like thunder, leaving us with a study in loneliness.

It’s a disquieting parable of iniquity.

Lance Henriksen's gaunt, anguished features have rarely been put to better use than in this superior horror story...Pumpkinhead would give the Predator nightmares. [23 July 1999]

There is great sadness in this film – and great anger.

Everything rattles and zings like a pinball machine, and it’s a bracing, entertaining, richly satisfying experience.

Lopez slinks through Hustlers with a deceptive ease, as in control of the film as her character is of her situation. It’s the sort of role that only a true movie star could pull off, so much of it reliant on a rare, intoxicating magnetism.

This very fine film has a way of pulling you towards its wavelength.

For fans of Black Widow and everyone else, this episode is great fun and Harbour could well ascend to spinoff greatness of his own.

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.

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.

Victor Kossakovsky’s Aquarela is an absorbing and disturbing spectacle, a sensory film about the climate crisis, and it begins with what might be the soundtrack to the end of the world – a persistent tinkling, crackling, trickling.

The result falls somewhere between a slave-escape drama, an action thriller, a western and even an unexpected kind of superhero film. It’s a winning combination, although Lemmons does not immerse us in the agony and injustice of slavery as such; she puts together a well-crafted movie that is the showcase for an excellent performance from Erivo.

It’s a heartfelt, funny, satisfying film.

Baumbach seeks to mine his material for laughs, no matter how desperate the situation becomes.

There are, arguably, scenes in this film which are less than subtle – and there were times when I wanted something more indirect. But Manville and Neeson have a real empathy and intimacy on screen.

It is a very grueling spectacle, often brilliant, sometimes slightly redundant and perhaps not able to maintain the storytelling rush of its first act. But it is always weirdly plausible in its pure strangeness and in the oddly poignant moments

While I confess that I found Ema to be a notch down on his best work, it’s still hugely distinctive and daring and may well be a grower.

What a thoroughly likeable and funny film.

The film’s prize asset ... is Meryl Streep.

The Painted Bird is a brutal kind of ordeal, but eerie, unearthly and even beautiful sometimes: a bad dream that leaks into waking reality.

You will no doubt bail out at some point – but that’s part of the deal. Llinás has done enough to make sure we come back.

The Killer is quite a spectacle and, incidentally, much more pessimistic than Sirk.

This is not social realism in the style of Ken Loach, but it is a film with a strong sense of outrage. Some might find it relentlessly bleak.

The Perfect Candidate is the sort of film I can imagine getting a remake in contemporary America or Britain, with not as many changes as we might assume.

About Endlessness contains moments of devilish wit, but at heart it is a sad, sweet picture, threaded with themes of estrangement and separation. Andersson isn’t exactly asking us to laugh at or pity these people. Instead, we’re being encouraged to wonder at their predicament – and perhaps relate it to our own.

There is much to irritate in the film, but it's bold, individual and a landmark in British cinema, with outstanding performances.