Decades on, I found its loopy humour and skew-whiff child’s-eye observations reassuringly in place.

This Kelly is motivated by an oedipal complex and wears dresses to distract his opponents; The Babadook’s Essie Davis is equal parts fearsome and magnetic as his enterprising sex worker mother. More enjoyable still are the film’s corrupt policemen; the louche, stockinged, pipe-smoking Constable Fitzpatrick (Nicholas Hoult) and virile cartoon villain Sergeant O’Neil (Charlie Hunnam).

It might be staged, but it has a scrappy, fly-on-the-wall feel.

What’s interesting and unexpected is the film’s subtle acknowledgement of culturally specific generational trauma and displacement.

The more times I listen to Frozen II’s rousing anthem Into the Unknown, the more I’m convinced of its earworm quality. It’s as good (and maybe better) than the indelible Let It Go.

Ruffalo optioned the rights to Nathaniel Rich’s original article and has an executive producer credit on the film; clearly, he has a stake in the material. The actor is excellent as reluctant hero Bilott, muting his natural charisma to create a character who is both taciturn and generous, determined but socially ill at ease.

Both are terrific, but Binoche is the standout.

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.

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).

Some will be repelled, many will be bamboozled. But for those with an appetite for cinema that gets you in the gut, Ducournau delivers the goods.

The film is a utopian riff on the apocalyptic source material, a Technicolor reimagining flooded with light and optimism.

Superior western starring John Wayne (just out of hospital and boasting that he had beaten 'the Big C') as an honest gunslinger rallying his wayward brothers (Dean Martin, Earl Holliman, Michael Anderson) to regain the family ranch from a crooked land baron and avenge their mother's death. [30 Jul 2000, p.10]

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.

Ali is tremendous in a dual role that takes in everything from a beguiling meet-cute with his future wife (Naomie Harris) to a third act consumed by grief and doubt about whether he did the best thing for his family after all.

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.

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.

This thoughtful documentary about Arthur Ashe, the first African American man to win Wimbledon in 1975, understands that representation is only one step towards equality.

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.

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.

Cretton negotiates potential cliches such as flashback sequences and that hoariest of old chestnuts, the training montage, with a gravity-defying lightness of touch.

Jóhannsson teases the possibility of a monster, but waits to reveal his hand. When he does, there’s more than a touch of gallows humour. I laughed out loud at his audacity, and had nightmares later.

It dismantles the lofty ambitions of cinema as great, important and significant, a monument on the cultural landscape. Instead, it shows us art for ego’s sake, and it has a lot of wickedly spiteful fun doing so.

It’s heartwarming, inspirational stuff.

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

[A] fascinating, chilling film.

Allan Brown, a textile artist, speaks eloquently of the rich symbolism of taking something that is a source of pain, stripping it of its sting and, over the years, gradually reshaping and repurposing it into a thing of beauty.

The film’s elegant framing and unobtrusive directorial choices give space for Chastain and Redmayne to fully inhabit their characters in a picture that combines compassion and empathy with a sickening swell of almost unbearable tension.

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.

Mostly, it’s the fact that Kormákur makes some genuinely interesting choices. Rather than relying on staccato editing to build tension, he opts for long, fluid single shots.

Frequently, the film is enraging. Not because it shows the way in which dogma has the power to rewire the moral instincts of its devotees, but for the sombreness with which it acknowledges that the devotees allow this to happen.

The real revelations, however, lie in the depiction of Fox’s family life, most notably his marriage to actor Tracy Pollan, who first won his heart by calling him “a complete fucking asshole”, and whose unswerving love leaves him all but speechless when he’s asked what she means to him, save for one word: “Clarity”.

This is a giddily entertaining and celebratory drama that hints at the emotional bruises under the sparkly lurex leotard and false lashes.

O’Connor clearly isn’t afraid of rattling cages when approaching sacred texts. There’s something refreshingly untethered about the gusto with which she reimagines Emily, tossing aside the image of a shy, sickly recluse, replacing it with an antiheroine whose inability to fit in with the ordered world is a source of strength rather than weakness.

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]

It’s admirably understated film-making, shot in restrained black and white, with a tight aspect ratio that evokes the walls closing in around Donya during the long insomniac nights.

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.

Despite the background noise of police brutality, gang violence and financial peril, it is the altogether more intimate elements of Brother that drive the drama.

The drama may be down to earth, but that doesn’t stop the film – or indeed its protagonist – from dreaming big, and daring to look beyond the horizon.

It is a delightful film, both comic and touching, with a wonderfully camp performance from Edward Everett Horton as one of God's bureaucrats. [06 Sep 2009, p.30]

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]

Dominican Republic film-maker Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias’s gorgeous, restlessly creative hybrid fiction combines ethnographic documentary with improvised drama to explore a clash of two religious identities.

This lovely, compassionate documentary, which recently won the audience award at the Glasgow film festival, is more than a character study. It’s a portrait of a friendship between Smith and film-maker Lizzie MacKenzie.

An exciting, frightening movie, and a landmark of the genre, it stands up surprisingly well. [16 Jul 2006, p.20]

The wordless earth magic of the storytelling won’t be for everyone, but the film casts a beguiling spell.

It’s enjoyable stuff: a taut and crisply edited balance between humour and horror.

Nine Days is, in its subdued way, a profound and powerful commentary on life.

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

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.

Ultimately, One to One might not reveal a huge amount that’s new about Lennon, but it makes him feel bracingly alive in a way few other documentaries have managed.

Ultimately, it’s all about balance, a yin and yang of roots and identities, humour and pathos that comes together into a satisfying, bittersweet wedding banquet of a movie.

It’s a fun, silly premise, but while there’s no shortage of stoner humour, the film is deeper and considerably more satisfying than the drug-baked adolescent wisecracking might initially suggest.

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

All loose limbs and exposed emotional scar tissue, Davidson is persuasively raw in a performance that becomes increasingly textured and interesting as Scott finds a father figure in his mother’s ex-boyfriend. It’s his bruised charisma that compensates for a certain spaced-out lethargy in the storytelling and an overlong running time.

This thorough and informative documentary, from the team behind RBG, shines a light on a brilliant and uncompromising firebrand who paved the way for generations to come.

With stately restraint, Bellocchio manages to put the audience in an ever-tightening chokehold of tension and outrage.

Basholli understands that healing is possible, even if closure isn’t.

With great physical poise and precision, Wilson (who optioned and developed the source book) engages the audience on a visceral level, her deceptively low-key performance taking us deep inside her character’s dreams, desires and insecurities.

Peck’s film – which, with its themes of race and failures of American justice, has a kinship with Ava DuVernay’s 13th and Garrett Bradley’s Time – is both infuriating and also unexpectedly uplifting in its celebration of family unity.

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.

A film that knowingly lifts riffs from screwball capers and melancholy romcoms alike, writing love letters to the city of New York as it swirls from one upmarket fairytale locale to the next.

With footage as raw and dramatic as this, it’s a credit to composer Nainita Desai that her score remains restrained and understated throughout, emphasising subtler themes of endurance and empathy, while gesturing gently toward the possibility of hope – of love – even in the midst of tragedy.

Subtlety is not Phillips’s strong point. What he does have is an eye for a well-chosen location, an ear for a provocative line of dialogue and a finger on the pulse of very marketable, confrontational (if also “cynical”) entertainment. Add to this an incendiary central performance by Phoenix and Joker looks set to have the last laugh.

The intelligence and craft of the film-making, the way Fingscheidt guides us along the emotional journey of the central character, is absorbing.

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)!

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.

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.

This picture is more or less equal parts an indulgent, endurance-testing slog and a brilliantly audacious, fiercely political poke in the eye to conventional cinema. I loved every enraging minute of it.

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

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]

This lean Danish drama is not wholly original – David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom is an obvious comparison – but it’s a tense, suspenseful piece of storytelling and a showcase for a treacherously mercurial performance from Knudsen as the fearsome matriarch.

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.

There are three sides to every story in Ekwa Msangi’s vivid and carefully observed feature debut, and so she cleverly splits the film into thirds, replaying the action but changing the vantage point with each chapter.

Larraín’s film demonstrates a palate for mordant humour as refined as the count’s taste for blood.

It is piercingly insightful without ever labouring the point.

Subverting the original text’s point of view allows Whannell to privilege his female protagonist while continuing to explore the novel’s theme of untrammelled power.

Harding’s film proves movingly open-minded on the subject of the strange things isolation can do, but as a neighbour he might have been nosier. English reserve seems to have prevented further prying into the circumstances that created this English eccentric.

The film features dazzling action and a fantasy world that is realised with an almost tactile level of detail. Seek it out on a monster-size screen if at all possible.

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.'

As the enigmatic, tarot-inspired title suggests, questions remain, but Lentzou leaves us with the sense that this long-stalled relationship can finally move forward.

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.

Two of the most immediately likable actors in Hollywood, Theron and Rogen are a joy together.

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.

Like the unblinking closeup that concludes the deeply moving (and ultimately redemptive?) epilogue to Quo Vadis, Aida?, Žbanić’s powerful and personal film keeps its eyes wide open.

Combining news footage, interviews, blustering commentators and vox pops, the film serves as an accusatory finger pointed at public appetites and the press that fed them, and a cautionary tale.

The movie defines the violent, complex persona that would make Marvin a star, and he's cast alongside the irresistibly alluring Angie Dickinson.

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.

Boisterous fun, with Day’s performance – as the song goes – as busy as a fizzy sarsaparilla.

Familiarity doesn’t lessen the impact of this excellent documentary by Peter Middleton, directing solo here, having previously collaborated with James Spinney on the acclaimed Notes on Blindness.

Given the vested interest that the business has in the industry and its highly lucrative maverick son, it’s surprising and refreshing that High & Low is as nuanced and thought-provoking as it is.

It’s one of the lovely ironies of Akhavan’s bittersweet film that Cameron finds true friendship in a place dedicated to stamping it out, and there’s laugh-out-loud joy to be found in the acid-tongued interaction between these soulmates.

I found this a rewarding and entertaining drama, heavy with the weight of the past, yet buoyed up by the possibilities of the future.

Amid such strangeness, the central performances keep us grounded.

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.

While the actual plot is a little thin, this is a thrillingly evocative piece of film-making: it’s shot in colour rather than the black and white of Lyon’s photographs but there’s a weary, beer-stained grit to it all, like leathers that have wiped out across asphalt a few too many times.

The lovely, subtle work from Macdonald, as her character blossoms and her horizons broaden, gives the film a warmth and magnetism.

Though the references are familiar, it’s a fresh direction for the macho franchise.

While the film doesn’t attempt to explore every aspect and every romantic connection, it does delve satisfyingly deeply into her interior life, explored through her artistic output.

The film may not be flawless (it’s a touch textbooky at times) but Oyelowo is note-perfect.