The film takes a fantastical leap that viewers will find either breathtaking or ridiculous – probably a bit of both.

Dog Man, the half-dog, half-cop protagonist of Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants spin-off book series, is a gloriously funny creation.

Like Maryam’s approach to local politics, the film is well-meaning but occasionally naive.

There are moments – Mimmi biting back her emotions as Emma dances for her alone at night – that tingle with discovery and promise.

It's a beguiling, slightly indulgent work, featuring a film-within-a-film starring Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina. [28 Nov 2010, p.34]

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]

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

For the most part, the film is a towering achievement. Not surprisingly, given Nolan’s preference for shooting on Imax 70mm film, the picture has a depth of detail you could drown in.

All in all, Western is a movie that leaks into the heart. With rootlessness and security painfully entangled right to the end, our delight in these characters feels well-earned. [10 May 1998, p.8]

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

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”.

An intelligent film reflecting the troubled Vietnam era. [21 Jan 2007, p.2]

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.

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

Smart, cynical and at times devilishly funny, the film delivers a crackle of disruptive static to the demonic possession genre.

While Fancy Dance has a tendency to labour its points a little too emphatically, Gladstone and Deroy-Olson are both phenomenal; their connection, played out in shared glances and urgent wordless messages, is palpable, persuasive and vital.

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

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

At its heart this is a gothic melodrama, a fever dream of childhood trauma haunting adult life, replete with skin-crawlingly cruel visions of inquisitorial torture, brutal ordeals and hellish infernos – more Nightmare on Elm Street than My Week With Marilyn.

Hall emphasises the moral grey area by shooting in black and white, an ingenious choice that allows her to light Clare as black or white.

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.

Particularly intriguing are the scenes in which Colette’s travails become the stuff of pantomime in the form of increasingly provocative theatrical productions, staged with a hint of carnivalesque chaos and evoking the spirit of Fellini.

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.

What makes this amiably amusing Danish comedy work is the fact that it takes its hapless protagonist almost as seriously as he takes himself.

Barney Douglas’s doc about tennis maverick John McEnroe belongs to that rare handful of portraits that should find an audience far beyond just fans of the game itself. In this, it has a kinship with Asif Kapadia’s films Senna and Diego Maradona.

Whis is a teen comedy with a refreshingly forthright approach to everything from puberty to the status of 13th-century women as chattels to be bartered.

Demoustier dangles doubts, but also raises questions about the difference between judgment and justice. The score acts as our guide through the story: neat, self-possessed string arrangements occasionally fray into something jagged, raw-edged and nervy.

Superb direction from Terence Fisher and a crisp, clean script by Jimmy Sangster are complemented by a rapturous score from James Bernard. [27 Oct 2013, p.6]

Inspired by real events, the film is at its best when it leans into the action-adventure genre; director Tom Harper smartly uses camera-shake and closeups to immerse the audience in the weather’s volatility.

Some talk eloquently, some glare at the camera with cagey mistrust. But the point of this worthwhile and frequently fascinating project is that all have the opportunity to be heard.

The film is understated rather than mawkish.

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.

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.

It helps that Gordon is a dream of a subject: funny, frank and eminently likable, she challenges preconceptions and prejudices about fatness with wit and grace.

Pretty Red Dress is both playful and defiant, swept along on a tide of toe-tapping tunes that tug at the heartstrings, yet unafraid to face up to complex personal issues while still maintaining its solidly mainstream appeal.

The film’s observational approach means that little context is provided for the techniques used here, or for the lives and circumstances of the daily visitors. But the warm, non-judgmental embrace of Philibert’s approach is profoundly affecting.

Even if The Iron Claw doesn’t quite match the bracing originality of the other two films, it still cements Durkin’s status as one of the most consistently impressive American directors of his generation.

It’s all very meta and self-referential; screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers hoover up memorable lines from past movies and serve them with a flourish and an exaggerated wink to the audience. It’s also a good deal of fun.

Better Man is a notable step up for Gracey. The synthetic, rather soulless panache of The Greatest Showman demonstrated his skills as a slick visual stylist, but here he directs from the heart, tapping into the rawness and vulnerability beneath the CGI monkey suit.

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.

[A] wonky, charming satire.

The career of the man who directed The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington could only go up, and it rocketed with this very funny comedy starring George Hamilton as Count Dracula, who's driven out of modern Transylvania by zealous Communist Party officials and heads for corrupt Manhattan, hoping to meet a trendy model he's seen in a fashion magazine. [13 Mar 2005, p.83]

This gripping action movie is a cross between The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Treasure Island. [01 May 2011, p.47]

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]

Vintage tear-jerker set in MGM's never-never England where an ageing Guards officer (Robert Taylor) indulges in a lengthy flashback from the Second World War to his ill-fated affair with a ballet dancer (the entrancing Vivien Leigh) who took to the streets when he was reported missing in the First World War. [21 Aug 2005, p.91]

A sweet-natured romantic movie. [15 Dec 2002, p.8]

This colourful fable, scripted by William Goldman (who wrote Butch Cassidy and All the President's Men ) deserved far better than the critical drubbing and public rejection that greeted it. [20 Jul 2008, p.18]

James Mason as the commanding officer and David Warner as his adjutant are both first rate, as are Coburn and Schell. This was Peckinpah's last important work and his only war movie.

This lean, intimate drama is a Paul Andrew Williams film, and anyone who saw his brutal revenge picture, Bull, will have an inkling of how dark his movies can get. Even so, the blunt force of Dragonfly’s tonal swerve is enough to knock the air out of you.

Skillfully adapted by prolific TV playwright Jack Pulman from Stevenson's classic adventure yarn. [02 Feb 2003, p.8]

A well-acted, soft-centred example of pre-rock rebelliousness with one of Brando's finest performances, it features the celebrated exchange between local lawman's daughter Mary Murphy and Brando: "What are you rebelling against?" - "What have you got?" [31 Aug 2014, p.48]

A critical and box-office disaster that the Master himself dismissed. It is in fact a fascinating film, and was revered in France by Truffaut and others as Les amants du capricorne. [02 Apr 2006, p.10]

Delightful period musical set in a small town on the eve of America's entry into World War Two. [09 Apr 2006, p.14]

Incoherent, idiotic and exhilarating. [28 Apr 1996, p.16]

Casablanca is its model, and though a minor classic, it isn't in the same league. [30 Jul 2000, p.10]

It moves fast and is superbly silly. [01 Aug 1954, p.6]

Wittily adapted by William Goldman from a Donald E. Westlake novel, it's the best film Yates made between Bullitt and Breaking Away. [08 Aug 1999, p.10]

The 1947 Broadway hit (which flopped in the West End) is an uneasy blend of Irish blarney, American whimsy and social satire (directed against Southern racists), but it's handled with freshness and vigour by Francis Coppola in his first job for a Hollywood major. [08 Mar 1988, p.13]

Despite a curiously disjointed narrative and Frankie Laine on the soundtrack, it's well-staged, turning what in real life was a brief skirmish into a mythic confrontation. [29 Jun 2014, p.48]

Astaire and Rogers in their last pre-war monochrome musical, a touching cinebiography of the celebrated American dancers of the pre-First World War era whose partnership ended with his death as a pilot in the war. The dance routines are more numerous, though less spectacular, than in the previous movies. [04 Jan 2004, p.8]

Clever, tongue-in-cheek and far more fun than the hi-tech remake. [05 Jan 2003, p.8]

An exciting tale with a cast that includes Christopher Walken and Martin Balsam, but its real concern is with a dehumanised, paranoid society dominated by electronic surveillance. [09 Oct 2011, p.46]

Skilfully crafted account of the final bombing raid over Germany in 1943 of a Flying Fortress, inspired by William Wyler's wartime documentary of the same title. Produced by David Puttam it avoids the worst cliches and gets affecting performance from its young all-American aircrew. [16 Jan 2005, p.87]

This frightening, darkly comic picture is much influenced by Sunset Boulevard.

John Gielgud makes a rare, youthful appearance as an intelligence officer ordered to kill a spy in WWI Switzerland in a fascinating, uneven thriller based on two of Somerset Maugham's Ashenden stories. Madeleine Carroll (a fellow agent pretending to be Ashenden's wife) and Peter Lorre (his flamboyant bisexual assistant) provide excellent support. The striking set pieces include a climactic railway accident. [18 Jul 1999, p.10]

The movie is brilliantly photographed in black and white by Boris Kaufman (who lit On the Waterfront and 12 Angry Men ), but this ambitious work strains for effect in trying to make Steiger's character the focus for half the problems of the twentieth century. [9 July 2000]

It all takes place before America's entry into the Second World War, and the three bids for freedom (the last from a prison train in Canada) are well handled. In his first English-speaking movie Kruger is impressive, though somewhat enigmatic. [26 Feb 2006, p.22]

Slick tongue-in-cheek thriller giving Rutger Hauer an unusually sympathetic role as a blinded Vietnam veteran who's spent 20 years in the jungle honing his other senses as well as his swordsmanship. [27 Oct 2002, p.9]

Engagingly wry thriller starring Charles Bronson as a Texas adventurer hired by Jill Ireland to spring her innocent husband (Robert Duvall) from a Mexican jail. [08 Oct 2000, p.10]

Hitchcock's fourth Hollywood movie is a subtle thriller set in a very Hollywoodian England populated by leading members of the Tinseltown cricket club. [19 Jan 2003, p.8]

Sharp small-scale western set in a nasty frontier community that finds its incorruptible old-style sheriff (Richard Widmark) a barrier to its joining the 20th century. Widmark is excellent, as is Lena Horne as the handsome saloon-keeper he marries. [17 Apr 2011, p.52]

Pleasing, affectionate adaptation of William Faulkner's last novel. [01 Aug 1999, p.10]

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.

Grand adventure yarn, based on an Alistair MacLean verbal comic strip about a Cold War race to grab some top secrets from an Arctic weather post. Like the nuclear submarine on which it's mostly set, the film cracks, leaks but finally stands the strain and has weathered well. [03 Feb 2008, p.2]

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]

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]

Overshadowed at the time and ever since by the similar but altogether bigger The Best Years of Our Lives (which the same studio, RKO, released a couple of months later), this is a very decent contribution to a cycle of movies about ex-servicemen adjusting to civilian life. [29 Aug 2004, p.71]

It is, in effect, a reworking of The Admirable Crichton, JM Barrie's parable about a servant taking command when a hopeless aristocratic family is shipwrecked. Far superior to the disastrous 2002 Guy Ritchie-Madonna remake. [30 Jan 2005, p.13]

An often hilarious, if always creaky, affair, bubbling with visual and verbal wit and co-scripted by the great humorist SJ Perelman. [06 Jan 2008, p.10]

This gripping thriller, an early film noir in colour, features the Niagara Falls thundering grandly in the background and Marilyn Monroe wiggling sexily in the foreground as a treacherous wife whose scheme to murder her middle-aged husband (Joseph Cotten) goes fatally wrong. [27 Sep 2009, p.29]

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]

While it is not quite in the same league as any of the films that clearly influenced it, The Sheep Detectives is an appealingly offbeat children’s film, showcasing Balda’s knack for visual humour while also sheep-dipping into unexpectedly weighty themes.

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]

Though short on chills and thrills, Hammer Studio's third, handsomely mounted period horror movie confirmed that they'd discovered a formula for hitting the international jackpot. It's therefore a bloody landmark in British movie history. [02 Aug 1999, p.10]

A journey by car that becomes a journey into the inner self, Wild Strawberries played a crucial role in creating what is now thought of as an American genre, the Road Movie. [11 Jun 1995, p.12]

Long, well-mounted early Christian epic based on the novel by 1905 Nobel prize-winning Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz about eager Christian martyrs and hungry lions in ancient Rome. [03 Aug 2014, p.45]

It's a bicentennial companion piece to Nashville, with a fabulous cast that includes Burt Lancaster (superb as dime novelist Ned Buntline), Harvey Keitel and Joel Grey. [22 Jun 1997, p.11]

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

Attractive comedy-thriller in the Topkapi vein starring Michael Caine, shortly after his international success in Alfie, as an over-ambitious cockney crook in Hong Kong. [30 Apr 2006, p.14]

Vigorous traditional western starring Errol Flynn at his most dashing as a conventionally heroic, glory-seeking George Armstrong Custer, whose career the film traces (without too much concern for historical accuracy) from West Point through the Civil War to the catastrophe at the Little Big Horn. [14 May 2006, p.2]

The blonde in this funny, lively Bob Hope thriller is one of Hitchcock's favourite blondes, Madeleine Carroll. The picture evokes her most famous Hitchcock film, The 39 Steps, and uncannily anticipates North by Northwest. [12 Dec 2004, p.95]

Inspired by the suspect career of a prewar Italian boxer, it's rather good, but inferior to the novel by Budd Schulberg, the expert on the fight game and Oscar-winner for On the Waterfront. [04 Jan 2009, p.06]

Amusing first screenplay by Betty Comden and Adolph Green (who went on to script On the Town and Singin' in the Rain). The evergreen numbers include 'The Best Things in Life Are Free' which, in a romantic, slightly camp sequence, is sung first by a very young Mel Torme, then (in French) by Peter Lawford. [09 Jan 2000, p.10]

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.

High-class sex work is presented as a financial quick fix and a route to female empowerment, but the film’s sex-positive politics gloss over any of the job’s potential pitfalls.

In Oscar Isaac’s enigmatic blackjack player “William Tell”, with his wary hooded eyes and closed book countenance, the film has a broodingly commanding central performance. It’s a pity, then, that much of its promise is squandered by sloppiness, both in the writing and elsewhere.

For all the impressive qualities of the picture, it does feel as though there is a rigid upper-age limit for its audience.

Reorienting a typically white male genre around themes of feminist awakening and racial tension is an intriguing proposition, so it’s frustrating that Brosnahan remains blank and the film’s pace plodding.