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

You, the Living is a very funny film - though in the darkest possible way. It is a silent comedy, but with words.

For my money, Bigelow says more about the agony and tragedy of war than all those earnest, well-meaning movies that sound as if they've been co-scripted by Josh and Toby from The West Wing.

With much buzzing, beeping and whirring, the Terminator franchise comes to an absolute creative standstill, or even goes clankingly into reverse, with this fantastically dull fourth episode.

This new Star Trek is fast-moving, funny, exciting warp-speed entertainment and, heaven help me, even quite moving - the kind of film that shows that, like it or not, commercial cinema can still deliver a sledgehammer punch.

The furrowed-brow seriousness of X-Men is its least attractive quality, but that is the mood that dominates in this film. It's hard to see how anyone other than hardcore fans will find much to entertain them.

It’s a nifty little tale of jeopardy and the eternally fascinating idea of breaking away from your parents: part frightening, part liberating.

CGI fantasy adventures in the post-Potter, young-adult, old-child mode are not quite my taste, but this one is likably boisterous, and Iain Softley directs with flair.

Quantum of Solace isn't as good as Casino Royale: the smart elegance of Craig's Bond debut has been toned down in favour of conventional action. But the man himself powers this movie; he carries the film: it's an indefinably difficult task for an actor. Craig measures up.

Seriously bloody horrible in every particular, and uncompromisingly bleak to the very end, this looks to me like the best British horror film in years: nasty, scary and tight as a drum.

De Niro is the most fluent and relaxed I've seen him for many years, but this is still very low-octane stuff, and the film lamely and unsatirically ends up at the Cannes film festival.

This week we learned that 99% of Sun readers want a return to capital punishment. I learned that 100% of me wants it for 100% of people involved in this romcom.

Frustratingly, the film tells us little about the crime itself and the denouement is a little unconvincing. The taste of sweat and fear is, however, real enough.

As a performer, Biller is fearless in her pursuit of perfectly recreated cheesecake, but is a twitchy and not especially charismatic presence. Where her film lets itself down, though, is it's simply not funny.

This is a dark, uncompromising film, thrillingly original and distinctive, with a visionary passion. It is a movie against which all directors, and all moviegoers, will want to measure themselves.

One could class The Walker as a thriller, in that it features a murder, a political scandal and a fraught chase that ends with a car crash. But these elements all seem a little rote and rudimentary. Instead, the film's real focus is on the character of Page and his perilous relationship with the world he inhabits.

Midway through, the plot blows a gasket and the camerawork turns altogether crazed, joggling us about in the semi-darkness while the soundtrack rings to distorted screams. Expect pitch and yaw and lots of gore.

The Coens are back with a vengeance, showing their various imitators and detractors what great American filmmaking looks like, and they have supplied a corrective adjustment to the excesses of goofy-quirky comedy that damaged their recent work. The result is a dark, violent, and deeply disquieting drama, leavened with brilliant noirish wisecracks, and boasting three leading male performances with all the spectacular virility of Texan steers.

It has to be said that there is a level of cheerfully self-aware ridiculousness, which means that 300 is not entirely without entertainment value.

The characters are entirely credible and likable, the simply drawn figures highly effective against the lush background artwork. Time travel has rarely seemed so joyous.

Though this is familiar Lynch stuff, it is never dull, and I was often buttock-clenchingly afraid of what was going to happen next and squeaking with anxiety.

It is all ridiculously enjoyable, because the smirking and the quips and the gadgets have been cut back - and the emotion and wholesome sado-masochism have been pumped up.

The film is a sharp reminder that the Queen has doggedly survived, because she has never been required to expend mental energy and political capital in shows of sincerity.

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.

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

Paul Greengrass and his cinematographer Barry Ackroyd have created an intestinally powerful and magnificent memorial to the passengers of that doomed flight. It is the film of the year. I needed to lie down in a darkened room afterwards. So will you.

Part of the film's brilliance is its stunning and unforgiving transmission of the great truth that for most of us, death is not a single, flatline moment, but a gradual, insidious process of deterioration.

The cast certainly seems to be in on the whole joke, or at least must have felt all those hours in the makeup chair getting swaddled in latex was worth it in the end.

Caché is Michael Haneke's masterpiece: a compelling politico-psychological essay about the denial and guilt mixed into the foundations of Western prosperity, composed and filmed with remarkable technique. It is one of the great films of this decade.

Memories of Murder is a great satire of official laxity and arrogance, and its final scene is very chilling.

It's a movie that you feel you're not so much watching on screen as having beamed directly into your skull from some malign, alien planet of horror.

This is an entertaining venture with energy, fun and immature bad taste in abundance.

It is a beautifully acted, exquisitely considered chamber drama of subtlety and nuance: spellbindingly tender and utterly involving

This could be projected on to a wall at a club, but actually being made to sit down and watch it in a cinema is a weird experience.

The film’s old-fashioned charm and sweet-natured Yuletide spirit has held up, although it interestingly seems attractive now more for these softer-edged qualities than for the straight-ahead SNL-type Will Ferrell comedy that it seemed to promise back in 2003.

Sofia Coppola's second movie as a director is more than a breakthrough: it's an insouciant triumph. She conjures a terrifically funny, heartbreakingly sad and swooningly romantic movie from almost nowhere and just makes it look very easy - as well as very modern and very sexy. It is a funky little Brief Encounter for the new century.

What makes the film so compelling is the ferocious ingenuity with which Moodysson ratchets up the fear and astonishment that accompany Lilya's all too believable descent.

It’s a documentary that should be shown in all film schools.

Tamahori, director of Along Came a Spider, does a competent, if over-fussy job, but the pace flags in the showdown in Iceland.

Spirited Away is fast and funny; it's weird and wonderful. Mostly wonderful.

It remains among the strongest of the wave of gay-themed Chinese features from the late-20th and early-21st century (along with Fish and Elephant and East Palace, West Palace), elegantly interleaving its social and political commentary.

The political and the supernatural come together beautifully (and violently), and the unsentimental portrayal of childhood is refreshing, with terrific performances from the boy actors. It’s altogether a supremely satisfying tale.

It’s still a very entertaining and spectacular movie, with a rush of nostalgia to go alongside the exhilaration of fun.

Mulholland Drive is as brilliant and disquieting as anything Lynch has ever done. It is psychotically lucid, oppressively strange, but with a powerfully erotic and humanly intimate dimension that Lynch never quite achieved elsewhere. It is a fantasia of illusion and identity, a meditation on the mystery of casting in art as in life: the vital importance of finding the right role.

Werckmeister Harmonies may be Tarr’s masterpiece.

It’s fair to say Washington has never quite topped this performance. It’s an unparalleled treat to watch him messing with the bewildered Hoyt at their first meeting at a diner, and then to watch the two men striding out to the car, filmed from a low camera angle. It is all thrillingly ominous.

There's some great Pinteresque dialogue, and the murky gloom is illuminated with flashes of genius. [07 May 2004, p.15]

Chopper is a great film.

It is about grief and about the shock of grief and the stabbing fear which, in its terrifying way, gives you a clarified view of your own existence. A film to wonder at.

There are some good gags and routines here, but loads of them, particularly the one about what it was like being eight and getting hit by your mother, have been done with far more invention and wit by Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy.

The Idiots works as a situationist provocation about a situationist provocation, though claiming the sentimental high ground at the end. As ever, von Trier gets points for his sheer chutzpah.

Erin Brockovich is a study in Hollywood optimism, and Roberts sells it hard.

Brosnan brings an intelligence and wit, together with a lightness, to the role - his softly Celtic vowels pleasingly reminiscent of Sean - along with a plausible virility Roger Moore never quite managed. And Pierce wears some beautifully tailored suits as to the manor born.

Watched again now, I can respond more strongly to the heartfelt directness and empathy.

It really is very very long; watching it like going to an all-night movie show where the only film is Fight Club. Yet it’s tremendously directed and performed with brio.

Admittedly Guadagnino throws a little too much into the directorial kitchen sink, but what could have been tasteless and exploitative emerges instead as intelligent and dignified, held together by Swinton’s seriousness of purpose.

First-time director Pablo Trapero has crafted an impressive debut - one that emphasises the dignity of his subject without lapsing into agit-prop.

The action is wrapped up with a slightly ridiculous reveal, which doesn’t quite make sense on its own terms, but Perfect Blue has its own kind of cult pungency.

It is the very preposterousness of Eyes Wide Shut which is the key to the achievement it represents: it has a singular excessiveness - at once gamey, florid and enigmatically deadpan - which underpins this picture's rich, sensuous style.

Assayas uses the same fluent handheld style as Irma Vep, and there's a practised ease with which he draws fine, naturalistic performances from his ensemble. [20 Aug 1999, p.5]

The ending of Limbo is a disappointment, but this is a film which lingers in the mind long after the final credits.

For all its cheesiness, Notting Hill delivers a very great deal of pleasure.

A superbly realised picture which moves with the power and the gigantic, deliberative slowness of a wartime North Sea convoy. [14 May 1999, p.107]

Afterlife is an immensely suggestive picture about the role of memory, the function of cinema and the limits of our imagination.

The metaphorical properties of The Matrix are part of what makes it so seductive, along with the no-filler-all-killer action.

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.

The film’s final twist makes the story close with a satisfying click, though there is something a little smooth about it; for me it works against the story’s social-realist credentials and its evident ambitions for something more mysterious and spiritually resonant. Yet there is great pleasure to be had in those fervent, crowd-pleasing lead performances from Montenegro and de Oliveira.

Charming and intriguing tale of undeclared love, full of haunting set pieces that stayed in my mind for hours afterwards. [11 June 1999, p.15]

The tones are dark, but washed with a rich golden light. The costumes, make-up and domestic props are exquisite. But for all the period detail, there is a genuine spontaneity in the emotions. [21 May 1998, p.2]

Blade is an entertainingly macabre and excitingly staged action horror, with a propulsive energy and a prototype “bullet time” sequence one year before the Wachowskis made it famous in The Matrix.

Imamura tells his tale, taken from a short story by Akira Yoshimura called Glistening In The Dark, in a bold mixture of styles encompassing horror (the murder) and passages near to farce, while at other times this seems the creation of a classically trained film-maker working out for himself a quiet psychological drama. [11 Nov 1997, p.9]

Poirier directs with a clear eye, an unsentimental mind and a fine ear for table talk. The humour, and there is plenty of it, comes from within, coloured by a view of the human race that combines realism with affection. [08 May 1998, p.7]

A solid biopic, with fine performances – though in its sombre tone and attempt to cover too much of Wilde's life, it could be accused of overstating the vital importance of being earnest.

Mostly, Kitano is as expressionless as Buster Keaton, but now and then a smile breaks out on that weather-beaten face. He doesn't use much camera movement either, but the combination of understatement and outrageousness is unique, and oddly appealing.

It's another extraordinary film with a quality of stillness about it, but combined, as usual, with brief bursts of explosive violence and Kitano's lovely deadpan humour.

It’s a great performance from Bridges, and he seems weirdly young in this film, certainly compared to the brilliant craggy oldsters that later became his acting birthright. You can still see the boyish, vulnerable figure that he was in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show. One of a kind. [20th Anniversary]

There's a lot wrong with The Brave, with a pace that may be intended to evoke desert languor, but is often plain leaden. Yet The Brave is oddly haunting, if only for its eccentricity. [13 May 1997, p.2]

It’s a wonderfully spritzy dialogue-driven work, full of oomph and chutzpah.

Crash is still creepy, still menacing, still hypnotic, and it is still dedicated, in its freaky way, to the ideal of eroticism, to just drifting from erotic scene to erotic scene without much need for story. But Crash is no longer so contemporary. [4K re-release]

It is a sombre and painful drama, enacted with reserve. There are no closeups, and it is fully one hour into the running time before we get even a medium shot of the female lead’s face. Even then there are shadows.

Never was a film so candidly designed to sell products, but it has an archival interest.

It is shot with fluency and energy; the dreamy chapter-heading inserts are striking, the final image is powerful, and of course Watson herself is a triumph.

DiCaprio’s performance is excellent; his Romeo is transformed and astonished by the real thing; he has play-acted at love until now, and he hasn’t realised how vulnerable it would make him. Danes looks more mature than he does (though in fact six years younger) and she is such a smart, stylish player, even at this age. The Luhrmann R+J is a tonic and a delight.

Trainspotting is supercharged with sulphurous humour and brutal recklessness.

A really absorbing and powerfully acted drama, guided with a distinctive kind of Zen wisdom by Sayles.

It is a dizzying, headspinning film, replete with violence, alienation and tech-porn. I confess I find it too opaque to make the kind of investment that would qualify me as a real fan. But it should be seen.

McDormand is perfect in the role.

The “fascist” staging could have been hackneyed, but Loncraine carries it off superbly as the showcase for action-thriller noir.

As for Williams himself, his wild-man routine is only in evidence in his opening scenes; otherwise he dials it down, perhaps sensing that the way to upstage the loony creatures is to be relatively rational. There is something touchingly innocent in his performance.

It is strident, yes, and naive, too perhaps; but lyrical and passionate and visually dazzling.

From the current vantage point, this film, not yet entirely dominated by digital effects, looks like a 1960s-vintage second world war film.

Maybe it’s the last great mainstream exploitation picture, a film which owns and flaunts its crassness; a bi-curious catfight version of All About Eve or Pretty Woman.

Never was a title more misleading. This is sophisticated pleasure.

A somewhat double-edged Arthurian romance. There's a sharp side, with Sean Connery the noblest of kings, Julia Ormond an impressive Guinevere, and some genuinely epic imagery; on the blunt side, the tragedy is Camelot-via-Tinseltown: Richard Gere's Lancelot is far from convincing and the armour is just too shiny. [31 Dec 2005, p.49]