The performances, from Moore and in particular Portman, are sublime: both bracingly unsympathetic and wildly enjoyable.

Happening is a visceral, confronting experience.

Made at the height of the Vietnam war, this remarkable film presents the second world war on an epic scale while painting a warts-and-all portrait of the military genius General George Patton (George C Scott), part mystic, part mad martinet. [28 Sep 2014, p.47]

As always, Colman manages to express deep wellsprings of emotion with few words and fewer gestures – her face telegraphing great swathes of anguish beneath polite smiles and annoyed glances.

This female-led triptych of stories, with its deft, empathetic camerawork and intimate, intricately crafted character sketches, is a minor masterpiece in its own right.

Great acting, and a superb screenplay by Robert Towne, who re-united with Nicholson the following year on Polanski's Chinatown. [02 Apr 2006, p.10]

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

[A] sensitive, frequently harrowing observational documentary.

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 silkily enigmatic and unpredictable, and certainly unlike anything else you will see this year.

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.

[An] expertly wrought movie.

It’s a wisp of a thing, clocking in at barely over an hour. But the agile poetry and formal playfulness of Mati Diop’s exquisite hybrid documentary belies the weight and wealth of ideas within.

Where Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner’s version comes into its own is in the moments where it dares to find its own distinct voice – nowhere more so than in placing Somewhere in the hands of Rita Moreno.

It’s powerfully affecting fare; elegiac, evocative and profoundly cinematic.

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

Though it’s filmed like a romance, the moment feels captured, not staged.

What’s so invigorating is the way she gives each principle equal weighting, discussing her formal decisions, such as Cléo’s editing or the tracking shots that move right to left in 1985’s Vagabond, with the same intensity and enthusiasm as her more existential motivations (she describes her 1965 summer bummer classic Le Bonheur as “a beautiful summer peach with a worm inside”).

The script is dense, subtly shaped, and bristles with stylised, often witty hard-boiled dialogue and voice-over narration, eg: 'I never saw her in the daytime. We seemed to live by night. What was left of the day went away like a pack of cigarettes you smoke.'

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

It’s a beguiling drama that contrasts the mirage-like quality of hopes against the more tangible solidity of regrets. But while there’s a melancholy magic to it all, the spell is stretched rather thinly over the long running time.

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.

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]

It’s sentimental stuff, certainly, but the picture’s unexpectedly dark humour outweighs any maudlin tendencies.

Under the party whoops and confetti cannons there’s a deceptively complex and layered portrait of female solidarity in the face of ingrained sexism, racism and general male shittiness.

This chilling, weirdly plausible tale centres on a New York dress designer (French star Simone Simon) obsessed with the notion that she's living under an ancient Serbian curse. It achieves its effects obliquely. [11 Dec 2005, p.123]

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

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.