Eye-popping is one way to describe the prolific Japanese director’s 103rd film, a cheerfully pulpy Tokyo-set noir.

The sweet-natured Kirikou and the Sorceress, is a French animated movie drawing on a West African tale that has an authenticity The Lion King lacks.

You won't easily forget Seul Contre Tous and you won't rush to see it for a second time. [21 Mar 1999, p.6]

Watching the film for a second time, with prior knowledge of the revelations of its final act, Close’s performance seemed even more nuanced, as if each look now meant something different.

It springs restlessly between ideas and, while it doesn’t quite cohere into a neat central thesis, the film did leave me with both the means and the inclination to do some further thinking on the subject.

By the Stream is a wry comedy of manners that muses, in its unassuming way, on the creative act.

At moments, however, the pacing treads a fine line between stately and somnolent. What consistently mesmerises, however, is the lead performance by Krieps.

As for Baker and regular co-writer Chris Bergoch, they refrain from judging their characters, observing the world from Mikey’s maniacally self-serving point of view even as comedy turns to queasiness and worse.

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.

With its wide-eyed lack of cynicism and the crystalline delicacy of the animation, this is a heart-swellingly lovely work.

Historically important Hollywood expose of the grim conditions in America's mental institutions and an influential plea for more sympathetic treatment of the mentally sick. Olivia de Havilland is harrowingly good as a deranged, incarcerated middle-class housewife; British actor Leo Genn is convincing if a trifle glib as a pipe-smoking shrink. [18 Jul 1999, p.10]

Key to the success of the film is the editing, a pinballing assault of free association, claymation and gleeful profanity, which goes some way towards recreating what it must have been like to spend time inside Zappa’s head.

While not as showy as Sam Mendes’s sweeping, single-shot takes in 1917, this is remarkable, if harrowing, film-making. Moments of striking beauty – sunlight carved into exultant rays by skeletal winter trees – are almost as shocking and disquieting as the scenes of suffering.

A long, marvellously vulgar tribute to the circus world, the penultimate movie by the septuagenarian veteran, that brought him a sentimental 'best picture' Oscar after 40 years in the business. [05 Feb 2006, p.2]

On screen, the man play-acted the qualities of courage and resilience. Off it, he came to embody them too.

This is a film that examines both the past and the present day; that plots a path on the common ground between them.

The volcanically sweary dialogue doesn’t quite disguise the naivety of the feelgood trajectory, and the ending feels clunky, but this is a boisterous and disorderly charmer of a picture nonetheless.

Gibney struggles to psychologically penetrate his cold antihero.

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.

The film runs out of momentum, finding itself ensnared in a needlessly complicated web of intrigue and administrative shenanigans.

Mikhail Kalatozov's The Cranes Are Flying has superb lyrical photography and a heartbreaking performance by Tatyana Samojlova as a hospital worker who makes a bad marriage after hearing that her fiance has been killed in action. [28 Jan 2007, p.20]

While Kahn offers no overt criticism, it’s hard not to question the sustainability of an art market that has evolved into a kind of prestige car park for vast quantities of money.

It's performed by a non-professional cast, who all seem a little tense, and the rebellious Rita is an unsympathetic, inadequately characterised figure, though not unconvincing. [30 Dec 2001, p.12]

What makes this particular adaptation, co-written by Bravo and Jeremy O Harris, sing is the fact that, while it winks at Twitter with a smattering of emojis, it’s the legitimacy of Zola’s voice, rather than the means of its dissemination, which is prioritised.

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.

Feels closer in approach to his early gallery installation work than it does to his narrative film-making.

The film does not serve up its ideas in easily digestible bites. The audience needs to work with a dislocated string of scenes that sometimes highlight absurdity, sometimes violence and frequently say very little at all.

Half-witted British comedy about a dim-witted gang's attempt at a big kidnapping. But it's worth seeing for a gifted cast, headed by Terry- Thomas (the victim's rich, shifty husband), that includes George Cole, Sid James, Bernard Bresslaw and John Le Mesurier. [25 Aug 2002, p.8]

The atmosphere, of sun and celebration, rings as hollow as the Europop that Ante blasts to drown out arguments; sonar-stabs of cello on the score sound a warning

Control director Anton Corbijn’s first documentary, Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis), is a fascinating and suitably maverick snapshot of a richly creative moment in music history, told through a couple of disreputable hippies who designed some of the most iconic album covers of all time.

Playing out over three excruciating days at Sandringham – from Christmas Eve to Boxing Day – and carried shoulder high by a note-perfect Kristen Stewart, Spencer (the very title of which seems to present a challenge to the House of Windsor) dances between ethereal ghost story, arch social satire and no-holds-barred psychodrama, while remaining at heart a paean to motherhood.

More than 70 civil and criminal charges have been lodged against the family. Marcos flaunted her wealth while her country’s living standards plummeted, and Greenfield’s portrait is damning.

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

Robert Preston unforgettably reprises his greatest stage role in this old-fashioned musical that challenged West Side Story on Broadway and proved quite as popular. [13 Nov 2005, p.87]

Meandering but richly detailed drama.

It’s terrific: nail-chewing, edge-of-the-seat stuff.

But for all the feverish visual invention, there’s a sluggishness to the storytelling that seems at odds with the frenzied creativity of the film’s subject.

Both the film and its cast of charismatic, dreadlocked old-timers are loaded with an easy charm that is as heady as anything that gets smoked during the course of the recording sessions.

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

It’s a very watchable picture, but one that, like the plan that Williams famously wrote for his daughters, feels at times like a checklist of challenges overcome and decisions vindicated.

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.

It’s about overcoming trauma; it confronts and interrogates the role of some African peoples – the Dahomey included – in the enslavement of others. It’s also a thunderously cinematic good time: see it on the biggest screen you can find.

Lunana’s appeal is hard to miss: though rather naive in its messaging and unashamedly sentimental, the film is so pure of spirit and so open-hearted, you want to breathe it in, to fill your lungs with it.

Fans will doubtless be dazzled by its meticulous imitation-of-life-in-miniature visual aesthetic, yet I swithered between whimsical amusement, mild curiosity and outright irritation.

That Ho Chi Minh City is as rotten as the old Saigon, only more cynical and decrepit, is no great revelation, and we learn little of how ordinary people live or how society is organised in Vietnam today. [24 Mar 1996, p.12]

This sublimely orchestrated marvel takes fantasy film-making to a new level, looking back to the dramatic choreography of silent cinema and forward to the colourful ecstasies of Ken Russell.

The parallels drawn between Fabienne’s life and the stories she’s drawn to are a little on the nose. “What matters most is personality! Presence!” she declares, determined not to fade into obscurity. Deneuve’s luminous performance ensures she won’t.

Goth is riotously entertaining throughout, but two specific scenes, in both of which the camera rests solely on her face for an extended shot, capture the full force of her unnerving talent.

This is a playfully sensuous affair that wonders what happens to slow-burn intimacy when mediated by the urgency of the online world.

This first film version, a milestone work in every sense, helped, through its fast, wise-cracking dialogue and rapid editing, to change the sight and sound of the new talkies. Adolph Menjou as the suave, double-crossing editor Walter Burns and Pat O'Brien as his star reporter head a great cast. [17 Dec 2006, p.8]

It’s small wonder that she effectively torpedoed the stardom she never much wanted anyway.

The Tarnished Angels is a polished psychological melodrama, meticulous in its subtle observation, but only the planes involved in the dangerous flying scenes are strictly of the 1930s.

The Fire Inside, which was scripted by Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) and directed by cinematographer turned first-time feature film-maker Rachel Morrison, understands that, with storytelling as with fighting, sometimes all you need to do is stand firm and land the punches.

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

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.

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.

Ali & Ava is a vibrant work that uses the transcendent power of song to turn a streetwise tale into a diegetic musical, with genuinely surprising results.

As a tribute to the man and his legacy it’s fascinating stuff.

Tyrone Power is outstanding in the most demanding role of his career as a con man who emerges from the fairground world to exploit the credulous rich as a mind-reader and descends to depths he's never dreamed of as a pre-avian flu carnival 'geek', biting off the heads of live chickens in exchange for alcohol. [04 Dec 2005, p.14]

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

There are episodes of muscular, tautly directed action but the overall tone is brooding melancholy, all of it accompanied by a fretful, moaning wind and an eerie score.

Rafeea, a non-professional actor and Syrian refugee, is the film’s secret weapon. At times, the tragedy unfolding on screen feels borderline unwatchable, but his strange, fascinating, eerily adult face offers a litany of minute expressions. There is a wisdom, a soulfulness, and an icy, angry candour that feels lived rather than performed.

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]

Stokes is a fascinating, elusive protagonist – she was a recluse who enjoyed daily martinis and felt a kinship with Steve Jobs. Yet Wolf treats her archive with reverence, rather than writing her off as an eccentric.

Throughout, there’s an intriguing interplay between the performers’ real and fictional personae that lends emotional weight to the “stuff and nonsense” of their act.

There’s just enough magic and mystery to tease out a supernatural reading of the film, though Petzold encourages viewers to find pleasure in puzzling out his femme fatale for themselves.

It’s directed with verve and acted with gusto.

The interview subjects are fascinating throughout, but jewellery designer and author Aja Raden is a particular gift: funny, insightful, dripping with sarcasm and oversized earrings.

It doesn’t all work; the flashbacks are unwieldy and the pacing falters in the second half. It’s also rather coy in addressing some of the more damning elements in recent Catholic history. But there’s something disarming about a scene of papal bonding over beer and footy.

Rosi’s broader critique of violence is implied through footage of a play performed by patients in a psychiatric hospital, and of a children’s art therapy class. He is more interested in the reverberations of conflict than the source, focusing on those who have suffered its effects directly.

Anderson’s backdrop, a kind of steroidally enhanced Frenchness reminiscent of films such as Belleville Rendez-Vous and Amélie, is rather lovely, if ultimately as far removed from reality as is the film’s romanticised view of journalism.

It gives heart-in-the-mouth insights into the realities of war reporting, and is a testament to the value – and the price – of great journalism.

A witty, light hearted movie in which Bing sings 'Moonlight Becomes You' to a suitably enchanted Dorothy Lamour. [25 May 2003, p.8]

The film’s actual pay off – the truth exhumed from this tainted earth – is ultimately not quite as satisfying as the picture’s elegantly constructed mood.

It’s heartwarming, inspirational stuff.

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

It’s a rambunctious adventure, certainly. But it’s also a film that argues for tolerance and LGBTQ+ acceptance.

This intimate observational documentary explores poverty in Sicily from two different vantage points, drawing poetic connections between lives that don’t appear to touch.

There’s a sparky authenticity to the performances , bolstered by the fact that Carpignano cast a real-life family in the central roles.

The result is the kind of stinging emotional candour that makes you wince.

Kenneth Branagh’s unabashedly feelgood memoir of growing up in Belfast as the Troubles erupted in the late 1960s suffers from a problem of perspective.

It does, though, capture chillingly the terrible, self-perpetuating momentum of war. A war that, in this case, has reached the point at which people no longer know what they are fighting for, only that they are fighting.

What could have been laboured and polemical is deftly handled, defused with comedy and powered by a pulsating score. Dialogue that slides into rap at key moments adds a heartfelt sense of honesty. This is the real deal.

There’s an inherent irony in any drama that places her centre stage. Yet at a time when news itself is under fire, with journalists demeaned and attacked by despots bent on obliterating the very concept of truth, perhaps Colvin’s story is more relevant than ever.

There’s perhaps an over-reliance on voiceover by way of letters and emails, though the film’s unvarnished formal directness is a good thing, given the sensitive material.

If writing is a democratic art and social leveller, Marcello indicts the celebrity author as a sellout, steamrolling their way to success.

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.

Crisply British and deliciously no-nonsense, Kennedy is a wonderfully bracing character for Elizabeth Carroll’s deft documentary.

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.

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.

Carmoon’s depiction of trauma, grief and mental health in crisis as a kind of putrid, repellent stench that clings to the skin, stings the eyeballs and turns the stomach makes for a queasily insalubrious viewing experience. Hoard is a film I admire, but struggle to like.

The result is a film of quiet but considerable power.

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.

Kasbe makes the most of his extraordinary access by presenting the film vérité style, preferring to immerse the audience in his characters’ lives to better make the case for each of their choices.

The compelling Ellis-Taylor goes some way towards tying together the disparate elements. She is a magnetic, dignified presence, persuasive in both the more melodramatic elements of the story and in the academic journey.

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.

Best of a series of lavishly mounted MGM historical yarns made in England in the early 1950s with American stars and British supporting casts. [03 Jun 2012, p.46]