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.

Unsubtle and on-the-nose though it undoubtedly is, there is also an amiable, upbeat energy.

Hitchcock's superbly insouciant crime caper from 1955 must surely be one of the last movies in which the American super-rich are indulged so extravagantly and adoringly – the kind of people who stub their cigarettes out in fried eggs.

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.