The film is grimly depressing in places. I covered my eyes during Google Earth time-lapse sequences showing the pace of deforestation in the Amazon; the violence of it is too much. And yet, there is Bitaté: still a teenager, he’s already a skilled communicator.

It’s too soon to know for sure, but this may end up being ranked as one of the best nonfiction films of the year.

It’s a kind of Martian’s-eye-view documentary about something that doesn’t actually exist; it is ice-cold and detached, almost without dialogue in the conventionally dramatic sense, other than the subdued exchanges which we, as audience, overhear rather than listen to. It accumulates its own kind of desolate force.

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

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]

Viet and Nam is a film that first feels opaque and elusive, and yet it becomes drenched with emotion.

It is a really powerful film and Brady’s final dialogue scene exerts a lethal grip.

This is a film with a hopeful message about people, and their ability and willingness to learn – and to get along.

It’s an uncompromising midnight movie.

The sheer laborious silliness of Avatar feels like harder work the second time around and its essential problem is more prominent. [2022 re-release]

For all of Mills’s cinematic tricks, he’s emerging as a great realist film-maker.

Haugerud has something of Eric Rohmer, and perhaps a little more of Hong Sang-soo; a readiness to simply talk, and talk and talk some more. It’s surprisingly cinematic.

Unsurprisingly, it all builds to a bleak conclusion, and the film as a whole is a powerful statement that lingers in the mind long after the final credits roll.

There is great sadness in this film – and great anger.

The final scene, a ravishing in a room, with a view, as the bells of Florence chime out, would leave only a stone unmoved.

An unexpected joy.

Gloria is a sad, painful romantic story.

This is a fine film, which cements Barnard's growing reputation as one of Britain's best film-makers.

What’s most striking about Ixcanul is the elegant way in which it is shot. Scenes are given space, and the audience is allowed ample time to soak up the atmosphere.

What an intriguing and unexpectedly watchable film. Bait is an experiment – and a successful one.

It’s a complex drama, a realist film teetering on the edge of the uncanny, whose very title points the way towards the idea that there are shades of grey in every judgment we make.

There is a trio of excellent performances from Arabuli, Kankava and Dumanli: very good actors, very well directed, defining three personalities very different from each other in terms of age and attitude but bringing them together in a way that doesn’t feel forced.

This is, against great odds and surely some western expectations, a beguiling hangout film – an invitation to the dinner party, a fascinating window into a group of underground artists who carry on despite the risks, a representation of creativity under surveillance. A snapshot of everyday resistance, the fight for a freedom from the bottom up. And most effectively, a moving portrait of one nutritive, symbiotic friendship in transition.

One of the grittiest, least romantic movies ever shot in New York, it's incisively edited by Dede Allen, whose work ranges from The Hustler to Reds.

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 may seem grainy and fusty compared to the all-action tongue-in-cheek spectaculars that came later, but it's the Bond closest to my heart.

Alternately rueful and whimsical documentary.

It’s an engaging and spirited piece of work.

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

It is an intriguing story, although I have to admit to feeling a bit bemused at the arbitrary way the Beast story is inserted into the already tense and interesting situation of Suzu/Belle and her relationships with people at home and school.

What an intelligent, emotionally grown-up film. More of this please.

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.

It’s an entertaining spectacle but the brilliant tonal balance in something like Jordan Peele’s satire Get Out leaves this looking a little exposed. Yet it responds fiercely, contemptuously to the crassness at the heart of the Trump regime and gleefully pays it back in its own coin.

It’s exciting, ingenious, funny and an unmissable Christmas treat.

The film has sympathy and charm, although I can’t exactly share all the praise that’s been lavished on it. It unfolds in an indulgent, dreamy summer haze, halfway between rapture and torpor; a murmuring indie-stonewash of good taste.

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

It sure as hell got under mine. Jonathan Glazer's sci-fi horror is loosely adapted, or atmospherically distilled, by Walter Campbell from the 2000 novel by Michel Faber. The result is visually stunning and deeply disturbing: very freaky, very scary, and very erotic. It also comes with a dog whistle of absurdist humour that I suspect has been inaudible for some American reviewers on the international festival circuit so far.

Red Army is executive produced by Werner Herzog and Polsky borrows some his impishness. He makes sport of the old guard's rebuffs, glories in the occasion when Fetisov gives him the finger. This, he seems to say, is the attitude that made these guys.

The plot is hardly the point here - the animation is delightful, colourful and detailed and the flying sequences in seaplanes as old-fashioned as this style of animation are exhilarating.

Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep give excellent performances, though not exactly a stretch in either case, and both with a tiny, tasty touch of cheese. Their characterisations are luxuriously upholstered, effortlessly fluent, busting with relatability.

The film is, I think, just as Cunningham would have wanted it: cerebral, highbrow and mildly frustrating, with nothing so conventional as talking heads or context.

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.

The Sting is the most purely enjoyable film in Oscar history – and that, I think, puts it in the most valuable American film-making tradition of all.

This melodrama the director weakens by mistaking postponement of event for suspense. But the film has compensating strength in the star, who photographs more beautifully than before and, though she is acted off the screen by Anna May Wong, shows herself unique in Hollywood by being majestically beautiful.

Pennebaker's film, running just under an hour, is revelatory in getting under the skin of the main players. And the director's opening revelation will exasperate musical-theatre nerds as we hear that this was the pilot for a whole series on original cast recordings that never got made. [15 Sep 2021]

Vandross’s specific power isn’t always fully articulated here – but his musical brilliance certainly is.

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.

[A] richly enjoyable documentary.

While the subject matter is enraging, the film is not without warmth and occasional levity.

It’s a goofy, drunken scrap of escapism and while the romantic comedy is not fully back, despite think pieces assuring us that it is, Palm Springs energetically reminds us, yet again, that it’s never really going away.

There are fierce and overwhelmingly authentic performances here from first-timers in Julien Colonna’s terrific mob drama.

When Abbot and Nixon start their sparring, Mond’s film takes on a magnificently physical and tactile quality.

Mitchell brings off some sensational setpieces of fear and suspense. I can’t remember when I was last so royally freaked out in the cinema.

An absorbing and nourishing documentary.

It is a film of immense humanity and charm: the very best kind of date movie.

For all of its 113 minutes, Charade presents us with a temporary entry into that brighter place, into the possibility of adventure, the vicarious possession of beauty. Acted by two Europeans in a mythic, dangerous, beguiling Paris, it remains a quintessential Hollywood film.

The issues are fundamentally the same: the enforced invisibility of a class of economic migrants who are now so numerous that many game the system, doubling their exploitation. Sangaré’s exemplary, unfeigned performance helps them speak.

Holy Cow is sentimental in the best of ways, with its warmth and hope in human nature.

Mifune's slob is deceptive, and the film builds slowly to a shattering ending.

Full credit to Hardy and Knight for making a film such as Locke. Low-budget film-makers could learn a lot from their method. And yet – having stripped away all but the bare necessities, having reduced the components to a car and a man – they make a classic error of overcompensation.

It’s a film you have to feel your way into, like a ruined church or a haunted house.

Roman Polanski's sensational 1962 debut...is an example of how a superlative director makes a film from the simplest materials.

If narrative clarity is obviously not top of Uzeyman and Williams’ priorities, the film always looks amazing: fluorescent dream sequences, glitchy cyberpunk overlays, wild character designs (from costume designer Cedric Mizero and makeup artist Tanya Melendez).

The script may feature numerous wobbly passages in which everyone eerily states precisely what they are thinking (an unfortunate tradition that runs throughout the series) but if anyone can sell it, it’s Stallone and Jordan.

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

The strangeness of this story will live in your bloodstream like a virus.

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.

LA film-maker Anna Biller achieves an ecstasy of artificiality in this amazing retro fantasy horror, delivered with absolute conviction.

The sheer sustained silliness of this spoof silent comedy is what finally compels admiration. It’s like chancing across a bunch of eerily gifted kids by the roadside putting on a bizarrely accomplished, very extended series of magic tricks and circus acrobatic stunts.

Oprah Winfrey, Angela Davis and Morrison herself explore her work and legacy in this fascinating documentary completed shortly before the Nobel-winning author’s death.

At its best, the Eras Tour film manages to capture the why of that bond, the shock of her vast stardom against the startling emotional clarity of her songwriting. The Eras tour, she says, has been the most special experience of her life; in this deft rendering, it’s easy to feel the intoxication of being in her temple.

Perhaps it is inevitably going to be of limited interest, and as intelligent as the two performances are, neither Whishaw nor Hall is tested very much. But it is an intriguing experiment in recovering the moment-by-moment reality of a lost time and place.

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.

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.

Trapero creates a cinematic eco-system that moment by moment, scene by subtle scene, completely enfolds you.

Pro-choice activists won with a campaign that declined to go negative, and, indeed, may have benefited from the attraction of its exuberant “Yes” motif. Now they face decades of vigilance to defend their gains.

This is a superbly controlled and expressed film and its high seriousness about the nature and purpose of art really is invigorating.

Hit Man comes close to fantasy and approaches screwball but keeps the realism. A hit is what it deserves to be.

The Kupferer-Mallens are Chicago theater stalwarts, having founded their own company, and the affection everyone involved with this project feels for the stage – as an art, therapy and practice – is so evident as to be contagious, even in the film’s most theater-y meta moments.

In the end I felt that the film fully achieves neither the ostensible comedy of the opening, nor the supposed sadness of its denouement.

A shiver of disquiet runs right through it.

Rachel Weisz performs with enormous intelligence and restraint.

What The End of the Tour tries to sell, and sells well, is that Wallace’s big heart was just not made for these times.

Labyrinth of Cinema is indeed labyrinthine, a maze of jokes, film references, quirky back projections, bargain-basement effects and melodramatic confrontations. But at its centre is something deeply serious: a belief that, as the sole country to have experienced a nuclear strike, Japan has a terrifying exceptionalism. This awful truth is marked by a tonal cymbal-clash, both acidly comic and desperately sad.

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.

Ciorniciuc and his co-writer Lina Vdovîi, in allowing events to unfold slowly in front of the camera, have created a beautifully measured portrait of an amazingly resonant topic.

At all events, it pays due homage to Edwards as a courageous pioneer.

It’s an engrossing, forthright adventure.

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.

It is elegant, eccentric and needs some time to be indulged. ... And yes, it is six parts beguiling to one part exasperating. But ... it leaves you with a gentle, bemused smile on your face.

There's a too-cute-to-be-true ending to this US indie movie by the much-acclaimed young director Destin Cretton; I couldn't buy it, and found myself wondering if I had kept the receipt for the rest of the film too.

How refreshing to watch a film in which the sexuality and desire of women in their 70s is portrayed not as a novelty but simply part and parcel of their lives; and since this French movie is a lesbian drama, there’s two of them – even better.

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 film that tries your patience a fair bit, and yet there is something attractive in its kind of innocence.

A cast-iron, self-evident hit, but also just a tiny bit boring, perhaps?

Our ­Beloved Month Of August is a real one-off: ­eccentric and singular and ­cerebral: an arthouse event, yes, but also witty and emotionally engaged. I found myself thinking about it for days afterwards – and smiling a very great deal. Try it.

A brilliant idea, brilliantly executed; hilarious, surreal and, yes, in its weird way, genuinely exciting.

Joyland is such a delicate, intelligent and emotionally rich film. What a debut from Sadiq.