Like the musical itself, the film has timeless charm and a brave sense of adventure. Bravo!

Most essential is the central performance: Zengel’s oscillating wild joys and storming furies are painful to watch. A moment when she howls for her mother (always tantalisingly out of reach) brought me to tears.

[An] expertly wrought movie.

There’s such tenderness to the storytelling, such empathy and emotional depth, that it broadens the film’s potential audience from kids, who will respond to the cute characters and gentle wit, to adolescents and adults, who will recognise the angst and awkwardness of trying to function alone once again.

It's a film whose four parts cover the seasons from summer to spring but is truly a film for all seasons and all time.

Director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s feature debut intertwines music and politics in one of the best concert movies of all time.

Tonally, the film is mercurial, capturing the multiple realities of its young subjects who are both children and soldiers – the distressing, disorienting dichotomy at the centre of its eerie spell. With skill and sensitivity, Landes manages to capture both sides of their fractured world, evoking empathy without resort to pity.

Thrillingly played by a flawless ensemble cast who hit every note and harmonic resonance of Bong and co-writer Han Jin-won’s multitonal script, it’s a tragicomic masterclass that will get under your skin and eat away at your cinematic soul.

Hitchcock's second Hollywood movie is a hugely enjoyable espionage thriller. [05 Jan 1997, p.12]

Jane Fonda gives what remains the best performance of her career as a confident, self-aware call girl in a riveting thriller by a master of paranoid conspiracy cinema that explores feminism and the darker side of inner-city life. [10 Jun 2012, p.48]

The Deer Hunter is a rich and powerful picture that without a trace of patronisation or the slightest touch of cultural superiority, speaks eloquently for the inarticulate.

A minor masterpiece. [05 Nov 1995, p.11]

Matthau is at his curmudgeonly best and Ritchie (at the time considered one of Hollywood's best directors) brings his usual sharp eye for middle-Americana to bear on a script by Bill Lancaster, son of Burt. [24 Oct 2010, p.46]

Both a landmark and some sort of masterpiece.

Marvellous musical and a movie landmark, with the first joint appearance of Fred Astaire and Gingers Rogers as members of a band touring Latin America. [28 Sep 2003, p.9]

Carefully restored Powell and Pressburger minor masterpiece in glowing Technicolor, doing more than justice to Mary Webb's melodramatic sub-Hardy novel of late Victorian Shropshire. [05 Aug 2001, p.9]

Bogart and Bacall's exchanges are wittily playful, and the only femme fatale is a minor though crucial figure who destroys that perennial noir fall-guy, Elisha Cook Jr. But it's unmissable, irresistible.

The film introduced a crucial theme that was to run right through Truffaut's work: how we cope with death and how we preserve our memories of those who have died. I don't think Jeanne Moreau gave a better performance than as Catherine.

Marketed as a glossy weepie but in fact an outstanding piece of social criticism that goes to the root of postwar American life. [26 Sep 2010, p.56]

This, you feel, is really a story with roots in the nation, not just a fiction snatched out of the busy air. [16 Apr 1950, p.6]

Toshiro Mifune is electrifying as an unemployed samurai exploiting two embattled factions in an early nineteenth-century Japanese country town. [05 Nov 2000, p.11]

This undervalued comic masterpiece, scripted by the husband-and-wife team of Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, would be a fine film even if it didn't try to be funny, which it so successfully does. [06 May 2007, p.64]

Guaranteed to scare the pantalones off you.

Soderbergh’s film is rich with such small but perfectly judged flourishes, and it is this depth of character development, together with the crackling chemistry between McKellen and his co-star Michaela Coel, that makes this odd-couple art world tale so charmingly raffish.

In one of the best-looking, wittiest, most melodious and stylishly romantic musicals ever made, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance and feud from London to a dazzling art deco Venice. [09 Oct 2011, p.51]

DaCosta’s film is a macabre morality tale about the best and worst of human nature. It is utterly brutal, and one of the most compelling so far.

This first film version, a milestone work in every sense, helped, through its fast, wise-cracking dialogue and rapid editing, to change the sight and sound of the new talkies. Adolph Menjou as the suave, double-crossing editor Walter Burns and Pat O'Brien as his star reporter head a great cast. [17 Dec 2006, p.8]

As well as being a skilfully developed thriller and a study in moral dilemma, High and Low is a precise and devastating anatomy of postwar Japanese society. [31 Jan 1999, p.11]

Kathleen Byron is unforgettable as a sister who goes dangerously off the rails. A beautifully designed movie with Oscar-winning colour photography by Jack Cardiff. [27 Apr 2014, p.48]

It's funny, touching and beautifully paced with numerous examples of the celebrated "Lubitsch touch".

Visually unforgettable and possibly Tarkovsky's finest work.

Attractively staged, it is one of numerous versions of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic adventure and is most notable for an unforgettable, over-the-top performance by Robert Newton as an eye-rolling Long John Silver. [7 May 2006, p.2]

Polished melodrama of considerable psychological and social subtlety. [03 Feb 2013, p.43]

Somehow, for all the dollar-book Freud brought to bear on it, the picture comes up fresh, innocent and enchanting whenever you see it.

The movie has an epic sweep that anticipated and influenced the best gangster movies of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola of which it is fully the equal. [18 Aug 2010]

While Kahn offers no overt criticism, it’s hard not to question the sustainability of an art market that has evolved into a kind of prestige car park for vast quantities of money.

Marvellous Astaire-Rogers musical with the usual high-gloss production. [06 Jan 2013, p.38]

Expressionist masterpiece. [11 Nov 2007, p.20]

Farewell My Concubine is an exquisite film, subtle, well acted, deeply moving. It confirms Chen Kaige's position as a major figure on the world scene and Gu Changwei as one of the today's finest cinematographers. [09 Jan 1994]

A great actress at her sado-masochistic best in a noir melodrama worthy of her talents. [28 Mar 2001, p.9]

The movie's final parting sequence, where Arletty rides away in a coach and Barrault is inexorably swept in the opposite direction by a swirling crowd, is among the peaks of romantic cinema.

Brilliant study of hero-worship and bloody-minded individualism centering on doomed outsider Paul Newman, jailed on a minor charge, bullied by guards, and winning the respect of fellow convicts on a southern chain gang. Superb cast, unforgettable moments. [29 Nov 2009, p.29]

Stunning adaptation of Catholic author Flannery O'Connor's novel about religious obsession in America's Bible belt. Brad Dourif is outstanding as an agnostic GI returning to the deep south after the second world war and becoming involved with competing evangelists Harry Dean Stanton and Ned Beatty. [26 Sep 2010, p.59]

An excellent 1954 John Wayne Western, in which he plays a cavalry scout with Indian sympathies fighting Apaches in New Mexico.

This French and English-language drama is a film about taking ownership over the end of life; about dying personally and, if necessary, selfishly.

The rather on-the-nose storytelling grows increasingly complex and interesting the further that the protagonist ventures into morally ambiguous territory.

This female-led triptych of stories, with its deft, empathetic camerawork and intimate, intricately crafted character sketches, is a minor masterpiece in its own right.

Talbot’s film is not perfect. A scene set to Joni Mitchell’s Blue makes its point awkwardly, and the narrative, like its characters, is prone to meandering. Yet as a film about place and personal mythology, it’s hugely moving.

It’s a heightened caricature, certainly, but there are uncomfortable truths underpinning the surreal excesses.

Woody and Buzz et al are still wonderful creations, and time spent in their company is rarely wasted. But riffs about new owner Bonnie starting kindergarten and once-favoured toys getting left in the cupboard smack of old ground being retrodden.

Writer-director Paul Andrew Williams is a furiously visceral force behind the camera. His knuckleduster direction goes beyond mere muscularity and takes on the daunting persuasive power of a mob enforcer; his storytelling is both thrilling and utterly terrifying.

The slow creep of the camera mirrors the incremental build in pressure; this is the kind of tension that feels like a tightening chokehold on the audience.

Both the film and its cast of charismatic, dreadlocked old-timers are loaded with an easy charm that is as heady as anything that gets smoked during the course of the recording sessions.

It’s a credit to Feldstein that the wobbliness of her Wolverhampton accent never comes between us and her character. Instead, we simply get on board with her adventures, accepting her for what she is – however odd that may sometimes sound.

[A] tender observational documentary.

Goth is riotously entertaining throughout, but two specific scenes, in both of which the camera rests solely on her face for an extended shot, capture the full force of her unnerving talent.

Set pieces . . . are thrilling and judiciously spaced. The performances Clooney draws out are even better.

This is a triumph-of-the-human-spirit story as dramatic as the most finely wrought melodrama, with flashes of vintage newsreels reminding us that it is all “real”.

Blending melancholy wistfulness with unruly energy and piercing humour, it’s a down-to-earth tale of love and death, boosted by a brilliantly believable central performance and elevated by fantastical moments of hallucinogenic horror and ecstatic joy.

The result is a technically astonishing mixture of optimistic Stalinist kitsch, agitprop and the epic Soviet style of the Twenties.

What becomes clear from the film, which vividly details the cultural backdrop as well as Goldin’s work, is that fear has never been part of Goldin’s vocabulary, either creatively or personally.

At the centre of it all is Kidman, bringing an impressive physicality to her performance that says more about Erin than words ever could. We learn so much from simply watching her walk, her gait combining an air of stroppiness with an overriding sense of being weighed down or crushed, like a packhorse hobbled by years of abuse. It’s a terrific turn that (like the rest of the movie) reminds us that awards often offer little indication of what’s really worth watching in cinemas.

The latest film from the acclaimed writer-director Pema Tseden casts a typically wry eye over the collision between modernity and tradition in 1980s Tibet.

This film understands that, irrespective of where your parents were born, or what part of the world they raised you in, if you grew up in the late 00s, you grew up primarily online.

For me, the moment where it all came together was during Blunt’s haunting rendition of The Place Where Lost Things Go, a heartbreaking lullaby that has something of the spine-tingling melancholy charm of Feed the Birds. Watching this sequence, I noticed I had started crying, and realised that I was safe – the movie’s spell was working and the magic was still here.

Like a big old glass of pub wine, it might not be particularly complex or sophisticated but, my goodness, it hits the spot.

Indecision and miscommunication, it turns out, are timeless. Sexiness less so, with Jones and Rizwan not quite able to summon the smouldering chemistry of Woodley and Turner.

What makes this particular adaptation, co-written by Bravo and Jeremy O Harris, sing is the fact that, while it winks at Twitter with a smattering of emojis, it’s the legitimacy of Zola’s voice, rather than the means of its dissemination, which is prioritised.

It’s bleak, certainly. But what makes this a distinctively Elliot film is not the relentless misfortune but the flashes of mordant humour to be found alongside Grace’s hoarded knick-knacks, and the care with which the director handles his damaged, cherished social outcasts.

Handsome, ponderous, politically toned-down treatment of Hemingway's passionately committed novel about an idealistic American (Gary Cooper) fighting with the anti-Franco loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. The casting of Cooper, Ingrid Bergman (his peasant lover) and Oscar-winning Katina Paxinou (gypsy guerrilla leader) couldn't be bettered. [25 May 2003, p.8]

There are thematic parallels with everything from The Lego Movie to The Matrix, but key to its appeal is an unabashed sweetness and goofy enthusiasm that proves irresistible.

Right now, Villeneuve is riding the sinewy worm of Herbert’s sacred text with aplomb.

Ali & Ava is a vibrant work that uses the transcendent power of song to turn a streetwise tale into a diegetic musical, with genuinely surprising results.

There’s something about the macabre sensuality and mossy, crepuscular gloom of this retelling of the vampire legend that leaves a mark on the audience. It’s not so much a viewing experience as a kind of haunting.

Superior mythic adventure yarn about the search for the Golden Fleece, nicely scripted by the late Beverly Cross (playwright and second husband of Maggie Smith), with pleasantly frightening monsters by the Hollywood-trained, London-based Ray Harryhausen (1920-2013). [13 Apr 2014, p.45]

It asks pertinent questions about loneliness and a world in which algorithms can know us better than our human partners ever will.

It’s a riotously entertaining candy-coloured feminist fable that manages simultaneously to celebrate, satirise and deconstruct its happy-plastic subject. Audiences will be delighted. Mattel should be ecstatic.

Eye-popping is one way to describe the prolific Japanese director’s 103rd film, a cheerfully pulpy Tokyo-set noir.

As for Law – sporting a bristling moustache and some girth that evoke the weariness that Husk must fight in himself – he gives a sometimes warm, sometimes commandingly irascible performance that shows this actor moving confidently into middle-career authority. He and Hoult’s icy-eyed adversary combine to somewhat mythical resonance; a wrestle-with-the-demon duo that actually fits the political context to pointed effect.

Not surprisingly given Kuras’s background as a cinematographer, Lee is largely visually driven.

[An] impressive and wrenchingly sad documentary.

Perhaps more radical than the censor-bating, though, is the fact that My Favourite Cake trains its lens on lonely, ordinary older people – a demographic all too frequently invisible to film-makers the world over. A rare delight.

A self-consciously nostalgic piece, with Oscar-winning music, immaculate detail, and made while soldiers were dying in Vietnam. [05 Aug 2007, p.8]

It’s tender, thoughtful film-making from Finnish director Mikko Mäkelä, exploring the bond between two men separated by generations but joined by literature and love.

It’s a fascinating story that starts as an affable, strange-but-true tall tale but ends in a decidedly minor key.

A haunting allegorical tale, Aniara warns of humanity hurtling in the wrong direction and realising too late that there is no turning back.

Certainly the performances by Léa Seydoux (already an important screen presence) and newcomer Adèle Exarchopoulos are extraordinary. Their portrayal of a blossoming, fragmenting relationship is shot through with genuine grace and conviction even when the film itself descends into indulgence.

Control director Anton Corbijn’s first documentary, Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis), is a fascinating and suitably maverick snapshot of a richly creative moment in music history, told through a couple of disreputable hippies who designed some of the most iconic album covers of all time.

Peng’s performance is physically rather than verbally expressive – he has barely more lines of dialogue than the dog – but Lang’s arc of redemption is explored with heart and humour.

Essential viewing.

This feature debut from the Sydney-based writer and director Samuel Van Grinsven may tackle familiar material – gay coming-of-age stories are hardly uncommon – but it does so with a lustre and style that marks Van Grinsven out as a name to watch. Perhaps even more notable is Leach, a silky, feline presence who owns every moment that he’s on screen.

Demoustier so supercharges her performance with charisma, she almost seems to sparkle.

It’s powerfully affecting fare; elegiac, evocative and profoundly cinematic.

Tyrone Power is outstanding in the most demanding role of his career as a con man who emerges from the fairground world to exploit the credulous rich as a mind-reader and descends to depths he's never dreamed of as a pre-avian flu carnival 'geek', biting off the heads of live chickens in exchange for alcohol. [04 Dec 2005, p.14]

Yella Rottlander is unforgettable as Alice. [06 Jan 2008, p.16]

Tarik Saleh’s political saga turns progressively knottier and more claustrophobic, almost to a fault. But it’s also horribly tense, richly textured and showcases a terrific supporting performance from Fares as the tale’s shadowy Thomas Cromwell figure.

This intimate observational documentary explores poverty in Sicily from two different vantage points, drawing poetic connections between lives that don’t appear to touch.

There’s a languid kind of magic to Koberidze’s approach, which, with its enchanting score, digressive montages and sparse dialogue, has roots in silent cinema but also feels refreshingly and genuinely original.