This is an exuberant manifesto that celebrates the infinite possibilities of what cinema can be.

If the result sends viewers scuttling back to Armitage’s uniquely accessible version of the source text, then that would be marvellous indeed. But there is enough here that is dazzling and enthralling for Lowery’s movie to stand proudly as a grand work of poetry in its own right.

What Enys Men “means” will differ for each viewer. For me, it is (like Bait) a richly authentic portrait of Cornwall, far removed from any tourist-friendly vision. . . I’ve seen the film three times so far, and I can’t wait to dive into it and be swept away again. Bravo!

Here’s a cause for celebration for fans of British cinema: a feature debut that launches not one but two of the most promising talents to arrive in movie theatres for a long while.

It’s not just Nicholson’s performance that makes this film a masterpiece; it’s the fact that Forman was able to prevent that performance from capsizing the whole enterprise.

A psychological thriller, it’s all the more tense for Green’s smart understatement of the genre elements.

The impact all but knocks the breath from your body.

Beautifully photographed in black and white by Commander Joseph August, this moving picture has images and sequences that show Ford at his poetic and humanistic best. [13 Aug 2006, p.20]

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.

Hansen-Løve hits a career high note, delivering a quietly thoughtful and ultimately life-affirming portrait of the strange interaction between loss and rebirth. It’s a miraculous balancing act that pretty much took my breath away.

It’s chilling and brilliant.

Informative, exhaustively researched, but never dry or didactic, this is a phenomenal achievement by Grimonprez, who holds his own country to account for its shameful role in this sorry tale.

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]

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.

This was Falconetti’s only major film, and over a period of a year under Dreyer’s direction (a combination of cruelty and patience) her extraordinarily expressive face made for one of the greatest, most harrowing screen performances.

Strongly scripted and deliciously acted, full of riveting confrontations as the emotionally intense events unfold. Though a feline Elizabeth Taylor overplays her role, Paul Newman is excellent as her brooding husband, but it's Burl Ives as dying patriarch 'Big Daddy' who's the ultimate revelation. [13 Aug 2006, p.10]

More film gris than film noir, it offers a biting moral conundrum at every turn. [17 Oct 2010, p.4]

What could have been a disaster in the hands of a less sensitive film-maker ends up an extraordinary feat of care, collaboration and creativity.

Vividly rendered, and filled with tangible yearning, it strikes a balance between romantic passion and mundane domesticity, as the skin-prickling attraction of new love is tested by the day-to-day tribulations of real life.

Widows is a sinewy treat that seamlessly intertwines close-up character studies, big-picture politics and audaciously reimagined heist-movie riffs.

The stark beauty of Florian Ballhaus’s black-and-white cinematography and painterly framing can’t conceal the ugliness that unfolds as the death toll mounts and Herold starts to believe his own grotesque creation.

A masterpiece.

There’s a fearlessness to Murphy’s film-making, a slightly wayward, maverick spirit. I can’t wait to see what she does next.

I struggle to remember the last time a non-documentary film proved so profoundly, soul-shakingly distressing. This is as it should be – anything less would be immoral and irresponsible.

Having now seen the film three times, I find myself loving it all the more for its imperfections. When a film-maker aims this high, how can one do anything but watch in wonder?

The film is acutely perceptive on the effect of a bereavement on other people.

It’s that blend of heartbreak and joy, profundity and absurdity that is the key to this enchanting movie’s magical spell.

I’ve often argued that cinema is a time machine, but rarely has that seemed so true.

So measured is the pacing, so sinuous the timeline, so understated the subtle ache of the performances that you don’t immediately realise that Wang Xiaoshuai’s exquisite three-hour drama has been performing the emotional equivalent of open-heart surgery on the audience since pretty much the first scene.

Charting a razor-sharp course between the borders of horror, satire, psychodrama and lonely character study (Taxi Driver has been cited as an influence), Saint Maud is a taut, sinewy treat, blessed with an impressively fluid visual sensibility and boosted by two quite brilliant central performances.

It’s a remarkable achievement – a raw and potent piece of storytelling that grabs you by the heart and doesn’t let go.

It’s a genuine modern masterpiece, which establishes Jenkin as one of the most arresting and intriguing British film-makers of his generation.

What Moonage Daydream does manage to do is to share some of the adventurous spirit of its subject – a chameleon who wasn’t afraid of falling flat on his face while reaching for the stars. If Bowie’s career teaches us anything, it’s that no one can laugh at you if you’ve already laughed at yourself. Certainly his capacity for balancing seriousness with self-deprecation (“No shit, Sherlock!”) remained one of Bowie’s most endearing traits.

Saint Frances expands the representation of women’s lives on screen in a way that is so casual you hardly notice it’s happening.

The result is another mesmerising and wholly immersive experience from a film-maker whose love of the medium of cinema – and fierce compassion for Baldwin’s finely drawn characters – shines through every frame.

It’s one of the most exquisitely realised films of the year.

A supremely accomplished debut feature from writer-director Georgia Oakley, Blue Jean captures a specific moment in British history with almost uncanny accuracy.

An atmosphere of empathy, reason and wit pervades Polley’s film, underwritten by an emancipatory urgency (“that day we learned to vote”) that drives the narrative even in its darkest moments.

A children's classic and among the best family movies of all time. [19 Feb 2006, p.2]

This thrilling, dizzying debut from Welsh writer-director Prano Bailey-Bond is a nostalgic treat for anyone old enough to remember the infamous “video nasties” scare of the early 80s. Yet beneath the retro surface lies a more universal tale about the power of horror to confront our deepest fears – a timeless celebration of the liberating nature of the dark side.

Directed with wit, subtlety and great emotional honesty by Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn (the co-directors of 2012’s brilliantly life-affirming Good Vibrations), it’s a singular story with universal appeal – striking a very personal chord with some viewers while finding common ground with the widest possible audience.

Petite Maman is short and sweet, yet fearlessly profound. A mix of fairytale, ghost story and rites-of-passage journey, this is at heart a cinematic parable about healing intergenerational wounds, about breaching the barriers that inevitably grow between parents and children.

Potemkin is a vital viewing experience that transcends its landmark/milestone status. Its virtuoso technique remains dazzling and is at the service of a revolutionary fervour we can still experience.

It’s an overpowering experience, awe-inspiringly photographed by Geoffrey Unsworth, groundbreakingly enhanced by Douglas Trumbull.

The film’s narrow visual focus – much of the drama plays out in the face of police officer Asger Holm (Jakob Cedergren) – accentuates the crackling cleverness of a screenplay that allows us to unravel a mystery in real time.

The gravitational pull of sex, death and the void is palpable.

This often hilarious heartbreaker is simply Baumbach’s best film to date – insightful, sympathetic and rather beautifully bewildered.

It’s an alchemic combination, this continuing collaboration between Lanthimos and Stone . . . together they unleash in each other an extra level of uninhibited artistic daring that, one suspects, must be rooted in an uncommon degree of mutual trust.

What a wonderful, heart-breaking, life-affirming gem of a movie this is.

Arguably the finest British film made during the second world war.

Perfectly pitched and sensitively played, this is truthful, powerful and profoundly moving fare from a film-maker at the very top of her game.

Unforgettably haunting images (a car submerged in a watery grave; a spider's web view of the children fleeing in a riverboat to the strains of Pretty Fly; a silhouetted angel of death) make this a perennially unsettling masterpiece from which modern chillers could learn much.

Inventive, economic, masterly.

It’s an end-of-friendship breakup movie that swings between the hilarious, the horrifying and the heartbreaking in magnificent fashion.

This technically simple, endlessly inventive film balanced laughter and pathos; its cabin fever sequence is unsurpassed. [28 Feb 2010, p.24]

There’s something about the folkloric quality of Rohrwacher’s films, their embrace of a kind of earth magic, that prompts people to describe them as fairytales. But this is perhaps misleading. La Chimera is no twinkly escapist fantasy, it’s a film full of grit, thorns and greed.

This one hits its stride somewhere in the middle, bounding confidently towards its hopeless, poetic conclusion.

Chalamet, with his restless, impatient physicality and a face as sensual and sculpted as a fallen angel from a Caravaggio painting, is quite simply astonishing.

This film is flawless.

Still the best, most penetrating picture about Hollywood, its surface charm, its underlying cruelty, its lack of interest in its own history, its ruthless disregard for failure. The casting is perfect. [16 Mar 2003, p.7]

It's a classic with special effects that could scarcely be improved on. [18 Apr 2004, p.13]

It’s not surprising to learn that its writer and director, Lauren Hadaway, who based this film on her own experiences on a college rowing team, has a background in sound editing.

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.

The narrative is carefully paced, the central performance magnificent, the final effect overwhelming in a manner that recalls the great Russian writers Kurosawa admired.

Shane is a beautiful, deceptively simple movie that takes on different meanings for each generation. [08 Oct 2000, p.10]

There’s something quite breathtaking about the deceptive ease with which Song’s first cinematic foray juggles the metaphysical and the matter-of-fact, conjuring a world in which every decision has transformative power, and concepts of love and friendship are at once mysteriously malleable yet oddly inevitable.

It’s a riotously audacious work.

The realisation that her husband is gone for good is a gradual process that plays out, largely without words, on Torres’s face, in a performance of extraordinary intelligence and emotional complexity.

It’s a supremely accomplished work.

Years ago, I compared Del Toro to Orson Welles, a film-maker who instinctively understood the hypnotic power of cinema to dazzle, delight and deceive. On the basis of Nightmare Alley, which is blessed with more than a touch of evil, that’s a comparison by which I still stand.

It is, it has to be said, something of a stretch to believe that this regal woman would be drawn to a dullard such as Ernest, but Gladstone and DiCaprio manage to convince us that this is more than a partnership of expediency – it’s a marriage of real love.

There’s not a frame of this rich, kaleidoscopically detailed animation that isn’t dazzling.

Astutely amplifying the absurdist – and remarkably modernist – elements of his source, Iannucci and co-writer Simon Blackwell conjure a surreal cinematic odyssey that is as accessible as it is intelligent and unexpected.

Anora deepens and darkens with each twist and turn and provides a violent corrective to so many Hollywood fairytales.

An enduring minor masterpiece with an amazing climax featuring a boat caught in a treacherous whirlpool. [05 Feb 2012, p.45]

Rothwell uses the language of cinema – macro lens closeups, distortion, off-kilter framing and an evocative blend of sound design and score – to convey the autistic experience of the world.

Fletcher is the real star of this show, a director whose enthusiasm for musical storytelling shines through every frame, hitting all the emotional high notes.

With this terrific feature debut, Anvari lifts the veil on his heroines’ hidden lives and leaves us all dreaming with our eyes wide open.

There’s a sustained tension between the concisely epic sweep of the narrative and boxy confinement of the 4x3 frame that perfectly matches the film’s twin themes of freedom and incarceration.

Whale's greatest work and the best ever gothic horror movie. [10 Oct 2010, p.46]

The film is superbly paced, imaginatively designed, consistently suspenseful and never attracts an unintentional laugh. [2003 re-release]

The genius of Todd Field’s superb Tár comes from the way the film-making echoes the treacherously seductive and mercurial nature of its central character.

The fierce intelligence of Fiennes’s work is magnified by Berger’s elegant direction.

It’s a marvel of a movie, with something of the humanist poetry of Satyajit Ray or Edward Yang. And it’s all the more remarkable given that this is Kapadia’s first fiction feature (her 2021 debut film, the documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing, also picked up a prize in Cannes). What a talent.

At times, it feels as though we’re watching something we’re not supposed to be seeing, such is the detail of the emotional degradation on show; in this sense, it’s impossible not to read it as something of a nihilistic suicide note.

Overall this elegiac, monochrome movie, shot in the snow and mud in wintry landscapes, is a rich masterpiece. [28 Jun 2015]

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

A brilliantly assured and stylistically adventurous work, this beautifully understated yet emotionally riveting coming-of-age drama picks apart themes of love and loss in a manner so dextrous as to seem almost accidental. Don’t be fooled; Wells knows exactly what she’s doing, and her storytelling is as precise as it is piercing.

This 1953 classic is one of the cinema's most profound and moving studies of married love, ageing and the relations between parents and children. It is flawless and rewards numerous viewings.

From the intimate restraint of the early scenes, Delpero’s direction becomes more fractured and abrasive. It’s a remarkable work.

The sense of the watering hole as a haven for lost souls – not to mention the threat of gentrification to civic space – couldn’t be more vérité.

What is particularly striking, however, uniting most critics so far, is how elegantly the film flows; there is a curious, intuitive logic weaving together these randomly chosen scenes and clips. It’s an outstanding achievement.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (the French title uses the less Jamesian “jeune fille”) seamlessly intertwines themes of love and politics, representation and reality. At times it plays like a breathless romance, trembling with passionate anticipation. Elsewhere, it seems closer to a sociopolitical treatise, what Sciamma has called “a manifesto about the female gaze”.

It captures the wary, precarious nature of a community that relies financially on the same forces – the rampaging drug cartels – that also terrorise it. Huezo taps into the intense vibration between young female friends who treasure each other above all else.

The film works as a collage of everyday moments that dovetail seamlessly between the sublime and the banal. Indeed in its most mesmerising scenes, the alchemy of duration and focus elevates these moments to something more profound.

The overriding impression, once the adrenaline has drained away, is of futility, waste and pointless destruction.

It's the greatest-ever comedy-thriller, the greatest film set on a train, a faultlessly cast mirror held up to the nation in the year of Munich.

One of the most beautiful of all Stanley Kubrick’s films, originally released in 1975, this slyly savage tale of social climbing in the 18th century is also arguably his funniest.