Coppola’s epic storytelling sweep is magnificent: there is an electric charge in simply the shift from New York to California to Sicily and back to New York.

Sublime moments, of which the most extraordinary must still be Everett Sloane, playing Kane's former business manager Mr Bernstein, remembering the girl in the white dress on the Jersey ferry: "I only saw her for one second and she didn't see me at all – but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl." I'll bet a week hasn't gone by when I haven't thought about that line and pictured the girl so clearly that she has become a false memory of the movie itself.

What's extraordinary, for a film that works on these different levels, is that it also manages to be a riveting thriller.

Seventy years on, this great romantic noir is still grippingly powerful: a movie made at a time when it was far from clear the Nazis were going to lose.

It is a film of much humanity and very far from smart European pap. But the external brilliance of its making does at times subvert its inner workings, as if its manufacture and its meaning were not quite in perfect harmony.

What an astonishing achievement; what a beautiful movie.

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

Vertigo also combines in an almost unique balance Hitchcock’s brash flair for psychological shocks with his elegant genius for dapper stylishness. Like Psycho, it ends in an “o”, or maybe “oh!” The ancient house adjoining the Bates motel in Psycho certainly has an unearthly similarity to San Francisco’s creepy old McKitterick Hotel in Vertigo. [Rerelease]

Playtime offers us an even clearer view of the contrast between Tati’s broad physical comedy as an actor and his superbly cerebral detachment as a director.

Brilliant.

It’s a thrilling, deeply necessary work that opens up a much-needed and rarely approached on-screen conversation about the nature of gay masculinity.

A powerful humane statement and a towering work of art.

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 glorious vigour and strength of this film is presented with such theatrical relish and flair: its energy flashes out of the screen like a sword.

A pleasure.

Reinvented by Wilder and co-screenwriter co-writer IAL Diamond, Some Like It Hot is effortlessly fluent, joyous and buoyant: a high-concept comedy that stays as high as a kite, while other comedies flag. "Nobody's perfect" is the last line. Wilder, Lemmon, Curtis and Monroe come pretty close.

[A] sublime classic.

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

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.

If you're not interested in all the backstage tittle-tattle, just settle back and enjoy a film whose script is studded with barbed and quotable bons mots, the finest ever part by suave cad George Sanders and a memorable cameo by Marilyn Monroe as an aspiring starlet (practically everyone was playing variations of themselves).

Every frame of this film is brilliantly contrived, particularly the underwater nightmare at the end. A gripping, complex chiller.

Some elements seem grotesquely dated, but this restoration of the 1939 classic finds the film as powerful and mad as ever.

A noir classic.

I can never watch it without a bowel-liquefaction of fear.

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

It was Anthony Perkins's maternally obsessed misfit in Psycho who most perfectly distilled the modern fear of the monster who looks just like you.

A luxuriously watchable and satirical suspense drama.

Eisenstein's film still has a hypnotic urgency.

Brando tends to upstage and upend the whole picture in his way.

The strange, dreamlike tension of the film escalates with each new confrontation, each new tailing, each new beating, with Gutman and Cairo shot from a queasy low angle, and the nightmare culminates in a gripping series of closeups on each strained face.

At times it feels novelistic, a densely realised, intimate drama giving us access to domestic lives developing in what feels like real time. In its engagingly episodic way, it is also at times like a soap opera or telenovela. And at other times it feels resoundingly like an epic.

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

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

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 is a sharp, elegant, unsentimental picture in which Stewart plays a character who is often gloomy and downright unsympathetic.

There is simply no other film which demonstrates so perfectly what it feels like to be young and in love.

Stark, visceral and unrelenting, 12 Years a Slave is not just a great film but a necessary one.

Manchester-by-the-Sea is a study of family dysfunction and the worse loss imaginable, but one held back by the fact it’s all filtered through Affleck’s withdrawn lead.

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

This is horror rooted not in misty Carpathian castles, but in recognisable modern life, with the satanists depicted not as outlandish fiends but the sort of everyday folk you might encounter on any urban street.

Utterly beguiling, funny and romantic.

The writing is utterly involving; with lines like tiny, imagist poems. A rich and delicious movie treat.

The movie's blazing energy is still astounding; the vérité street-scenes are terrific and Scorsese's pioneering use of popular music is genuinely thrilling.

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

The film thrums with an ongoing existential dread. And yet, tellingly, Cuaron's film contains a top-note of compassion that strays at times towards outright sentimentality.

Fantasia is mashed potatoes and gravy but there's more than a hint of beluga there too.

McQueen’s compositional sense is a marvel; the movie’s period and location is evoked with masterly skill, and the romance is wonderful. What a cure for lockdown depression.

Bride is a wild ride, even today. It flits between the classical and the gutter, the camp and the serious in a manner that's hard to pin down.

Sutherland and Christie are an overwhelmingly convincing married couple.

One Battle After Another is at once serious and unserious, exciting and baffling, a tonal fusion sending that crazy fizz across the VistaVision screen – an acquired taste, yes, but addictive. The title itself hints at an unending culture war presented as a crazily extreme action movie with superbly managed car chases and a final, dreamlike and hypnotic succession of three cars through the undulating hills. And is the central paternity crisis triangle an image for an ownership dispute around the American melting-pot dream?

The greatest ever making-of documentary.

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

It is a striking work of storytelling. By assembling the scattered images and historical clips suggested by Baldwin’s writing, I Am Not Your Negro is a cinematic séance, and one of the best movies about the civil rights era ever made.

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.

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

The icy message may be that love is not a consolation as we face death. Rather the reverse. Love will give your death meaning, but make it no less unbearable.

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.

Otto Preminger's fiercely austere courtroom drama was strong stuff in 1959.

In 1994, all the talk was of former video store clerk Tarantino's indifference to traditional culture. That patronised his sophisticated cinephilia, and in fact, twenty years on, the writerly influences of Edward Bunker, Elmore Leonard, and Jim Thompson seem very prominent. Don DeLillo began the '90s by warning that the U.S. is the only country in the world with funny violence. Maybe Pulp Fiction was the kind of thing he had in mind. Unmissable.

Telling a nearly three-hour story with an ending everyone knows, Bigelow and Boal have managed to craft one of the most intense and intellectually challenging films of the year.

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.

I love Double Indemnity because it's about a couple who are cheap and greedy, but achieve a kind of tragic heroism; because it has one of the great father-son relationships (although they aren't actually father and son); because it's a thoroughly cynical thriller redeemed by just a fading touch of romance. And it also has a trio of superb performances.

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 a brilliant film, but there is nothing sweet about it.

With great verbal athleticism, the film earns its reputation as one of the fastest-talking comedies ever made.

It is a creamily sensuous, richly observed piece of work, handsomely detailed and furnished: the clothes, the hair, the automobiles, the train carriages, the record players, the lipstick and the cigarettes are all superbly presented. The combination of all this is intoxicating in itself.

Before Midnight is intimate and intelligent, and also undemanding in the best possible way,

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

This is a powerful, superbly crafted film with a story to tell, avoiding war porn in favour of something desolate and apocalyptic, a beachscape of shame, littered with soldiers zombified with defeat, a grimly male world with hardly any women on screen. It is Nolan’s best film so far.

It could be the finest hour for both of its lead actors.

What a mad and brilliant film it is: 1,000-degree proof Seventies cinema. [30th Anniversary Release]

The panoramic intelligence of this film is a wonder.

It is a brilliant, subversive account of class relations and the changing times.

What a glorious film this is, richly and immediately enjoyable, hitting its satisfying stride straight away. It's funny and visually immaculate; it combines domestic intimacy with an epic sweep and has a lyrical, mysterious quality that perfumes every scene, whether tragic or comic.

There’s an almost meta-maturity, as if Scorsese is also looking back on his own career, the film leaving us with a haunting reminder not to glamorise violent men and the wreckage they leave behind.

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.

It’s both a sublime hang-out of a film and a celebration of individual achievements, a fascinating map of a long-ago scene and a referendum on legacy.

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

The pleasure of the music is overpowering.

It hasn’t anything as genuinely emotionally devastating as Up, or the subtlety and inspired subversion of Monsters Inc. and the Toy Stories which it certainly resembles at various stages. But it is certainly a terrifically likeable, ebullient and seductive piece of entertainment, taken at full-throttle.

An unmissable big-screen experience.

This is an unmissable commentary on Hollywood's rejection of its silent past: a kind of Sobbin' in the Rain.

Absolutely brilliant.

A film that needs to be seen on the big screen.

It is a beguiling and unique piece of work.

The film, with its transcendentally beautiful visuals...is a rich and rewarding experience. [1 Sept. 2011]

Song is a writer of elegant restraint and as the final act progressed, I worried that perhaps this restraint might end up a little too delicate for the years that have preceded and the feelings that have amassed. But then in a bar scene for the ages, we find ourselves floored, a slow buildup that finally hits like a bus.

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.

An unmissable, transcendentally beautiful classic. [28 Aug. 1998]

There is such tenderness to this film. I was overwhelmed by it.

Baumbach seeks to mine his material for laughs, no matter how desperate the situation becomes.

The final moments of The French Connection are a powerful, even magnificent repudiation of the modern piety of redemption and sympathy. It is a stunningly nihilist ending, one to set alongside Polanski's Chinatown.

It is not free of plot-holes...but what a supremely stylish and watchable picture it is.

I was utterly absorbed by this movie’s simple storytelling verve and the terrific lead performances from Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone who are both excellent – particularly Stone, who has never been better.

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

Lady Bird doesn’t exist as a twee indie movie construct, it feels thrillingly real and deeply personal, every single beat ringing true.

This is Welles's warmest, most personal film.

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