This deceptively gentle 50s-set film addresses weighty matters of life and death with a winning simplicity that is hard to resist.

Soderbergh’s film is rich with such small but perfectly judged flourishes, and it is this depth of character development, together with the crackling chemistry between McKellen and his co-star Michaela Coel, that makes this odd-couple art world tale so charmingly raffish.

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.

Law manages to be both utterly authentic and glossily untrustworthy.

Slick, thrilling and saturated with vivid hues and 60s can-do optimism, Le Mans ’66, James Mangold’s follow-up to Logan, is a precision-tooled machine of a movie.

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

Yates (hired on the strength of his taut British crime flick Robbery) eschews fashionable camera gimmickry and facile psychiatry, and concentrates on telling a fast-paced story of decent San Francisco cop Steve McQueen doing his job. The set-pieces (the car chase, the airport shoot-out) are famous, but the film lives on through its tone of romantic realism. [23 Jan 2000, p.10]

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.

DaCosta’s film is a macabre morality tale about the best and worst of human nature. It is utterly brutal, and one of the most compelling so far.

Trey Edward Shults’s bombastic third feature crashes and recedes, leaving few revelations in its wake.

The film is understated rather than mawkish.

The latest film from horror director Ti West (The House of the Devil), about a porn movie shoot gone wrong, is ripe with playful winks and nudges.

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

[A] tender observational documentary.

The movie has an epic sweep that anticipated and influenced the best gangster movies of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola of which it is fully the equal. [18 Aug 2010]

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.

While subjects as dark as separation and death may be faced head-on (a reading from Philip Larkin’s The Trees had me in tears), there’s a comedic quality that reminded me of Aardman’s sublime Creature Comforts animations – a joyous juxtaposition of quotidian, vérité-style dialogue and fancifully inventive visuals that hits a tragicomic sweet spot.

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

Perhaps, in its polite and unassuming way, the film advocates not just a new way of looking, but also a new way of living.

Most modern American film-makers rarely get the chance to conjure frank sex scenes that serve an explicit narrative purpose, so it’s significant that Sachs has cited the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Belgian film-maker Chantal Akerman (along with fellow Europeans Maurice Pialat and Luchino Visconti) as inspirations for this French-German co-production.

The result is an A-list B-movie that juggles moments of breath-taking visual splendour with much on-the-nose speechifying about sins of the fathers and eternal isolation, spiced up with some action-packed silliness that entirely undercuts its more po-faced pretensions.

Its writer-director, John Sayles, is one of my favourite American film-makers, when he is pursuing tough social and historical subjects as in Matewan, Eight Men Out and City of Hope. He's that rare being, a political director, but I don't care for Sayles's excursions into lyricism (Passion Fish, for example), and this present exercise in stage Irishry. [11 Aug 1996, p.8]

Malick links the lonely labour of working the land with the thanklessness of sainthood, asking questions about devotion, tradition and individual acts of resistance. Mileage (and the film is three hours) will likely depend on your tolerance for the director’s signature poetic style.

Perhaps more radical than the censor-bating, though, is the fact that My Favourite Cake trains its lens on lonely, ordinary older people – a demographic all too frequently invisible to film-makers the world over. A rare delight.

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

Today, Browning’s sympathies are clear; if there are “freaks” on display here, they are not the versatile performers to whom the title seems to allude.

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

It’s a riotously entertaining candy-coloured feminist fable that manages simultaneously to celebrate, satirise and deconstruct its happy-plastic subject. Audiences will be delighted. Mattel should be ecstatic.