The child’s perspective on the story means that the film is unquestioning when it comes to the sources of the psychic powers, neatly sidestepping the need for exposition. In a child’s mind, magic is real, black magic painfully so.

Top Gun: Maverick offers exactly the kind of air-punching spectacle that reminds people why a trip to the cinema beats staying at home and watching Netflix.

Schrader’s sensitive, unshowy approach to the directing choices is a smart decision; this is a film that is respectful of and in service to the stories of the women.

It’s dazzling, baffling and staggeringly ambitious.

For all the genre nods, this remains very much its own movie – a film that isn’t afraid to talk to its core audience, even while giving them the heebie-jeebies.

This slow-burning drama, which won one of the top prizes at Sundance earlier this year, elegantly balances a spark of hope against a slowly rising tide of dread.

Fans will eat it up (with relish and fries); older kids will adore the oddball humour. And even cinemagoers who have never seen an episode of the TV series (me, for example) are likely to find much to amuse them, provided they have a tolerance for extreme silliness.

Regular horror ingredients are all mixed up into something truly terrifying. [17 Dec 2006, p.8]

For a movie about the undead, Japanese director Shin’ichirô Ueda’s horror comedy is certainly lively.

A beguiling, if slightly convoluted, fantasy.

The magnetic Scicluna is a Maltese fisherman in real life, and part of a cast predominantly made up of non-professional actors. His performance is impressively complex.

The words are so piercing and acute that we hardly need the stirring score that swirls in the background.

It’s the eerie mystery of sadness that rings most clearly through Nikou’s film, a meditation on the construction of personality that, like all the best ghost stories, combines wistful melancholia with a hint of wish-fulfilment, of lost souls who, in forgetting, are trying to remember.

While the film defies neat genre classification, it has elements of physical horror – like a mating between the mind of David Cronenberg and something that crawled out of a compost heap.

The Eternal Memory is a restrained, respectful piece of film-making that takes its lead from its two subjects. It’s wrenchingly sad, but also a testament to the love that endures, even as Augusto increasingly struggles to recognise his wife.

What differentiates Sendijarević’s film, however, is the hot-blooded current of feminine lust that runs through it. Zorić’s Alma stomps, pouts and scowls her way through the film, aware of her sexual power and unafraid to use it to her advantage.

Rock’s wildest years – both the man and the music – swirl together into a psychedelic maelstrom of pills, pictures and brilliantly creative swearing.

Ozon first read Chambers’s novel as a teenager and his adaptation blends the prickly joy of that first encounter with the stylistic confidence of a film-maker revisiting an old flame.

Coppola evokes the aching loneliness and isolation experienced by women who simultaneously have everything and nothing.

I can think of few other films that get into the skin of new motherhood, with its formless terrors and fierce, furious primal love, as inventively and effectively as this one.

Conventional, highly efficient patriotic war drama, made during the Korean War but set in the Pacific during the Second World War. John Wayne as a martinet US Marine Crops squadron leader is confronted by Robert Ryan as a compassionate second-in-command, and the flying sequences are as outstanding as one might expect from a movie produced by ace aviator Howard Hughes. [08 Dec 2002, p.8]

The film is shrewd on male friendship, suggesting that a lot of men are vulnerable and crave intimacy, but are often too poor at communicating to truly reach for it.

An apt title indeed, as the film's extreme violence always explodes from nowhere, with the resulting sparks carrying far and wide. Yet the narrative moves at a contemplative pace, allowing each scene to gently yield its secrets. [26 Jul 1998, p.8]

Shot on film, using vintage equipment, the picture has a scrappy, tactile quality, its ghostly black-and-white images scratched and scorched. Meanwhile, Neil Hannon’s smartly used score envisages a chilling authoritarian future for pop music.

It’s this – the wry humour provided by the long-suffering Bonnie; the lovely lived-in quality of the friendship – rather than the lengthy swimming sequences and a few slightly unwieldy flashbacks that gives the film its crowd-pleasing appeal.

While some sections of the globe-trotting plot strike a baggy, backward-looking note, it’s the smaller moments that make this fly, particularly when the film uses fantasy to turn horribly real everyday harassments into moments of air-punching triumph.

It’s an absolute joy.

Ultimately, one of the key pleasures of the picture is its uncertainty – the niggling doubts that remain, and the sense that a crucial piece of the puzzle is tantalisingly out of reach.