Moore’s subtle, empathetic work elevates what could be dismissed as a small-scale, even banal story.

This is immensely enjoyable stuff.

A haunting study of middle-class paranoia scripted by seasoned horror author Richard Matheson, it established Spielberg in Europe as a name to be reckoned with before he'd been heard of in the States. [03 Oct 2004, p.83]

Everything about Nil By Mouth rings true. [12 Oct 1997, p.10]

The performances, so thickly layered with charm and artifice that it’s hard to know what and who is real and what isn’t, are first-rate. It’s a pacy and enjoyable movie.

By encouraging a merry chaos of overlapping personalities and performances – restructuring the timeline into a multilayered playground where the child and adult stories interact – and subtly foregrounding existing themes of female fulfilment and the economics of creativity, Gerwig creates something that is true to its roots and bracingly current.

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.

This is a stylish and satisfying prequel that elegantly integrates Sam’s poet’s sensibility into the storytelling.

First-rate blockbuster preaching an anti-war message but laying on grand battle sequences as it recreates, coherently and convincingly, Operation Market Garden, the Allied Forces' airborne assault on Arnhem in 1944 that was intended to end the Second World War by Christmas. [19 Nov 2006, p.2]

Powered by a surging, impatient energy and a bracing undercurrent of spite, Ramin Bahrani’s version of Aravind Adiga’s 2008 Booker prize-winning novel is one of the more successful literary adaptations of recent years.

The child’s perspective on the story means that the film is unquestioning when it comes to the sources of the psychic powers, neatly sidestepping the need for exposition. In a child’s mind, magic is real, black magic painfully so.

Top Gun: Maverick offers exactly the kind of air-punching spectacle that reminds people why a trip to the cinema beats staying at home and watching Netflix.

Schrader’s sensitive, unshowy approach to the directing choices is a smart decision; this is a film that is respectful of and in service to the stories of the women.

It’s dazzling, baffling and staggeringly ambitious.

For all the genre nods, this remains very much its own movie – a film that isn’t afraid to talk to its core audience, even while giving them the heebie-jeebies.

This slow-burning drama, which won one of the top prizes at Sundance earlier this year, elegantly balances a spark of hope against a slowly rising tide of dread.

Fans will eat it up (with relish and fries); older kids will adore the oddball humour. And even cinemagoers who have never seen an episode of the TV series (me, for example) are likely to find much to amuse them, provided they have a tolerance for extreme silliness.

Regular horror ingredients are all mixed up into something truly terrifying. [17 Dec 2006, p.8]

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

A beguiling, if slightly convoluted, fantasy.

The magnetic Scicluna is a Maltese fisherman in real life, and part of a cast predominantly made up of non-professional actors. His performance is impressively complex.

The words are so piercing and acute that we hardly need the stirring score that swirls in the background.

It’s the eerie mystery of sadness that rings most clearly through Nikou’s film, a meditation on the construction of personality that, like all the best ghost stories, combines wistful melancholia with a hint of wish-fulfilment, of lost souls who, in forgetting, are trying to remember.

While the film defies neat genre classification, it has elements of physical horror – like a mating between the mind of David Cronenberg and something that crawled out of a compost heap.

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.

What differentiates Sendijarević’s film, however, is the hot-blooded current of feminine lust that runs through it. Zorić’s Alma stomps, pouts and scowls her way through the film, aware of her sexual power and unafraid to use it to her advantage.

Rock’s wildest years – both the man and the music – swirl together into a psychedelic maelstrom of pills, pictures and brilliantly creative swearing.

Ozon first read Chambers’s novel as a teenager and his adaptation blends the prickly joy of that first encounter with the stylistic confidence of a film-maker revisiting an old flame.

Coppola evokes the aching loneliness and isolation experienced by women who simultaneously have everything and nothing.

I can think of few other films that get into the skin of new motherhood, with its formless terrors and fierce, furious primal love, as inventively and effectively as this one.

Conventional, highly efficient patriotic war drama, made during the Korean War but set in the Pacific during the Second World War. John Wayne as a martinet US Marine Crops squadron leader is confronted by Robert Ryan as a compassionate second-in-command, and the flying sequences are as outstanding as one might expect from a movie produced by ace aviator Howard Hughes. [08 Dec 2002, p.8]

The film is shrewd on male friendship, suggesting that a lot of men are vulnerable and crave intimacy, but are often too poor at communicating to truly reach for it.

An apt title indeed, as the film's extreme violence always explodes from nowhere, with the resulting sparks carrying far and wide. Yet the narrative moves at a contemplative pace, allowing each scene to gently yield its secrets. [26 Jul 1998, p.8]

Shot on film, using vintage equipment, the picture has a scrappy, tactile quality, its ghostly black-and-white images scratched and scorched. Meanwhile, Neil Hannon’s smartly used score envisages a chilling authoritarian future for pop music.

It’s this – the wry humour provided by the long-suffering Bonnie; the lovely lived-in quality of the friendship – rather than the lengthy swimming sequences and a few slightly unwieldy flashbacks that gives the film its crowd-pleasing appeal.

While some sections of the globe-trotting plot strike a baggy, backward-looking note, it’s the smaller moments that make this fly, particularly when the film uses fantasy to turn horribly real everyday harassments into moments of air-punching triumph.

It’s an absolute joy.

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.

Küppenheim is terrific, her precision and restraint in the role drawing us into the story.

Surface similarities to Groundhog Day are relegated to background noise, thanks to the crisp writing and the nihilistic bite of the humour.

The result is goofily charming and a rare, age-appropriate children’s film in which the adults are silly and the kids, especially the girls, are smart.

Classic rock needle drops and showy, snaking, single-shot action sequences – both GOTG trademarks – abound in a picture that balances a slightly overstuffed storyline with mischief, humour and the biggest of hearts.

Von Horn understands the gap between Sylwia’s authenticity online – mediated through the safety of a screen – and the intimacy her followers feel entitled to in real life.

It’s a terrific little film that combines the earthy humour and honesty of a Shane Meadows movie with an unexpected expressionistic section – flooded with colour – that channels the boys’ joyful dancefloor abandon.

This is full-blooded (and arrestingly tactile) fare, which gets right under the skin of its central character, in appropriately unruly and unflinching fashion.

At a time when the press is routinely denigrated, an account of investigative journalism as a force for good makes for inspiring viewing.

While the symbolism can land a little heavily at times, Bessa’s fiercely committed performance and the palpable anger in the storytelling are the picture’s driving force.

It’s a bold, arresting debut from writer-director Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk, who balances muscular, crime-thriller tropes against moments of striking, unsettling beauty, tension and urgency against knottily complex character development. Highly recommended.

It’s a savagely funny showcase for Cage at his very best. But the picture sours somewhat in a third act that departs from crisp character study to target cancel culture, losing some of its biting humour in the process.

Writer-director Evan Morgan’s deft screenplay balances a taut crime story against a textured character study.

This is not cinema that leaves you feeling good about things. Nor does it tread a familiar path. But I’m Thinking of Ending Things is one of the most daringly unexpected films of the year, a sinewy, unsettling psychological horror, saturated with a squirming dream logic that tips over into the domain of nightmares.

A collision is inevitable, but even so, the film’s climax is unexpectedly devastating.

A quite brilliant look at the hypocrisy and conformity of small-town life in the Midwest and those who challenge it.

Fascinating, confounding and continually surprising.

It’s a gentle piece of Arabic-language storytelling, one that softly, slowly enfolds the audience rather than propels them on a journey.

The Substance not only offers a female perspective on women’s bodies, but also argues that things only start to get properly messy once fertility is a dim memory.

Despite the inherent silliness, the actors play it straight. There’s an earnestness to Rylance’s performance, which encourages us to find inspiration in the underdog.

Deftly written, directed with a light hand and acted with honesty and heart, the picture captures moments of acute sadness without ever sinking into sentimentality.

Stewart is low key and likable, creating real emotional stakes and strategically using her signature shoulders-down shuffle. A pity, then, that she and Davis don’t quite have the romcom chemistry needed to secure the film’s place in the Christmas movie canon.

A delicate gem of a film, with a powerhouse turn from Franky.

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.

The result will leave you with a smile on your face, a spring in your step and (hopefully) a renewed confidence in next-wave British film-making.

Akinola (best known to some for his work on Doctor Who) is clearly completely in tune with the director, getting under the skin of his story and striking just the right note of internalised anguish and ecstasy that defines this tender, heartfelt and clearly very personal movie.

A combination of tender details – the way Guo carefully picks the fibres from his girlfriend’s skin after a gruelling shift at the factory – and a strikingly surreal approach to a scene in which Lianqing prostitutes herself for the first time makes this unflinching picture a notable addition to the ever-swelling list of films that deal with migration.

Sukhitashvili’s subtle performance brings interiority to a character who might otherwise be defined entirely by her suffering.

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]

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’s generous documentary is a fitting tribute to the late, great author.

The lip-smacking, acid drops of malice in the latest film from Paul Feig (Bridesmaids) makes this unexpectedly cruel comedy as intoxicating as the mid-afternoon martinis swilled by the two central characters.

Deft editing and unexpectedly affecting music choices make for an engaging portrait of the kind of impassioned and dedicated politician who seems in short supply right now.

Crawford is brilliant and bitter as a soon-to-be divorced dad unable to accept his fate.

Hardy is terrific, his face crowded with conflicting emotions that Luke doesn’t have the words to express.

The ensemble cast electrifies Powers’s dialogue, jockeying between black power and integration, activism and commerce, spiritual clarity, pork chops and sex.

What it all adds up to, other than a moment-by-moment experiential overload, is uncertain.

The power of Sebastian Meise’s subdued prison drama comes not from big, brash moments but from subtle details. Sound design that hints at the aching emptiness outside the frame and beyond the walls.

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]

Strong allegorical undertones reflecting the Cold War, then at its height, and an unforgettable score by Jerome Moross. [31 Dec 2006, p.12]

After Love constantly foregrounds duality, narratively and stylistically.

It plays out at the tipping point at which living with loneliness starts to feel easier than tackling the daunting prospect of conversation with a stranger.

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.

It’s a comedy, certainly, but one that leans into the discomfort of the polar differences between the couple.

Temple has always used archive material playfully; here, it’s particularly riotous, like a chaotic patchwork quilt tacked together by one of Shane’s drunk aunties.

While the 2022 expedition doesn’t match the nail-biting life-or-death stakes of the original venture, it’s compellingly captured through the eyes of a likable cast of eccentric world experts.

One of the aspects that makes this an unexpectedly satisfying piece of storytelling (aside from the obvious improvements in the joke quality) is the way that the film digs into the structure of Autobot society.

There is an elegant, even-handed character study buried within Clint Eastwood’s crisp procedural.

This is film-making as role-playing, which has immersed itself, method-style, in a past era and aesthetic, which wears its luminous black-and-white cinematography like a costume.

As a portrait of friendship, viewed through the compound eye of a mutant insect, it is multidimensional and rather moving.

There are two epic set pieces (a slave revolt and a peasant fire festival), numerous battles (including an extended fight with lances between two samurai) and endless felicitously staged scenes. In his first widescreen picture, Kurosawa revelled in a shape disparaged at the time, and stuck with it thereafter. [24 Mar 2002, p.9]

It’s that sense of beauty – of the possibility of redemption – that prevents Les Misérables from being crushed by the grim weight of the world it depicts. It’s a world in which Ly grew up, and his love of these neighbourhoods, in all their hardscrabble glory, is tangible.

The friendship that grows between the two is a splinter of hope in an otherwise increasingly bleak situation.

It’s a terrifically tactile film, full of the kind of deliciously observed detail that lingers in the mind long after the movie has finished.

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.

Bird finds beauty and wonder in every frame (one that Arnold has slyly shaped to evoke the format and curved corners of a smartphone screen, echoing the way Bailey captures private moments of visual poetry). The film celebrates rather than judges its erratic and occasionally challenging characters It’s the closest Andrea Arnold has come to a feelgood flick.

Malaysian-born writer-director Yen Tan shoots stylishly in black and white 16mm, each frame a tasteful photograph. What’s most skilful, though, is the way he succeeds in complicating archetypes.

The latest feature from the Bristol-based animation studio is an absolute delight.

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

It all adds up to a very modern drama about age-old anxieties: the fear of ageing and death; the desire for intimacy and reassurance; the allure of artifice and deceit.