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]