Boyega carries the film with a compelling authority of his own.

Playing Falstaff might have been Welles’s creative and physical destiny: in the character he found a dignity and sensuality in his, by then, overweight form. The confidence and panache of his staging is a treat.

8 1/2 is probably the most potent movie about film-making, within which fantasy and reality are mixed without obfuscation, and there's a tough argument that belies Fellini's usual felicitous flaccidity.

Eisenstein's film still has a hypnotic urgency.

The co-directors created from Rumer Godden's novel an extraordinary melodrama of repressed love and Forsterian Englishness - or rather Irishness - coming unglued in the vertiginous landscape of South Asia.

The face-off between two of the biggest legends in American pop culture, Sinatra and Brando, is something to be relished, although the roles are perhaps a little too atypical for each for the pairing itself to be legendary as the individuals. But still, what a joy it always is.

An unmissable big-screen experience.

Get Carter has as much value as a piece of social history as it does as a thriller.

There’s a real tragic power in this almost unbearably brutal and shocking movie from writer-director Jasmila Žbanić.

A pleasure.

The lack of awareness of this event is another tragic example of black history being ignored. Only this time the record survived, and now we all get to share in it.

This animated documentary from Danish film-maker Jonas Poher Rasmussen is an irresistibly moving and engrossing story, whose emotional implications we can see being absorbed into the minds of the director and his subject, almost in real time.

Building to a remorseless climax, Sims-Fewer and co-writer/director Dusty Mancinelli brilliantly, and times almost unwatchably, overhaul the rape-revenge movie as something far more realistic, traumatised and noxious.

Céline Sciamma’s beautiful fairytale reverie is occasioned by the dual mysteries of memory and the future: simple, elegant and very moving.

Hitchcock's superbly insouciant crime caper from 1955 must surely be one of the last movies in which the American super-rich are indulged so extravagantly and adoringly – the kind of people who stub their cigarettes out in fried eggs.

Allen's best film for some time. As an examination of middle-aged, middle-class Manhattan mores, in fact, it is well nigh unbeatable. [22 Oct 1992, p.6]

In the work of someone so exhaustively appreciated as Hitchcock, you wouldn't expect to find forgotten masterpieces but I Confess is one. It might never catch fire, but it smoulders gloriously.

Lisa Rovner’s superb documentary pays a deeply deserved, seldom-expressed tribute to the female composers, musicians and inventors from the brief history of electronic music.

It’s such a delectable film: I’ll be cutting myself another slice very soon.

Pure evil is all around in this unnervingly subtle, sophisticated movie; an eerie oppression in the air.

The elements of silliness and deadly seriousness are nicely balanced and although I wasn’t absolutely sure about the ending, which has maybe too neat a bow tied on it, this is just very enjoyable and I was on the edge of my seat, not knowing whether to flinch or laugh, though I did both.

This is an utterly absorbing film, a story that Scorsese sees as a secret history of American power, a hidden violence epidemic polluting the water table of humanity.

The Northman is a horribly violent, nihilistic and chaotic story about the endless cycle of violence, the choice between loving your friends and hating your enemies – which turns out to be no choice at all, and the thread of fate down which masculinity’s delicious toxin drips. It’s entirely outrageous, with some epic visions of the flaring cosmos. I couldn’t look away.

The mystery of other people’s lives, the unbridgeable gulf between us all – even, or especially, between married couples – is the subject of this outstanding drama from first-time film-maker Aleem Khan.

The Power of the Dog is a made with artistry and command: it is one of Jane Campion’s best.

It’s a gorgeously and grippingly made picture and Tang Wei is magnificent.

Perhaps the ultimate value of Nitram has nothing to do with its qualities as an intensely disquieting tone poem – though on that level the film is brilliant, marking another extraordinary achievement from Kurzel, who has a penchant for evoking gut-sinking emotional atmosphere.

Trier has taken on one of the most difficult genres imaginable, the romantic drama, and combined it with another very tricky style – the coming-of-ager – to craft something gloriously sweet and beguiling.

Where once Hamaguchi’s film-making language had seemed to me at the level of jeu d’esprit, now it ascends to something with passion and even a kind of grandeur.

Vortex tells us something else about old age, something which a severe and high-minded movie like Michael Haneke’s Amour would not grasp: death is chaotic, like life. It ends with things undone and in messy disarray. This is a work of wintry maturity, and real compassion.

The film allows you to ponder not just the mother-child bond – strong enough to confront fascism – but the way everyone has to let their children be influenced by strangers; the unintended upbringing of being out in the world. What an emotional experience.

Kristen Stewart proves entirely compelling in the title role. She gives an awkward and mannered performance as Diana, and this is entirely as it should be when one considers that Diana gave an awkward and mannered performance herself, garnishing her inbred posh hauteur with studied coquettish asides.

Love letters to the past are always addressed to an illusion, yet this is such a seductive piece of myth-making from Branagh.

This family could be blown into pieces. And yet an irrepressible defiance and comic energy bubbles under every scene.

It’s pitiless and pitch-perfect, an existential tour-de-force with shades of Camus’s The Outsider.

There’s something both reassuring and terrifying about it all, the family’s resilient warmth and togetherness providing comfort as the existential horror of what it all amounts to chills us simultaneously.

The movie hits its stride immediately with a taut, athletic urgency and it contains some superb images – particularly the eerie miracle of Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane, with Malcolm’s soldiers holding tree-branches over their heads in a restricted forest path and turning themselves into a spectacular river of boughs. This is a black-and-white world of violence and pain that scorches the retina.

This is a tremendously well-made film with a burning vitality: without question one of the most important Australian documentaries of the 21st century so far.

There’s a feminist undercurrent in You Won’t Be Alone, its observations of the patriarchy emerging in ways totally germane to the experience. An odd kind of eroticism also emerges: neither sensual nor entirely gross, and certainly not from the male gaze. Sometimes the film doesn’t even feel like it’s from a human gaze.

A gentle, exquisitely sad film.

This engrossing film is a time capsule of London itself – the faces not so very different from those you would see in the 40s or 50s.

The Innocents is a nightmare unfolding in cold, clear daylight.

Youth is a great theme of Linklater’s, but presented without any great directional moralising or emotional narrative. Being young just is. This is a film of enormous charm.

I enjoyed this more than either of the two earlier filmed versions, with Gene Wilder in 1971 and Johnny Depp in 2005. It supplies the chocolate-endorphins.

The Fabelmans left me with a floating feeling of happiness.

It’s a glorious celebratory montage of archive material, live performance footage, Bowie’s own experimental video art and paintings, movie and stage work and interviews with various normcore TV personalities with whom Bowie is unfailingly polite, open and charming.

With remarkable confidence, [Wells] just lets her movie unspool naturally, like a haunting and deceptively simple short story. The details accumulate; the images reverberate; the unshowy gentleness of the central relationship inexorably deepens in importance.

Baumbach has landed a sizeable white whale in his tremendously elegant and assured adaptation.

No one but Blanchett could have delivered the imperious hauteur necessary for portraying a great musician heading for a crackup or a creative epiphany. No one but Blanchett has the right way of wearing a two-piece black suit with an open-necked white shirt, the way of shaking her hair loose at moments of abandon, the way of letting her face become a Tutankhamun mask of contempt.

Ozu shows how fragile and yet burdensome the institution of the family is.

This film has mystery and passion, it climbs mountainous heights and rewards you with the opposite of vertigo: a sort of exaltation.

This is a genuinely bizarre, startling, freewheelingly lo-fi and funny indie picture with the refreshing bad-taste impact of Todd Solondz or Robert Crumb.

There is such superb compositional sense in the still life tableau shots and the almost archaeological sense of time, creating something deeply mysterious and unbearably sad.

In the pantheon of invented languages, there have been many of studied, intricate beauty: Elvish, Klingon, Na’vi. Nude Tuesday’s language is not one of them. It is lewd and crude, landing somewhere between a bad ABBA impression and backpackers at Oktoberfest. It’s as though an alien learnt Swedish entirely through Ikea’s most misjudged product names – and it is utterly delightful.

The film itself is terrifically accomplished and horribly gripping, with golden-age movie pastiche and dashes of Psycho and The Wizard of Oz.

Bones And All is an extravagant and outrageous movie: scary, nasty and startling in its warped romantic idealism.

Hollywood here looks diabolically seductive.

An absorbing and nourishing documentary.

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

The severity and poise of this calmly paced movie, its emotional reserve and moral seriousness – and the elusive, implied confessional dimension concerning Diop herself – make it an extraordinary experience.

It takes its audience on a dizzying swirl, like a waltz, or a champagne-induced headspin.

The Stranger avoids both neat explanations and contrived ambiguity, when narrative pieces are shuffling around to confuse audiences.

This beautiful and compassionate film from first-time feature director Colm Bairéad, based on the novella Foster by Claire Keegan, is a child’s-eye look at our fallen world; already it feels to me like a classic.

The silence of Jeanne Dielman is the film’s weather and its atmosphere. It is a silence of terrible loneliness, and a silence in which a storm is gathering.

The combustion engine gave humanity the new experience of speed; now the movie camera gave us a dizzying new speed of perception and creation.

FW Murnau's classic 1927 silent is one of the first movies with a really substantial feature-length narrative: an exuberant pioneer picture conceived on a big canvas, blazing an inspirational trail for just about everything Hollywood has done since. [06 Feb 2004, p.15]

It is not a simple film to summarise or describe as a comedy, satire or drama. Renoir was too generous to deal with such absolutes, and that's one of the reasons the film endures: nobody is good or bad, they just make good or bad decisions – hence the title.

The film is an entertaining comedy that also happens to be a stunning evocation of the fear and yearning that come with standing on the precipice of adulthood.

A pioneering glory of the new wave.

This searing film bears a terrible witness to this great crime.

This heart-meltingly romantic and sad movie from Korean-Canadian dramatist and filmmaker Celine Song left me wrung out and empty and weirdly euphoric, as if I’d lived through an 18-month affair in the course of an hour and three-quarters.

The last silent film by Danish master Carl Theodor Dreyer, it largely eschewed traditional master shots for a dazzling range of expressive, character-probing close-ups: no historical biopic has ever felt quite so unnervingly intimate.

This, the film says, is what it really feels like to be on the receiving end of the law in a case like this: a calm, professional, technocratic but relentless display of overwhelming power.

It is all entertainingly absurd and yet the pure conviction and deadpan focus that Fassbender and Fincher bring to this ballet of anonymous professionalism makes it very enjoyable. And there are moments when the veneer of realism is disquieting.

Phoenix is the key to it all: a performance as robust as the glass of burgundy he knocks back: preening, brooding, seething and triumphing.

This extraordinarily mundane film – a combination of words I’m fairly certain I’ve never used before – is a tremendous achievement and, in a subtle way, an amazing work of art.

The tunes are gold, and as Jane approaches a local creek, resplendent in her gorgeous yellow gown, we get one of the most famous visual gags in the history of the musical.

Everything in it – every frame, every image, every joke, every performance – gets a gasp of excitement.

In its scale and seriousness, Occupied City allows its emotional implication to amass over its running time. The effect is mysterious and moving.

This is a deadpan comedy which strides off down its own confident, eccentric path, and actually the whole heist trope is subverted from the outset by the purely un-tense way the robbery is shown.

The panoramic intelligence of this film is a wonder.

Bellocchio shows us a brutal convulsion of tyranny, power and bigotry with echoes of the Dreyfus affair in France, and later, horrific events.

La Chimera is a film that utterly occupies its own fictional space; it expresses its eccentric romance in its own fluent movie dialect. I was utterly captivated by this sad, lovelorn adventure.

The deepest appeal of this 74-minute study in insolence is that Cagney is cock of the walk.

The Beast may not add up to a cogent or thoroughgoing critique of all the ideas it invokes, but it’s such a luxurious cinematic experience; it’s created with such elan and attack, and the musical score amplifies its throb of fear.

This film opens up the storytelling throttle with a throaty growl, delivering the doomy romance of an old-fashioned western and the thrills of a mob drama.

The film is an enormously satisfying and affecting experience.

This film is a gruelling experience and Dirk Bogarde’s coup de grâce is the most horrible effect of all.

For a film as over-the-top as this, it might be counterintuitive to talk about subtlety, but Stewart is genuinely that; her line readings are coolly calibrated, quizzical, restrained, sometimes infinitesimally double-taking at the bizarre or outrageous things happening in front of her.

I Saw the TV Glow is claustrophobic, unwholesome and brilliant.

This is a film with thrilling directness and storytelling force, a movie that fills its widescreen and three-and-a half-hour running time with absolute certainty and ease, as well as glorious amplitude, clarity and even simplicity – and yet also with something darkly mysterious and uncanny to be divined in its handsome shape.

Both Culkin and Eisenberg are excellent and this is such a pleasure.

This works well just as simple drama, directed and performed immaculately, and as a glorious promise of films to come from Lin.

A deeply humane and emotionally literate piece of work.

You’ll Never Find Me builds a profoundly creepy and spiralling momentum before everything comes together in a shockingly brilliant final act with twists that nobody will see coming – or be able to forget.

This is stylish, energised new wave film-making.

No Other Land, for its many images of despair, still offers a stirring vision for what could be – Israelis and Palestinians working together in the name of justice, collaborating toward a world where both are free.

Copa 71 is a revolutionary political parable that goes beyond football.