It's a landmark film that brought a new psychological complexity to the genre and gave John Wayne the first truly challenging role of his career.

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

While the plot itself is a little nebulous, the atmosphere that Abbruzzese creates, through a hypnotic, pulsing electronic score and Rogowski’s febrile presence, is unnerving and intense.

Low-budget, sci-fi classic, one of the key Hollywood nuclear-angst pictures. [23 Jul 2000, p.10]

Fashion is fleeting, style remains, said Vreeland, and indeed the film attempts to apply her mantra, more interested in consecrating Talley as a man of taste and influence than it is probing for gossip or weakness.

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

The comic potential of the collision of personalities is thoroughly mined: Lazaridis the diffident visionary; Fregin the extrovert oddball; Balsillie the driven, hyperaggressive alpha male.

It shouldn’t work yet it does, underscoring the tragedy of corrupted innocence, constricting codes of masculinity and the aftermath of trauma.

The story is a touch convoluted, but it’s a gleefully grim good time.

The Taste of Things defies expectations. There is something refreshingly unconventional about its depiction of the tender, well-worn love between Eugénie and Dodin.

With the exception of Stéphane, who becomes more intriguing and less likable with each secret unpeeled, the main characters are a little schematic and two-dimensional. It’s fortunate, then, that the always impressive Calamy is on top form.

Marvellous, macabre horror story from Corman's Edgar Allan Poe series. Vincent Price is a diabolical delight, his 12th-century Italian tyrant Prince Prospero a worthy model for Machiavelli. [21 Feb 2004, p.53]

To call it horror seems reductive. With its shapeshifting disquiet, I Saw the TV Glow is too languidly weird, too unmoored from genre conventions to be neatly categorised. But there’s not a frame in Jane Schoenbrun’s suffocating second feature that isn’t drenched in dread and unease.

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.

A third act that stumbles into genre territory loses focus temporarily, but is redeemed by a scene that celebrates the power of words above all else.

Simon’s fly-on-the-wall mode is a distancing tool, but shouldn’t be confused with ambivalence. Exposing the mechanics of decision-making is an implicit reproof of increasing conservatism, both of La Fémis itself and the film-makers they are producing.

What’s particularly striking is an inventive sound design that tunes us in and out of the blood-pounding fury in Roman’s head – a place, we soon realise, which is not somewhere that’s comfortable to linger.

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

An immaculately cast and acted film that paints a warts-and-all portrait of Hollywood at its zenith. [22 Apr 2012, p.24]

Few will remain unmoved by this intriguingly adventurous and thought-provoking drama.

It’s powerful stuff: wryly tender, frequently funny, but insidiously suffocating. More than once I found myself stifling a scream – and I mean that as a compliment.

Yet there are also moments of heart-stopping tenderness and beauty.

The final set piece is a little protracted, but the jokes are mostly sharp and enjoyably self-referential and the songs still catchy (one track is titled Catchy Song).

Inspired by Diop’s own experience of attending the trial of a woman accused of murdering her baby, it’s a meditative exploration of a complicated connection between the woman in the dock and the one who bears witness.

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.

A triumph of true sentiment over lurking sentimentality starring John Wayne as an Irish-American boxer returning to Ireland in search of peace and a wife (Maureen O'Hara) and finding himself in the middle of a brawling, drinking, singing, timeless Oirish Neverland. [03 Oct 2010, p.47]

The film’s messaging on female empowerment and living authentically might border on the trite. The means of delivering that message, however, does at least feel genuinely fresh and new.

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

Chalamet’s Dylan sucks so fervently on his cigarettes it’s as though he’s breathing in the genius of the musical heroes who came before him. But while he radiates insouciant charisma and channels the once-in-a-lifetime talent, he reveals next to nothing about Dylan as a person. This is not necessarily a failure in Chalamet’s acting. It’s a deliberate choice – the film is called A Complete Unknown, after all, and it’s a manifesto as much as a title.

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

So often, historical films are stale and mired in misery, but Harriet has a rare buoyancy.

It is, at times, harrowing. The film doesn’t shy away from grief at its rawest, fear at its most paralysing.

It’s the movie equivalent of a fairground ride with all the bolts loosened and the safety booklet blazed long ago when someone ran out of Rizlas.

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.

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

Interlocking vignettes swing from laugh-out-loud comedy to piercing melancholia, but at the centre of it all there is a genuine sense of rebirth and renewal – no mean feat for a small movie with a big heart and a surprisingly wide-ranging vision.

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.

There’s an unexpected elegance to this window into unimaginable evil.

There’s a pulpy, comic-book noir to this highly enjoyable thriller, whose rules and parameters are clear.

Layla is less about making peace with the past than it is about staying true to the present.

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.

The final battle is giddily cathartic, but the catharsis arises from prioritising character development over plot and spectacle. This, I imagine, will be the Avengers’ legacy.

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.

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]

It’s this aspect – the real warmth, the way the camera becomes almost incidental in the encounters between documentarian and subject – which gives this film its satisfying emotional depth.

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.

A mixture of melodrama, sentimental romance and heavy-handed comedy, Wings was superbly choreographed with skilfully photographed stunt flying and aerial combat.

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.

A thrillingly intense central performance by Alice Krige (who earned her genre spurs in the underrated 1981 screen adaptation of Peter Straub’s Ghost Story) is the lightning rod at the core of the film, grounding its hallucinogenic visuals in the terra firma of past tragedies and modern traumas, provoking “dark thoughts; really dark thoughts”.

While Luca might lack some of the dizzying inventiveness that marks out top-tier Pixar, it’s packed to the gills with charm.

What makes this more than just another formulaic feelgood film is the grit with which Chung evokes the hardscrabble lives of his characters, balancing the dreamier elements of the drama with a naturalism that keeps it rooted in reality.

It is a heartbreaking story, tragic, unsentimental, but suffused with a belief in the ability of decency and dignity to survive under the most terrible circumstances. [02 Dec 2007, p.18]

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

The jokes are brutal and very funny, with Benjamin the butt of most of them.

The use of the notoriously media-shy Margiela’s warm, serious spoken voice helps to create intimacy, even though we never see his face.

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.

The beauty of Wham!, a key part of the appeal of the band, came from the perception that they were a self-contained unit, a guaranteed good time seemingly impervious to negativity. And for a while, that was true.

A must watch.

Powerful and enraging.

Blue Beetle may be frontloaded with visual fireworks that neatly meld the practical and the virtual, but it is the likable interplay between its down-to-earth characters that gives the film oomph, making it more than just a Shazam-style romp.

The film’s bluesy woodwind score has a teasing, goading quality that feels tinged with melancholy; the spectre of Aids hovers around the film’s edges.

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]

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.

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 result is a spicy nerve-jangler served with a chargrilled side order of jet-black gallows humour – a divine comedy barrelling towards inevitable tragedy, played out in hell’s kitchen where someone is bound to get burned.

With its all too timely themes of bullying, corrupt leaders and the demonisation of difference, this is a movie that promises a froth of pink and green escapism but delivers considerably more in the way of depth and darkness.

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.

Wonka is an effervescent pleasure – an endlessly, intricately charming treasure trove of a movie. And overall, Timothée Chalamet’s fresh-faced take on the central character – bringing a puckish innocence and spry, light-footed energy to one of the most famously jaded misanthropes in children’s literature – works rather well.

What a lovely, hopeful and rather magical movie this is.

Perhaps too reliant on the structure of the original article, which tells the events in flashback, the film wraps up a little hastily. Brilliantly, though, the editing is teasing rather than explicit; Scafaria offers just enough of the girls and their bodies to get pulses racing without exploiting them or their story.

While Ronan is terrific, Robbie has arguably the more difficult role, conjuring an engaging portrait of someone whose position has made her “more man than woman”.

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

Dujardin plays it ingeniously straight, embarking on a violent rampage set to French lounge music.

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.

Walter Hill is the living director closest to the great film-makers of Hollywood's Golden Age such as Raoul Walsh, John Ford and Howard Hawks, and Geronimo is his finest movie to date. Certainly it is his most humane. [16 Oct 1994, p.9]

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

This Albert Hughes-directed adventure is visually stunning.

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.

It’s a fine, if mild, escapist hoot.

It shows how a cast of veteran actors (Richard Attenborough, Steve McQueen, James Garner et al), most with some military experience, can breathe life into conventional characters, and how excitement can be generated without endless explosions and special effects. [19 May 2002, p.9]

“Narrative art is dead – we are in a period of mourning”; “To scandalise is a right, to be scandalised a pleasure”; “Refusal must be great, absolute, absurd…” Abel Ferrara’s infatuated tribute to Pier Paolo Pasolini is littered with such gnomic bon mots, which could apply equally to either director.

The picture also doubles as a fascinating psychological study of fanaticism, with Poots’s expressive performance unpeeling the layers beneath Dugdale’s fervent belief in her cause.

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

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

Subtle it’s not, but it’s maliciously entertaining. It turns out that revenge on the ultra-wealthy is a dish best seared over a naked flame.

It’s a teasing exploration of the cost of freedom and of the dualities of life.

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

For some, Little Joe may seem too sterile to engage emotionally, but I found it glassily unsettling – even more so on second viewing. Inhale at your peril.

The family scenes, all jostling banter and suffocating love, are terrific.

With its VHS bargain-bin aesthetic, this is scuzzily enjoyable stuff.

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

This open-sore autobiography feels like the missing piece in the puzzle of this frequently brilliant, invariably self-jeopardising actor.

Shot with a documentary-style naturalism and propulsive restlessness that mirrors Olga’s ferocious drive, this is a terrific, timely feature debut.

Some of the humour is dated, but mostly it's astonishingly modern, full of unforgettable images. Muni is stunning and George Raft, who, like Sinatra, enjoyed the company of mobsters, gives an iconic performance: his cool, coin-tossing habit is referred to both in Singin' in the Rain and Some Like it Hot. [09 Apr 2006, p.18]

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.

There’s lots to love here, not least the animation itself, which uses split screens, Ben-Day dots and onomatopoeic text that mimic the tactile experience of reading physical comics – panels, hatching and primary colours intact and ready to leap off the page.

Bring Them Down is an impressive first feature from Christopher Andrews.

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.