This is a masterpiece of serious cinema; long, slow and grave as the grave.

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

Coppola’s uproarious and bitingly timely film feels every inch a necessary artwork.

Before, after, and between these (action) sequences, even by the paltry standard of previous scripts, it’s slow-witted and won’t shut up.

Flies buzz, sweat trickles, negotiations continue, and you feel your breath dry up.

In the end it amounts to not much, but in the moment I laughed a lot.

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

As metaphors for life go, wine has a very high yield, and Gilles Legrand’s sensitive screenplay tramples out every last drop of juice.

I’m So Excited! is vertiginously disappointing in the way only bad films from great filmmakers can be.

A large portion of Star Trek’s audience may well be satisfied by a film that amounts to not much more than an incredibly pretty and sporadically funny in-joke. But think back to the corny romance of that original mission statement, recited by William Shatner on many a rainy school night. Strange new worlds. New life. New civilisations. Boldly going where no man has gone before. That pioneer spirit? It’s gone.

The film’s glib disregard for collateral murder runs to farcical extremes.

On his broadest canvas yet, Trapero mounts a saga about the role of conscience, which might seem old-fashioned if it weren’t so urgently imagined. An added fillip is Michael Nyman’s stirring score, his best in years.

It’s a lovely, coherent piece of storytelling, with a unique sense of place.

Carruth creates a wholly compelling world. And despite my irritation with his deliberate obscurity, my immediate desire when it ended was to stay in my seat and watch it all the way through again.

An acutely compassionate account of unshakeable guilt.

Love is All You Need has been made for an audience rarely catered for by the film industry: intelligent adults who enjoy perceptive and good-hearted drama.

Reminders of Shaun of the Dead (2004) abound. However, an endearing cast...and a satisfying mix of gore and gorblimey charm more than compensate.

Paradise: Love flits nimbly between humour and sadness, and treats potentially ponderous themes such as sex, race and the rancid legacy of colonialism with a welcome light touch.

Black has an instinctive feel for balancing action set-pieces against the passages of soap-opera that are required to make them matter.

The conceit of a film as a warning from the future is a promising one, but 2073 feels more like political signalling for the present.

Flawed but compelling ... [A] hallucinatory gimmick feels a few rewrites away from working smoothly, and the thematic linking of Philippa’s plight with that of her subject’s never quite convinces. But Hawkins is quietly impressive.

The film’s focus may be tight – just a few tangled, formative years – but it encompasses so much.

Told briskly and with an unapologetic determination to yank at the heartstrings, The Keeper unfolds like the Great Escape meets the Match of the Day goal of the month highlights.

Everett overdoes the lachrymosity right at the end, the one part of the film where a more subdued rigour would have served him better. At the very least, though, it’s a command performance he puts in front of us, an uncompromising feat of empathy in the role he’s made his own more than any other.

Barnard once again evokes a grubby, gothic landscape that’ll get right under your fingernails. It’ll stay there for weeks.

What kept me smiling right through this overturned odyssey is that the men in it aren’t brave pioneers or scary outlaws or any such thing – they’re incorrigible nerds, a century before the word was coined.

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.

[Haigh] hasn’t sacrificed a shred of the understated, observational style, lace-like emotional intricacy and lung-filling feel for landscape that all made his previous film, the Norfolk-set marital drama 45 Years, such a force to be reckoned with.

Rush hurls himself into the film’s star turn with a cantankerous abandon that more than compensates for his slightly unsteady accent. It’s a wildly entertaining performance that feels vividly inhabited both physically and vocally.

Wholly useless, entirely harmless, Stratton would be good clean fun, if it was good or fun.

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.

An interesting film rather than an engrossing one, and it’s hard not to wish it was a little more energised by its subject’s enduringly transgressive spirit.

It takes a special kind of biopic to reduce its subject to the least imaginably interesting version of itself.

Elliot is a talent eccentric enough to make Nick Park look like an office drone, and the serious sadness underpinning his vision only makes the humour work better.

It’s a catastrophically bad movie whose aggressive dullness and dumbness can best be reproduced by picking up a brick and slamming it against one’s forehead for two hours.

This is a grand success – perhaps a new populist benchmark in what to do with a flagging franchise, and a witty, light-on-its-feet prequel.

A compromise, a ghastly hybrid, a film that appears to have pirated and wrecked its own potential.

Inkheart is cheerful and amiable, and in the absence of a Harry Potter film this winter, it fills a gap neatly.

Quantum of Solace offers next to no solace, if we mean respite, but in plunging its hero into a revenge-displacement grudge mission, it has the compensation of a rock-solid dramatic idea, and the intelligence to run and run with it.

This slice of class-baiting British ordeal horror from writer-director James Watkins is potently made. It's also exploitative trash, serving up silly levels of alarmist editorialising about kids today.

None of it works: the inexplicable alchemy between co-stars that can seduce the audience even in an indifferent rom-com doesn't arise between Thurman and Morgan.

It has the desperate vitality of something barely made-up.

My Name Is Albert Ayler is a loving and elegantly crafted documentary.

Gary Oldman made his directorial debut with this unflinching portrait of life in a London family. Bleak, violent and foul-mouthed, it's the story of people battling their way through miserable lives that are all they have ever known. [25 Sep 2010, p.35]

The film is very loud, and festooned with the sort of comic violence far more disturbing than anything in an 18-rated movie.

Centered on Mara Wilson's extraordinary young girl Matilda, the kooky fantasy is comprised of charm, warmth and screwball comedy.

Gymnasium attendants may have worked long and hard on Demi's body, but $12.5 million does seem an unconscionable amount for her to show us nothing we haven't seen before. If only half that money had gone on the rest of the film, then we might have had a better rendering of Carl Hiaasen's hilarious novel, which is an excursion into the by-ways of Miami's crazy culture.

Plays entertainingly like an Asian version of a Michael Mann film, albeit with the plot of Mean Streets. It's not quite essential, but the deeply felt ending looks like a jumping-off point for all that Wong has made since. [22 Jan 2005]

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

Fascinating.

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]

Cool Runnings is a charming tale of determined underdogs, with plenty of laughs, moments of real tension, and five engaging performances.

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.

Tense but formulaic. [16 Oct 2010, p.31]

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.

For Lynch himself, “the big news was that I’d finally completely killed Twin Peaks with this picture”. But in fact, this exceptional, widely misunderstood film restores it to writhing, screaming life...Far from cheating viewers, this fresh perspective offered them a new way to decode the entire Twin Peaks mythos, with Sheryl Lee’s extraordinary, soul-tearing performance shaking the franchise out of its cherry-pie-munching reverie...Time has passed, and its brilliance is gradually coming into focus, just as Lynch hoped it would.

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.

De Mornay is oddly compelling as Mott. There’s a gleeful joy in watching her slow, insidious progress, and it’s hard not to secretly root for her character.

The role fits Farrow like a silk slip, but its kooky premise doesn’t quite shake up the by-now familiar narrative concerns.

Tornatore may have hit a sticky wicket with his subsequent work, but he knew what he was doing here: warning us about the irrational lure of the filmed past, which is to say cinema itself, then ushering us grandly to our seats.

Miracle Mile is unforgettable and quietly devastating. [29 Jan 2007]

Cinematogapher Dean Semler gets amazing colours as the sun sets, and there’s a bravely avant-garde debut score from Kiwi composer Graeme Revell, pumping up the pulse with sinister breathing sounds. The plot even thrives on a tacit cultural tension between the Australian stars and the arrogant interloper.

The whole climax is a delight

With its deft blend of hilarity and humanity, Planes, Trains and Automobiles is Hughes' most satisfying work.

It's part sex comedy and part critique of the social divisions of Thatcher's Britain and despite its politically incorrect nature, the film is keenly observed and funny. [09 Apr 2011, p.34]

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.

It's painfully slow at times, but the performances are decent, especially Hanks who teases the talent yet to properly shine. [08 Feb 2022, p.27]

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

Alternately downbeat, witty, bleak and optimistic. Down by Law is a delight, right down to the unexpected last scene.

Stand By Me is one of those films that stands up to the test of time. It may never top any critic’s “films of the century” list, like Citizen Kane, or Raging Bull, but it has a charm and depth that seems to resonate with each generation.

It’s an interesting achievement in many ways.

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.

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

The shock of seeing tough guy De Niro as suburban dad Frank, falling in love with suburban mum Meryl Streep after a chance encounter, was insurmountable for some film goers. But time and distance lend this modern Brief Encounter (with added adultery) a certain glow and De Niro and Streep repeat the chemistry they first showed in the Deer Hunter. They were born to act together.

Body Double isn’t trash, misogynistic or otherwise. It’s unrepentantly trashy – not the kind of film you watch while your parents or kids are in the house, or with your curtains open. But it’s also a complex, provocative suspense thriller that bears comparison with the three immaculate Hitchcock classics – Vertigo, Psycho and Rear Window – it gleefully drags through the sludge.

A welcome reissue of the 1984 creature feature in which a Capra-esque idyll is besieged by ravening beasties.

The much-lauded director of Westerns, Sergio Leone, gives us an epic saga of gangland America. Charting the lives of New York mobsters Noodles (Robert De Niro) and Max (James Woods) over four decades, the narrative is compelling and De Niro's controlled performance makes this a classic. [04 Jan 2019]

A classic adventure story that brilliantly transcends its fairly average formula (buttoned-up city gal is softened by devil-may-care chancer while outwitting baddies in foreign lands) through a mixture of perfect casting, lashings of chemistry between the stars and a clever script.

80 minutes of total joy, its momentum utterly uncompromised, every single second an invitation to snort uncontrollably. I can hardly wait to watch it again.

This unforgettable movie is not to be missed – though full of superb jokes, it has a weird integrity, something melancholy and serious, at its core that stays with you.

Director Bob Clark, fresh (if that's the word) from the juvenile high jinks of Porky's and Porky's II, oversees a rather more family-friendly outing with this charmingly nostalgic, Forties-set comedy in which nine-year-old Ralphie (Peter Billingsley) is very specific - in a believably nine-year-old way - about what he wants for Christmas. [01 Dec 2012, p.36]

The chase sequences with government agents are tame but the film builds to a tense (and witty) conclusion at the Cheyenne Mountain nuclear bunker in Colorado Springs.

While a certain amount of drama is found in these revealing scenes, it is somewhat dis­sipated in the romantic relations between Leia and Solo....The dialogue given to the lovers is laughable, and their performances match it. So what is presumably intended as a great romantic finale comes to little, which might equally be said of the film as a whole....The appeal, perhaps, will be strongest to the young.

The acting, most of it by non-professionals, is at times a little shaky and the sound is patchy. But it's great to see again this bolt of ghetto joy, a kind of updated West Side Story, that shows hip-hop as a living, breathing expression of cultural resistance rather than a crunky, cheerless set of cruddy grunts and boasts from which to make money. [10 Aug 2007, p.29]

Attenborough's stately film is in every sense of the word an epic and Ben Kingsley is superb as Mahatma Ghandi, aging as he does 50 years during the three-hour film, and transforming from dapper young lawyer to loin-cloth wearing ascetic.

This film about the cult of celebrity in America strikes me as a uniquely intelligent ironic masterpiece – though, witty as it is, it isn’t a comedy, despite what the title and the casting of Jerry Lewis might lead you to expect.

If it sounds insane on paper, the film is even more bizarre up on the screen. Demonstrating considerable skill as a director, Young gives the action an eerie, artificial sheen.

Chariots of Fire covers arduous ground — faith, conviction and history (both the making of it and the living up to it) — but it does so with the same courage and sincerity that drives the two young men at its heart.

The terrific close-up showing Harold's look of appalled realisation – and resignation – is unforgettable.

It’s an underrated classic.

Hurt is brilliant as Merrick, projecting in his anguished eyes and mournful body language a humanity past the makeup that embodies so convincingly the pain of Merrick, the original elephant man, whose rare disease was exploited by the people running a Victorian freak show.

Demonstrating that cheesy low-budget sci-fi can sometimes be more fun than the blockbuster variety is this spiffing deep-space pastiche of The Magnificent Seven, written by John Sayles and exec-produced by Roger Corman. [11 Nov 2012, p.47]

The really great thing about Airplane! is that the jokes undercut your expectations so deftly, right down to the sour air traffic controller called Stack. When it's suggested that he turns on the landing lights on the runway, he snaps back: "That's just what they're expecting us to do."

The film also has stunning car chases, choreographed like the dancing in a musical, as the Blues Brothers are pursued throughout Chicago, at one point even tearing through a shopping mall, in their 'Bluesmobile', a retired 1974 Mount Prospect, Illinois Dodge Monaco patrol car.

An impressive and unconventional thriller. [4 Sept 2010]

Werner Herzog's classic vampire movie Nosferatu will scare the living daylights out of you.

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

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