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.