Eerie images of a bloodied fingernail and long grass lit by amber floodlights signal Oakley’s sly sense of humour and eye for visual poetry.

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]

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

The atmosphere is stripped down and austere, allowing the songs to speak for themselves as they transport us from this world to the next.

The result may be a tad overlong and convolutedly overstuffed, but it made me laugh, cry and think – which is more than can be said for many a Marvel flick.

After Love constantly foregrounds duality, narratively and stylistically.

Astonishingly natural and engaging performances from young newcomers Eden Dambrine and Gustav De Waele lend heartfelt authenticity to a film that builds upon the promise of 2018’s Girl, confirming Dhont as a deft and empathetic chronicler of the tumultuous anguish and ecstasy of adolescence.

It’s a testament to the quality of writing, and to the action direction, that this never feels as corny or as crass as you might expect.

There’s a strong element of myth and magic at work here too, most notably in the recitation of an eerie dream about mating eels and mass infidelity, and in the sight of the body of a horse rotting over a period of years and returning to the earth. It all adds to the film’s haunting appeal.

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]

Arguably Price's finest single performance, certainly the one that called on all his varied talents as a comedian, aesthete, mellifluous speaker of verse, old-fashioned barnstormer and exponent of horror, is Douglas Hickox's classic black comedy Theatre of Blood, best of a string of horror pictures he made in Britain.

Pollard’s decision to eschew traditional talking heads in favour of voiceover interviews allows the archive to take centre stage.

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

The space that Mungiu leaves, both physically, with his immaculately composed wide shots, and temporally, in the unhurried plotting, allows for a satisfying complexity, and an eventual swerve into dreamlike symbolism.

Captured by a camera that frequently rattles against the sides of the hurtling ambulance, the Ochoas’ night-time escapades are electrifying and urgent, doused in strobing emergency lights and powered by adrenaline.

The story works on two levels, first as a prickly critique of the pressures facing Black creatives. But equally satisfying is its depiction of the abrasive, complicated dynamics in a high-achieving family.

We laugh, partly, from relief at escaping the unimaginable.

One of the year’s most hypnotic performances nestles inside this seemingly modest French-language coming-of-age drama.

Strickland’s work seems to exist in that strange space between the social-realist tragicomedy of Mike Leigh and the exotic kaleidoscopic imaginings of Nicolas Roeg or Ken Russell. It’s a mesmerising place to be, at once familiar yet otherworldly. Try it on for size.

Hats off, too, to choreographer and movement consultant Madeline Hollander for bringing a shiversome physicality to the shadow roles that recalls the creepiest moments from Hideo Nakata’s Ringu.

Independently produced on a small budget and directed by the New York-based Taiwanese moviemaker Ang Lee, The Wedding Banquet has the spontaneity, unpredictability and human warmth that are lacking in Sleepless In Seattle and The Fugitive. [26 Sep 1993, p.4]

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.

The boldness of this remarkable feature film debut resides in its reticence, and we experience the world through a special sensibility. [03 Apr 1994, p.5]

Though it leans on the genre beats of melodrama to occasionally clunky effect in order to mine the audience’s tears, it’s impressive how it metabolises these moments of charged emotion in order to make its wider points.

The primary tone is gentle and melancholic – an almost existential evocation of memory, and the longing to be made whole.

The real star? Johnson’s crisply mischievous screenplay, which crams in so many laughs you almost don’t notice the occasional plot holes.

The momentum really builds in the third act, but the film’s quieter moments of contemplation are its most striking.

There are two special moments in the film.

Behind it all is an endlessly saddening search for that transformative sacrament evoked by the film’s title – alluring yet elusive.

Alternately hilarious and spine-tingling, it recalls David Lynch’s Twin Peaks in its serious, penetrating sense of doom.

This deceptively gentle 50s-set film addresses weighty matters of life and death with a winning simplicity that is hard to resist.

Geirharðsdóttir commands the screen throughout, but she receives significant support from Jóhann Sigurðarson as Sveinbjörn, the gruffly avuncular sheep farmer who lives alone with his dog, Woman.

Law manages to be both utterly authentic and glossily untrustworthy.

Slick, thrilling and saturated with vivid hues and 60s can-do optimism, Le Mans ’66, James Mangold’s follow-up to Logan, is a precision-tooled machine of a movie.

The film retains a warm sense of humour about technology’s grip on society.

Yates (hired on the strength of his taut British crime flick Robbery) eschews fashionable camera gimmickry and facile psychiatry, and concentrates on telling a fast-paced story of decent San Francisco cop Steve McQueen doing his job. The set-pieces (the car chase, the airport shoot-out) are famous, but the film lives on through its tone of romantic realism. [23 Jan 2000, p.10]

The approach of director Matthew Dyas, who gives the archive material the appearance of found footage, adds to the mythic romance of Fiennes’s life story.

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.

Trey Edward Shults’s bombastic third feature crashes and recedes, leaving few revelations in its wake.

The film is understated rather than mawkish.

The latest film from horror director Ti West (The House of the Devil), about a porn movie shoot gone wrong, is ripe with playful winks and nudges.

From bucket-of-water tomfoolery to visually inventive biography and witty musicology, this really does have something for the girl with everything.

[A] tender observational documentary.

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]

This long, exciting second world war thriller (based on a true-life incident involving art conservationist Rose Valland, who appears briefly in its opening sequence) has particular present-day relevance in view of the mindless destruction of art works and ancient ruins by Islamic State and our responses to these iconoclastic barbarities.

While subjects as dark as separation and death may be faced head-on (a reading from Philip Larkin’s The Trees had me in tears), there’s a comedic quality that reminded me of Aardman’s sublime Creature Comforts animations – a joyous juxtaposition of quotidian, vérité-style dialogue and fancifully inventive visuals that hits a tragicomic sweet spot.

A minor classic. [02 Apr 2000, p.10]

Perhaps, in its polite and unassuming way, the film advocates not just a new way of looking, but also a new way of living.

Most modern American film-makers rarely get the chance to conjure frank sex scenes that serve an explicit narrative purpose, so it’s significant that Sachs has cited the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Belgian film-maker Chantal Akerman (along with fellow Europeans Maurice Pialat and Luchino Visconti) as inspirations for this French-German co-production.

The result is an A-list B-movie that juggles moments of breath-taking visual splendour with much on-the-nose speechifying about sins of the fathers and eternal isolation, spiced up with some action-packed silliness that entirely undercuts its more po-faced pretensions.

Its writer-director, John Sayles, is one of my favourite American film-makers, when he is pursuing tough social and historical subjects as in Matewan, Eight Men Out and City of Hope. He's that rare being, a political director, but I don't care for Sayles's excursions into lyricism (Passion Fish, for example), and this present exercise in stage Irishry. [11 Aug 1996, p.8]

Malick links the lonely labour of working the land with the thanklessness of sainthood, asking questions about devotion, tradition and individual acts of resistance. Mileage (and the film is three hours) will likely depend on your tolerance for the director’s signature poetic style.

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.

Rubika Shah’s smart, spirited feature debut is a whistle-stop tour of a DIY uprising.

Today, Browning’s sympathies are clear; if there are “freaks” on display here, they are not the versatile performers to whom the title seems to allude.

Bergman Island has a languid, meandering pace and a plot that is governed by chance encounters and discoveries.

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.

One of the discoveries of the year so far.

Jessie Buckley, who proved so electrifying in Michael Pearce’s psychological thriller Beast, lights up the screen as Rose-Lynn Harlan; a 23-year-old firebrand, fresh out of jail, wearing an electronic tag beneath white cowgirl boots.

The teasing, tricky structure adds intrigue to a fairly rudimentary horror premise and the cinematography – actor Giovanni Ribisi steps behind the camera as the DOP – is suitably strident, with reds and yellows screaming from the screen.

For all its decorous restraint, this is emotionally potent storytelling.

Not everything in this Leone-inspired Latino western hits its target, but the picture has a venomous bite, and a smart, slippery final scene that turns the lens back on to the act of film-making, questioning cinema’s role in (mis)shaping the way we view history.

[A] warm, funny and enjoyably rude debut.

Beautifully believable performances from Haarla and Borisov add emotional weight, rivalling the nuanced naturalistic charm of Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy.

The film is a goldmine of small but perfectly formed parts.

It’s an enjoyably grisly good time – a film that puts both power tools and Pomeranians to gleefully suspenseful use.

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

Rarely does a music documentary so vividly evoke both the artistic approach and the tricky personality of its subject.

Authentic, if unsurprising, look at the brutal, exploitative, drug-ridden world of top-level American football through the honest, if bleary, eyes of an over-the-hill pro, superbly played by Nick Nolte who attended several colleges on football scholarships. [02 Nov 2003, p.8]

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.

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.

This daringly satirical parable of magic and misogyny, superstition and social strictures confirms [Nyoni's] promise as a film-maker of fiercely independent vision, with a bright future ahead.

Adapted from the novel by the poet James Dickey (who plays the small, significant role of a sheriff in the moral coda to the journey), it's a riveting, resonant film, the male rape sequence as shocking as it was 35 years ago. [28 Oct 2007, p.20]

Eternity and a Day is a graceful, elegiac, humourless film, a poetical work that invites you to fall in with its meditative pace. [16 May 1999, p.6]

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

It’s not an easy watch, certainly – I cried more or less solidly through the last 30 minutes – but it’s an important one.

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.

Plante’s measured pacing and cool, dispassionate storytelling burrow into the skin of the character. It’s not a comfortable place in which to spend time.

Weighty themes are handled with a refreshing lightness of touch.

Although this is a wartime flagwaver and Flynn pulls out a grenade pin with his teeth, it is still a thoughtful and gritty depiction of platoon life and jungle warfare that uses actual combat footage shot by the US army signal corps. [07 Jul 2013, p.43]

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.

The 0-60 acceleration of disaster and melodrama is a little disconcerting, as is the tendency to self-sabotage demonstrated by Ava and her mother. But there’s a jagged emotional authenticity scored into the film like initials carved into a desk.

Architecton is a gorgeously photographed poetic reverie on the subject of stone and concrete, permanence and profligate waste.

This very enjoyable film explores his extensive body of work, much of it daringly ahead of its time; it was Paik who, long before the concept of the internet had taken root, first broached the idea of an electronic superhighway.

[A] remarkable documentary.

It’s a highly personal documentary: in addition to focusing on the mountains, Guzmán revisits his childhood home, now derelict, and explores his own archive footage of the 1973 coup d’état that prompted his relocation to France.

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

Central to the spirit of the film is Seydou, a gangly string bean with a smile that warms the screen; a teenager who is still enough of a child to believe that manhood means never being afraid. It’s a gorgeous, sensitive performance from Sarr.

As an account of a notable moment in French legal history, it’s undeniably compelling stuff.

Flux Gourmet makes us laugh because, on some bizarre level, we do actually believe in and care about these utterly preposterous characters and situations.

A crowd-pleasing, if slightly formulaic, documentary in the vein of Spellbound.

Immersive, disorienting, frightening: this experimental documentary takes its form from the landscape it explores.

Ultimately, it’s the film’s sheer strangeness – that peculiarly magical, lapsed-Catholic sensibility that runs throughout all of Del Toro’s most personal works – that makes this sing and fly.

There are moments when Dune: Part Two feels uncomfortably timely.

Unfortunately, it becomes clear that the film is all backdrop, a boomer nostalgia trip with little in the way of actual story.

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.

It’s possibly the most Russian thing ever created, and it’s most certainly not a soothing viewing experience. But there’s something grimly fascinating about it nonetheless.

This impressive first feature from Indian director Shuchi Talati burrows into the skin of its high-achieving, ambitious central character.