It’s an adventure which begins by being bizarre and hilarious but appears to run out of ideas at its mid-way point, and run out of interest in what had at first seemed to be its central comic image: humans turning into animals.

Forrest Gump is Hollywood film-making at its most corn-fed, sucrose-enriched and calorific; you’ll need a sweet tooth for it.

It’s another really bold and distinct statement from Jenkin.

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.

There’s no doubting the shiver of pure fear that runs through this movie from beginning to end.

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.

Ray's assured debut as director is a brilliant noir combination of love story and crime thriller. [24 Dec 2005, p.48]

In its simplicity and punch, this is a film that feels as if it could have been made decades ago, in the classic age of Planet of the Apes or The Omega Man.

Andres Veiel’s sombre documentary tells the gripping, incrementally nauseating story of Helene “Leni” Riefenstahl, the brilliant and pioneering German film-maker of the 20th century who isn’t getting her name on a Girls on Tops T-shirt any time soon.

It is 80 minutes of pure woodwork-musicianship-upcycling erotica for a very specialist but passionate market.

Gerwig's performance is full of depth and nuance; self-conscious without being mawkish, clever behind the kook.

Running at just 71 minutes, Socrates left me wondering if it was slightly underdeveloped as a feature project. But plenty of glossier and more finished films don’t have its beating compassionate heart.

It’s an impressively contrived film, almost a machine for winning awards, a monochrome reverie of midlife yearning.

Danish director Tobias Lindholm spins an exacting drama out of a crisis on this deft, verite-style account of Somali piracy in the Indian ocean. Full credit to A Hijacking for resisting the siren-call of Hollywood histrionics in favour of the nuts-and-bolts.

If you’re in the right headspace, the whole thing is quite entrancing. Still, it’s also an extremely rarefied sort of entertainment.

Itō is an amazing personality: an intelligent, courageous journalist who may have changed the course of Japanese history.

It is an absorbing, committed drama.

A valuable introduction to the movies and to the man.

What we have is a straightforward murder mystery, but it is told with gusto and humour.

Ponsoldt elicits remarkably strong performances from his two young leads, who display a depth of feeling that's breathtaking in its simplicity and honest. There's an inherent chemistry here that's both disarming and refreshing.

The humour in My Man Godfrey is madcap, but in the best way.

Democracy has never looked so vulnerable.

Graham uses darkness and a very sparse score/soundscape to create a truly disturbing work that relies not so much on gore as the uncanny in its most potent form: stillness, pools of darkness and just-visible figures.

Rams is as curiously captivating as the bleak landscape in which the two protagonists site themselves.

This story is not about consummation, but about reconciliation; it's a recognition that we want wrongs to be righted, that good will prevail, and that the faithless will be punished or reformed.

A startling piece of film-making, floating free of the conventional demands of period and narrative.

Mixing droll animation, stock footage and a restrained number of talking head interviews, the director Penny Lane’s biography has all the whimsy of a tall tale, until a late change in tone surprises with genuine emotion. Nuts! is really a kick.

Moment by moment, line by line and scene by scene, Challengers delivers sexiness and laughs, intrigue and resentment, and Guadagnino’s signature is there in the intensity, the closeups and the music stabs.

Cage is remarkably restrained (bar one unnecessary scream), delicately deconstructing what we’ve come to expect from him. His trademark tics are gone, his voice that much softer, his swagger replaced by an unsureness, an aggressive blare that’s faded into calm.

It’s a haunting little film that ends with a somewhat overwhelming poignancy.

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

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.

Sorkin’s heavily heightened sense of drama works best when the stakes are equally aligned but, despite the film constantly informing you of just how incredibly important everything all is, it’s disappointingly difficult to truly care about what’s taking place.

What results is an immensely detailed overview of Marley's life and times, from the hillside Jamaican shack where he grew up to the snowy Bavarian clinic where he spent his last weeks in a fruitless attempt to cure the cancer that killed him in 1981, aged 36.

What a unique talent Giamatti is; it’s a pleasure to see him play a movie lead, his first for a while, and his prominence in this really good film is a signal that the cinema could be moving back to a more approachable world of authentic drama and analogue talent.

A heartbreaking collection.

Ahmed’s performance clarifies the drama and delivers the meaning of Ruben’s final epiphany. He gives the film energy and point.

Ciro Guerra’s gorgeous picture just has that ripped-from-your-dreams sensibility, where surprising turns float alongside a story you feel like you’ve known your whole life. Embrace of the Serpent is the type of film we’re always searching for, yet seems so obvious once we’ve found it.

Working through one’s own strife as a form of autofiction can often lead to self-indulgence but Kaphar has crafted something that deserves to exist outside of his inner circle, an emotionally wrenching drama set to resonate with those who have also had to confront the complicated equation of radical forgiveness.

The proceedings are claustrophobic, intense and alienated – often brilliant, sometimes slightly redundant.

Hitchcock's 1926 silent melodrama offers a gripping prehistory not just of his own work, but the Hollywood thriller itself.

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.

It’s a shaggy, wistful film that acts as a heartfelt tribute to both a city and a friendship and when the cutesy quirk that surrounds it is dialled down, we’re able to appreciate the underpinning earnestness.

There is so much detail in the breakneck race from image to image that Isle of Dogs will reward multiple viewings as much as any Anderson film, visually if not narratively.

There is something exacting and audacious in it, something superbly controlled in its composition and technique. The clarity of her film-making diction is a marvel – even, or perhaps especially, when the nature of the story itself remains murkily unrevealed.

Like Reichardt’s directorial hand, the performances are understated across the board, but deeply felt.

Despite its glorification of thrill-seeking, the message that runs through Mountain like rivulets over rocks is that our highest peaks are places to be revered and respected.

Its line of attack is remorseless, an ongoing rain of hammer blows, and yet it never feels especially dour or heavy. If anything, Chupov and Merkulova’s handling of the material is almost playful, choosing to frame Stalin’s Russia as nightmarish deadpan comedy.

There is something nightmarish and hallucinatory about this business and also in the terrible retribution exacted by Oreste, a grotesque mob chieftain. The film has a throb of something disturbing and transgressive.

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 Superman alludes explicitly to its origins in the Depression-era comics, and Clark has a quaint 30s habit of using the phrase “Swell!” from his boyhood. Maybe now this movie looks quaint in the same way. But there’s still a surge of adventure and fun.

This tender and sweet animation from film-makers Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han is an involving, poignant study of early childhood; how fragile it is, and how strong you feel yourself to be to have outlived or surpassed it.

[A] riveting and valuable documentary.

It is every bit as beautifully made and intelligently acted as you might expect, with some wonderful visual imagery at the very beginning. Yet I was disappointed.

Grosev is all about data: by getting hold of passenger manifests, travel details or call records – and everything digital leaves a trace – he can put together an objective picture, even retrieving the culprits’ passport photos. It is quite staggering.

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

Blow-up is still an absolute must, such is the degree of visual and intellectual excitement of the film.

An outstanding piece of work.

The movie is a distillation of the assassin’s life of watchfulness, survival and fear. At other times, it has a dreamlike quality: a floating hallucination. The Assassin baffles, but more often it quietly captivates and astonishes.

It’s an engaging portrait - film-making which works from the ground up.

It’s a strange film in many ways, affectless and directionless, coolly refusing the usual dramatic beats and climactic moments, and as unreflective as MOR rock.

It’s an immersive and exotic experience. Howard is a revelation.

This a quasi-war movie set in peacetime; these men are fighting to the death, but not for nation or principle or ideology — or at least, not a conscious ideology: they are caught in larger economic currents.

Tragedy and slapstick run through the film and it is very funny.

A Hero is an engaging and even intriguing film, but I wonder if its realist mannerisms are concealing a slightly unfocused story.

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 Killer is quite a spectacle and, incidentally, much more pessimistic than Sirk.

Neruda takes a lot of wild chances and, like the poet whose life acts as inspiration, it’s unwilling to play by the rules. Dizzily constructed and full of more life and meaning than most “real” biopics, it’s a risk worth taking.

It is extremely pleasurable to watch, and shows every sign of having been extremely pleasurable to make.

Peck’s film, in which LaKeith Stanfield narrates a kind of heightened, fictionalised first-person account from Cole’s own writings and diaries, is devastatingly sad. It is the sadness of an artist who becomes estranged, not merely from his homeland, but from his art and his livelihood.

With a blend of archive footage and re-enactments the film-makers skilfully recreate the urgency, passion and energy of their protest.

With his two early features, "Distant" (2002) and "Climates" (2006), Ceylan has showed himself a superb film-maker. This is his greatest so far.

McEnroe makes a fascinating focal point.

It's a comical sentimental reworking of the journey of the Magi, with John Wayne, Pedro Armendariz and Harry Carey Jr as the soft-hearted outlaws. [01 Mar 2008, p.53]

Film-makers Adéla Komrzý and Tomáš Bojar are interested not only in the individual subjects, but also the hidden machinations of cultural institutions.

The tired old trope "erotic thriller" does no justice to how confrontationally and explicitly sexual this movie is — nor how thrilling, nor how menacing and complex.

François Ozon’s lustrously beautiful and superbly realised monochrome version of Albert Camus’s novella L’Etranger has an almost supernaturally detailed sense of period and place. It amounts to a passionate act of ancestor worship in honour of a renowned French artwork, though by making changes that bring a contemporary perspective on the book’s themes of empire and race – changes that include a critique of the original text – this adaptation perhaps loses some of its source material’s brutal, heartless power and arguably some of the title’s meaning.