Although it is a spectacle film, the story of how a man takes on the tyranny of the Romans, with all sorts of horrible consequences to himself and his family, is powerful and gripping.

Sharp, exacting, trenchant, and fascinating, it’s a shard of history which uses immense polish to make of itself a mirror.

Starting her film with an aphorism of William Blake’s – “The bird, a nest; the spider, a web; man, friendship” – she not only does justice to the human end of this equation, but looks out for a rare spectrum of the animal kingdom into the bargain.

The world of Mad Max has always been welded together from bits of whatever was lying around, and the films’ brilliance has always been in their welding – the ingenious ways in which their scrap-metal parts were combined to create something unthinkable, hilarious or obscene, and often all three.

The film is heroically unabashed about the power of love, expressed through extraordinary photography (by Jamie D Ramsay, who lifted Living), and a quartet of stars bouncing off each other to hit stratospheric acting highs. It shimmers, and it aches.

It is an extraordinary, prolonged popping-candy explosion of pleasure, sadness, anger, lust and hope.

The odd scenarios keep coming, fast and thick. Phantom Thread is built along the theoretically familiar lines of gothic romance – if you had to pick a predecessor, it would probably be Hitchcock’s Rebecca – but it’s very hard in the moment to work out where on earth it’s going, or even how conventionally romantic Reynolds and Alma’s relationship actually is.

The true genius of the film, based on a 1952 short story by Daphne du Maurier, is the way Hitchcock makes the malevolent birds seem like manifestations of his characters' mental unease.

Where Part I had a shimmering poignancy as a tragic love story, this is busy and dazzling: Hogg has never made a funnier piece of work or come to us with such fresh provocations.

There’s a haiku-like purity to it: Look Back is as neat and yet also as overflowing as the four-panel strips in which its leads once diligently honed their craft. And if something so beautiful also feels too brief – well, that may be the idea.

Christopher Nolan's portrait of the father of the nuclear bomb is a triumph, like witnessing history itself being split open.

Music has a vital role all the way through, inspiring the film’s rhythm and flow, its time jumps and nomadic shifts in location, its very destiny.

Perhaps the best (and certainly the most realistic and violent) of the great 1930s gangster films, with Paul Muni as an Al Capone surrogate. Directed by Howard Hawks at a flat-out pace, with thrilling shoot-outs and intriguing if depraved characters. [18 Jun 2013]

How Jarmusch takes this match-stick house of nothings and fills it with such calm and wisdom is a mystery with only one real answer: he’s an artist.

The Gold Rush is a flawless example of Charlie Chaplin's masterly fusion of comedy and tragedy. [20 Apr 2024, p.23]

Charles Crichton's classic crime spoof remains one of Ealing Studios' most successful films. [25 May 2013, p.36]

What gives the film its lip-smacking, chilli-pepper kick is that we are never entirely certain who is conning whom, or even if what we are watching has any truth to it at all.

Any movie that lasts three hours should have a damn good reason for lingering so long. At 182 minutes, Michael Cimino's Vietnam War epic is timed to perfection.

However genius may flourish, you know it when you see it, and Whiplash is it.

It’s tough stuff, though the skateboarding interludes, full of low-gliding camerawork and Jackass-like gallows camaraderie, go a long way towards leavening the gloom.

This is another hugely admirable entry in the Dardenne canon: nothing all that new, perhaps, but as thoughtful, humane and superbly composed as we have, very fortunately, come to expect from them.

On paper, this looks like a flatly impossible task for DiCaprio: the film’s central character is neither hero nor charismatic outlaw, but a grasping, biddable, determinedly unreflective stooge, whose actions inspire revulsion and outrage.But he meets the challenge with one of the finest, most complex performances he’s ever given.

It’s beautifully organised, and there’s no way you could possibly watch it without learning all kinds of stuff.

Director Raoul Walsh does not stint on the melodrama or the almost casual violence, and Cagney duly exits in a blaze of tainted glory. [18 Jun 2013]

Elle forces you to critically confront every myth it indulges, every cliché it embraces and subverts.

The cast’s performances are all so beautifully observed that you may end up wishing the film had given their characters a few more moments of quiet.

For its entire two and a half hours – which whips past in what feels like mere minutes – Safdie’s film had me vibrating like a tuning fork. It’s a joyous salute to life’s beautiful cacophony.

Emotions and moods are anchored to specific moments of stillness, and we feel them all the more intensely because of it.

The inspirational, thoroughly festive ending is guaranteed to bring tears to the eyes.

The film is often hard to watch, but Campion and her uniformly excellent cast leaven the discomfort with a constant sense of prickling intrigue around what precisely we are watching play out here, and how far the ritual will go.

For sheer theatricality, the very thing Weaver thought she was abandoning, Alien is difficult to beat.

One of the rawest, toughest, most emotionally scalding portraits of a marriage ever put on screen.

Kaufman and Johnson tease out the possible causes and effects of Michael’s crisis with great imagination, tilting your sympathies so subtly as they do so that you don’t even feel it going on.

This superb debut feature from Andreas Fontana puts an ingenious spin on the paranoid thriller: its main character is determined to behave as if he isn’t in one.

Paddington was uncommonly charming and Paddington 2 is very nearly as good.

A black comedy, really, based on Patricia Highsmith's source novel - remains a cracking piece of entertainment. It is shot with all his usual invention and style, and a couple of scenes rank among the director's most visually memorable.

Re-entering Mike Leigh’s stomping ground in Hard Truths is both a solace and, in the best possible way, a slap in the face. It’s also an impressively funny ordeal, in that unmistakably morose way no one has ever mastered better than Leigh.

It all makes for soaringly satisfying viewing, yet the satisfaction comes from blistering performances and virtuosic screenwriting, and absolutely nothing else.

Hansen-Løve and Huppert cup a single life in their hands and ponder the mixed blessing of freedom from a philosophical position: the trade-off between self-sufficiency and aloneness that Nathalie finds herself negotiating.

It’s wonderful.

Nothing about it should work as a film, yet almost everything does.

This is a beautiful, bold, intently serious film.

The story of A Star Is Born may be as old as show-business, but it is also electrifyingly fresh – a well-known melody given vivid, searching new force.

Poitras sets the saga on a low simmer, while the Social Network-like score throbs away.

Childlike vulnerability hasn’t been something Hopkins has opened up to show us in a long, long while, but he seems ready for this role, hungry to do it, and you may not be prepared for how deep he goes. Zeller’s writing, and his shockingly naked acting, peak at the bitter end.

Maoz’s control of tone is meticulous and his technique swaggeringly assured, making Foxtrot a film that works best in the spine-prickling moment.

The film thrives on unsettling images of overgrowth and rot, such as the dead flower that drops at Kerr’s touch, and the beetle that crawls obscenely out of the mouth of a cherub statue.

Sweet Country is tough, spare and lyrical right down to the bone.... It is also a work of moral conscience that rules out easy answers, with acridly funny moments of black comedy and a sense of awesome natural spectacle that is inseparable from its dramatic impact. It has a power that makes the cinema shake.

Subtle but assured to the end, Granik’s film is all undertow, but it irresistibly grabs you.

Even when Almodóvar plays on easy mode – and nothing about Parallel Mothers could be described as difficult – the results are irresistible.

It has a straight-down-the-highway momentum, interesting stakes, and more textured character work than you can shake a stick at.

This triumphant adaptation, which premiered last night at Venice, strip-mines Gray’s book for all its funniest, fizziest and sexiest ideas, and leaves the chewier, more literary stuff on paper, where it belongs. I’d say purists might bridle, but speaking as one of them, I wasn’t just relieved, but overjoyed.

As Mulligan so deftly demonstrates, the story is in the characters, their failings and fragility, their heroism and nobility of spirit. It's in the depiction of heart-breaking cruelty and heart-warming humanity. It's in the innocence of a child's world overshadowed by the evil that adults do.

Braga has been presented with an uncommonly dense and multi-faceted role here, and she plunges into it with a kind of glossy-maned, leonine majesty, investing the character with a hard-won dignity that often has you stifling a cheer, but also exploring her flaws in gripping fashion.

Small-town America is portrayed with gentle, affectionate humour.

As with Jordan Peele’s Get Out, or Coogler’s 2015 Rocky spin-off Creed, Black Panther isn’t a novelty, but a fresh perspective on a well-worn format. Not to get all Rosa Parks about it, but the film walks into the multiplex like it’s insane that it hasn’t been allowed in there all along. And it is.

This is the same wondrous journey on which Apichatpong sends his audience: inwards and downwards, to a place where the simplest rhythms of everyday life become hallowed and mythic.

This is his and Swinton’s first film together: in fact, it is the Spanish master’s first English-language production. But the two are an obviously good creative match, each one well-versed in the interplay of depth and surface, and capable of switching moods from ripe to heartfelt in a blink.

The star of Brooklyn is Fiona Weir – not a person who appears on screen at any stage, but the woman who cast it.

Van Dyke's energy is prodigious (especially when he leaps around with a gang of sooty chimney-sweeps on the London rooftops) and the songs are classics.

If proof were needed that Barry Jenkins’s directing achievement was far from a one-off, it pulses and dances through every sequence of his follow-up, If Beale Street Could Talk, in all its gorgeous romantic melancholy and sublimated outrage.

Spectacular, star-powered cinema that makes us ask anew what cinema is for. Call it a "Dark Knight" of the soul.

It Happened One Night is pure delight.

It looks amazing, and the complex treatment of the issues marks it out from the shoot-'em-up standards of the time. [29 Jun 2013, p.32]

The film often rings hollow.

Grant's delivery of mordant mutterings is superb. The lines, from Bruce Robinson's semi-autobiographical script, are an oddball joy and mostly involve drink and the inevitable hangover.

The Velvet Underground is not the kind of music documentary that dutifully walks the viewer through the greatest hits and bitterest feuds. Instead, it re-conjures the moment that made the hits possible and the feuds inevitable, via a whirl of archive footage and interviews new and old.

OK, McQuarrie may not have De Palma’s sweat-drop precision, John Woo’s craziness or the impish wit of Brad Bird, but his mastery of logistics here is easily sufficient to make it the blockbuster of the summer.

Thirty-nine years on, it’s as vivacious as ever.

Agnes Varda's exquisite New Wave masterpiece, about an hour and a half in the life of a gorgeous, possibly dying chanteuse. [30 Apr 2010, p.31]

It holds the attention of the audience from brazen start to fantastic finish – well, not quite to the silly end, perhaps, but then we can’t have everything.

Romance and cinema are ideal bedfellows for all sorts of obvious reasons, but on screen, the beauty of friendship can be harder to pin down. This wise and wondrous (and wordless) animation does it better than any other film in recent memory – and in ways a six-year-old could effortlessly grasp.

The terror, panic and small town politics are all brilliantly done but this is also a film about bravery and friendship and the scenes in which the trio bond as they sit out at sea waiting to fight death itself are moving and witty.

It's hard to conceive of a sword-and-sandals epic with greater sweep or grandeur than Spartacus...For majestic, mind-blowing sequences, you're spoilt for choice.

He remains a master of composition, subtly guiding your eye towards details that reveal the kind of stories we might usually overlook – in life as well as in the cinema itself.

The sheer compassion of Zhao's direction is one of the film's most elemental pleasures, while McDormand is one of those rare actors who can somehow make the act of listening as thrilling as a barnstorming speech.

Farhadi’s films are like moral whodunits, and as Sepideh and her friends gradually unearth the truth, he expertly buffets our sympathies in all directions until the very last shot.

Young women have desires too, and the unsinkable, uninhibited Minnie finds that a little self-belief can make up for a lot of bad decisions.

The film’s scope is limited, but as far as it goes, All Is Lost is very good indeed: a neat idea, very nimbly executed.

This is an often shoulder-shudderingly funny film, whose comic dialogue is dazzlingly designed and performed. But McDonagh leaves fate itself with the last, black, bone-rattling laugh.

It’s flat-out hilarious – find me a funnier screen stab at Austen, and I’m tempted to offer your money back personally. Gliding through its compact 92 minutes with alert photography and not a single scene wasted, it’s also Stillman on the form of his life.

This is categorically not a film that will be universally admired – but even as it cleaves to old formulas, it transports your mind to new terrain that feels genuinely and frighteningly hostile, and leaves you with plenty of mental souvenirs by which to remember the trip.

What makes the film so special is that Ford and Tommy Lee Jones (as his chief pursuer, US Marshal Samuel Gerard) are such beautifully matched adversaries.

Very dark and very British, with strong performances all round. [28 Aug 2010, p.30]

As parable, the film’s slippery quality catches you off guard in the best way. And it summons profound love for a character – a village idiot it would never let you describe that way – without congealing even slightly into sentimentality. It clings on to Lazzaro like the only hope in a benighted world.

It's so rare in British cinema to see the "L" in "LGBTQ+" up there in such bold type, which makes Blue Jean not only a biting look at this historical moment but a riveting act of redress.

Of all Shakespeare’s plays, Macbeth may be the best-served by cinema, with terrific, distinctive adaptations over the years from Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Roman Polanski, and most recently Justin Kurzel, with Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard. Coen’s is something different again – though new would be entirely the wrong word. It resonates with the ancient power of a ritual.

Particle Fever offers enough broad explanation to keep lay persons up to speed. Where it excels is in depicting the various personalities involved.

Flow might be a digital confection, but it’s also open, alive, elemental. In every sense, it’s a breath of fresh air.

This is an impressively clear-eyed and deeply moving portrait.

Like the best bath you’ve ever had, it sends tingles coursing through every part of you that other films don’t reach.

The on-screen chemistry between Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy was so powerful that they ended up making nine movies together, to huge public acclaim. But in no other film did that chemistry produce such delightfully explosive results as Adam's Rib.

Strickland has made something uniquely sexy and strange, built on two tremendous central performances and a bone-deep understanding of cinema’s magic and mechanisms.

Mightily clever in its rather theatrical structure, but bracingly cinematic in its formal approach, the movie has a bold, ambiguous final act.

Among Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's formidable oeuvre, this early romcom stands out for charm and quirkiness. [20 Aug 2020, p.20]

Vitally, Wandel doesn’t ramp up the misery here for dramatic effect, but rather successfully makes the fairly everyday unpleasantness feel as chest-clutchingly hopeless as it would to – well, a seven-year-old.

It radiates a candour, immediacy and tongue-scalding sex appeal that a bigger budget would have only smothered.

It ought to be a triumph. Somehow, though, it lacks the flooding emotional force Donoghue gave it on the page.