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

It’s one of the most exquisitely realised films of the year.

It's a classic with special effects that could scarcely be improved on. [18 Apr 2004, p.13]

It’s dazzling, baffling and staggeringly ambitious.

As far as the plot is concerned, almost nothing happens, and yet Andreas Fontana’s sinewy debut teems with unseen threat. He crafts an atmosphere of grubbiness despite all the polished surfaces.

About Dry Grasses tiptoes around the edge of being suffocatingly verbose, and there are scenes that could stand a tighter edit. Still, the meaty, novelistic writing and exceptional quality of the performances make for a rich and engrossing viewing experience.

Great turns don’t always amount to a great picture, and the unfortunate consequence of this no-frills directing approach is that the film-making can feel rather flat and functional – a display cabinet for the acting rather than a vital piece of storytelling.

Its Oscar-bait earworm tune may be entitled Shallow, but the film itself is as deep and resonant as Bradley Cooper’s drawl, and as bright as Lady Gaga’s screen future.

For all its apparent structural complexities, The Father is not quite as mysterious as its creators would have us believe.

It’s Cruz who sets the tone, with a performance that radiates warmth and is refreshingly forgiving of her character’s flaws. She has never been better.

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

It’s an alchemic combination, this continuing collaboration between Lanthimos and Stone . . . together they unleash in each other an extra level of uninhibited artistic daring that, one suspects, must be rooted in an uncommon degree of mutual trust.

So measured is the pacing, so sinuous the timeline, so understated the subtle ache of the performances that you don’t immediately realise that Wang Xiaoshuai’s exquisite three-hour drama has been performing the emotional equivalent of open-heart surgery on the audience since pretty much the first scene.

A celebration of human endeavour, and of a rare moment of global unity.

Full of humanity, humour and moments of pathos. [08 Jul 2012, p.45]

The result is another mesmerising and wholly immersive experience from a film-maker whose love of the medium of cinema – and fierce compassion for Baldwin’s finely drawn characters – shines through every frame.

Tonally, Can You Ever Forgive Me? cuts an elegant path between humour and pathos.

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]

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]

As the title suggests, the result is a tragicomic swirl of heartbreak and joy, slipping dexterously between riotous laughter and piercing sadness. At its heart is Banderas giving the performance of a lifetime in a role that, following his Cannes triumph, surely demands Oscar recognition.

Park’s portrayal of Freddie never misses a beat – an astonishing transformative feat for a first-time actor who seems to arrive on screen as a fully formed, multifaceted performer, inhabiting the film’s kaleidoscopic central character.

A more conventional director might have chosen to focus on their most famous member, Reed, but Haynes smartly structures the film as a group show, giving space to the women in the ensemble.

Despite the poisons in the air, the brothers continue their work, mending broken creatures, one by one.

Genre convention means it’s a foregone conclusion that this mission is not, in fact, “impossible”, but director Christopher McQuarrie cleverly controls the ticking clock quality that makes these films so much fun.

At times T for tedious and P for pretentious, the film remains essential viewing for admirers of the great cineaste and showman.

It's a beguiling, slightly indulgent work, featuring a film-within-a-film starring Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina. [28 Nov 2010, p.34]

The theatrical origins of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom weigh heavy on this film, directed with a stagey air by Tony award winner George C Wolfe.

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.

As is customary, absurdist humour, global history and abject horror sit side by side, all equally weighted and witnessed.

There’s a hardscrabble sense of ordinary ageing folk making the best of a bad deal in often desolate and unforgiving circumstances. Yet whatever hardships they face, it’s the air of community and self-determination that rings throughout Zhao’s empathic film.

It’s an end-of-friendship breakup movie that swings between the hilarious, the horrifying and the heartbreaking in magnificent fashion.

Nyoni’s Zambia-set film, using the Bemba language and English, deftly juggles humour with pathos, domestic drama with surreal fantasy flourishes. It’s dizzyingly creative and rather special.

One of the best acted, most technically accomplished movies ever made in Britain with a great cast of British and Irish actors, though at times a trifle self-conscious in achieving its effects. [29 Aug 2010, p.50]

Inviolata is Italian for “unspoiled”, and the word could apply to its people as much as their straw-gold land.

There’s lots to love here, not least the animation itself, which uses split screens, Ben-Day dots and onomatopoeic text that mimic the tactile experience of reading physical comics – panels, hatching and primary colours intact and ready to leap off the page.

A supremely accomplished debut feature from writer-director Georgia Oakley, Blue Jean captures a specific moment in British history with almost uncanny accuracy.

The film has a cold, abstract beauty.

An enduring minor masterpiece with an amazing climax featuring a boat caught in a treacherous whirlpool. [05 Feb 2012, p.45]

A landmark in the history of the crime movie, Point Blank's expressive feeling for landscape and architecture anticipates Michael Mann's Heat.

It is piercingly insightful without ever labouring the point.

At times, it feels as though we’re watching something we’re not supposed to be seeing, such is the detail of the emotional degradation on show; in this sense, it’s impossible not to read it as something of a nihilistic suicide note.

Ultimately, one of the key pleasures of the picture is its uncertainty – the niggling doubts that remain, and the sense that a crucial piece of the puzzle is tantalisingly out of reach.

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

There’s not a frame of this rich, kaleidoscopically detailed animation that isn’t dazzling.

Beautifully photographed in black and white by Commander Joseph August, this moving picture has images and sequences that show Ford at his poetic and humanistic best. [13 Aug 2006, p.20]

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 shows how a cast of veteran actors (Richard Attenborough, Steve McQueen, James Garner et al), most with some military experience, can breathe life into conventional characters, and how excitement can be generated without endless explosions and special effects. [19 May 2002, 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.

For a movie about the undead, Japanese director Shin’ichirô Ueda’s horror comedy is certainly lively.

To call it horror seems reductive. With its shapeshifting disquiet, I Saw the TV Glow is too languidly weird, too unmoored from genre conventions to be neatly categorised. But there’s not a frame in Jane Schoenbrun’s suffocating second feature that isn’t drenched in dread and unease.

The performances, from Moore and in particular Portman, are sublime: both bracingly unsympathetic and wildly enjoyable.

Happening is a visceral, confronting experience.

Made at the height of the Vietnam war, this remarkable film presents the second world war on an epic scale while painting a warts-and-all portrait of the military genius General George Patton (George C Scott), part mystic, part mad martinet. [28 Sep 2014, p.47]

As always, Colman manages to express deep wellsprings of emotion with few words and fewer gestures – her face telegraphing great swathes of anguish beneath polite smiles and annoyed glances.

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.

Great acting, and a superb screenplay by Robert Towne, who re-united with Nicholson the following year on Polanski's Chinatown. [02 Apr 2006, p.10]

An immaculately cast and acted film that paints a warts-and-all portrait of Hollywood at its zenith. [22 Apr 2012, p.24]

[A] sensitive, frequently harrowing observational documentary.

Hansen-Løve hits a career high note, delivering a quietly thoughtful and ultimately life-affirming portrait of the strange interaction between loss and rebirth. It’s a miraculous balancing act that pretty much took my breath away.

It’s silkily enigmatic and unpredictable, and certainly unlike anything else you will see this year.

If the result sends viewers scuttling back to Armitage’s uniquely accessible version of the source text, then that would be marvellous indeed. But there is enough here that is dazzling and enthralling for Lowery’s movie to stand proudly as a grand work of poetry in its own right.

[An] expertly wrought movie.

It’s a wisp of a thing, clocking in at barely over an hour. But the agile poetry and formal playfulness of Mati Diop’s exquisite hybrid documentary belies the weight and wealth of ideas within.

Where Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner’s version comes into its own is in the moments where it dares to find its own distinct voice – nowhere more so than in placing Somewhere in the hands of Rita Moreno.

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

This one hits its stride somewhere in the middle, bounding confidently towards its hopeless, poetic conclusion.

Though it’s filmed like a romance, the moment feels captured, not staged.

What’s so invigorating is the way she gives each principle equal weighting, discussing her formal decisions, such as Cléo’s editing or the tracking shots that move right to left in 1985’s Vagabond, with the same intensity and enthusiasm as her more existential motivations (she describes her 1965 summer bummer classic Le Bonheur as “a beautiful summer peach with a worm inside”).

The script is dense, subtly shaped, and bristles with stylised, often witty hard-boiled dialogue and voice-over narration, eg: 'I never saw her in the daytime. We seemed to live by night. What was left of the day went away like a pack of cigarettes you smoke.'

It’s a teasing exploration of the cost of freedom and of the dualities of life.

It’s a beguiling drama that contrasts the mirage-like quality of hopes against the more tangible solidity of regrets. But while there’s a melancholy magic to it all, the spell is stretched rather thinly over the long running time.

It’s not surprising to learn that its writer and director, Lauren Hadaway, who based this film on her own experiences on a college rowing team, has a background in sound editing.

A triumph of true sentiment over lurking sentimentality starring John Wayne as an Irish-American boxer returning to Ireland in search of peace and a wife (Maureen O'Hara) and finding himself in the middle of a brawling, drinking, singing, timeless Oirish Neverland. [03 Oct 2010, p.47]

It’s sentimental stuff, certainly, but the picture’s unexpectedly dark humour outweighs any maudlin tendencies.

Under the party whoops and confetti cannons there’s a deceptively complex and layered portrait of female solidarity in the face of ingrained sexism, racism and general male shittiness.

This chilling, weirdly plausible tale centres on a New York dress designer (French star Simone Simon) obsessed with the notion that she's living under an ancient Serbian curse. It achieves its effects obliquely. [11 Dec 2005, p.123]

Shane is a beautiful, deceptively simple movie that takes on different meanings for each generation. [08 Oct 2000, p.10]

The film works as a collage of everyday moments that dovetail seamlessly between the sublime and the banal. Indeed in its most mesmerising scenes, the alchemy of duration and focus elevates these moments to something more profound.

The Taste of Things defies expectations. There is something refreshingly unconventional about its depiction of the tender, well-worn love between Eugénie and Dodin.

In Front of Your Face is a gentle pleasure and, as such, may not be a picture that will win new fans to the films of director Hong Sang-soo. But admirers of his distinctive style – long takes, zooms, social awkwardness, vast quantities of strong alcohol – will be beguiled by this bittersweet series of encounters.

Hall emphasises the moral grey area by shooting in black and white, an ingenious choice that allows her to light Clare as black or white.

No-nonsense beekeper Hatidze Muratova’s face is as weathered and craggy as the cliff face we see her scaling at the start of this gripping, Sundance-winning documentary.

Valadez’s expressionist images give texture to the abstract emotions of rage and pain.

This humourless, portentous, beautifully made and exquisitely acted movie won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes, though when the men in white coats came to take Josephson away, some sardonic observers thought they'd come for Tarkovsky. [12 Jan 2003, p.8]

This is an archetypal Anderson film: mannered, fussy, obsessively designed – normally irksome traits, but in this alchemic instance it’s an utterly delightful combination.

The dance is the picture’s climax, a glimpse of joy and optimism. But the film’s coda, shot three years later, shows the cost of prolonged separation. Hope is a spark that can be easily extinguished.

If you’re looking for a film that explains where the Spielbergian tropes you know and love came from, then The Fabelmans is for you.

From the intimate restraint of the early scenes, Delpero’s direction becomes more fractured and abrasive. It’s a remarkable work.

Visually unforgettable and possibly Tarkovsky's finest work.

The realisation that her husband is gone for good is a gradual process that plays out, largely without words, on Torres’s face, in a performance of extraordinary intelligence and emotional complexity.

The Eternal Memory is a restrained, respectful piece of film-making that takes its lead from its two subjects. It’s wrenchingly sad, but also a testament to the love that endures, even as Augusto increasingly struggles to recognise his wife.

Yet there are also moments of heart-stopping tenderness and beauty.

It is, at times, harrowing. The film doesn’t shy away from grief at its rawest, fear at its most paralysing.

With a smile that frays a little around the edges, and a peppy enthusiasm that can’t quite hide the doubts, McAdams wrings every last drop of pathos from her scenes, almost upstaging her screen daughter in the process.

Every bit as immersive as Victor Kossakovsky’s recent documentary Gunda, about a sow and her piglets, The Truffle Hunters serves as a timely reminder that the world does not turn to the industrialised rhythms of mankind alone, and that we lose track of its natural heartbeat at our peril.

It’s a credit to Stanfield that he manages to keep these complex contradictions alive throughout his performance, capturing perfectly the uneasy manner that O’Neal exhibited on camera, his eyes darting anxiously as he attempts to read his surroundings, his manner a mix of fearful, furtive and oddly forceful.

If it’s a love letter, it’s the kind tinged with the grasping anguish and stab of bitterness that comes from knowing that the object of affection is almost certainly eyeing up a new favourite.

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]