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

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

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.

Paul Thomas Anderson has directed a swaggering, funny and timely action epic, where momentum never lets up and supporting actors Sean Penn and Teyana Taylor steal the show.

The mind, too often, moulds memories into prophecies. Colours get dialled up. Emotions solidify. It’s a hard thing to talk about, let alone visualise. That’s why Aftersun, the debut of Scottish filmmaker Charlotte Wells, is so astounding. She’s captured the uncapturable, finding the words and images to describe a feeling that always seems to sit just beyond our comprehension.

Does she actually love Hae Sung? The answer to that question eludes Nora, Past Lives, and the director herself, as Song’s script allows these strikingly mature and reasonable adults to work through some very difficult emotions.

It’s a film that feels like a long exhale, the moment of unburdening after a tight embrace. It’s beautiful.

The film magnificently frames modern life as a world of illusions, where a busy life equates to a successful one and the gamble always pays off. It’s an almost punishingly chaotic film, though each line of overlapping dialogue and jittery camera move is carefully orchestrated.

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]

Cate Blanchett swallows Tár whole and spits out bullets in return.

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

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

The Zone of Interest . . . issues a warning from just outside the walls of Auschwitz, spreading its soul-sickness across each frame.

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

At 160 minutes, the film teeters on self-indulgence, but it moves freely from scene to scene, propelled by Mendonça’s energetic camerawork and a performance that elevates Moura to the top table.

It’s a film of overwhelmingly visceral emotion; impossible, then, to separate from what we imagine Panahi must feel himself. And yet, so often, we’ll see characters clamber over each other and wheel around their limbs like they’re in a Buster Keaton comedy.

A feat of full-bodied immersion, using a point-of-view camera, finely tuned sound design, and cinematic illusion to create a reality that takes hold of and then never quite leaves its audience’s souls.

Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron contains multitudes. It is beautiful, tortured, whimsical, and stoic.

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

Madison takes a character trained by life to always pounce – on an opportunity or a threat – and subtly, but consistently, reveals to us her softness and her soul.

It’s not a film to devour, but to be devoured by. There’s such a weight to it that it creates its own field of gravity.

There’s something to this film, and to director Alice Rohrwacher’s work at large, that feels as delicate, as enigmatic, and as spiritually charged as these millennia-old artefacts. It stirs up a fierce protectiveness in the viewer. Treasure this now, hold it, turn it, and examine it from all sides, or it may slip beyond your grasp.

The Worst Person in the World carries a shimmery feeling of definitiveness to it. It’s the rare piece of art actually invested in why an entire generation can seem so aimless and indecisive.

Boxing Licorice Pizza inside the realm of juvenile memory more often feels like an excuse than a conceit.

In Andrew Haigh’s melancholy ghost story, where real ghosts are out-haunted by words left unsaid, Scott, an actor of fierce intelligence, channels shrewdness into tragedy for the greatest performance of his career.

It is a tender, sprawling drama that feels less inert than its predecessor and far more compelling.

Cillian Murphy allows the light to dim from his eyes in every subsequent scene, but it is Robert Downey Jr who is titanic here.

Sorry, Baby is funny in that confrontational way where your body moves to laugh, but you feel a little guilty for letting it out. That’s life, though. Mining misfortune for a punchline is its own survival skill. And Victor doesn’t chase after subjectivity.

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

DiCaprio and De Niro are brilliant, but it is relative unknown Lily Gladstone who is truly extraordinary.

It spins out like a fairytale penned by someone midway through a stimulant-induced panic attack.

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.

Hard Truths withholds catharsis, instead choosing simply to let the shutters swing open on its protagonist’s psyche for a brief interlude.

Parallel Mothers, in that way, brings a new sense of depth to Almodóvar’s gallery of fearless women – suggesting that their strength is not always by choice.

Stone gives surely the boldest performance of her career so far, in a role that puts upon her heavy physical and psychological demands.

Go back to your roots, we’re always told, and you’ll find your heart’s true home. But in Davy Chou’s daring and mesmeric Return to Seoul, an adoptee’s search for her birth parents tears open wounds and unearths neither meaning nor resolution.

The Banshees of the Inisherin is really a beautiful work to behold.

Oakley’s film ends on an ambiguous though hopeful note. Usually, this sort of conclusion risks coming across as a little mechanically inspirational. But Jean is a complicated sort of hero, full of indecision and regret. It’s something bracingly captured by McEwen, who plays her as someone in a perpetual state of fight-or-flight.

McDormand carves out a little space for anger, though underplaying her performance so early on gives her further to leap when Lady Macbeth must succumb to her eventual madness. But, if anything, it only adds to the terrible weight of inevitability that hovers over Coen’s film.

It’s hard not to be drawn in. That’s the trick of Anatomy of a Fall. Sandra is a fascinating, one-woman puzzle box, thanks largely to the strength of Hüller’s performance.

This is, dare I say it, how fan service should be done. It’s far easier to overlook the usual nostalgic pandering when it’s taken a backseat to genuine creativity.

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

That Luhrmann trades in razzle-dazzle certainly helps: he capitalises on his subject’s fondness for garish sunglasses, giant sideburns, and an arsenal of jumpsuits filigreed with gems and boasting outlandish collars. The two men’s shared appetite for gilded excess and perpetual motion makes this tribute, even more than the biopic, seem like a kinship of strutting peacocks.

I Saw the TV Glow speaks so powerfully to the curse of denial that the words “there is still time”, scrubbed in chalk on a suburban street, can have an almost magical effect on the viewer.

It’s a closely focused character study, galvanised by the tremendous performances from Portman and Moore, which delves into areas more conventional dramas don’t go near.

That’s the wonderful thing about The Lost Daughter – it embraces thorniness. It treats it not as a personality flaw but as a badge of survival. Sadness is lanced through the heart of Gyllenhaal’s film, which she both adapted and directed, but it’s rich and luxurious in its texture.

Sentimental Value doesn’t argue that art heals all wounds, but that it’s sometimes the only recourse for honest expression.

The irony of being intimately connected while desperately lonely can be a hard one to digest. Yet director Mia Hansen-Løve prods at the concept with the same tenderness that she applies to all her films – each of them united by the pains and pleasures of interconnectivity.

Park has a galvanising kind of curiosity behind the lens, pairing here with cinematographer Kim Woo Hyung. There’s always a new, unexpected angle to either watch Man Su or see his point of view.

Eisenberg fills that anxious blank space with genuine questions seeking genuine answers, delivered by the comforting typewriter patter of his own voice, and a poignant, wrecking ball performance by Culkin.

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?

It preserves DreamWorks’s broad, direct appeals to sentimentality while weaving in a little more of the thematic maturity and subtlety you might see over at Ghibli or Ireland’s Cartoon Saloon.

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]

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]

Passing is as richly felt as it is carefully conceived.

What Lighton has achieved here is incredibly delicate, intuitive work, which never compromises on the story’s explicit nature or in the specificities of its subculture.

While the supporting cast are impeccable across the board, it’s really Blanchett and Fassbender’s film to command, with performances that drip with old-school star power.

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

Lovely, immaculate, and extremely faithful.

Spielberg’s motivation for The Fabelmans has little to do with cementing his own myth – it’s a more tender, more bittersweet journey towards the realisation that, though the camera never lies, what it shows us can be hard to swallow.

Torres, in her masterfully controlled performance, offers up all we could possibly require.

It’s a phenomenal performance from McAdams, subtle and gentle in its heartbreak.

Its opening monologue speaks of music’s ability to “pierce the veil between life and death”. Sinners, in all its beauty and horror, proves the same can be true of film.

When the real shock occurs, it doesn’t feel cosmic so much as deliberate manipulation by a filmmaker’s hand. The rhythm feels off.

Buckley, already a frontrunner for the Academy Award for Best Actress, lives up to all the chatter and more. Like Mescal, she’s well-placed to express Agnes’s particular grief.

Jacobs delicately toys with the boundaries between truth and artifice, between dishonesty and vulnerability. Our intimacy with these characters is earned by their own efforts to shed their steel-built defences. And it’s all the more rewarding for it.

In its earliest stages, Turning Red is bracingly different, and filled with an earnest warmth when it comes to themes of girlhood and the panic-inducing weirdness of the human body. That it becomes a loud and action-driven spectacle seems disappointingly inevitable for a Disney film.

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]

Vengeance Most Fowl sees Aardman return to their tried-and-tested formula. Yet, it’s also the source of the studio’s continuing brilliance – somehow, the familiar always feels new, and the craftwork never tires.

The emotions in Janet Planet creep up on you.

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

Arjona matches Powell’s passions, while Linklater, with a touch of his signature nonchalance, sprinkles in a few of Gary’s classroom musings on whether people can truly change.

Is Noé suddenly feeling self-reflective? Not to be contrarian for the sake of it, but I struggle to find anything gentle or humanistic in Vortex. That’s what’s so mesmerising about it. It is the ringing of the death knell, a memento mori in action, and an alienating if ultimately deeply humbling experience for its audience.

We’re constantly reminded that there are hundreds more stories weaving in and out of these streets, existing beyond Yas and Dom’s. This romance is special. But it also sort of isn’t. It’s exactly the kind of hope the most lovelorn in Rye Lane’s audience might be looking for.

Rose of Nevada is Jenkin’s most conventional narrative film so far, which is to say it’s still filled to the brim with dreams, visions, and ambiguities. It’s a Cornish The Great Gatsby, in its own mesmeric way, though its boat bearing us back ceaselessly into the past is a literal one.

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

It’s the most gripping sports movie in years.

It’s lovely, if a little practised. Yet, the real gutting here comes courtesy of the film’s miniature thesis on grief, and how privilege determines the channels of its pain.

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.

It’s a big risk to spend that much cash on an auteur-driven historical epic at a time when historical epics have largely fallen by the wayside. But what a beautiful risk it is. I call upon Odin: may The Northman make a billion dollars.

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]

Zach Cregger’s follow-up to the monstrous Airbnb hijinks of 2022’s Barbarian is easily as weird, wicked, and fun – what it’s not, however, is the chilly, nightmare headf**k we’ve been told it is.

Everything Everywhere All at Once exists in the outer wilds of the imagination, in the realm of lucid dreaming and liminal spaces. It bounces off familiar representations of altered states, whether it be The Matrix or the phantasmical films of Michel Gondry, while feeling entirely unclassifiable. It’s both proudly puerile, with a running joke about butt plugs, and breathlessly sincere about the daily toil of intergenerational trauma.

Hushed glances between estranged friends give way to maximalist drama and heavy-handed symbolism, as if the everyday horror of growing up needs literal horror to be cinematic.

To reduce the film simply to its outlook on race ignores both its content and its message, as some of its most rewarding elements follow Monk back to his family, for a funny, touching portrait of a man attempting to fine-tune his relationship with the world.

It’s a film that’s lighter, brighter, and far more straightforwardly comic in approach, trading its predecessor’s shadowy, creaky Massachusetts mansion for the Mamma Mia splendour of a private Greek island. Knives Out may have bottled a cultural moment, but Glass Onion seems built for longevity: it’s populist entertainment with its head screwed on right. And there’s plenty of value in that.

You will leave Dead Reckoning the same way you always do: wondering how Cruise could possibly outdo himself in the next one – until inevitably, he does.

Benediction isn’t a cradle-to-grave biopic, nor does it dramatise a single, pivotal event. It’s one man’s breathless search, careening back and forth through the chapters of his life in search of something concrete and true. It’s beautiful, but only in the way it tends to its tragedies with such care.

Hermanus is more than happy for his film to live in the shadows of Kurosawa’s. There’s still much to savour.

Nitram is a stark, difficult, but deeply reflective film that asks sincerely why we describe these crimes as incomprehensible at the very same time as we watch the same patterns unfold, again and again.

It’s rich thematic territory for the series, and slowly amps up the audience’s anticipation for the moment these two finally cross paths. When they do, it’s spectacular and audacious.

Wake Up Dead Man extends its usual punchline denouement with a poignant examination of what it means to be truly righteous in an unrighteous world.

Fastvold circumnavigates the lack of historical evidence of Lee’s life by building on what is known via compassionate imagination.

When the inevitable comes for our protagonist, The Mastermind delivers it as one of the smartest, wryest punchlines of the year.

Passages is smart and precise about other people’s messes. It’s a way to indulge in the most volatile parts of ourselves without ever feeling like we’re about to lose control.

While it’s impossible for any studio film to be truly subversive, this Mattel-approved comedy gets away with far more than you’d think was possible.

The future presented in The Beast, Bertrand Bonello’s mesmeric blend of sci-fi, horror and romance, feels frighteningly plausible.

Arnold’s Cow is grimy and unvarnished where it counts, laced with poeticism whenever the banal cruelty threatens to leave its audience numb.