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]

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

Bergholm gives us precision-tooled jump scares and creeping, clammy atmospherics; a malevolent mother and an insurrectionist child.

This Kelly is motivated by an oedipal complex and wears dresses to distract his opponents; The Babadook’s Essie Davis is equal parts fearsome and magnetic as his enterprising sex worker mother. More enjoyable still are the film’s corrupt policemen; the louche, stockinged, pipe-smoking Constable Fitzpatrick (Nicholas Hoult) and virile cartoon villain Sergeant O’Neil (Charlie Hunnam).

As a portrait of friendship, viewed through the compound eye of a mutant insect, it is multidimensional and rather moving.

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.

This thoughtful documentary about Arthur Ashe, the first African American man to win Wimbledon in 1975, understands that representation is only one step towards equality.

Writer-director Evan Morgan’s deft screenplay balances a taut crime story against a textured character study.

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]

Even if the scattershot plotting doesn’t quite hold together, there’s a wayward energy to the picture and a barbed sense of mischief.

The film features dazzling action and a fantasy world that is realised with an almost tactile level of detail. Seek it out on a monster-size screen if at all possible.

There is an incandescence and a buoyancy to the animation that elevates the formula.

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]

Borrowing a punky, handmade aesthetic from the famous monthly programme posters, the film collates wildly entertaining interviews with former staff and punters.

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.

It may lack the originality of the best Miyazaki films, but with its heart-swelling score and exquisitely realised worlds, this is a must for Ghibli fans.

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]

It’s a fun, silly premise, but while there’s no shortage of stoner humour, the film is deeper and considerably more satisfying than the drug-baked adolescent wisecracking might initially suggest.

If anything, this follow-up is even more enjoyable, its appeal boosted by Milady slinking on to centre stage, her weaponised sexuality backed up by her private collection of daggers and swords.

In the elegant balance of these seemingly incongruous elements, Guadagnino has outdone himself.

Right now, Villeneuve is riding the sinewy worm of Herbert’s sacred text with aplomb.

It’s a droll, perceptive and shamelessly sentimental look at generational tensions.

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

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.

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.

Kendrick’s knack for capturing period detail goes beyond the psychedelic synthetics and kipper ties. She taps into the treacherous sexism that was hardwired into the entertainment industry and wider culture of the time, both of which are shown to be minefields of fragile male egos and potential violence.

Like Barry Jenkins’s If Beale Street Could Talk and Todd Haynes’s Carol, Ashe takes the form of the 50s melodrama and recentres it on characters the genre has tended to ignore. This isn’t as politically restless as those films – it’s less interested in subverting the “woman’s picture” than establishing itself as one.

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.