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of family dysfunction and the worse loss imaginable, but one held back by the fact it’s all filtered through Affleck’s withdrawn lead.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