Frequently, the film is enraging. Not because it shows the way in which dogma has the power to rewire the moral instincts of its devotees, but for the sombreness with which it acknowledges that the devotees allow this to happen.

The tone flits between revenge thriller and against-the-elements survival movie, but commits to neither.

It may not be as significant to the Marvel canon as, say, Black Panther but the skittish wit and playfulness wins us over.

The music they create together is emblematic of the central problem. It’s sterile, manufactured and utterly fake production-line pop masquerading as some kind of indie rock spotify sensation.

The result is the kind of stinging emotional candour that makes you wince.

While the fantastical elements provide a distance for the audience from the bleak core of the story, they also heighten the sense of enveloping melancholy of this aching tale of thwarted first love.

Immersive, disorienting, frightening: this experimental documentary takes its form from the landscape it explores.

A superb first feature from Marcelo Martinessi, this entirely female-driven story is full of gentle wit and playful observations on the crumbling upper echelons of Paraguayan society – there are parallels with early Lucrecia Martel, and with Sebastián Lelio’s exploration of older female sexuality, Gloria.

The film shares far too many tropes with other YA sci-fi properties – The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, Divergent – to make a mark in the unforgiving post-apocalyptic wasteland of the adolescent market. That said, the casting is strong.

It’s not quite Sharknado or Mega-shark Versus Giant Octopus level, but The Meg is certainly on the sillier end of the big, dumb shark-movie spectrum.

This is an enjoyably pacey spy picture, unfolding against the backdrop of a country that has imploded. It’s a film in which smiles are masks and conversations are loaded with double meanings.

Whatever its inconsistencies, The Lost King is an underdog story that proves a perfect vehicle for Hawkins’s reliably winning screen presence.

A subplot about George Orwell is perhaps surplus to requirements, but otherwise the film is a striking, efficient political thriller.

Guaranteed to scare the pantalones off you.

It's an exhilarating commentary on Swinging London in its dying days and the worlds of popular music and crime, with the disturbing paintings of Francis Bacon and the fascinating fictions of Jorge Luis Borges as influences. [11 Mar 2007, p.14]

The sweet-natured Kirikou and the Sorceress, is a French animated movie drawing on a West African tale that has an authenticity The Lion King lacks.

Eternity and a Day is a graceful, elegiac, humourless film, a poetical work that invites you to fall in with its meditative pace. [16 May 1999, p.6]

It's flat, unrevealing, but powerfully sincere. [11 Apr 1999, p.6]

You won't easily forget Seul Contre Tous and you won't rush to see it for a second time. [21 Mar 1999, p.6]

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]

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]

Everything about Nil By Mouth rings true. [12 Oct 1997, p.10]

That Ho Chi Minh City is as rotten as the old Saigon, only more cynical and decrepit, is no great revelation, and we learn little of how ordinary people live or how society is organised in Vietnam today. [24 Mar 1996, p.12]

The result is a technically astonishing mixture of optimistic Stalinist kitsch, agitprop and the epic Soviet style of the Twenties.

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]

The boldness of this remarkable feature film debut resides in its reticence, and we experience the world through a special sensibility. [03 Apr 1994, p.5]

Walter Hill is the living director closest to the great film-makers of Hollywood's Golden Age such as Raoul Walsh, John Ford and Howard Hawks, and Geronimo is his finest movie to date. Certainly it is his most humane. [16 Oct 1994, p.9]

Farewell My Concubine is an exquisite film, subtle, well acted, deeply moving. It confirms Chen Kaige's position as a major figure on the world scene and Gu Changwei as one of the today's finest cinematographers. [09 Jan 1994]