There is such artistry and audacity in this new film by the 30-year-old Chinese director Bi Gan. Long Day’s Journey Into Night, a hallucinatory experience whose sinuous camera movements take you on a long journey into memory and fear and a night full of dreams.

Olivier has made a superbly dramatic film, in which by variations of tempo, by superb acting on the part of the awe-inspiring cast, and by a wonderful knack of indicating the side-shows while maintaining the main theme of Richard's own drama, he has cheated the clock. His long film never, or hardly ever, seems long.

Wild Strawberries, which, while scarcely a bag of laughs, has a compassionate view of life that best illustrates the more optimistic side of Bergman's puzzled humanity.

It is an agonisingly tough watch, crackling with tension.

Ingmar Bergman's dark masterpiece effortlessly sees off the revisionists and the satirists; it is a radical work of art that reaches back to scripture, to Cervantes and to Shakespeare to create a new dramatic idiom of its own.

Pure evil is all around in this unnervingly subtle, sophisticated movie; an eerie oppression in the air.

The film is pitched with insouciant ease and a lightness of touch at both children and adults without any self-conscious shifts in irony or tone: it’s humour with the citrus tang of top-quality thick-cut marmalade.

Despite the opaque story line, their film is a glittering, perfectly honed artifice; but what pushes it into the Coen premier league is the sense that, as with Fargo, there's something very personal going on here.

The Death Of Stalin is superbly cast, and acted with icy and ruthless force by an A-list lineup. There are no weak links. Each has a plum role; each squeezes every gorgeous horrible drop.

Strangers is full of marvellous set pieces and uses the architecture of Washington to dramatic effect.

This film, so apparently forbidding and opaque the way many Ceylan films initially are, has in fact something engrossing in its garrulous and wide-ranging quality: a literary quality in fact.

Hard Truths is a deeply sober, sombre, compassionate drama about a black British family, with flashes of fun and happiness that are emollient if not exactly redemptive.

Putting aside the worthiness of its politics, this is also a crackling, tense thriller, graced with beautifully measured performances, that explores with wisdom and sorrow the best and worst in human nature.

Those familiar with McDonagh’s work will be unsurprised to learn that Three Billboards is a bold and showboating affair, robustly drawn and richly written; a violent carnival of small-town American life. Yet it has a big, beating heart, even a rough-edged compassion for its brawling inhabitants.

Sadly, the problems affecting the Raineys, the African American family whose north Philadelphia home accommodates this heartening documentary, are all too familiar: poverty, drugs, gun violence.

It remains breathtakingly good. There is a miraculous, unforced ease and naturalness in the acting and direction; it is classic movie storytelling in the service of important themes.

Things to Come is a smart, earnest undertaking: an exploration of the insecurity that can hit any of us, at any age, when we start to question the life we’ve built.

With this film, Anderson has built a thoroughly likable vision of a prewar Europe – no more real, perhaps, than the kind of Viennese light-operetta that sustained much of 1930s Hollywood – but a distinctive, attractive proposition all the same. It's a nimblefooted, witty piece, but one also imbued with a premonitory sadness at the coming conflagration.

At its best, writer/director Clint Bentley and co-writer Greg Kwedar have crafted a gorgeous and poignant film of quiet, bruised life in a fragile place, anchored by a magnificently sensitive and restrained performance from the still-underrated Edgerton.

In fits and starts, this is a stunning picture. At its best, Winter Sleep shows Ceylan to be as psychologically rigorous, in his way, as Ingmar Bergman before him.

For one star to get an award, a handful of defeated nominees have to swallow their pain, as the spotlight moves away from them. For one star to deliver the shock of the new, another one has to receive the shock of the old. A Star Is Born turns that transaction into a love story.

Citizenfour is a gripping record of how our rulers are addicted to gaining more and more power and control over us – if we let them.

It keeps all the power of a live performance while simultaneously adding a filmic pizzazz including some breathtaking aerial shots. There is extraordinary direction – again under Kail – so that the cameras capture the mise en scène of theatre without losing any of the closeup intimacy of film.

It’s a difficult, often quite brutal, viewing experience, as it needs to be given the subject matter, not only because of the fractured storytelling but because of the devastating lead performance from Hopkins.

Foxtrot is a movie from Israeli writer-director Samuel Maoz that is structurally fascinating yet also structurally flawed: its accumulations of ambiguity and mystery are jettisoned by a whimsical final reveal.

Filmed with a luminous brilliance by cinematographer Freddie Francis, The Innocents is the apotheosis of old-school Brit spookiness.

This is fiercely powerful storytelling, simple and muscular in one way, but also conveying nuance and sophistication in its depiction of character.

It’s a movie that will live with me for a long time.

McDormand is perfect in the role.

Let nobody fault Almodóvar’s ambition here. If this finally lacks the polished sweep and completeness of Pain and Glory, his previous feature, it compensates with an air of fraught intimacy and throws out a wealth of ideas, leaving some tantalising loose ends to be picked up and examined.

It’s an action-thriller with punch; Bridges gives the characterisation ballast and heft and Pine and Foster bring a new, grizzled maturity to their performances.

This is so much more than a film about a film, it’s about young women breaking the rules set in a conservative country - the process of doing that was a lot more powerful than finishing the actual film.

For its control of narrative, its photography of the vanished suburban California of the 1940s, and for its compelling central performance from Crawford, Michael Curtiz’s noir thriller is utterly gripping.

Everything in it – every frame, every image, every joke, every performance – gets a gasp of excitement.

[A] somewhat bemused memoir-essay about place, cinema and time.

It’s a richly detailed character study, immersing the audience in the life and mind of its imperious main character.

So Long, My Son is a piercingly, profoundly moving picture that peels and exposes the senses.

Chernov is armed only with a camera, to the astonishment of many soldiers he encounters, and the film was constructed by editing his footage together with that of solders’ helmet cameras and drone material. Chernov shows us how drones are now utterly ubiquitous in war, delivering both the pictures and the assaults.

Highly entertaining, but that’s about all.

The intriguing thing about Black Panther is that it doesn’t look like a superhero film – more a wide-eyed fantasy romance: exciting, subversive and funny.

It is such a strange film in its way, stranger still if you are not accustomed to Weerasethakul’s work, and it needs a real investment of attention. But there is something sublime in it.

Swinton’s delivery has a theatrical style – it very much feels as if we could be watching a stage show – and there is something frozenly despairing about it; it is the voice of someone who is unwilling to relinquish her dignity or rationality and just give in to an aria of sadness.

Without Ronan’s performance, Brooklyn might have left a sugary taste. But she is the ingredient that brings everything together: her calm poise anchors almost every scene and every shot.

Tomlinson is the great heart of the movie, the warmth to Andrews’ splinter of ice, who, while sustaining the film’s line in jokey verbosity, still manages to be moving.

Somehow, it doesn’t look like something that happened 50 years ago – but rather an extraordinarily detailed futurist fantasy of what might happen in the years to come, if we could only evolve to some higher degree of verve and hope.

It is a picture of something inexpressibly gentle and sad, something heartbreaking and absolutely normal, but something stirred up by a violent, alien incursion. Something lands with an almighty splash in this calm millpond of melancholy regret.

It’s a shocking and compelling piece of work.

In some ways, If Beale Street Could Talk is a portmanteau movie with great performances from KiKi Layne, Regina King and Brian Tyree Henry, a succession of scenes from interrelated lives, constellated around the main narrative arc and supercharged with an ecstasy of sadness and knowledge.

There’s no doubt it makes for a jubilant ride, a galvanic first blast. But it remains a film which feels deeply thought rather than deeply felt; a brilliant technical exercise as opposed to a flesh-and-blood story.

Out 1: Noli Me Tangere is confounding at every level.

Sometimes the shagginess of the film can make it feel a bit slight and at times it does work better as a concentrated character study, but it’s such a joy to spend this time with McCarthy, drunkenly scheming and grumbling, that it’s hard to complain.

This is a charming and thoroughly likable film.

As buoyant and elegant as bubbles in a glass of champagne, Frank Capra's sublime 1934 comedy, written by long-time collaborator Robert Riskin, survives triumphantly because of its wit, charm, romantic idealism and its shrewd sketch of married life.

An enormous pleasure. The performances are so fresh and natural – yet so subtle and delicately judged. The direction is superb in its control and the cinematography creates a gripping docu-realist vision.

This inspirationally lovely and gentle film has a real claim to be Miyazaki’s masterpiece, or first among equals in his collection, with a simple hand-drawn design whose innocence only becomes more beguiling with repeated viewings, along with its bright, expansive, Gershwin-esque musical score.

The Invisible Man boasts a brilliantly chill and confident performance from (an almost entirely unseen) Claude Rains and a gloriously over-the-top supporting turn from Una O'Connor as his inquisitive landlady. Moreover, its tart, acid tone largely honours the spirit of the novel.

In acting terms Tom Hulce's shrieking, giggling Wolfie was easily outclassed by F Murray Abraham's brooding Iago-like villain, but Forman's distinctive central European locations, painterly night-time exteriors and period crowd scenes still look terrific. [2002 Director's Cut]

Superbly photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond in a desaturated colour that echoes a bygone age, The Long Goodbye is an elegant, chilly, deliberately heartless movie.

Chahine conducts his big cast with uproarious energy, immediacy and freshness; he has tremendous stylised set pieces, including a railway-carriage rock'n'roll number performed by a group gloriously credited as Mike and his Skyrockets.

As ever, Almodóvar has made a film about pleasure, which is itself a pleasure: witty, intelligent and sensuous.

This exquisite, exemplary science documentary, directed by Irish editor turned helmer Emer Reynolds, recounts the rich and fascinating story of the Voyager mission, arguably Nasa’s finest, noblest contribution to scientific understanding.

Love for the moving image – and love for artistic creativity – marches hand in hand with the fight for political freedom.

It's beautiful and strange, with its profoundly disturbing ambient sound design of industrial groaning, as if filmed inside some collapsing factory or gigantic dying organism.

This is a ramshackle, exuberant affair, peppered with larger-than-life inhabitants, ludicrous scenes and quotable dialogue that have long since grown worn from frequent use.

The implacable forces of nature, nurture and destiny are what this movie grapples with; it is a really emotional and absorbing drama about adoption with terrific performances (many from nonprofessional first-timers) and compelling soundtrack musical cues.

This is a great documentary about people who are serious about music and serious also about art, and what it means to live as an artist.

Shaunak Sen’s documentary is a complex, thoughtful, quietly beautiful film about the ecosystem and human community.

Medium Cool encapsulates the divisive issues of race and poverty that remain as urgent today as they did in 1968. It also makes us think about the way the media shape our lives and are used to deflect public attention from sustained political action.

The film is almost totally schematic and this weakens it. What strengthens it is the sheer emotional power of its making.

The sleek, stark images of this film are hypnotic; the faces are compelling and the hallucinatory finale is rather inspired. An arresting piece of work.

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.

Fire at Sea is masterly film-making.

Over two-and-a-half hours, you get a lot of deafening bangs for your buck, and the tourist location stunts are impressive - but there isn’t as much humour in the dialogue as before.

F for Fake is a minor work in some ways, but there is fascination and poignancy in seeing Welles's elegant retreat into this hall of mirrors.

A pioneering glory of the new wave.

Not just my favourite Bond movie, but the standard by which all other Bond movies must be judged. It has Sean Connery, of course, and the best theme song, incorporating Shirley Bassey and lashings of John Barry brass...And it has the best villain.

This is Boseman’s final performance on screen, and what a glorious performance to go out on. It is a head-butting confrontation of the galácticos: Davis and Boseman are each the immovable object and irresistible force.

This is a sweet, fuzzy movie, possibly a little soft-hearted. Still, I dare anyone to watch the final moments without a lump in the throat.

The treasure in this story is not a sunk vessel, as the interviews with its more literal-minded subjects might suggest, but a sense of justice and equilibrium that has been denied to a people that have been passing down their trauma from one generation to the next.

This is a suspense classic that leaves teeth-marks.

A stirring classic.

This is an immersive experience, like being plunged back into the 70s. There is passion there. No matter how chaotic or bleary things get, no one is in any doubt that the music counts.

About Endlessness contains moments of devilish wit, but at heart it is a sad, sweet picture, threaded with themes of estrangement and separation. Andersson isn’t exactly asking us to laugh at or pity these people. Instead, we’re being encouraged to wonder at their predicament – and perhaps relate it to our own.

It is an intensely disquieting, utterly distinctive film and a superb final panel to his triptych.

Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland is an utterly inspired docu-fictional hybrid, like her previous feature The Rider. It is a gentle, compassionate, questioning film about the American soul.

There is something, for me, unrevealing about the drama, and almost sentimental about the final moments. But Hovig and Skarsgård are both very good.

About Elly confirms Farhadi's shrewd judgment of pace, dramatic technique and formal control of an ensemble cast.

It’s morally complex and sometimes uncomfortably close to the bone, but also lushly bawdy and funny, and packaged together with an astonishing degree of cinematic brio by first-time writer-director Marielle Heller.

If only modern American politics were remotely as entertaining.

Redford delivers a tour de force performance: holding the screen effortlessly with no acting support whatsoever.

There are plenty of genuine laughs in this movie, but each of them seems to dovetail into a banshee-wail of pain.

Beckinsale is a hoot to watch as a character with no redeemable qualities, except for her cunning ability to get what she wants. You can’t help but love Lady Susan because of the evident joy she takes in being so duplicitous. Her energy is infectious.

Hereditary is basically a brilliant machine for scaring us, and Collette’s operatic, hypnotic performance seals the deal every second she’s on the screen.

Director Steven Riley’s film is a fascinating collage which profoundly probes its subject’s psyche.

While it’s such an intriguing idea, an almost absurdist scrutiny of what avoidance looks like and how families choreograph their collective denial, there is something a little bit contrived in it and, though always engaged, I found myself longing for some outright passion or rage or confrontation.

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 documentary vividness that Carol Reed brought to the streets of Vienna in The Third Man and London in The Fallen Idol, he here brings to Belfast in this fascinating but imperfect 1947 thriller.

With Happy as Lazzaro, Rohrwacher has crafted a magic-realist fable that doubles as an origin myth for a modern Italy subsumed by corruption and decline.

This is another deeply felt film from Jia Zhangke, with a very contemporary artistry.

It may not always land and gets lost in itself on the way there, but Jackson has crafted a beautiful experiment indicative of ambitious vision, one whose magic outweighs its weaknesses.

Hüller’s quiet, sinewy performance provides the film’s form and musculature.

The film is unafraid of emotion, unafraid of plunging into basic human ideas: the need for trust, and the search for love.

It’s the kind of seemingly effortless success that makes producing a good superhero movie look easy: find a likable hero and a colorful villain, hire someone who knows how to write a punch line, and for Stan Lee’s sake, keep it fun.

There is genuine fear in its nightmarish tableaux: the breast-feeding woman holding an egg in the ruined churchyard is like a detail from Hieronymus Bosch. And that final sequence, with the eponymous Wicker Man, is inspired.

The movie hits its stride immediately with a taut, athletic urgency and it contains some superb images – particularly the eerie miracle of Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane, with Malcolm’s soldiers holding tree-branches over their heads in a restricted forest path and turning themselves into a spectacular river of boughs. This is a black-and-white world of violence and pain that scorches the retina.

As visions of apocalypse go, it’s rather lovely: a world lush with nature, animals learning to get by together.

Yes, Del Toro’s latest flight of fancy sets out to liberally pastiche the postwar monster movie, doffing its cap to the incident at Roswell and all manner of related cold war paranoia. But it’s warmer and richer than the films that came before. Beneath that glossy, scaly surface is a beating heart.

Leila’s simmering rage at the contemptible mediocrity of her father and brothers, and the exhaustion of trying to save them from themselves, is the emotional energy that powers the movie, building to that climactic wedding scene. It is a great performance from Alidoosti, first among equals in a great ensemble cast.

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.

It's a richly conceived treat.

Its riddling quality, combined with its spectacular visual effects, may leave some audiences agnostic – and I myself wasn’t sure about the silent-movie type effects. Yet it’s a work of real artistry.

The Duke of Burgundy will have its detractors. But this is not just a filthy movie. It's a considerable work of art, and one that touches on a rarely discussed side of human sexuality completely free of judgement.

Vintage screen Dickens with a cutting edge: the French terror is vividly, hauntingly realised, all chaos and guillotine ghouls. [16 Aug 2000, p.23]

It is very intelligent and humane, and what a great performance from Collias.

A self-assured gem constructed like the bowl of classic ramen the characters strive to cook: a collection of individual parts perfectly arranged.

The happiness and innocence in this film are beyond compare.

This is one of the finest films about the process of movie-making, a bleak, complex work that gives Travolta his most challenging role.

An intriguing, disorientating 60s artefact.

At just 72 minutes, this is a brief, intense feature: it’s possible that Wandel envisaged it as even shorter than it actually is, and perhaps its narrative tendons slacken a little after the initial spasm of horror. But what an incredible performance from Vanderbeque: an intuition of fear and pain and moral outrage that goes beyond acting.

There’s real energy.

There are some plausibility issues in Room, but this is a disturbing and absorbing film, shrewdly acted, particularly by Larson. It lets the audience in; it does not just let the nightmare stun them into submission. You make a real emotional engagement.

Hu provides no easy resolutions, and evidently found none himself. This epic of futility will have to stand as an epitaph for an extremely promising career cut short.

Admittedly some of these moments get a little gushy. Beyoncé has much to be thankful for and she spends a little too long doing the thanking, from her parents to her dancers to guests like Diana Ross. But there’s always another slab of concert action round the corner to jolt the whole show back to life.

The film does not signpost the traditional twists and turns and dramatic reversals, but keeps a cool distance, letting us wonder if Sandra is guilty or not, and we are kept guessing until the end. It’s a lowkey, almost downbeat drama, but with something invigoratingly cerebral.

Fallen Leaves is another of Kaurismäki’s beguiling and delightful cinephile comedies, featuring foot-tapping rock’n’roll. It’s romantic and sweet-natured, in a deadpan style that in no way undermines or ironises the emotions involved and with some sharp things to say about contemporary politics.

Nebraska may not be startlingly new, and sometimes we can see the epiphanies looming up over the distant horizon; the tone is, moreover, lighter and more lenient than in earlier pictures like Sideways. But it is always funny and smart.

It’s dynamic and intriguing, though the detail and the emotion can get lost in the splurge.

It’s grim, unfussy and deeply moving.

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

The co-directors created from Rumer Godden's novel an extraordinary melodrama of repressed love and Forsterian Englishness - or rather Irishness - coming unglued in the vertiginous landscape of South Asia.

The stunts are wildly impressive, especially the motorbike riders who sail through the air in a ball of flame, and the gunplay is unique, although I have never found the term “balletic” quite right for something so brutal and quick. It is all so bizarre that you have to enjoy it.

It is a bravura debut from a young film-maker, proving that one can still make a movie for no money at a family member’s house and come away with a work of art, not just a calling card.

It's a cool customer – the hip lingo and fast-talking characters all of a piece with its bebop score – but there's a scrupulous honesty to the story, too.

Tatum manages to ground the viewer in his abject bewilderment and pain. It’s a instantly memorable performance in a haunting movie, one that I have carried with me in the hours since I’ve seen it. Perhaps that is the best thing I can say about this remarkable feature – for its viewers, as it is for its meticulously rendered subject, the disquiet lingers.

Sachs’ approach is so humane, and his characters so fully rendered, that an agenda never announces itself; instead, Sachs’ worldview seeps into you. He’s that skilled a film-maker.

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

The movie's disturbing labyrinthine story of murder and betrayal now looks like a fable by David Lynch: and the witty, charged dialogue between the leads shows that no screen couple, before or since, had as much chemistry as Bogart and Bacall.

As activist Larry Kramer remarked, the movement had "its good cops and its bad cops", and there is a remarkable, angry, passionate funeral speech from campaigner Bob Rafsky that helped mobilise Act Up and awaken America's conscience.

Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Loveless is a stark, mysterious and terrifying story of spiritual catastrophe: a drama with the ostensible form of a procedural crime thriller. It has a hypnotic intensity and unbearable ambiguity which is maintained until the very end.

Everything in Showing Up is certainly valid, but I confess I thought it lacked some perspective on Lizzie’s life, and it is sometimes a bit studied and passionless, especially compared with Reichardt’s previous film, First Cow. But there is sympathy and charm and food for thought.

Elvis is of course a tailor-made subject for Luhrmann, the Moulin Rouge director’s trademark bombast and razzle-dazzle so in tune with the singer’s rattle and roll, which comes through in both his biopic and now EPiC.

The weird oppression and seediness of the times is elegantly captured, and Hoss coolly conveys Barbara's highly strung desperation.

It’s a movie that rescues the tired zombie trope – without insisting on metaphor or satire.

Museum is an oddly genial, garrulous film in many ways – rather like Güeros – and it doesn’t behave quite like a heist thriller, nor exactly like a coming-of-age comedy.

There is one especially lovely moment. At their first meeting, lovestruck Tony asks Maria if her kindness to him is just a joke. She replies: "I have not yet learned to joke that way. Now I never will." This is a real big-screen event.

I Saw the TV Glow marks a remarkable progression for Schoenbrun as both writer and director, a more substantive, if still challenging, narrative married with an incredible, expanded ability to fully immerse us in the visuals they have created. It’s made with such transportive precision that I can still feel it as I write.

May December is delivered with a cool, shrewd precision by Todd Haynes, Julianne Moore carries off her dysfunctional queenliness very watchably and Natalie Portman has a great scene where she gives a lecture on acting to Gracie’s children’s high school drama class.

This movie looks and feels superb, it is pure couture cinema. But there is also a excess of richness and bombast and for all its sleekness I felt that the spark of emotion was being hidden, and there is a kind of frustration in the operatic sadness.

Hersh emerges as a tough, combative, peppery personality from this movie.

It is a deeply unsettling meditation on sexuality and transgression.

Vitalina Varela stars as herself in Pedro Costa’s bleak but beautiful film about a woman discovering the hidden life of her late husband.

The drama mimics Anne’s own sense of denial, her own refusal to remember or imagine the catastrophe. What we get instead are clinical inspections functioning as chilling parodies or inversions of that sexual intimacy that has upended her life.

It bends a few facts, and occasionally slips towards satire. But, for the most part, this is a remarkably enjoyable - and commendably fair - biopic of an unforgettable character. They don't make many films, or indeed generals, like this any more.

What is great about Colman’s performance is that it is always teetering on the brink of some new revelation about Leda: her face is subtly trembling with … what? Tears? Laughter? A scowl of scorn?

There's a degree of puffery in the writing, however, that makes this drama untrustworthy.

The themes may be contentious, but the handling is perfect. If there were ever a movie to cause the lame to walk and the blind to see, The Master may just be it.

The Wild Pear Tree is a gentle, humane, beautifully made and magnificently acted movie.

Its austere beauty, artistry and wrenching sadness are undimmed after 30 years, and there is nothing distant or still about it.

It’s a baggy comedy, sentimental in ways that are not entirely intentional, but there is value, too.

It’s tender and sometimes beautifully made, but also contrived and occasionally features some too-good-to-be-true caring characters. Frankly, it’s rather precious.

This trio of stories is elegant and amusing, with a delicacy of touch and real imaginative warmth.

The film is about more than simply personal loss and Heineman’s admiration of journalist activists. It’s a guide to the media war being fought between Isis’s video team and RBSS.

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

A poignant, funny male-bonding tale, adapted by Robert Towne from Darryl Ponicsan's novel. [21 Dec 2013, p.54]

It would be too simplistic to call it brave. Ford excels, and shows us why we should be angry at America’s indifference to dead black men. The documentary won’t bring William Ford back, and it may give Yance Ford some catharsis, but more importantly it could and should lead to greater justice and empowerment.

There are toe-curling culture clash moments.

It is an eccentric and entertaining movie soap-opera.

First Reformed is a deeply felt, deeply thought picture; impressive in its seriousness and often gripping in the way it frames itself as a debate and a sermon.

[An] outrageously enjoyable petrolhead heist caper.

Hollywood here looks diabolically seductive.

The first 20 minutes of Hogir Hirori’s extraordinary documentary has the beat of a gripping thriller, full of hushed voices, car chases, and the terrifying sounds of gunfight.

Beasts of the Southern Wild is a vividly poetic and maybe even therapeutic response to one of the most painful and mortifying episodes in modern American history, second only to 9/11.

It’s as involving as it is necessary, a rare ray of sunshine on yet another cloudy day.

Persona is a film to make you shiver with fascination, or incomprehension, or desire.

For all its tendency to soap opera, it has a lovely happy-sad sweetness.

The elusiveness of the film is precisely the point: it is as beautiful and mysterious as a poem and its formal elegance and conviction are unarguable. What makes it a must-see, however, is the generous, unselfconscious passion of Jacob's performance as a young woman - two young women - in love.

Korean director Park Chan-wook’s new film brings his usual effortlessly fluent, steely confidence and a type of storytelling momentum that can accommodate all kinds of digressions, set-pieces and the occasional trance-like submission to mysterious visions.

It’s a transparently personal project and a coming-of-age film in its (traumatised) way, a moving account of how, just for one day, two young boys glimpse the real life and real history of their father who has been mostly absent for much of their lives – and how they come to love and understand him just at the moment when they come to see his flaws and his weaknesses.

A Real Pain is occasionally insightful on the subject of suffering, sometimes funny, a bit endearing, a little pretentious, often dry.

Roeg revels in the hallucinatory, creating a wilderness that exists as much in the mind as it does the land.

Atlantique may not be perfect, but I admired the way that Diop did not simply submit to the realist mode expected from this kind of material, and yet neither did she go into a cliched magic-realist mode, nor make the romantic story the film’s obvious centre. Her film has a seductive mystery.

It comes from the age of Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange, but none of those movies can match the sheer hardcore shock of the Australian New Wave nightmare Wake in Fright from 1971.

David Lowery’s complex, visually sumptuous and uncommercial tale of Arthurian legend revels in upending expectations.

This remarkable film feels like it could become a time capsule, showing future generations what it felt like in 2020 for those on the frontline.

This superbly composed film comes as close to perfection as it gets.

I have to say that Clift's plot is far less compelling than Lancaster's and something of the zip goes when Frank Sinatra disappears from the action, sent to the stockade. But what a punch this movie still packs.

I would have loved to hear a discussion on a wider range of issues, particularly #TimesUp, but with a film this much fun, it seems churlish to ask for anything else.

The Salesman is a well-crafted, valuable drama.

Deeply caught up in decoding this tradition, perhaps Serra is too beholden to it. If only this admittedly riveting examination of dark human compulsions had found a way to also articulate the perspectives of the animals for whom the arena is a lethal experience.

It is an invigorating and enlivening film.

Get Out is very creepy, very funny and as pitiless as a surgeon’s scalpel.

West Side Story is contrived, certainly, a hothouse flower of musical theatre, and Spielberg quite rightly doesn’t try hiding any of those stage origins. His mastery of technique is thrilling; I gave my heart to this poignant American fairytale of doomed love.

Folky music and Studio Ghibli-level flights of eerie fancy are obvious pleasures, but even more subtle and entrancing is the way Moore and his team use echoed shapes to suggest hidden patterns in nature and parallels between the real and the mythical.

It is an overwhelming story, and despite everyone knowing the ending, it is as gripping as a thriller: Kapadia has fashioned and shaped it with masterly flair.

This intriguing documentary from Croatian film-maker Igor Bezinović is partly a comic opera and partly a chilling message from the past.

In the most reductive way, it is another mafia story. But as with their previous film, it is the specificity that counts, and while certain genre tendencies prevent the narrative from truly unmooring, hardly a scene goes by without something fundamentally familiar being rendered in a unique fashion.

What does the ending of Ash Is Purest White mean — and what does its middle or beginning mean? I’m not sure. It feels like a gripping parable for the vanity of human wishes, and another impassioned portrait of national malaise.

Laughs emerge from the recognisable micro-horrors found in modern living, which, if the world was run in the way we all agree it should be run, wouldn’t exist.

This is an extraordinary record. But be warned. Once seen, these images cannot be unseen.

This is a movie using non-professionals playing versions of themselves, and under Zhao’s patient, unintrusive directorial eye they appear to be inhabiting a kind of heightened documentary.

Two hours in this director’s company is a pleasure.

This is a deadpan comedy which strides off down its own confident, eccentric path, and actually the whole heist trope is subverted from the outset by the purely un-tense way the robbery is shown.

It is a mysterious, digressive, long and baggily constructed film possessed of a distinctive richness and humanity, all about the balance between memory and forgetting which we all negotiate as we come to the end of our lives.

A Canterbury Tale may be the most loving and tender film about England ever made. It’s a picture that’s steeped in nature, in thrall to myth and history; a re-affirmation of the English character, customs and countryside from a time when many viewers may have wondered whether this underpinning had been kicked clean away.

Elsie Fisher is magnificent as a vulnerable teenager facing trouble at school and at home in Bo Burnham’s gripping drama.

It’s hard to deny Fuhrman’s pinch-faced vehemence and the film’s hallucinatory verve.

It's not exactly a documentary, more a lovingly-filmed homage, but some candid interview material allows scraps of Baker's story to emerge.

This sunny 1989 fantasy by master animator Hayao Miyazaki broaches the issue of female sexuality more boldly than any Western children’s movie would dare.

Ultimately, there is something trite at the centre of the movie, most especially in the overuse of Nat King Cole’s haunting Mona Lisa to suggest Tyson’s ambiguity and Hoskins’s puzzlement. But this is almost concealed by Tyson’s sense of desperation and Hoskins’s painful sincerity.

With icy provocation, Israel’s ruling classes are presented as decadent and indifferent to the slaughter and suffering of Gaza. But the film is also in some ways a sympathetic study of a people haunted by the antisemitic butchery of 7 October.

Clever, heartfelt and frequently stunning, The Wild Robot offers the type of all-ages-welcome animated entertainment that will delight kids and leave a lump in one’s throat.

Support the Girls is a shrewdly observed, day-in-the-life-style portrait of a woman under pressure. It’s way too early to be thinking about awards season, but Regina Hall could be in line for some silverware.

The film clearly nods to old-school Hollywood and Vegas, but it has a sharp edge that keeps it funny and authentically modern, with Steve Kloves's streetwise and sometimes surprisingly elegiac script summing up the seediness and melancholy of 80s glamour.

This gripping thriller, part of the BFI's Bogarde retrospective, daringly smashed through 1961's homosexual taboos, but has weathered best as a study of blackmail and paranoia.

Admittedly, there are a lot of documentaries like this, made by citizen journalists recording uprisings in their homelands, but this is one of the best of the recent crop, and a timely reminder of a conflict that's slipped out of the headlines of late.

An early masterclass in the art of the caper movie, John Huston's 1950 thriller stands up wonderfully well, even if we've got used to far more convoluted scheming by movie robbers in the intervening period

It is a deeply intelligent, humane drama.

Bring tissues for a doozy of an ending that will have everyone bawling in the aisles.

There is something visionary in this film.

There is charm and delicacy here and Magimel and Binoche perform impeccably, though I wasn’t entirely sure they go together as the ingredients of a love story.

Mudbound is absorbing: the language, performance and direction all have real sinew.

As compelling and as complicated as this fraught friendship might be, Hall’s script can’t quite find a way to take it – and the other pieces of Larsen’s novel – and turn them into something deservedly substantial.

Business as usual has largely resumed in Wuhan, but Wang’s film contends that that’s just the problem. The same apparatuses of messaging and censorship are still in operation, ensuring that the full extent of the malfeasance may never be fully known

Honeyland really is a miraculous feat, shot over three years as if by invisible camera – not a single furtive glance is directed towards the film-makers.

The Beasts is a strange film in many ways, difficult to pin down tonally or generically, but it leaves a trail of unease in the mind.

Weird and wonderful, rich and strange – barking mad, in fact. It is wayward, kaleidoscopic, black comic and bizarre; there is in it a batsqueak of genius, dishevelment and derangement; it is captivating and compelling.

This debut feature from Yorkshire-born actor and first-time director Francis Lee is tough, sensual, unsentimental, with excellent lead performances from Josh O’Connor and Alec Secareanu.

The inspired calculation of action and agonised human reaction is irresistible and inescapable. It is a film that leaves the audience shattered and exhausted.

If the lads were insufferable misogynistic pricks, Everybody Wants Some!! would make for horrible viewing. Thankfully they’re all intensely lovable.

It is a very disturbing parable of the insidious micro-processes of tyranny.

What this exceptionally lucid film-survey reveals is what has to go on at ground level, and beneath the surface, in order to power a powerhouse.

It is an intricate and often brilliant drama, with restrained and intelligent performances; there is an elegantly patterned mosaic of detail, unexpected plot turns, suspenseful twists and revelations.

The joy of live music is in immediate, fleeting sensation, which doesn’t need to get caught on the hide of history. But that sensation is something Carruthers captured brilliantly in 1996.

It is a real love story, and the movie amusingly and touchingly takes us through the final stages and out the other side.

Steven Soderbergh’s downbeat, affectless tongue-in-cheek spy comedy (“caper” isn’t quite right) is in this new mode, though taking itself to the edge of self-satire, with a few 007 refugees in the cast, efficiently scripted by David Koepp.

I would have liked (in a spirit of devil’s advocacy) to hear from an economist about the measurable benefits or otherwise of this brutal approach, and perhaps to ponder the climbing global population. These reservations hardly diminish the film’s force.

Mysterious, complex and brilliant: the disquieting portrait of a serial killer, seducer and con-man in Japan whose motivation remains an enigma. [9 Sept 2005, p.13]

It is brilliant and audacious, with one of the most extraordinary final sequences in modern cinema, and all in a manner which Hollywood in the succeeding decade would learn to call "high concept".

At 37 minutes long, its brevity perhaps exposes or even creates a flimsiness in his signature style that in a longer film would have more space to breathe and parade itself.

This is visionary cinema on an unashamedly huge scale: cinema that's thinking big. Malick makes an awful lot of other film-makers look timid and negligible by comparison.

It’s a gorgeously and grippingly made picture and Tang Wei is magnificent.

It’s a tender, painful, intimate film, made over several years as we watch four girls in the months before the dance.

There remains a remove though still, Spielberg giving us a slightly too stage-managed version of himself and his family, some gristle missing from the darkest moments.

This is a movie of virtuoso nihilism and scorn.

The result is a hot, sticky, trippy fusion of wild style and painfully genuine emotion, with plenty of moments that take your breath away.

[A] brilliant documentary.

It’s an outstanding documentary.

It is wonderfully acted with unaffected naturalism by its cast of professionals and newcomers and plays an extravagant, almost shameless pizzicato on the audience’s heartstrings.

Like Solaris, his earlier meditation on the future, Tarkovsky's 1979 film Stalker is mysterious and compelling though in my view not, like Andrei Rublev, in the realms of greatness: a vast prose-poem on celluloid whose forms and ideas were to be borrowed by moviemakers like Lynch and Spielberg.

Beanpole is moving, disturbing, overwhelming.

This documentary by Morgan Neville reveals that he really was just what he seemed to be at first innocent sight: a kind-hearted, square but saintly man who genuinely loved and understood children.

The robust acting and sharp sense of the Bay Area milieu glides us nicely over the film's few soft patches.

The subtlety and dignity of Fernanda Torres’s Oscar-nominated performance in Walter Salles’s new film have been rightly praised.

Sarandon’s force and confidence are undeniable, and she easily holds her own against Burt Lancaster.

Sometimes God is just too on the nose when he makes his creations suffer; but at least Alberdi’s humane, profoundly empathic film-making offers some balm.

Given the nudity on show, some are already quick to criticise Park’s direction as gratuitous and to claim that his male gaze is affecting the depiction of lesbian romance. But the impotency of the male characters helps to counter this while the sex scenes themselves, as lovingly shot as they might be, feel vital to the narrative.

I’m not sure this is my favourite Skolimowski film, but it is engaging in many ways: beautifully photographed, sentimental and surreal in equal measure; and also stubborn – as stubborn as its hero – in its symbolism and stark pessimism.

It is compelling in every sense and takes you on a moving journey: not only through the story of The Lion King, but through a small portion of the beautiful cultures and traditions that exist within black communities globally.

The dry, strictly observational shooting style means the doc stays in the moment and rarely ventures out of the room where the programme unfolds, adding immediacy.

Director Théo Court does a fine job of capturing the barren beauty of this landscape and using it to suggest the broader moral vacuum.

This extraordinarily mundane film – a combination of words I’m fairly certain I’ve never used before – is a tremendous achievement and, in a subtle way, an amazing work of art.

It must be added that Giant, in spite of its length, seldom seems long – its story is too eventful, its effects too picturesque, and its director too skilful for that even over so long an expanse of time. It may not be a great film but it is certainly an awesome one.

76 Days is not a hard-hitting documentary about the centre of the Covid-19 pandemic – maybe such a film will be slower to arrive than the vaccine – but it’s a potent human-interest story, and a portrait of a city under siege.

A sweet, eminently sensible film.