The road through year 10 may be rocky, but Manners is a confident guide – her film-making is splashy and stylish throughout, shrewdly conveying just how much one can learn, and break, in a year.

This is, against great odds and surely some western expectations, a beguiling hangout film – an invitation to the dinner party, a fascinating window into a group of underground artists who carry on despite the risks, a representation of creativity under surveillance. A snapshot of everyday resistance, the fight for a freedom from the bottom up. And most effectively, a moving portrait of one nutritive, symbiotic friendship in transition.

There is an unadorned honesty to the film that makes it admirable and not uplifting.

This is an elegant, chilly dream of despair.

With an unerring but sardonic sense of how death presses in on us all, this is a promisingly pungent debut from Mitchell.

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

The film is in the shape of 32 elegantly constructed sequences and balances [Gould's] music and his personality with rare skill. [14 Feb 1994, p.5]

Backbeat is a historically plausible take on the relationships between John Lennon, Stuart Sutcliffe and Astrid Kirchherr, and a thoughtful, engaging film.

It’s a kind of Martian’s-eye-view documentary about something that doesn’t actually exist; it is ice-cold and detached, almost without dialogue in the conventionally dramatic sense, other than the subdued exchanges which we, as audience, overhear rather than listen to. It accumulates its own kind of desolate force.

Here is a visually epic and surprisingly positive documentary about a maligned subculture: football ultras.

Although no amount of revisionist gallantry can conceal how terrible Yoko Ono’s vocals are, this has a historical fascination as they were Lennon’s only full-length concert performances after the Beatles’ split.

It is a fierce rejection of anything starry-eyed about movie-making and a quietly gripping psychological study of a painful confrontation between father and daughter.

This is a bleak, pessimistic film with two excellent lead performances.

There is some top-quality entertainment value on offer here from a movie which can only intensify the world’s K-obsession.

The Black Ball is handsomely produced, lovingly detailed and confidently constructed, bringing the puzzle pieces together in the edit and contriving an elegant, poignant cameo for Lorca himself, a kind of incidental choric figure who seems to intuit all the future triumphs and disasters of love and war. It is a rich and rewarding movie.

On the face of it, the film contains a soap-opera’s worth of secret feelings and tumultuous events, including the teenage lovers’ sensational escape from the town during a heavy storm. And yet Fukada maintains a cool distance.

Ramblers are justified in keeping the pressure up and the take-home message is: opening up the glories of the countryside and nature itself to everyone is a universal good.

What is fascinating about northern soul is the way it survived under the media-cultural radar and appears to resist larger interpretive analysis.

This is a powerful, memorable film.

The film is an amazing feat of animal training and deft editing, and it’s all so weirdly cheering.

One could class The Walker as a thriller, in that it features a murder, a political scandal and a fraught chase that ends with a car crash. But these elements all seem a little rote and rudimentary. Instead, the film's real focus is on the character of Page and his perilous relationship with the world he inhabits.

Perhaps we are near to cliche here. Yet the film never really tips over into bathos and predictability. Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy are the students, each giving the sort of performance that heralds considerable talent. The film will undoubtedly speak to those at whom it is aimed, and I hope others too. It isn't that wonderful. But it's much, much better than usual.[16 June 1985, p.20]

Highly entertaining, but that’s about all.

The absence of a real point of view, and of any depth of characterisation, prevents the otherwise pleasing entertainment drawing blood.

Live and Let Die borrowed from blaxploitation; The Man with the Golden Gun took a couple of kicks at kung fu, though in a distinctly half-hearted fashion.

It's a stylish, entertaining movie, starring Frederic Forrest (a dead ringer for Hammett, bar the height) as a drinking, smoking, coughing and typewriter-bashing writer lured back into detection by an old Pinkerton associate (Peter Boyle) and stumbling into the plot of The Maltese Falcon.

The cast is skillfully alert and Schrader's vision is unencumbered either by sentiment or cynicism.

Its subtitle, A Rock & Roll Fable, contains all the elements Hill looked for in a movie as a teenager in the late 50s, and in 94 minutes it manages to be an urban western, a backstage rock musical and a biker flick set in an unidentified, run-down rust-belt inner city that might be yesterday or tomorrow.