Twenty-five years on, the story is still charming and beguiling.

Campion offsets what could have been a morose drama with an atmosphere that becomes increasingly, and unnervingly, mystical.

It is a wonderfully fluent, engaging story, with beautiful cinematography by Guy Green.

Here’s a movie that tells us that the days of summer, like the boys of summer in Don Henley’s song, are going to get outlived by the love they inspire. It’s what happens in this thoroughly sweet-natured, charming and unassuming British film.

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. 

Despite such a heavy context, the tone of the film is soft and pensive rather than polemical, constructed with a lightness of touch. It is often inspirational, in a quiet sort of way, and this is derived almost entirely from Hoosan himself.

Sixty years on, the big-screen adaptation of the landmark play looks more conservative than revolutionary but Burton’s firepower is undimmed.

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]

This is a heartfelt movie, a documentary unafraid to spread itself across its vast subject matter, and a fierce denunciation of the arrogant political classes, still in denial about one of the biggest tragedies in American history.

It’s a quizzical time capsule of pre-internet fame from the perspective of a troubled but capable young man who knew his way around a camera.

An intriguing, disorientating 60s artefact.

It is compelling in every sense and takes you on a moving journey: not only through the story of The Lion King, but through a small portion of the beautiful cultures and traditions that exist within black communities globally.

A very absorbing and valuable documentary about the creation of this artwork, which relates to Ai’s honourable record of using art as memorialist-activism.

Schrader has carpentered a strong and vehement film, hypnotically watchable and squalid with nightmarish flashbacks and a typically apocalyptic ending that grows plausibly enough out of what has gone before. There’s a horrible, queasy urgency to this high-stakes game.

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.

Amstell creates a detailed ecosystem of in-jokes from the worlds of media and film, and from that cynical context he conjures a miraculously heartfelt love story, sweet and poignant in all its awkwardness.

What’s so funny about the film is that it shows how very little divides your early-twentysomething self from your mid-thirtysomething self – you’re never too old to be humiliated.

It’s a clever and expertly made movie; Oakley luxuriates in its winter chill.

F for Fake is a minor work in some ways, but there is fascination and poignancy in seeing Welles's elegant retreat into this hall of mirrors.

Ray's assured debut as director is a brilliant noir combination of love story and crime thriller. [24 Dec 2005, p.48]

There’s something exciting about a film that immerses you in the life of a creative artist, and so it proves with this documentary about Howard Ashman.

A plumply overripe fruit of the counterculture, dripping with the juices of spiritual rebellion, semi-comic posturing, consciousness-raising and all-around freakiness.

The cumulative effect is like strolling through a Reykjavik gallery where each painting moves within its well-chosen frame.

It’s a powerful tale of human frailty.

What an emotional, satisfying film this is – and a whopping oversized calling card for everyone involved.

Although I can’t help wishing Blakeson could have given Pike’s co-star Dianne Wiest more to do in the final act, it is grisly and gleefully cynical entertainment. If Ben Jonson directed films, they would be like this.

Pinocchio is a thoroughly bizarre story; Garrone makes of it a weirdly satisfying spectacle.

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.

The movie is packed with brilliant, logic-chopping dialogue and surreal visual gags that, though familiar and often quoted, come up fresh at each viewing, none funnier than Harpo getting money from a phone as if it were a fruit machine.

This is substantial and rewarding.

It is all unexpectedly potent, particularly in the absurdity and petulance and pain that Parsons crams into his performance. It’s a strange, compelling dose of unhappiness.

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

It is a love story that is also a fascinating artefact: quixotic, romantic, erotic.

This debut feature from writer-director Brian Duffield (best known for his screenplays for Underwater, The Babysitter and Jane Got a Gun) has plenty of gallows humour to leaven the gore and tragedy, and plenty of subtexts swimming under the surface like glittering, metaphorical koi.

It’s a film that understands that humour and horror are not always mutually exclusive and that even the worst moments in life carry an air of the absurd.

There is no moment where Byrne dramatically opens up, either on stage or off, but perhaps that’s not the point. It’s a treat for Byrne fans, and could well make converts.

Hathaway moseys rather than gallops along with a charming blend of comedy, action and sentiment; and in Robert Duvall there is a bad guy eminently worth shooting. [24 Dec 2005, p.48]

It’s just a rare joy to see a film-maker scrambling together overused tropes and making something so vibrant and vital as a result, an exciting and unexpected studio movie with a brain, some guts and a heart.

This is undeniably a very theatrical film, but it never hides that – indeed, it makes the most of a certain claustrophobia. It’s an immensely watchable evocation of a moment when black America was on the verge of an upheaval that continues to resonate, in 2020 as strongly as ever. It absolutely puts you – to coin a phrase of the time – in the room where it happened.

On the most basic level, it is a warning of what inequality can cause in the future and what it is effectively causing right now. Perhaps there is something nihilistic here, but New Order very effectively persuades you that a real-life revolution might well be every bit as ugly, horrifying and un-Hollywood as this shows – and that it is on the way.

Energetic and heartfelt, tipping towards tragedy, Sun Children crawls through the mud and emerges all the stronger. The quest is a red herring; the real treasure is the film.

There is sweep and confidence in this movie

The secret life of farm animals remains a secret, but a fascinating and even poignant one, in this strange and unexpectedly subtle film from the Russian documentary-maker Viktor Kossakovsky.

The freshness of the approach, combined with the substance of the stories, works the same strange magic on the viewer as on the inmates. It is easy to be swept along.

The tale drifts and falters when I wished it would have hit home with more conviction, but that may be partly the point. The struggle is endless, unwinnable. Everybody is compromised.

What prevents Apples from becoming a simple Lanthimos copycat is its comparative kindness and its abiding direction of travel.

There is a fair bit of sentimentality here, but an awful lot of affection and energy as well.

Explicitly, his film shows how a hundred shades of grey combine to make a darkness. Implicitly, it warns that it could well happen again.

Herzog and Oppenheimer are back (and Oppenheimer gets a co-directing credit) with another nimbly curious and fascinating film on a similar topic: meteorites. This is a rare example of modern documentary film-making that uses voiceover – that inimitable Herzog growl.

Fastvold’s film is distinctive in that she shows us how physical constraint and violence are part of the fabric of living.

There’s a rich confectionery of strangeness, sadness and fear to this very absorbing film.

Good Joe Bell is a generous film about an outsider travelling across the country realising the importance of listening and learning from others (as well as his own guilty conscience).

James Erskine’s film showcases the unforgettable Holiday voice: her elegantly casual, almost negligent readings of melodies, with a sensual moan or purr that was on the verge of a sob.

The humour in My Man Godfrey is madcap, but in the best way.

There is much to appreciate in this film; much to like. You don’t just watch it in big bright colours; you remember it in big bright colours too.

Nocturne is simpatico with a protagonist who, in lieu of greatness, decides to steal – then play it like she owns it. An elegant, forking finale proves as much.

Sud – with plenty of inexorable tracking shots through the family’s chilly condo – efficiently tightens the screw as the twitchy mother and indulgent father first bicker, then are doomed together by their blood allegiances.

Timeless entertainment. [24 Dec 2005]

The Prom is as corny as you like, and there is hardly a plot turn, transition or song-cue that can’t be guessed well in advance; but it’s so goofy that you just have to enjoy it, and there are some very funny lines.

76 Days is not a hard-hitting documentary about the centre of the Covid-19 pandemic – maybe such a film will be slower to arrive than the vaccine – but it’s a potent human-interest story, and a portrait of a city under siege.

If there is a tonal uncertainty in this comedy, then that’s because there was a tonal uncertainty in the real-life events, and the movie nicely conveys how they were at one and the same time deadly serious and Pythonically silly.

Lovely, heartfelt performances from Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth carry this intimate movie.

It is a personal film – and political, too. There is emotion and urgency in that familiar soothing voice.

What a man. Just writing this makes me want to watch the documentary all over again.

Swinton’s delivery has a theatrical style – it very much feels as if we could be watching a stage show – and there is something frozenly despairing about it; it is the voice of someone who is unwilling to relinquish her dignity or rationality and just give in to an aria of sadness.

Cushing relishes the role of his career as the sociopathic dandy whose passion for science overrides all moral considerations, while Christopher Lee conveys the dire plight of the creature through body language alone.

This is Boseman’s final performance on screen, and what a glorious performance to go out on. It is a head-butting confrontation of the galácticos: Davis and Boseman are each the immovable object and irresistible force.

In writer-director Evan Morgan’s unusual neo-noir The Kid Detective, it’s not just a suspect or a motive that’s a red herring, it’s an entire genre, a strange rug-pull of a movie that starts in the middle of the road before ending up off a cliff, in a way that both works and doesn’t, a fascinating gambit nonetheless.

A brilliantly textured film to be savoured.

This dense but witty film is never caught short for a flourish.

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

The film never behaves as if it is anything other than a realist coming-of-age drama but there is something else going on.

Perhaps it’s quaint, but it’s also watchable, and it is the kind of sci-fi that is genuinely audacious, trying to envisage what the future will be like – and often succeeding.

Vintage screen Dickens with a cutting edge: the French terror is vividly, hauntingly realised, all chaos and guillotine ghouls. [16 Aug 2000, p.23]

In the end, the film operates best as an act of ancestor-worship to an extraordinary musician whose best days – we are forced to sadly conclude – appear to be behind him.

Wonderful entertainment.

There’s no denying Zappa’s personal charisma and devotion to his cause, nor his articulacy in its service. Winter has created a fascinating watch.

Rams is a lovely, even-tempered drama about men and rural life, gentle but firm of spirit, with a down-to-earth pith and a way of entertainingly and unpretentiously exploring potentially difficult subjects such as masculinity.

It's all sweat, death and bloody retribution: one of Peckinpah's finest. [03 Apr 2010, p.53]

It is an intriguing movie that lives in the mind for hours after the lights have come up.

An absorbing tale of feline ambition.

Machoian, who is also the editor, composes each scene with studied care and Oscar Ignacio Jiménez’s clear, crisp cinematography and framing is beautifully achieved. This is a compelling portrait of a toxic marriage.

It is about a homecoming that isn’t quite a homecoming, a reckoning with something not exactly there, an attempted reconciliation with people and places that can’t really be negotiated with.

A valuable introduction to the movies and to the man.

It’s intense but not unwatchably painful, and so much more than an issue film or portrait of a victim. I really hope Knight finds a place in the film industry; with her terrific performance here she’s earned it.

The atmosphere and performances are sustained at a terrifying pitch, and the movie ends suddenly, leaving the audience to deal with the ideas and emotions aroused.

Sean Connery's weary Robin returns from the crusades to confront Robert Shaw's Sheriff Of Nottingham once more, but despite their heroic final duel, it's Connery's scenes with Audrey Hepburn's Marion that make the magic. [03 Jun 2006, p.53]

It's a nice, if undemanding, Yuletide treat.

As much as this gripping documentary is about the mysterious DB Cooper, it is about human nature, too. These brilliant characters, some deeply entangled in the story, some distant from it but connected, are believers. This film asks what keeps them believing, and it is a far bigger question than the mystery itself.

It is hauntingly sad.

Mulligan knows how to lead us up and down the garden paths of his bucolic world, and as with Psycho you need a second viewing to appreciate the various skills that have gone into this movie.

Cowboys is a film that relaxes into its ideas and themes, and the performances from Knight, Zahn and Bell – with Ann Dowd as the cop on Troy’s trail – are all tremendous.

Its strongest element, aside from Eilish herself, is the generosity and empathy afforded to the experience of fandom.

Their faces are vivid and Pennetta’s film somehow returns you to the simple, fundamental fact: these are real people whose lives carry on outside the movie screen’s perimeter.

It is an intriguing and empathic study, which could help all of us to understand.

One of the best movies in the American Film Theatre Collection. [22 Aug 2004, p.12]

Taylor-Joy and Hemsworth are a great pairing and Taylor-Joy is an overwhelmingly convincing action heroine. She sells this sequel.

It features an awful lot of very rich, clever, cordially self-satisfied collectors and connoisseurs; their pink, twinkly-eyed faces positively beam out of the screen, and surely Hoogendijk is inviting us to wonder how Rembrandt himself would have painted them.