It’s bleak at times, but there is a defiantly celebratory aspect to the film, which finds hope in the solidarity of Black women and dignity in Gia’s quiet stoicism.

Wilde expertly modulates the giddy highs and bittersweet lows of being a teenager, as demonstrated in the way the film’s house party climax crests and then crashes.

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]

Accompanied by a lithe, organic score by Dan Deacon, which weaves the rhythms of industry and technology into the music, the film is a mosaic portrait of the realities and repercussions of “the Chinese dream”.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig may not be his most elegant picture – it has pacing issues and a laboured final act – but it is without doubt Rasoulof’s most important film to date.

More film gris than film noir, it offers a biting moral conundrum at every turn. [17 Oct 2010, p.4]

It’s not just Nicholson’s performance that makes this film a masterpiece; it’s the fact that Forman was able to prevent that performance from capsizing the whole enterprise.

It’s an overpowering experience, awe-inspiringly photographed by Geoffrey Unsworth, groundbreakingly enhanced by Douglas Trumbull.

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.

The film’s empathetic approach allows Dixon to explore her decision, peeling back the layers of complexity that racism brings to the burden of sexual abuse. A must watch.

Perhaps a more potent political statement is the way that Christopher Scott’s choreography claims and owns every square inch of the block. Reclaim the streets (with fabulous shoes and glorious Latin dance routines)!

The film’s approach skirts around the actual science of the Kraffts’ work, but it does explore the psychology of a shared passion, of a couple who melted their boots together on smoking lava flows and danced by the craters in a confetti of volcanic bombs.

That a film with such an apparently familiar narrative can keep us this intrigued is a credit to the film-makers – particularly Patterson, from whom we should expect to hear much more in the future.

Widows is a sinewy treat that seamlessly intertwines close-up character studies, big-picture politics and audaciously reimagined heist-movie riffs.

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]

While Gosling plays everything close to his chest, it’s Foy who invites us into the unfolding drama with her wonderfully empathetic performance.

Strongly scripted and deliciously acted, full of riveting confrontations as the emotionally intense events unfold. Though a feline Elizabeth Taylor overplays her role, Paul Newman is excellent as her brooding husband, but it's Burl Ives as dying patriarch 'Big Daddy' who's the ultimate revelation. [13 Aug 2006, p.10]

It’s a fascinating and enraging film and a timely reminder of the courage of members of the feminist vanguard.

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

Henry Fonda brings an overwhelming sadness to his role as a New York nightclub musician who's almost ruined, and his wife (Vera Miles) driven insane, as the result of his wrongful arrest for armed robbery. An intriguing case of life imitating Hitchcock's art. [02 Nov 1997, p.9]

This is subtle, unshowy film-making that is entirely in the service of the screenplay and the performances – and what performances.

With this terrific feature debut, Anvari lifts the veil on his heroines’ hidden lives and leaves us all dreaming with our eyes wide open.

The Gershwin songs are magnificent, and the climactic ballet a tour de force that won the great Hungarian-born cameraman John Alton an Oscar.

This oppressive, atmospheric Austrian drama takes the kind of alpha female high achiever familiar from Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann, but undermines her with splinters of Hitchcockian paranoia.

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.

The sense of the watering hole as a haven for lost souls – not to mention the threat of gentrification to civic space – couldn’t be more vérité.

It’s a visually sumptuous riot of ideas, pitched somewhere between a playful musical, a divine comedy and a metaphysical drama.

It’s powerful and profoundly moving stuff.

Turning Red is a fizzing, squealing adolescent explosion of a movie that nails a fundamental truth about growing up.

The film’s narrow visual focus – much of the drama plays out in the face of police officer Asger Holm (Jakob Cedergren) – accentuates the crackling cleverness of a screenplay that allows us to unravel a mystery in real time.

It captures the wary, precarious nature of a community that relies financially on the same forces – the rampaging drug cartels – that also terrorise it. Huezo taps into the intense vibration between young female friends who treasure each other above all else.

A must watch.

Mel Brooks's send-up of 1930s horror movies is a mixed, always amiable affair, beautifully shot in monochrome with loving attention to detail. [12 Nov 2000, p.11]

A children's classic and among the best family movies of all time. [19 Feb 2006, p.2]

Frat boy humour is dressed up in an expensive, arthouse jacket.

Veteran Hathaway skilfully balances humour and action in a classic western handsomely photographed by Lucien Ballard, one of the great cinematographers, who came to this task immediately after The Wild Bunch. [14 Nov 1999, p.10]

There’s a strong element of Greek tragedy underpinning Rose Plays Julie.

Saint Frances expands the representation of women’s lives on screen in a way that is so casual you hardly notice it’s happening.

There are many things to enjoy here, not least the force of Cage’s performance as incensed lumberjack Red (and, it must be said, his scream).

This classic adaptation of Emily Bronte's novel is actually only the first half of the book and the Goldwyn Studio's notion of 19th-century Yorkshire is distinctly odd. But it's an intense, atmospheric work, and the performances are first rate. [11 Aug 2013]

Greene is terrific – her Rosie is a force of nature. When she cracks, briefly, under the strain, her voice is a raw blade cutting through the bubble of safety she has created but no longer believes in.

It’s a genuine modern masterpiece, which establishes Jenkin as one of the most arresting and intriguing British film-makers of his generation.

While not as satisfying as the director’s two previous films – a jarring ending knocks the picture off balance – this uneasy eco-parable is still very much worth your time.

Much of it borders on the inept and the embarrassing, and that goes for the title song sung by Matt Monro, the "singing bus-driver".

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

Rothwell uses the language of cinema – macro lens closeups, distortion, off-kilter framing and an evocative blend of sound design and score – to convey the autistic experience of the world.

The film’s message is a beautiful one: to integrate our real-life vulnerabilities with the persona we project is to become all the more powerful.

What Moonage Daydream does manage to do is to share some of the adventurous spirit of its subject – a chameleon who wasn’t afraid of falling flat on his face while reaching for the stars. If Bowie’s career teaches us anything, it’s that no one can laugh at you if you’ve already laughed at yourself. Certainly his capacity for balancing seriousness with self-deprecation (“No shit, Sherlock!”) remained one of Bowie’s most endearing traits.

BlacKkKlansman slips seamlessly from borderline-absurdist humour to all-too-real horror, conjuring an urgent blend of sociopolitical period satire and contemporary wake-up call.

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

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]

Wise achieved fame and riches with West Side Story and The Sound of Music, but he's most highly regarded for his splendid genre movies like this sci-fi classic, one of his numerous minor masterpieces.

Charting a razor-sharp course between the borders of horror, satire, psychodrama and lonely character study (Taxi Driver has been cited as an influence), Saint Maud is a taut, sinewy treat, blessed with an impressively fluid visual sensibility and boosted by two quite brilliant central performances.

While the film lacks the bravura flourishes that characterised Powell and Pressburger at their peak, it’s an engrossing celebration of two of British cinema’s most distinctive voices, and their creative harmony.

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

One for the buffs. [17 Feb 2008, p.3]

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

Dan Duryea (manic outlaw) and Shelley Winters (pioneer wife) are excellent, as is the photography by William Daniels. [22 Jul 2012, p.43]

Fascinatingly, in this world there are only fascists, making the film’s looming riot police feel like a real and relevant threat.

Throughout, Konchalovsky juxtaposes wide-ranging events with seemingly insignificant details to dramatic effect.

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

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

This portrayal of imprisonment may be authentically down to earth (Blackbeard’s rival Lass wants inmates to be managed “more rationally”, not as enslaved people but “customers”), but Night of the Kings proves most captivating in evoking the transformative power of the imagination.

There are charismatic figures fronting the movement, but the real power comes from each of the many shared, sad stories from women whose lives were affected by the law.

The meditative experience is heightened by Wenders’s innovative use of sound: indistinct whispers flutter like bats through the cavernous spaces.

Hit Man takes Powell’s amiable, supporting actor appeal (Top Gun: Maverick) and hones it to a star quality of such laser-beam intensity, you start to fear for your eyesight. It breathes fresh life into the played-out hitman genre – and contains what may be one of the top five winks in movie history.

There’s a despairing inevitability to the film’s incremental pacing – we feel every aching minute of the nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time. It’s not exactly fun, but it’s a relentlessly powerful piece of film-making.

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.

Richly detailed and superbly acted across the board, the film cast a scathing eye over the rigid social constraints that ensnare anyone who fails to conform.

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.

An engaging comedy thriller, one of the Master's rare straightforward whodunnits, producing real cinematic chemistry between Grace Kelly (her third and last Hitchcock film) and Cary Grant (his third and penultimate Hitchcock picture). [19 Oct 2014, p.48]

Inspired by the story of Bonnie and Clyde, superbly performed by Granger, O'Donnell and (as the evil gang leader) Howard De Silva. The opening scene shot from a helicopter was revolutionary in its day. [01 Jun 2014]

It’s a masterclass in using a stripped-back, minimal approach to gripping effect, evident throughout Ilker Çatak’s terrific, taut, Oscar-nominated drama.

It’s a tough watch – at the start, she suggests that we “close our eyes and take a deep breath if we need to” – but a brave and important one.

Small Things Like These casts a powerful spell.

This terrific, unexpectedly moving documentary portrait captures the man at work.

Built upon a wittily verbose script that delivers more laugh-out-loud lines than most of the year’s alleged comedies, Knives Out retains a beating human heart into which daggers are regularly plunged.

The slow-motion breakdown of a family is tracked by a lens that initially sought out intimacy and celebration, but finds itself, as the years pass, increasingly distanced from figures caught in its time capsule of a frame.

It's a beautiful, elaborately textured film, by some way Tarkovsky's most difficult, and not to be approached without first consulting some exegetical text. [15 Aug 2004, p.9]

The sex is like tennis: fierce, combative bouts in which there will always be a winner and a loser. And the tennis, ultimately, is like sex: an ecstatic consummation between two perfectly matched people at their glistening physical peak.

Though the film is teed up as a kind of John Wick-style revenge bender, Cage’s star persona is soon smartly subverted.

Time and again, scenes of back-breaking struggle end with the screen fading to black, as if the film itself is simply too tired to go on or hanging its head in empathetic shame.

What a joy is a documentary that neither talks down to its audience nor diminishes its subject.

There’s a bracingly astringent bleakness under its surface layer of melancholy humour; a biting, sharp edge that counters the occasional lurch towards sentimentality.

While the changing moods of BlacKkKlansman seemed bold and audacious, the warring elements of Da 5 Bloods appear bolted together rather than alchemically mixed.

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 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 an intense watch; at times infectiously hilarious, at others wrenchingly sad. For the film’s brief running time, there’s an emotional osmosis at play, in both sauna and cinema alike.

It’s a genuinely exciting piece of storytelling, a propulsive real-life quest for truth driven by ingenious tech-geeks and the disarming force of Navalny’s personality.

This elegant, imperishable romantic comedy is lighter in tone than the play and has a haunting score by Oscar Strauss (no kin to the waltz family).

The dilemma she presents is ethical: is it fair to ask someone to traumatise (or retraumatise) themselves for the sake of art? Rather boldly, it seems as though Decker is also asking the question of herself.

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.

Refreshingly, Farhadi is ambivalent towards his “hero”, and his control over the film’s tone is masterful; what begins as funny and almost farcical, soon shifts into something much sadder and more sobering.

While the Norns-of-fate narrative may contrive several reversals of fortune and sympathy, there’s little of the genuinely uncanny weirdness that made Eggers’s first two features such a treat. What madness lies herein is not of the north-northwest variety but more in keeping with the bonkers blockbuster spectacle of Darren Aronofsky’s Noah.

The narration, by LaKeith Stanfield, speaks on behalf of the photographer, who died in 1990. It’s through his remarkable pictures of South Africa and Black America, however, that we really hear his voice.

This underrated picture opens with a superbly staged bank robbery, is strikingly shot in Death Valley, and is dedicated to the great Harry Carey, who starred in Ford's 1919 version of this story and died in 1947 after appearing in Red River. [22 Aug 2004, p.63]