This whole film has a wizardry to it which you’ll be thinking about for days.

You couldn’t accuse the film of outstaying its welcome for even one of these 81 pristine minutes.

This is a resounding return to form for Payne: there are moments that recall his earlier road movies About Schmidt and Sideways, but it has a wistful, shuffling, grizzly-bearish rhythm all of its own.

The animation is state-of-the-art – but isn't it high time superheroes stuck a pin in one reality and ripped up their passports?

Heavenly Creatures, which remains Jackson's best movie, his most serious and his most daring, is 99 minutes long and doesn't waste a single one. It manages to be both shocking and intoxicating, a portrait of giddy teenage escapism which yanks itself free from reality in disturbing, and finally deadly, ways. Jackson has an obvious flair for fantasy - an obsession with it, one might say - but this is a film about its dangers, not just its temptations. [17 Nov 2012]

Longinotto and editor Ollie Huddleston stitch it, with lightness and dexterity, into a wholly edifying, often stirring tapestry of survivors’ stories.

Fifty Shades of Grey can only dream of being as erotic a work as Powell and Pressburger's tale of repressed desire and simmering passions among a community of nuns at a convent in the Himalayas. Jack Cardiff's cinematography, with its rich, dark interiors and mountains painted on glass, is among the most beautiful in film. [09 Mar 2020]

The Big Sleep is the best scripted, best directed, best acted, and least comprehensible film noir ever made. [27 Aug 2004]

Brian De Palma's flamboyant directing might seem callous were it not balanced by Sissy Spacek's heart-rending performance as the mousy adolescent who wreaks telekinetic vengeance when she's humiliated by bitchy classmates. [10 Dec 2011, p.39]

Though there isn’t a single word of dialogue in the film’s 80-minute running time, the big questions it asks, about ambition, acceptance and the beauty of companionship, ring loud in every heart-melting frame.

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.

Achieving the gossamer profundity of one of Alice Munro’s short stories, her film is about the uninterrogated privileges success brings and the envy they can easily spawn.

This new Elvis Presley concert movie is an intimate, sweaty and explosively joyous experience that revives the King’s reputation as one of the greatest performers of all time.

In its own ingenious way, One Cut of the Dead cleaves true to the most important zombie rule of all: survival has always been a team effort.

Jerome Robbins’s legendary choreography needs the biggest screen it can get; when the movie’s firing on all cylinders of music, lyrics and motion (twice: “America” and “Gee, Officer Krupke”) there’s little to touch it.

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.

A shimmering coup de cinema to make your heart burst, your mind swim and your soul roar.

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

Deftly adapted by director Audrey Diwan from a novella, Happening is a period piece, but it’s acted and shot with a shivery immediacy.

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]

The sheer unsparing intimacy of Gyllenhaall’s film gives its thrills an excitingly illicit quality. Watching it feels like reading someone else’s diary – and then finding yourself mentioned in its pages.

The film bears its real-world resonance as lightly as a button, thanks both to the steady supply of well-turned one-liners and the rippling chemistry between Nanjiani and a never-better Kazan, who’s so disarmingly funny here that I kept catching myself pulling puppy-dog faces whenever she was on screen.

Ceylan expertly draws your eye and ear to the drama behind the drama, and gives the most gently naturalistic scenes the weight and grain of visions. The word visionary has been flogged by the film business to the point of redundancy, but with The Wild Pear Tree, Ceylan reminds us he has earned every letter of it.

This tremendous follow-up to Trier’s 2021 international breakthrough hit The Worst Person in the World flows with a ravishing freeness through the many complex strictures it builds for itself: layered family psychologies; behaviours and secrets that recur and reform across generations; the therapeutic value of art to its makers.

First Reformed doesn’t come off as pastiche, or a raking-up of old ideas – largely because Schrader and his cast commit to the project with sharpened and unblinking seriousness, even when the going gets mesmerically weird.

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.

Magnificent melodrama. [11 Feb 2012, p.34]

Seydoux has unfakeable chemistry here with a perfect-as-usual Poupaud, the leading man in French cinema who seems most incapable of putting a foot wrong.

It’s tense, absurd, desperate and daft, all at once: seldom have so many contradictory tones been so gainfully employed.

A Real Pain is a very welcome throwback to a type of indie comedy-drama that had all but disappeared. It manages to be ruefully perceptive and laugh-out-loud funny, often at the same time: that’s not easy. It also presents characters with issues we grow to understand, and doesn’t set about artificially “fixing” them: how refreshing.

Beautifully done, I think, with a completely appropriate and consistent style.

It has a slippery elegance, an ambitious way of nudging its nose into magic realism, and some unforgettable images.

Each vignette has the subcutaneous prickle of folklore – unapologetically weird as they are, you can feel their hooks snagging on your psyche’s most deeply buried regions.

It’s the women who steal the film, collectively recalling Grey Gardens (1975) in their distinctive, damaged mannerisms.

Hawaiian waves crash over a high-calibre Hollywood prestige drama, sharp and sobering, with top-drawer work from Lancaster, Clift and Sinatra.

In a breezy chat, the quartet are mostly unwilling to dwell on unpleasant subjects, so Michell uses archive footage to spell out the subtext.

What’s striking about the film’s tone is its redemptive warmth. Though the details are chilling, it’s as if a cathartic space has been opened for these girls and their families to explain what they went through.

On this present occasion, Farhadi may hardly be reinventing himself, but his old tools serve him just fine.

The movie rattles with provocations.

There’s no need for Spielberg and Kushner to tease out topicality here. Aspects of West Side Story feel as pertinent today as they must have done on its 1957 Broadway debut. But relevance is easy: timelessness is the real artistic feat. And Spielberg has magnificently pulled it off.

Kapadia’s film is many things: a Sherlockian reconstruction of Winehouse’s arcing path across the skies of superstardom, a commemoration of her colossal talent, and a moving tribute to a brilliant, witty, vivacious young woman gone far too soon. But above all, it’s a perceptive examination of the singer’s need for love – from her friends, family, colleagues, husband and public – and the ways in which that need went unmet, or was exploited, at the times it ached in her the most.

It’s hard to remember the last time an actress aged as convincingly on screen as Zhao Tao does in the melancholic, gently epic Ash Is Purest White.

Night Will Fall isn’t simply a film about the war, it documents the power of emerging technologies to reveal and publicise war crimes - something that also feels acutely relevant today.

Varda by Agnès is unquestionably one for the fans ... But this film also serves as a tantalising crash-course for newcomers.

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]

A modern-day pilgrimage and profound comment on Englishness. [03 Apr 2021, p.20]

While Kayla Day is very much a teenager of her precise time and place, her gruelling anxiety – and Fisher’s wonderful yearning in the role – make her universally relatable anyway.

Girlhood carries you along with its characters, neither lionising nor demonising them, but allowing you to watch them live their lives and make their own decisions, be they rash or inspired or a terrifying mixture of the two.

It’s hard to recall a time when the state-of-the-art felt this much like art.

It manages a light, improvisatory mastery, an immaculate hold on tone, and a grave yet sunlit tableau of an ending, with each one of these faces turned in collective mourning, that I’ll never forget.

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]

Tran, a practised sensualist, is superb at depicting food as a vehicle for pleasure.

Mudbound’s brutal climax is a shock and an affront in all the ways it must be – and though the film is a little wobbly up front, it’s fully worth wading through.

Alive to pulse-quickening details of body language and the conversational codes by which a dangerous friendship lives or dies, the film is a study in contrasts far beyond the monochromatic.

This isn’t just good writing, it’s humane and honourable.

The film has a cumulative power that sneaks up on you even as you think you’re keeping track of it, and a twilit afterglow that hasn’t faded yet.

Unforgiven is dedicated to "Don" (Siegel) and "Sergio" (Leone) and it is a sombre, insightful, genre-reinventing western, directed by a filmmaker acutely aware of the western’s history, its limitations and the dubious truths of its legends.

The characters often come across as immature dolts, but the film’s humane enough to recognise that’s all part of being 18.

Oasis Knebworth 1996 is a film to restore your faith in the unifying power of rock and roll.

Without a doubt, it gives us the oddest couple of the year in Alexander Skarsgård’s Ray and Harry Melling’s Colin. For that, and many other reasons, this fresh, funny and poignant pairing is one to be cherished.

It positions spycraft as a hybrid of occult ritual and parlour game – and perhaps also a grand-scale working-through of deep-seated national jitters. Happily, it’s also enormous fun with it, and has your mind whirring to keep up with David Koepp’s devious screenplay, which gives itself a head start and waits until the very end before willingly surrendering the lead.

An impressive and unconventional thriller. [4 Sept 2010]

This being a Wes Anderson film, it almost goes without saying the details are delectable.

The shot-making is sensational, and the film knows it; the camera does things you’ve never seen before, say with focus in an interrogation room mirror, and the whole saga’s edited as though Park can’t wait to show you what’s up his sleeve.

The thing about Spielberg these days is he makes this stuff look easy.

Round Midnight is too long and too slow. [25 Jun 1987]

While admitting the man’s flaws, Coogler chooses to give Oscar the benefit of the doubt, which is precisely what he didn’t get on that platform just after midnight struck.

Some films based on dramatic true events offer us a snapshot of a life: I’m Still Here shows us a life of snapshots.

It’s hard to pinpoint the precise moment at which The Handmaiden, Park Chan-wook’s deviously kinky period thriller, shifts from being a lascivious slice of art-house delirium to a gruelling, dislikable contraption which meretriciously sells out its source material. But that’s what happens.

Bizarre, beautiful, moving and playful, this is an oddity to cherish, with depths that only reveal themselves – entirely aptly – on the hoof.

And there we were thinking the stage recording of Hamilton was going to be the best thing on Disney+ this summer. Fools! Yes, Hamilton has songs, but does it have motorbikes? Synchronised swimming? Beyonce singing on the moon in diamonds? Naomi Campbell? I haven’t even got to the poodles yet.

The diversity of the human elements - the wonderful accumulation of interlinked characters and situations in Nakamura's family, daughters, ex-mistresses, business associates, sisters, brothers - builds impassively to a harrowing, unusually bleak climax in which death claims its due and the consolation offered is disturbingly minimal, tenderly as we feel for those bereaved. [20 Mar 2004]

It is a valentine to the kind of innocent adolescence that modern teenagers will never have a chance to experience.

Here is a documentary that is simple but contains multitudes.

In some passages, the film abides by the biopic rulebook more carefully than it needs to; its best moments are the ones where King and his cast create some tension then simply let it cook.

There’s a gleeful toxicity here that will launch a thousand think-pieces – Pitt’s character is capital-P problematic, absolutely by design – but the transgressive thrill is undeniable, and the artistry mesmerisingly assured.

No director working today observes family life with such delicacy and care, or is so unstintingly generous with what they find.

In lieu of monologues and soul-baring, Coogler crams the film with proper movie-star performances at every level: by turns glowingly charismatic, sparklingly funny and silkily seductive.

For all its baroque pomp, though, McQueen intuits the one unspoken terror – loneliness – which nudged this fascinating artist into the void.

Luckily, Wilde has brought together a pair of stars whose joy in each other’s company is impossible not to relish, and their chemistry just goofing around reaches Tina-Fey-and-Amy-Poehler levels of inspired fizz.

As a giant window on all this toil, the film is full of news, insights and revelations without pushing a dogmatic thesis: it’s as open-ended and humanly interested as documentaries get.

As much a meditation on weariness and ageing as it is an unsentimental thriller, the film stands up today, particularly Mitchum's performance. [01 Aug 2020, p.20]

Reality transcends staginess as a strikingly well-realised piece of filmmaking, using judicious sound design and expressive lighting to gain a surreally vivid edge.

Campillo has mounted a methodical tribute to this era of activism which successfully balances everything on its plate: what’s brought to the table is a filling meal from a good chef, only lacking the genius of inspired presentation.

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.

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.

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

There’s a coldness in Schrader’s calculations, and disturbingly he seems to swallow the entire myth of Mishima, an extreme right-wing nutjob who wanted to return Japan to samurai values. Philip Glass’s score, however, still takes the breath away.

It feels like summer on film – the thing radiates Factor 50 good vibes, and boasts a cast so preposterously attractive, and with such sweltering chemistry, that a couple of hours in their company may make you feel as if you’ve had a holiday fling by osmosis.

What Hamnet leaves you with isn’t sadness, but joy – at the human capacity to reckon with death’s implacability through art, or love, or just the basic act of carrying-on in its defiance. It blows you back on to the street on a gust of pure exhilaration.

The intergenerational debate underlying Graduation does throw novel wrinkles into the mix.

As a writer, Kaurismäki has a precious knack for jokes that work beautifully in any language.

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

It exists in an eerie cinematic in-between, and is completely unlike anything else you’ll see this year.