It shares a vague shape and a handful of specific, linchpin scenes with its predecessor, but everything about it lands differently: characters that were previously empty or ludicrous now have real grit and depth, while action sequences that were once incoherent, lightweight and garish now number among the most thunderously spectacular in the genre.

Elicits from McQueen a directing job that's compellingly humble but also majestic, because his radical showmanship is turned to such precise, human purposes.

Mandy exists in its own supremely unnerving horror dimension.

it’s often very funny indeed. The mood is often closer to the perkier passages of the Connery films, and the humour feels contemporary and British: the Phoebe Waller-Bridge script polish evidently yielded the desired result.

Shoplifters is compassionate, socially conscious filmmaking with a piercing intelligence that is pure Kore-eda. This is a film that steals in and snatches your heart.

Robert De Niro is sensational in Scorsese's history-making mob masterpiece.

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.

Dispassionate engagement won't fly here. You either stagger out early or plunge in up to your elbows.

This is a bold work that seeks to educate its young audience about classical music. But it is also playful and delightfully imaginative.

Like its precursor, Glass Onion doubles as a dazzlingly engineered gizmo and a raucous cautionary satire, with implications that billow out into the world even as its mechanisms snap satisfyingly shut.

Moving but funny, serious but light of touch, it's a classic. [18 May 2024, p.22]

Helped by a peerless script and a great team of actors (Alfie Bass and Sid James as professional thieves; Stanley Holloway as an oratory-inclined artist-scamster), the film is both a joyous comedy and a tense thriller.

This is instant A-list Coens; enigmatic, exhilarating, irresistible.

The film comes and goes without commotion, but its magic settles on you as softly and as steadily as dust.

The two stars generate an astonishing sensual charge in a brilliant addition to the Batman canon that refuses to behave like a blockbuster

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.

Glazer’s astonishing film takes you to a place where the everyday becomes suddenly strange, and fear and seduction become one and the same.

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

The movie is hauntingly romantic at heart, in the best spirit of a Gothic fairytale, but without the harsh shadows or hard edges.

Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman won Oscars, but the work of Eileen Brennan and Timothy Bottoms is even more cherishable.

Inspired by The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a short story by Leo Tolstoy, this is a mournful masterpiece. Shimura's performance is central - he plods around like a gnarled tortoise, his weather-beaten head perpendicular to his body, his expression a downturned rictus of despair. [01 Mar 2014, p.36]

By applying cutting-edge restoration techniques to footage shot at the time, Jackson has crafted an historical portrait of matchless immediacy and power, in which young souls lost in a century-old war stare out across the years and meet our gaze.

Unless you’re a devoted fan, concert films can be a rather dreary experience but the sheer spectacle and energy of the her film is enough to convert even the most rabid anti-Swiftite.

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.

The film’s sweetness and bitterness are held so perfectly in balance, and realised with such sinew-stiffening intensity, that watching it feels like a three-hour sports massage for your heart and soul.

Few Westerns examine the depths of human feeling, but this film by George Stevens is one of them, and it has since become a cinematic landmark. [13 Feb 2020, p.29]

It’s a feat of pure cinematic necromancy.

They don't come sourer or sexier than Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (1947), a pretty much perfect film noir. [26 Jul 2014, p.4]

The script, co-written by Zvyagintsev and his regular collaborator Oleg Negin, scrupulously extends to each of its characters the dignity of complexity, and both excellent leads repay the favour tenfold, investing what could have easily been petit-bourgeois caricatures – the preening shrew, the oafish office drone – with riveting sincerity and nuance.

This story is about whether secrets can be survived, whether the knowing or not knowing is more injurious. Haigh’s very fine, classically modulated film keeps these questions alive until literally its last shot, and lets them jangle their way through you for days afterwards.

It works as beautifully as it does because the film’s comedy has been machined with Swiss precision, and all of its characters written with obvious love.

It’s a film full of tight close-ups of hands accepting gifts that comfort, inspire and bring succour to their recipients’ souls. That’s how we should receive it.

It takes about three minutes – roughly the length of time it takes Hoffman to get down the moving walkway to Simon and Garfunkel's Sound of Silence and from the airport to the suffocating atmosphere of his graduation party, where he gets gradually trapped into a relationship with one of his parents' friends – to realise that The Graduate is actually a very nasty film, and a very, very funny one.

Wilder’s intoxicating script, co-written with IAL Diamond, flows like finest brandy, and Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine shine as two essentially good souls trapped in a tangle of office politics.

It is one of the year’s very best films, a great, rumbling thunderclap of genius.

Mank feels like both a film for the ages and one hauled up from them: a forbidden tale grave-robbed from the Hollywood catacombs.

Jackie, the English-language debut from the Chilean director Pablo Larraín, shows you the past in a hall of shattered mirrors – fractured and unsettling, with every surface sharp enough to draw blood.

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.

Not one of the quartet misses the opportunity to do some of their very best work here.

Watching that brilliance in action remains a thrill: you can see the angles and vectors align in his mind’s eye before every kick. Tryhorn and Nicholas have pulled off something similar here. Having got every calculation just right, their film soars.

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.

For Hollywood’s armies of unsung craftsfolk, Nope turns the blockbuster rules on their head: an expansive science-fiction thriller whose heroes rise up and claim their heroism from behind the scenes. For the rest of us, it’s an outrageously good time.

Mikkelsen, who is not given to sympathetic roles, has never been better. This is cinema that sinks its claws into your back.

Shot and edited by Spielberg and his team in less than six months, The Post is very evidently a strike-while-the-story’s-hot kind of project, and it finds the master filmmaker at his most thrillingly supple and intuitive.

The Muppet Christmas Carol's warmth, wit and obvious affection for Dickens make it one of the greatest Christmas films – and literary adaptations – of all time.

Poignantly lyrical as a city symphony, it branches out for a sequel, when the characters abscond to the coast to figure out what to do: at once a respite and a reckoning, ghostly and mysterious.

The film itself is a mesmerisingly gripping and controlled parable-thriller in which the paranoia, misogyny and rage of the Iranian state are mapped seamlessly onto an ordinary family unit.

Mark Sandrich's musical, written and scored by Irving Berlin, is a stone-cold festive classic. [07 Dec 2018, p.35]

Great animation can communicate wildly complex ideas with head-spinning clarity and wit, as Docter capably proved with Inside Out – a film which staged the interplay of emotions in an 11-year-old’s head like a vintage sitcom. If anything, Soul pushes this capacity for revelation even further: there are moments of true Blakean mystery and wonder here, expressed with a crispness that feels like a lightbulb snapping on above your head.

There are gripping chases and balletic combat scenes, painstakingly realised by Oshii’s animators, but the mood is mostly cold and melancholic, as Kusanagi broods over the fleshly implications of living in a world of data

It tests our presumptions, makes us squirm.

It’s the sort of film that rattles you in three ways at once: through the grim candour of its themes, the chill precision of its craft, and the nightmarish throb of its images.

His tender, witty, wondrous The Phoenician Scheme is the most Andersonian Anderson film to date – but then again, they all are, and that’s the fun of them.

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.

It’s about acting, denial, wrongdoing and the age of consent, but also about growing up, and the different ways we tread through that process, or fail to.

Writer-director Alan Parker's utterly delightful, tongue-in-cheek love letter to the gangster genre.

Beyond the troughful of fun tics, Spall makes Turner tenderly and totally human — the effect of which is to make his artistic talents seem even more extraordinary still.

A sick joke, an urgent warning and a roar into the abyss, Mother! earns its exclamation mark three times over and more.

Bessa’s contained fury goes haywire in this stretch, and brilliantly so: it’s a tour de force of social-realist acting to be notched up with the likes of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves.

Disguises, time bombs, runaway trains: Cruise, his director Christopher McQuarrie and their collaborators are very consciously working in a century-old tradition here, perhaps to show the business and art of stunning audiences can – if we choose – be much the same now as it ever was.

The film may handle differently to its predecessor, but it’s clearly been tuned by the same engineers. After the pared-down drag racer, here comes the juggernaut.

There are some of the very finest character actors that Warner Brothers could muster and a rich, detailed screenplay studded with an indecent number of sparklingly quotable lines. It is a movie to play again, and again.

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.

Franklin J Schaffner's superb war epic charts US General George S Patton's role in the Second World War. [06 Jun 2015, p.32]

Roofman has heart, energy and personality fit to burst. If the cinema gods decided that it was finally time for Channing Tatum to have a chance at an Oscar nomination, they could hardly have equipped him better than with this role.

It’s a stunningly confident piece of filmmaking, which holds on to vital clues about how much time has elapsed, and what’s happened, then springs them on us. The performances slay you.

The mechanisms at work in Baby Driver, while calibrated with hair’s-breadth precision, are nothing new. Here’s what is: the sheer glee with which the film prods around in its own clockwork to show you what spins what.

Toy Story 4 reaffirms that Pixar, at their best, are like no other animation studio around.

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.

So hauntingly perfect is Barnard’s film, and so skin-pricklingly alive does it make you feel to watch it, that at first you can hardly believe the sum of what you have seen.

As for Andrews, she is just a joy, conveying enough doubt beneath that brisk, clean exterior to stop her character becoming a prig; her comic timing and the way in which she convinces in her relationships with the children are so understated they can be underrated.

There’s so much in this seething cauldron of a film, so many film-industry neuroses exposed and horrors nested within horrors, that one viewing is too much, and not nearly enough. Cronenberg has made a film that you want to unsee – and then see and unsee again.

Thrilling, moving and gloriously Cruisey, Joseph Kosinski's sequel to the 1986 hit is unquestionably the best studio action film in years.

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.

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

Belle is a beautifully observed, dazzlingly animated sci-fi fairy tale about our online-offline double lives – it’s Hosoda’s finest film since 2012’s Wolf Children, and perhaps his best to date.

David Oyelowo has never given a better performance. He seems to penetrate into King’s soul and camps out there for two hours. He’s tremendous, of course, when electrifying his congregation at the podium, but a sense of fatigue is even more paramount.

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

Loznitsa’s construction of this world apart – which is, of course, a grotesque allegory for Russia itself – is as immersive as it is unnerving.

James Stewart is superb as a stubborn frontiersman turned bounty hunter called Lin McAdam, who wins a one-in-a-thousand Winchester repeater rifle in a Dodge City marksmanship contest.

It is mystical, daring, poetic, thrilling, appalling and never less than utterly mesmerising.

Style over substance? Not at all – it’s more that Fennell understands that style can be substance when you do it right. Cathy and Heathcliff’s passions vibrate through their dress, their surroundings, and everything else within reach, and you leave the cinema quivering on their own private frequency.

Its title refers to the mythical Islamic bridge across hell, on which one false step leads to certain damnation. The path trodden by the film itself is no less risky, but it styles out the crossing astonishingly.

What makes the film so charming is the comic interplay between Matthau and Lemmon.

As In Fabric transitions from one plot to the next, it is as if the film itself is nodding off, in order to reach a conclusion a conscious mind could never have found. The effect is wholly and deliberately bewildering, both in the moment and for days and nights afterwards.

It’s not an experience to relish, exactly, but it’s still one that’s fully capable of blowing you away.

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.

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

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.

Throughout the film the sense of Vienna as a frazzled echo of its glorious past is underpinned by Reed's greatest trouvaille – the discovery of Anton Karas's zither melodies, used as the only musical accompaniment. Half-jaunty, half-melancholic, they epitomise, like the film itself, a world gone sadly to seed.

Its salvaged parts combine into an internally incongruous but crazily unique whole.

The action is underpinned by the men's nostalgic reminiscences and regretful ruminations. A masterclass in unobtrusive film-making. [17 Mar 2014, p.29]

Denis Villeneuve's new adaptation of the 1965 Frank Herbert novel – starring Timothée Chalamet – is an awe-inspiring piece of work.

Thanks to both its mesmerising cast and McQueen’s flawless command of atmosphere and mood, it pulls off what I can only describe as a kind of cinematic jiu-jitsu – heaving you back to that precise moment in history, then lifting your soul out of your skin in one seamless move.

It’s a film that could have so easily smacked of an exercise, but its beauty feels thrillingly natural, and its considerable emotional power is honestly earned.

It's a great idea, and the supporting cast (including Sid James) is terrific, especially during the sight gags. It's very funny indeed. [22 May 2010, p.31]

Fennell has a sharp eye for outrage, and an even sharper one for hotness, crafting any number of scenarios and images here that may elicit sotto voce phwoars against your better judgement.

Scott’s Alien: Covenant is a mad scientist film – arguably, one of the maddest. It’s grandiose, exhilarating, vertiginously cynical and symphonically perverse.