A young Russell Crowe is spellbinding in this ugly but unforgettable film that remains hard-hitting and shockingly violent more than two decades on.

This 1966 drama ticks most of the right boxes when it comes to entertaining as well as educating.

Some of the set pieces are overdone but the final scenes take on an almost operatic quality.

The development of Bond films in the early 1960s brought a new dimension to espionage-oriented cinema. Where Eagles Dare brings these strands together - fusing the spy story with war action - and helped create a wave of patriotic cold war thrillers that arguably climaxed with The Spy Who Loved Me.

There’s an unexpectedly huge amount of old-fashioned fun to be had in Disney’s spectacular new origin-myth story.

The film finds rousing energy in the tension between Milla’s journey into adulthood, and the potential dead-end of her illness.

While it has both style and content, El Camino feels more like a feature-length TV episode than an actual movie. It is too compact and fragmented to truly stand on its own, and viewers who have not seen the preceding 62 hours of Breaking Bad will likely struggle to enjoy it.

Dark Waters is a movie that works marvellously well within its own generic terms, and perhaps after the fey disappointment of Todd Haynes’s previous, rather insufferable fantasy Wonderstruck, this tough, clear movie was what Haynes needed to clear his creative palate.

British writer-director Edgar Wright takes a grab-bag of 1960s ingredients, paints them up and makes them dance to his tune. His film is thoroughly silly and stupidly enjoyable.

It’s a solid, well-crafted piece of professional carpentry, like a heavy piece of Victorian furniture; built to last; built to be used. The longer you look at it, the more impressive it grows.

Rare Beasts is a bold experiment in nerve-jangling confrontation: it has the structure and ingredients of romantic comedy but turns everything on its head.

There are big scenes, big performances, big emotions here, and audiences will have to recalibrate their antennae for these, especially for the stunning shock that arrives around halfway through. The waves of emotion can get very high, yet they bring exaltation with them.

Vitalina Varela stars as herself in Pedro Costa’s bleak but beautiful film about a woman discovering the hidden life of her late husband.

The movie’s a great night out, but you sense it’ll also become a priceless resource.

Packed with rambling digressions, sudden shifts of tone, and playful fake-outs as it shuttles between layers of “reality” and performance, but constructed with precision and assurance, it leaves you with both a sugar high and slight sense of nausea.

What an intriguing and unexpectedly watchable film. Bait is an experiment – and a successful one.

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.

It is a sombre, realist study of what day-by-day, moment-by-moment abuse actually looks like.

It's a cool customer – the hip lingo and fast-talking characters all of a piece with its bebop score – but there's a scrupulous honesty to the story, too.

Martin Eden is a sad story of a sad man who lacks the capacity for happiness and who is astonished to find that artistic success is as compromised as any other kind. But there is a kind of thrill in tracing his progress from rags to riches to annihilation.

To say The Cave would break anyone’s heart feels flimsy. Like Ballour, it has a purpose: to focus the world’s attention on the suffering of Syrian people.

What this solemn and enlivening documentary plunge into the history of Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic reiterates is the idea of film as a collective art form – not just the wider circle of writers, performers and technicians beyond the director, but in the case of the truly great films, serendipitous access to a deeper collective unconscious to which we all have the keys – even if few know how to use them.

This movie gets a real gallop on, due to the sheer warmth of its performances.

It might not be at the very zenith of what he can achieve but for sheer moment-by-moment pleasure, and for laughs, this is a treat.

This film is a distinct, articulate pleasure.

The movie, shot in CinemaScope and colour, is punctuated by shocking moments, but is more notable for its claustrophobic, doom-laden, necrophilic atmosphere and elegant camerawork than the kind of fashionable, in-your-face horror that was launched in the same year by Psycho.

Gives us an amazingly candid and rather shocking study of the legendary fashion designer, and his apparent physical and mental deterioration at the age of 60.

[Gibney's] film does present Khodorkovsky in context in a way that I haven’t seen before. He was the oligarch smart enough – and ruthless enough – to do as well or better than anyone in the Yeltsin/Putin free-for-all years, and then his smartness and ruthlessness perhaps gave him a perspective on it all.

A movie with flair and force.

Although it is often seen as a precursor to the multiple parts played in Dr Strangelove, Sellers' turn here is a reminder of his true potential, soon to be swallowed up by a stream of ever more awful Pink Panther films.

Apted has honed his skills over the years, becoming less presumptive and more content to let narratives unfold naturally. And, of course, the unprecedentedly long relationship between the maker and his subjects has led to more give and take between them.

Her photographs are like very bad dreams and simply looking for any period of time at dead bodies is a very strange experience.

It’s a mouth-puckeringly tart movie that’s tonally in a world of its own – darkly disturbing, absurd, brutal and silly, with a batsqueak of bonkers.

The film is at its most intriguing in its earlier half, when it simply takes you through the growing excitement within the scientific community as the reality of Crispr emerges.

A little of the personality has been lost in adapting Shaun’s world for sci-fi (the Wallace and Gromit movie Curse of the Were-Rabbit pulled off horror with a little more finesse). It’s a minor quibble; Shaun is by no means past his prime.

Not a word is spoken throughout, which harkens back to an older era of cinematic storytelling. At the same time, the extreme frame-to-frame fluidity of the computer-assisted animation style, composed entirely of fields of subtly modulated colour, no outlines and minimal modelling, looks completely 21st century.

With its handsome, and expensive, period recreation, a wide rural American canvas and an audience-provoking last act, it’s a shame that more of us won’t get to enjoy Let Him Go on the big screen, where it truly belongs. But for those who will, they’re in for a wild ride.

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

With great style and technical bravura, the film takes us on a fairground ride, running on rails right up to the final question.

Ciorniciuc and his co-writer Lina Vdovîi, in allowing events to unfold slowly in front of the camera, have created a beautifully measured portrait of an amazingly resonant topic.

Often moving but also disquieting and even intermittently funny, this drama unfurls a spiritual parable that is uniquely Polish but accessible to all.

The physicality of this picture is exciting.

It’s a film that both looks and feels the part, a handsomely made love story that’s easy to fall in love with.

This film is a time capsule of the 1980s: an era that was crass and excessive in so many ways, but now seems weirdly exotic.

How refreshing to watch a film in which the sexuality and desire of women in their 70s is portrayed not as a novelty but simply part and parcel of their lives; and since this French movie is a lesbian drama, there’s two of them – even better.

Vivarium is a lab-rat experiment of a film, with flat, facetious humour and a single insidious joke maintained and developed with monomaniacal intensity. In its way, this film is an emblem of postnatal depression and simple loneliness.

This film is a very tasty confection of satire and scorn.

There’s a lot here to digest, a bitter cocktail with many confounding flavours and its abrasiveness will prove tough-going for some, especially those in search of a more polite and familiarly structured literary biopic. But for those willing to sink into the depths with Shirley, it’s a delicious journey down.

It delivers some much-needed laughs.

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.

This is a fascinating slice of Americana which reminded me of 70s movie-making, like John Huston’s Fat City. I half-expected young Stacy Keach and Jeff Bridges to roll in for a few whiskies.

It all builds up to a remarkable coup de cinéma: a Buñuelian finale that is startling and moving. This is both an exploratory personal project and a thought-experiment of a film.

Chung’s nuanced portrait of a family figuring out their place in the world is both small and somehow rather grand.

The film is forthright and intelligent on the difficulties and complexities involved in the discussion.

What an engrossing film – and the gender reversal of a male muse inspiring a female painter has got to be one small step for art-world equality.

Now this has been turned into a very entertaining lowlife crime comedy from director and co-writer Janicza Bravo, a film that preserves the fishy flavour of the online original – if perhaps only semi-intentionally – and has interesting things to say about the exhaustingly performative and self-promotional world of social media.

There’s real, seat-edge fun to be had here, the sort of fun that’s too often missing from modern horror.

It’s as involving as it is necessary, a rare ray of sunshine on yet another cloudy day.

The meta gets better in Lawrence Michael Levine’s dizzying but gripping comedy Black Bear, which is a recurring nightmare – or rather, an entertainment in two acts about the messy business of making a personal film based on actual events.

Bryan Fogel’s documentary about the Khashoggi murder may not reveal anything substantially new, but it’s a fierce, forceful and highly illuminating film, set out with clarity and verve.

It’s all so human and messy and it’s refreshing to see a director that doesn’t shy away from such complexity with Colangelo crafting a film that’s every bit as nuanced as the subject at hand.

For anyone who values diverse storytelling, Peoples’ portrait of a hardworking woman on the up is a tale of hopefulness – and a reason to hope in itself.

A strange, funny, mysterious and rather beautiful film about an activity that’s recherché to say the least.

It’s a really valuable work, beautifully edited and shot, with a wonderful performance by the veteran actor Lance Henriksen: a sombre, clear-eyed look at the bitter endgame of dementia.

The result is a film that’s people-pleasing in inverse proportion to its grouchy heroine.

Fundamental to Relic’s psychological oomph are three excellent performances, perfectly complementing that sticky-icky ambience.

This bizarre and sometimes scary film from Iceland has a way of keeping you off balance and on the edge of your seat.

The faces are the most intriguing thing. Loznitsa gives us a montage of inscrutability and repressed anxiety.

There’s a strong basis of originality here, and the warmth and good nature of the movie carries it along.

More than just an Aussie horse opera, this film employs stunning scenery, technical flair and Kirk Douglas in two roles in its pursuit of an uplifting conclusion.

What an extraordinary story of sexism, violence, diplomatic bad faith and dishonesty on an international scale.

David Lowery’s complex, visually sumptuous and uncommercial tale of Arthurian legend revels in upending expectations.

It’s a difficult, often quite brutal, viewing experience, as it needs to be given the subject matter, not only because of the fractured storytelling but because of the devastating lead performance from Hopkins.

It's set on the suitably exotic locale of a Spanish fishing village – shortly before its obliteration by hotel development, you have to assume – and although everyone moves and speaks at about half normal pace, it all works wonderfully well: Gardner, especially, just glows on the screen.

It functions elegantly as both a victory lap for longtime fans and a belated introduction to the Belchers, a family of lovable misfits and cranks that’s as genuinely close as any on television.

Happiest Season exists within well-worn framework but still feels fresh, a sprightly and substantial comedy that will be an immediate addition to the Christmas movie rotation for many, including myself.

The action of After Yang, bizarre and exotic as it is, meditates on what it is to be human and how that may in the future be modified, but it also addresses loss in the present day: our anguished and futile human instinct that death must surely be fixable.

With his new film, Charlie Kaufman again proves that if you want something to make you feel trapped in a terrifying claustrophobic nightmare for ever and ever ... well, he’s your guy.

Some may think it precious, but it's the haunting, poetic product of an original imagination.

An elegant midsummer, end-century night’s dream of a film, with an elusive, gossamer lightness.

Why Don’t You Just Die! is an accomplished film that makes the very most of its limited sets, without seeming constricted or stagey.

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

This is not animation which is there to exalt, or soothe, or celebrate human loveliness: it is animation which takes a fiercely miserable satirical stab at the world and itself, a language which is unreconciled, unaccommodated.

Watching this film means recalibrating your expectations so you can gauge the subtleties and absorb the sotto voce implications about relationships and sexual politics. Pretty much all the way through, nothing very sensational seems to be happening. And yet the movie’s sensational meaning is hiding in plain sight: in the title.

The film’s freakiness and wooziness might have been a bit grating were it not for the glacial authority that Ferrara brings to every scene and shot – centred, of course, in the craggy gravitas of Dafoe himself.

It isn't as haunting as Angel, nor as imaginative as The Company of Wolves. But it is tighter and better constructed than either, and the performances flourish as they haven't before in his films. [14 Sept 1986, p.19]

No one is a bad guy here, while all of them are also flawed, and the movie keeps the viewer wondering right up to the end what Jess will finally decide.

There’s a brutal efficiency to the storytelling, swiftly, heartlessly propelling us up and down the building, forcing us to bear witness to a great many horrors.

It’s not a reassuring film. But it has a chilling brilliance and relevance.

A grisly, gripping watch.

It’s all very been here, seen that yet there’s something infinitely pleasing about a film doing very little but doing it very well, knowing just how high to aim without aiming any higher, aware of exactly what it can and can’t do. In a tight 91 minutes, without any bloat, Nobody gives us exactly what we want.

The Biosphere 2 project now looks like reality TV, or maybe a conceptual art happening. Its quixotic extravagance is rather amazing.

This is a sharp, elegant, unsentimental picture in which Stewart plays a character who is often gloomy and downright unsympathetic.

Binoche’s performance and the movie are elegant, ingenious and sexy.

The varied ingredients blend together well.

It is commonplace to say that some films are scary and mad. But this really is scary and mad.

The Invisible Man boasts a brilliantly chill and confident performance from (an almost entirely unseen) Claude Rains and a gloriously over-the-top supporting turn from Una O'Connor as his inquisitive landlady. Moreover, its tart, acid tone largely honours the spirit of the novel.

This documentary is a bit reticent on the subject of racism. It’s not a subject that Trejo addresses, other than to say that cops who used to pull him over now do so to get selfies. Yet it’s an amazing true-life success story.