Mike Leigh brings an overwhelming simplicity and severity to this historical epic, which begins with rhetoric and ends in violence. There is force, grit and, above all, a sense of purpose; a sense that the story he has to tell is important and real, and that it needs to be heard right now.

What a gloriously daring and explosive film Joker is. It’s a tale that’s almost as twisted as the man at its centre, bulging with ideas and pitching towards anarchy.

This is such a beguiling, generous film from Gerwig. There is a lot of love in it.

Refusing to make Breivik spectacular, the film pays tribute to process, how Norway gave him precisely what he was entitled to so as not to give him what he wanted – scale, martyrdom, glamour.

This animated Japanese masterpiece is a war story as wrenching as any live-action movie.

It's a film with jazz in its bones and rhythm to its beats.

Brilliant.

Utterly beguiling, funny and romantic.

A noir classic.

This is an enthralling drama: the best and most interesting Australian biopic since Chopper in 2000.

It's an allegory about the Vietnam war, a study of American character and a national propensity for violence. Southern Comfort is a masterpiece.

There is something visionary in this film.

Notorious has fascinating echoes of other Hitchcock movies such as Rebecca and Psycho. A must-see or must-see-again.

I would have loved to hear a discussion on a wider range of issues, particularly #TimesUp, but with a film this much fun, it seems churlish to ask for anything else.

The film features an acting cameo from Siegel’s assistant and protege Sam Peckinpah, who also worked on the script, and is known for its high-octane pulp thrills. It should also be praised for elegant satire.

Peter Jackson has created a visually staggering thought experiment; an immersive deep-dive into what it was like for ordinary British soldiers on the western front.

I felt wrung out at the end of this film. How incredible must it have been for those who were there in person.

Extraordinary.

It is an eerie, sad story whose meaning disappears over the vast horizon as if on a highway heading away through the desert.

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

Somehow, it doesn’t look like something that happened 50 years ago – but rather an extraordinarily detailed futurist fantasy of what might happen in the years to come, if we could only evolve to some higher degree of verve and hope.

An arrestingly bizarre experience.

The Souvenir is an artefact in the highest auteur register. Its absence of tonal readability is a challenge. But there is also a cerebrally fierce, slow-burn passion in its austere, unemphasised plainness.

In the past I have been agnostic and a nay-sayer about M:I, but the pure fun involved in this film, its silly-serious alchemy, and the way the franchise seems to strain at something crazily bigger with every film, as opposed to just winding down, is something to wonder at.

It is a wildly silly, wildly entertaining adventure which periodically gives us a greatest-hits flashback montage of the other seven films in the M:I canon - but we still get a brand new, box-fresh Tom-sprinting-along-the-street scene, without which it wouldn’t be M:I.

One terrific moment in which Pat sees what he believes are the killer's shoes underneath a toilet stall door and berates him while Pamela climbs into the green van outside is reminiscent of another scene that arrived years later and was also labelled "Hitchcockian" – the footsteps down the hallway confrontation in the Coen brothers' No Country For Old Men.

Two-Lane Blacktop should have established Hellman as one of the great directors of his generation. Instead, its box-office failure made him an enduring cult figure.

Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland is an utterly inspired docu-fictional hybrid, like her previous feature The Rider. It is a gentle, compassionate, questioning film about the American soul.

Villeneuve is superb at juxtaposing the colossal spectacle with the intimate encroachment of danger and a mysterious dramatic language that exalts the alienness of every texture and surface.

So Long, My Son is a piercingly, profoundly moving picture that peels and exposes the senses.

Cutter's Way is a movie that starts yielding up its real treasures around the third viewing, so stick with it (you'll hate the ending first time out). I've seen it perhaps 30 times – it may be my favourite American movie – and, unlike its three broken leads, I have still yet to hit bottom. For once, the word is appropriate: masterpiece.

The polar opposite of a date movie, Possession is incredibly well directed and acted (great soundtrack and camerawork too). Neill and Adjani are both at the height of their powers here, free of ego and fearless. She, in particular, has one relentless freakout scene that you'll never forget. We're still no closer to finding a category for it, but it doesn't need one. [27 July 2013, p.23]

Sifting six years’ worth of rubble, al-Kateab turns up beauty and one earthly miracle to set alongside the horrors, but horrors there are.

It's a dazzling, emblematic portrait of America in 1975, both trapped in amber yet still vitally alive.

This is an immersive experience, like being plunged back into the 70s. There is passion there. No matter how chaotic or bleary things get, no one is in any doubt that the music counts.

Brando’s charisma sells the climactic scenes with Willard; without his presence, the literary musings would be a little callow.

Probably the funniest mobster movie ever...A sublime meld of black satire, high camp and happy farce.

A superbly elegant, enigmatic drama ... I was on the edge of my seat.

It’s fierce, open and angry, unironised and unadorned, about a vital contemporary issue whose implications you somehow don’t hear on the news.

Beanpole is moving, disturbing, overwhelming.

Very few films can make you scared and excited at the same time. Just like the lighthouse beam, this is dazzling and dangerous.

Every second of this noir masterpiece is gripping, and the chemistry between Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor is utterly thrilling.

Absolutely brilliant.

Bringing Up Baby is very funny. It leaves one in awe at the speed and timing of Grant and Hepburn, as well as their goofy, lopsided humanity...Don't trust the public to recognise a masterpiece.

The sheer silliness is inspired.

The more you look at it, the more perfect it seems. Hollywood doesn't make films like this now because public taste has changed. But it's doubtful if they could anyway.

Anyone who says voting is a waste of time needs to watch this film.

It has a claim to be the last movie with the authentic spirit of the Ealing comedies; although with a longer perspective we can also see how it’s also indirectly influenced by producer David Puttnam in its high-minded spirit of Anglo-American amity.

It’s a deeply sweet, happy, gentle film.

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.

It’s a cinema of pure energy and grungy voltage, and the Safdies make it look very easy. This will be the year’s most exciting film. You can take that to the bank.

This wonderfully sweet, sad and funny film simply delivers more moment-by-moment pleasure than anything else around.

I can state without hesitation that this is a monumental piece of work and one I’m deeply glad to have seen. I can also say that I hope to never cross its path again.

Andersson’s films are endlessly rewatchable. To view them is to abolish gravity.

1917 is Mendes’s most purely ambitious and passionate picture since his misunderstood and under-appreciated Jarhead of 2005. It’s bold, thrilling film-making.

It is a tremendously engaging story which does something that very few movies do: mention money. Something very palpable is at stake, the jeopardy is real and it’s a question of survival.

Sutherland and Christie are an overwhelmingly convincing married couple.

Akira Kurosawa's 1950 masterwork is a chilling, utterly memorable dissection of the nature of human communication.

This film is such a rush of vitality. It rocks.

The film punches out its warped drama with amazing gusto and Clark is lethally assured: not Saint Maud really, but Saint Joan, a spectacular horror heroine.

Lauren Greenfield’s film about the Philippines’ former first lady Imelda Marcos reveals a grotesquely self-pitying, wholly unrepentant and very rich woman.

This gripping thriller, part of the BFI's Bogarde retrospective, daringly smashed through 1961's homosexual taboos, but has weathered best as a study of blackmail and paranoia.

This is Herzog's journey to the heart of darkness, a film that specifically echoes his earlier offerings The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and his South American odyssey Aguirre, Wrath of God.

This is a gift to cinephiles everywhere from deep in the cellar and we’re all lucky to get a sip.

The scenes of artistic, scientific and communal triumph were significant. The isolated, solipsistic anger of each character, lost in their own identity loop, seemed like a perfect analogy for the conflicts in eastern Europe in the mid-1990s.

Writer-director Emerald Fennell (a showrunner for TV’s Killing Eve) lands a stiletto jab with her feature debut, and Carey Mulligan is demurely brilliant as the appropriately named Cassandra.

For me, Tenet is preposterous in the tradition of Boorman’s Point Blank, or even Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, a deadpan jeu d’esprit, a cerebral cadenza, a deadpan flourish of crazy implausibility – but supercharged with steroidal energy and imagination.

West Side Story is contrived, certainly, a hothouse flower of musical theatre, and Spielberg quite rightly doesn’t try hiding any of those stage origins. His mastery of technique is thrilling; I gave my heart to this poignant American fairytale of doomed love.

What an addictive romantic drama it is, mixing sentimentality with pure rapture.

This is a wonderfully absorbing and moving family drama with a buttery, sunlit streak of sentimentality.

It’s not clear if it’s funny or tragic, if it’s reality TV or reality itself. But Boys State is as exciting and moving as Steve James’s high school basketball epic Hoop Dreams was a generation ago, with its emotional rawness, its guileless patriotism and capacity for hurt and wonder.

The visual brilliance of this film combines with shroomy toxicity and inexplicable moral grandeur: what a stunning experience.

Its effects are essentially theatrical – but they are powerfully achieved, and the performances from Hopkins and Colman are superb. It is a film about grief and what it means to grieve for someone who is still alive.

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.

It’s all so inventively bizarre that you could treat it simply as a black comedy, but in the final 15 minutes there is an amazing crescendo of emotion.

In a calmly realist, non-mystic movie language, this director really can convince you that the living and the dead, the past and the present, the terrestrial and the other, do exist side by side.

This rich and mysterious film is a real achievement.

What DAU. Natasha shows is the bizarre way that, in totalitarian societies, the normal and the abnormal, the banal and the grotesque, and the human and the inhuman live together side by side.

Stanwyck supplies a bravura double performance, a showcase for her brilliant versatility.

The cynicism and indifference to suffering is truly horrible, and a kind of insidious evil rises from the screen like carbon monoxide, and also a terrible sadness.

It keeps all the power of a live performance while simultaneously adding a filmic pizzazz including some breathtaking aerial shots. There is extraordinary direction – again under Kail – so that the cameras capture the mise en scène of theatre without losing any of the closeup intimacy of film.

If anything, Robert Altman's self-styled "anti-western" looks even richer, stranger and more daring than it did when it first appeared back in 1971.

John Huston's hellfire burlesque is one of the great lost films of the 1970s and a movie to stand alongside his Maltese Falcon or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

Often, the film-maker seems to be on a journey without a destination, perhaps without a script. Occasionally, brilliantly, he goes entirely off the rails.

A wonderfully composed movie in which Ingmar Bergman is able to vary the tone from melancholy to gaiety in the most deeply satisfying way

The film itself is a kind of free spirit, and one that has made an indelible print on Australian cinema.

A neglected 1976 gem from a neglected Hollywood genius. May was known for her comedy but here proves absolutely fluent in the language of mobster lowlife, with an edge of caustic, disillusioned humour, and strange yet shockingly real outbursts of violence in which cafe owners and bus drivers are suddenly roughed up.

The film is thrillingly, unapologetically about decency and honour, about, as Laura heartrendingly puts it, controlling oneself.

Over the course of Rio Bravo we are treated to an entertainment masterclass, a high watermark of Hollywood cinema in its heyday.

For its control of narrative, its photography of the vanished suburban California of the 1940s, and for its compelling central performance from Crawford, Michael Curtiz’s noir thriller is utterly gripping.

It remains breathtakingly good. There is a miraculous, unforced ease and naturalness in the acting and direction; it is classic movie storytelling in the service of important themes.

Top Hat reflects a transatlantic kind of universe, the Brit dimension absorbed into American waspy class, and sweetened with some mannered comedy; this was a Hollywood that loved PG Wodehouse.

Ingmar Bergman's dark masterpiece effortlessly sees off the revisionists and the satirists; it is a radical work of art that reaches back to scripture, to Cervantes and to Shakespeare to create a new dramatic idiom of its own.

It is a passionate drama of fear and rage.

Residue is a fleeting and haunting lament for what is lost to gentrification, and other tolls on black life in America. But at the same, it’s exhilarating and monumental, laced with the sensation that we’re discovering a bold and sensitive new voice.

This is a pellucid and gentle film, made with the simplicity and grace of a children's tale and yet its humour, emotional clarity and directness speak directly to adults and children alike - and the pre-teen principals shoulder an adult burden of performance.

What a lovely, rousing, finally moving film this is.

What a thoroughly wonderful sophomore feature from the British director Ben Sharrock – witty, poignant, marvellously composed and shot, moving and even weirdly gripping.