The film is bawdy and wistful, with a rich vein of melancholy running through it.

It’s a rare achievement contained within an even rarer type of film: a Black-led, British romantic comedy. But there are, unfortunately, limits to how new and invigorating Boxing Day actually feels.

Most of Silent Night’s pleasures are to be found in the strength of its cast – Knightley, whose comic talent is frequently underused, can turn on a kind manic perkiness that’s as endearing as it is absolutely terrifying. It’s a smile that says, yes, if I ever were to murder you, they’d never find the body.

C’mon C’mon is a great big bear hug wrapped in celluloid.

All those technical triumphs only complicate what feels like an unanswerable question: how can a film look this good, feel so moving, and still come up lacking?

Gaga plays the film’s early scenes with a winking, playful innocence, consciously mirroring Patrizia’s story with that of Ally, her character in 2018’s A Star is Born – another ordinary woman plucked from relative obscurity.

No, the problem with Home Sweet Home Alone isn’t that it had the temerity to encroach on a holiday classic. It’s that they bungled the whole thing so badly.

Encanto bursts with colour and abstract flights of fantasy.

All the characters’ feelings here are very deeply sublimated. The fascination of The Power of the Dog lies in its ambiguity and its depth of characterisation. Nothing is obvious here, not even the title.

Who’s really at the wheel of Richard’s ambition? His love for his children or his own ego? It’s a testament to both Green and Smith that the question is allowed to linger so potently.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife is simply the things you already knew and liked, but repeated with unearned gravitas.

Miranda’s film finds a graceful balance between fact and fiction, framing art as a heightened form of self obsession and the most magical and important thing in the world.

The irony of Eternals is that, despite its characters explicitly tussling with their own lack of humanity, Zhao has delivered one of the most emotionally grounded entries in the entire franchise. She puts into full view the kind of moral quandaries that Marvel’s only ever really danced around in the past – the cost of individual life, or whether humanity is even worth saving in the first place.

It’s fitfully moving – a monologue in which Finch recalls witnessing the worst of human behaviour and doing nothing about it is powerful – but there’s often a sense of a darker, less gentle film aching to get out from beneath the sop.

This action caper is less a film than a collection of buzzwords.

The Card Counter is claustrophobic, certainly – but not always in the right ways.

It is hard not to wish Wright had made an entire film set in the Soho of the Sixties rather than one that pays tribute to it through the prism of the present day. It is a pity, too, that the magnificent Taylor-Joy’s role wasn’t further foregrounded.

Stewart’s febrile, sensitive performance and Larraín’s trademark lyricism give it an emotional kick that such predecessors lacked.

There are measured performances here by both Russell and Plemons, two unfailingly talented actors, and a host of well-crafted practical effects that explain why producer and horror veteran Guillermo del Toro would take such an interest in the project. But all the trickery in the world can’t conceal how inauthentic Antlers feels at heart.

Passing is as richly felt as it is carefully conceived.

When all roads lead back to Evan, and to Platt’s misstep of a performance, the film becomes one giant gamble that’s quite disastrously failed to pay off.

As a thoroughly modern, self-reflective revival of one of the most famous horror films of all time, 2018’s Halloween felt like a small miracle. Its sequel suggests that Green shouldn’t have pushed his luck.

The Last Duel is perfectly engrossing as a slice of historical intrigue, a clash of iron wills and iron swords, all muddied on the battlefields of medieval France. But there’s a tendency here for the film to present basic facts about contemporary gender politics as some earth-shattering revelation.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage is a love story written in blood, sweat and the slime of half-eaten brains.

Every aesthetic decision here seems carefully made, even down to the brightly painted frontier towns (the historically accurate choice), which play in jokey contrast to a literal “white town”, in all meanings of the phrase. That’s what makes The Harder They Fall feel so thrilling – it’s a film that exists in the past, present, and future, all at the same time.

There’s a mainstream, global scope to the film, but Smith and Peter Bayham’s script isn’t without the small quirks and observations native to British comedy.

Like the very best of Anderson’s films, The French Dispatch is both utterly exquisite and deceptively complex – a film that, like the finest of dishes, is even richer in its aftertaste.

Director Pascual Sisto has achieved something a little more clever than pure imitation. He takes his audience’s expectations, that his film can only lead to bloodshed and despair, and leaves them hanging in the air for as long as he likes – it’s both tantalising and deliberately unsatisfying. You’re never given the comfort of knowing what comes next.

No Sudden Move may be a fairly minor entry in his filmography, but it’s well-crafted and thrilling in a way that feels oddly reassuring.

These animated outings will always feel like a flash in the pan if they continue to rely on contemporary nods as a source of cheap humour.

The Tender Bar is uneventful. But its performances have such an easy, lived-in quality that it wouldn’t be fair to call it inauthentic – just a little rosy in its outlook, perhaps.

This project should have been relatively straightforward: to provide a worthy showcase for Hudson, who is tremendous in exactly the kind of way that grabs the attention of awards show voting bodies.

The Many Saints of Newark is both instantly recognisable and somehow unplaceable. It’s fierce and brilliant, too – a work that both expands on and complicates the cultural legacy of The Sopranos.

A wrong turn was taken. And The Starling has come out the other side an utterly bizarre, tonal misfire that fumbles through several ideas before implying that it’s perfectly OK to berate the suicidal for being so suicidal.

There’s enough warmth to Guerrero’s script, co-written with Shane McKenzie and Perry Blackshear, to paper over the odd rickety effect or wooden performance.

It was Gyllenhaal, here in a producer role, who initially bought the rights to Gustav Möller’s Danish film. You could call this a vanity project, but at least his presence adds a dose of originality to this carbon copy remake.

It is a film of such literal and emotional largeness that it overwhelms the senses.

It’s irresponsible, boring and a waste of everyone’s time.

Cary Joji Fukunaga has made a smashing piece of action cinema with No Time to Die – it’s just a shame it had to be a Bond film.

Pretty Red Dress reaches out gently to a few untouched corners of British film – not only in how it tackles gendered expectations, but in how it finds in Candice neither hero nor villain.

Its self-congratulatory crusade to restore its subject’s reputation has, for the sake of entertainment, distorted reality to the point that it borders on farce.

It's not that Paperback Hero is a duff film, exactly. Just a little flimsy, a trifle slight, a mite schematic. The story turns dog-eared midway through. [03 Sep 1999, p.19]

Close-Up is two films in one, a hugely skilful work of cinematic origami about doubles and doubling.

Assayas's attention to even the most marginal character is a joy, as are his mesmerising changes of pace and register. A slow-burning delight. [11 Feb 2000, p.11]

With this cast, you might have thought that Hytner didn't need to emphasise anything, but he does a lot of damage to the film's final half-hour by sending the camera off on wild, skyward missions, or slapping George Fenton's score on to the soundtrack with a trowel. In the last minute he repents for his sins, permitting us to leave the cinema with only the creak of rope and wood in our ears.

Space Jam is nothing if not a product made by men who gauge a film's success by how many soft toys it spawns.

It is a harsh and muddling movie, but often an astounding one. [24 Mar 1996, p.11]

One of Ken Loach's more harrowing evocations of working-class British life, anchored by Crissy Rock's performance as a hard-knocked Liverpudlian battling for the right to raise her children. [23 Oct 2014, p.54]

This is an audacious project and one which, for all its flaws, has much to commend it.

Iain Softley, its first-time director, handles his actors with skill and has a real flair for comedy. But Backbeat also feels lightweight, not a landmark movie - it betrays its long genesis and many rewrites in an overpacked and unfocussed script, so often the weakness of Palace's previous productions. [01 Apr 1994, p.23]

[Harris's] loud, rough, energetic tale of 'girlz n the hood' is low on polish and production values but certainly drawn from life.

Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo and based on his cult cartoon, the film is a computer graphics showpiece: best at swooping round structures (skyscrapers) and rotating three- dimensional objects (lots of explosions). But it's the hallucinogenic sequences that tell you why it has become a cult. [03 Feb 1991, p.24]

It all makes for an admirable rather than a likeable work, one which hardens its heart against contentment and even good luck. [13 May 1990, p.21]

This is one of the best evocations of the end of days ever committed to film: not too shabby, given a meagre budget. [29 Jul 2018, p.66]

The special effects are gruesomely convincing, and Robinson views the world of advertising with a characteristically sharp comic eye. [25 Jul 1989, p.29]

The cast - Michael Horden, Ronald Pickup, Cyril Cusack - is distinguished, and the film not without sluggish charm. [27 Jul 1989, p.15]

On a first viewing of the film, I was instantly impressed by Nair's narrative skill: the speed and certitude with which she draws you into her world, and the dexterity with which she interleaves half-a-dozen different stories. The second time, her sentimental streak was more apparent and more annoying, but Salaam Bombay still convinces as a modest, uplifting movie. [26 Jan 1989, p.15]

There are echoes of Jarmusch and Wenders, yet the film looks surprisingly ordinary, especially given Frank's credentials as a photographer. [28 Dec 1989]

An austere and appropriate rumination on leave-taking and loss. [07 Dec 2007, p.20]

Hoskins is admirably twitchy as the crime-boss in the midst of having his henchmen culled, and being unable to work out who is behind it. [06 Mar 2000, p.21]

Bitter and twisted and a visual marvel. [18 Jul 1996, p.6]

Director Tobe Hooper trapped a suffocating depravity in TCSM that film-makers have struggled to copy ever since.

A berserk, angry, funny and exhausting analysis of sado-masochistic power games masquerading as loving relationships.

As in Tokyo Story, the climax is quietly devastating and piercing in its truthfulness. [27 Sep 2012, p.46]

Yasujiro Ozu's portrait of familial relations, first seen in 1953, is marked by an indefinable melancholy that settles on the frame as softly as snow.

A dated but still serviceable Cold War thriller about a US nuclear sub racing the Russians to the North Pole to retrieve some film from a downed Soviet satellite. [19 Jun 2010, p.26]

A film of two halves - and not only because of its use of voguish split screen. The first, filmed faux-documentary style, is a grim police procedural featuring Henry Fonda's grizzled detective. In the second, Tony Curtis puts in a nuanced performance, playing against type as the real-life serial killer Albert DeSalvo, who killed 13 or more women in their homes. [16 Oct 2010, p.26]

An unspectacular but solid, ensemble (anti-) war movie, considered moderately progressive in its day for the way it describes the war in the Pacific from both sides. [19 Jun 2010, p.26]

Yasujiro Ozu's final film, re-released in a restored version, is a stately, slow-burning but very moving family drama.

Greek myth by way of the US film producer and special-effects artist Ray Harryhausen, best remembered for the fantastic four-minute sequence (four months in the making) in which an army of sword-wielding, stop-motion skeletons are spawned from the teeth of the Hydra. Bernard Herrmann's score also adds to the exciting atmosphere. [26 Jul 2008, p.48]

Cool and witty action cinema of the highest order. [26 Jun 2014, p.50]

First seen in 1960, Godard's debut feature feels as fresh as a warm baguette, and its insolent, intimate, off-the-cuff style is still copied everywhere in cinema.

The combination of Christie and Wilder ensures the story is impeccably told and the dialogue is unsurpassable from start to finish.

Amazingly, Welles gets away with it. Citizen Kane may be the more weighty, rounded work, but Touch of Evil is a heap more fun.

Elvis's best film, in which he quite convincingly plays an unsavoury character sent to jail for killing a man in a bar brawl, but is reformed after he's introduced to the music business by his country-singing cellmate and becomes a big star. [18 Oct 2008, p.48]

This 1950s Hollywood examination of mental illness won an Oscar for Joanne Woodward, who plays a frumpy housewife, a sultry seductress and an urban sophisticate, giving a virtuoso performance which manages to compensate for Nunnally Johnson's flat direction. [25 Jun 1999, p.21]

This lavish historical epic has plenty of campy treasure in it. [07 Aug 2013]

Beloved adaptation of Jack Schaefer’s wonderful novel, with Alan Ladd perfect as the buckskinned gunfighter trying to hang up his six shooter but finding that “There’s no living with a killing”. [10 Dec 2022]

Robert Taylor plays the Roman general and Deborah Kerr the Christian slave he's attracted to, but it's Peter Ustinov, hamming it up a treat as the Emperor Nero, who steals the show in this long and lavish epic. [05 May 2007, p.48]

The Lavender Hill Mob, along with Passport to Pimlico and Genevieve, is one of British cinema's most evocative films.

There are all kinds of deception being practised in this whodunit, then, not least by Alfred Hitchcock. [28 Feb 2009, p.48]

Only 72 minutes, in black and white, this is a small classic, directed by Robert Wise. [02 Jul 2000, p.17]

The Big Sleep is as fresh and perverse as ever, and remains one of Hollywood's most entrancingly strange bedtime stories.

Though it was out of step with contemporary sensibilities, Powell and Pressburger's Technicolor epic increasingly seems the Citizen Kane of English war movies. [19 Mar 2011, p.26]

Recruited by RKO to knock out some cheapo horrors and recoup the losses the studio had incurred on Citizen Kane, the producer Val Newton instead made a cycle of indefinably creepy and mysteriously poetic films, of which Cat People was the most successful. [24 Dec 2011, p.26]

It is more a film poem, an ode to modernity and a symphony of a city.

Many of [Hitchcock]'s signature motifs were established with this film, including a memorable climax with Novello almost killed by a bloodthirsty mob, and Hitchcock’s first trademark cameo appearance.