In every shot and every scene, mostly in closeup, Ronan carries the film with her unselfconsciously fierce and focused presence.

For me, it never came to life.

The film’s real ferocity is saved for the ideologues of terror.

The film makes cogent, sweeping sense of the record for perhaps the most illuminative, swift and damning case against the institution of policing – the real fourth estate, as one subject puts it – of the many investigations conducted in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. But there’s a dryness to its procedure.

It's a likable scary story – with hints of Tim Burton and Steven Spielberg.

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

It might resemble other family dramas, but there’s a hum of something strange underneath, a sense that life is about surrendering to the infinite flow of events.

Essential viewing for anyone interested in what freedom of information means in the digital age, this passionate, fascinating, unapologetically partial but fair documentary celebrates Aaron Swartz.

There is a sincere effort to get beneath the facade of what an extremely fit twentysomething firefighter’s life is like. There’s even a possibility that the film’s first act is intentionally distancing so that the later scenes will have a bigger payoff.

It’s a dizzy swirl of fun.

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.

It’s a charming and engaging mix – the antithesis of Metallica’s ego overload, and just as watchable.

While its craft is certainly interesting, there’s something decadent and empty at its heart.

Hail, Caesar! is a lot of fun, and beautifully crafted, too. One to savour.

It's the sort of film you either go along with or fall into a stupor watching. [28 Dec 1989]

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

Contrived and possibly overheated though the film might be at times, there is real storytelling gusto to it, and Laurent punches it across with relish.

The underlying collective testimony furnished by Four Hours at the Capitol is that the age of Trump has not yet ended – and the true day of reckoning in the United States is still to come.

This heartfelt movie-musical of The Color Purple sugars the pill and softens the blow, planing down the original’s barbed and knotty surfaces, taking away some of the shock of violence and tragedy and tilting the experience more towards female solidarity and triumph over adversity.

The Lure’s premise alone will turn heads but once the novelty wears off the question will remain: where’s the story?

The result is an amusing, and occasionally touching meditation on fame, sibling rivalry and ambition, with a sweet payoff.

The whole thing might have been improved by slightly nippier pacing, but the slow-burn action pays off with a spectacular climactic gun-fight, where the distances are so vast it takes half a second for bullets to find their marks.

In Hall, [Campos] has the perfect actor to convey Chubbuck’s internal struggle in a manner that’s devastating.

Only the hardest of hearts could fail to enjoy the great 80s action classic, rereleased for its 30th anniversary: with uproarious explosions, deafening shootouts and smart-alec tag lines following the bad guys getting shot.

People are unlikely to charge out of the cinema with quite the same level of glee as they did in 2009; but this is certainly an astute, exhilarating concoction.

Craig is so dominant that sometimes it seems that Gene is almost not worthy of him. Craig is strangely magnificent.

This documentary by Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin argues that Pussy Riot suffered an old-fashioned Soviet show trial, and what emerges is the effrontery and hypocrisy of Putin's attempt to associate these three young women with the Bolsheviks' suppression of religion.

It’s a tight, slick polemic which doesn’t shy from the complexity surrounding the debate or the fact it wants you the viewer to get up and do something about it.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s macabre and amusing new film has a predictably strong performance from Emma Stone, an intestine-shreddingly clamorous orchestral score from Jerskin Fendrix and, most importantly, a wonderful montage finale – but frankly it’s a very, very long run-up to that big jump.

Elena and Dovydas’s relationship unfolds at a gentle, unhurried pace, their growing attraction indicated by small details – coy glances, long, loaded pauses between conversation – that reward attentive viewing.

It is a sweet-natured little tale, indebted to Monsters Inc and the whole Pixar canon but saved from being predictable with other borrowings (Back to the Future, Inception), as well as its various metafictional levels of storytelling.

This small, delicate, late-blooming film is quite lovely, and a throwback to the 1990s/2000s craze for semi-improvised, rough and ready indie film-making.

On the surface, it is just another action adventure set in a well-known theatre of revolution, with a romance to set beside its thrills. But it contains within it the seeds of a political and personal drama that questions both American policy in Latin America and the exigencies of contemporary reporting. [19 Feb 1984, p.19]

Author is less a run-through of one of the biggest controversies to plague the literary world in the past century, than an illuminating study of the enigmatic and driven woman behind the phenomenon.

If you are going to see one outlandish and occasionally nauseating bloodbath samurai pic this year, this is the one.

This is a calm and often affecting study of L’Arche, a community of people with learning disabilities in Trosly-Breuil, northern France.

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.

Stingily is relaxed and amiable, but in acting terms there may be nothing else there and the film doesn’t develop in any interesting direction.

The film gives us a precious glimpse into LGBTQ+ life in the postwar period.

Part delicious satire of Hollywood culture and part frustratingly muddled thriller. But the good bits are sufficiently impressive it wouldn’t be fair to hold its flaws against it too much. We mustn’t be greedy for perfection.

In all honesty The Untamed doesn’t seem to go anywhere special. But connoisseurs of oddness may cherish it.

Even if Aisholpan’s training – which includes hoodwinking, responding to calls, dragging dead foxes and other hallmarks of falconry – is for the camera, it doesn’t make it any less extraordinary. Especially in this remarkable environment, captured in breathtakingly crisp digital video.

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.

Though I was willing myself to enjoy this fourth film, about the heroine’s adventure with a younger man, the Bridget Jones series has frankly run out of steam.

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

Perhaps the full story of the encampments has yet to be told.

If it’s not quite devious enough overall, Redux Redux still opens up a punchy murder-revenge side alley for the genre.

The script does a solid job of making it an accessible world to those not already steeped in it although Goldstein and Daley, writing alongside Michael Gilio, are less effective with the film’s many attempts at comedy.

This is another powerful addition to Larraín’s movies about the ongoing agony of Chile, and the Chilean people’s struggle to confront the past, armed with the hammer and the sharpened stake.

For a film about the inevitable eradication of most life on Earth, Arco isn’t as depressing as you might expect, as it finds a tiny thread of optimism to hold on to.

It is efficiently executed, though its relentless cursor-nudging will probably make older viewers want to unplug and retreat into an 18th-century novel.

The movie is rich on its own as a character piece about the difficulties of being bi-racial, especially at the very specific location of Columbia University.

Neither an overlooked masterpiece nor the disaster the Beatles and the critics thought, it’s finally getting a fair shake. [2024 Restored Version]

James’s sleek telling excels at intertwining the personal and the political with illuminating detail.

With its pale, washed-out colour palette, its eerily slow, almost somnambulist pacing and occasionally bizarre emotional demonstrations, Post Mortem is strangely gripping.

A captivating examination of criss-crossing relationships permeated by incisive performances.

It’s a thoroughly enjoyable film, a crescendo of paranoid trippiness building to an uproarious grossout in its final moments.

This is a fervent film, heartfelt and shot with passion and sweep.

It is well acted, well shot, earnest and high-minded in its eroticism, but with a certain Mills-and-Boony-swoony-ness that creates something unsubversive in the love affair itself.

It hardly needs to be said that subtlety is not really among this film’s attributes - but it is fierce, angry, engaged, and intensely, sensually alert to every detail of its own pleasure and pain.

I’d like to see a film about a comedian who, like Bishop, really does flower into being funny.

There are moments of inspiration that light up this film like flashes of lightning.

It’s a tremendously engaging and likeable superhero ride, in which the classiest of casts show they know exactly where to take it seriously – and where to inject the fun.

Unimprovably brisk at 91 minutes, Watcher is not messing around – and probably won’t hang around long in cinemas with starry awards fare in the offing. But a few more of these nifty diversions, and the multiplexes might once again be a viable night out.

Not everything works here, but the sheer crazy confidence-through-chaos of the Suicide Squad and their bizarrely dysfunctional MO makes for a mighty spectacle.

The Day After is an elegant exercise. It feels like a chapter from something bigger.

Dunham, who pads through much of this extremely well-written, often funny and very touching film in the semi-nude, doesn't give a damn about any of it.

This is a film in touch with modernity, but I wonder if the livestreamers were quite as apolitical as this film makes them appear. And I was unsure about Zhu’s decision to correct all the images from colour to black-and-white, an arthouse-ification that the film didn’t need.

Refn delivers some shocks - but not the shock of the new.

As always, I find myself considering that in a world where everyone’s a cynic and an ironist, Cousins’s unaffected rapture is unique and refreshing. And there is an odd-couple comedy here, with Cousins as the unstoppably garrulous super-fan and Thomas as the reticent English gentleman, almost like a charismatic Cambridge don on the long vacation, who has picked up a voluble hitchhiker.

It is a poignant set-up but, disappointingly, Okada’s ideas about motherhood don’t cut as deep as they could.

Here is a film about a very complicated and painful kind of coming of age, or maybe a meditation on “coming of age” as something that never actually happens; it also examines the illusory dividing line between childhood and adulthood, innocence and experience, present and past.

You have to admire the ambition, even if Elliot doesn't always seem certain if he's laughing with or at his creations.

The initially alluring casualness of Ohs’s project fades quickly into a mildly irksome shallowness – lots of unearned and unconvincing staring, docile conversations, should-be evocative images that do not evoke.

This is an effortlessly excellent film, about a horribly hard subject.

The directors and Dastmalchian – high on his own bogus gravitas – have fun with a fresh premise that reminds us that light entertainment is the anteroom of hell.

In addition to being a funny, invigorating and inspirational ode to being the cleverest kid in the room, it’s a remarkable testament to the suspension of disbelief.

It’s an engaging film, but it leaves you with a feeling that there might be a deeper, darker, more specific story yet to be told.

The real chemistry here is with the four-legged ass, not the human one.

At a tight 72 minutes, the film is a quick and dazzling burst of pleasure, pulling together so many opposing visuals, ideas and genres and coming up with something dazzling as a result.

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

The performances from Hathaway and McKenzie are vehement and watchable, but the film itself is an unsatisfying and anticlimactic oddity.

It’s a movie presented with absolute conviction and gimlet-eyed seriousness, but less wayward humour than Cronenberg often gives us.

What 100 Meters lacks in narrative subtlety and pacing, it makes up for in dazzling visuals.

The movie is about how people ruin everything with their destructiveness, but also about the beauty of the human heart. It’s so inventive and imaginative that I wanted to love it more, but in the end found it a little bit psychologically uninvolving, perhaps because of its nonstop swirl of ideas and stories.

It’s an intimate portrait combined with increasingly shocking footage as his opposition movement comes under attack.

There’s fun to be had here, thanks to Moss and an involving set-up, and given the state of multiplex horror, especially at this time of year, this is a striking diversion. But Whannell gives us just enough to make us want more and despite the stretched 125-minute runtime, he can’t quite deliver what he loosely promises.

The ending is tiresome and shark-jumping in the extreme.

Mikkelsen hurls himself into proceedings. It’s a performance of intense commitment, one where every grunt and yowl feels agonisingly authentic.

This is terrific film-making – enough to bring a rush of blood to the head.

There is terrific fun, charm and storytelling energy in Superboys of Malegaon, and it settles on an interesting theme: very rarely indeed does a new film-maker find success with a completely original work.

It’s an elegant directorial performance from Herzi.

This is an elegant, chilly dream of despair.

It is a disturbing and unsettling piece of work, a psycho-pathological moodboard of a film, in which guilt, horror and shame poison the atmosphere.

It is a human-oriented drama that builds a thoughtful and contemplative space, empathising with characters grappling with difficult circumstances outside the common experience. It is also the kind of drama you sometimes want to grab and shake to life.

It is a deeply personal drama about culture, family, community and what it means to represent – though it can also be self-indulgent and even a bit self-involved, though this is arguably a function of the story.

Untouchable: The Rise and Fall of Harvey Weinstein (BBC Two), directed by Ursula MacFarlane, is a film of halting testimonies, long pauses, lips pressed tightly together and eyes filling with tears.

What Cumberbatch delivers is an impressively rounded character study of someone variously kind, prickly, aggressive, awkward and supremely confident. But it's almost too nuanced. Accuracy isn't all, but fumbling in the dark isn't always fun.