It seethes with frustration on its subjects’ behalf – that for all the impact their stand has had, they still face a many-headed hydra on the road to real democracy.

Dramatic fragments, blasted our way, dance before us for the next two hours, rotating and glinting, colliding and connecting, like a puzzle in zero gravity. As a transition into flinty, supercharged genre filmmaking, it gets by on no more than electric confidence, high-fiving technical virtuosity, and a cast to die for. It’s very satisfying.

Chazelle has always specialised in virtuoso endings, and his sure hand and sharp eye brings this ambitious character study smoothly into land.

It’s less Star Wars as you’ve never seen it than Star Wars as you’ve never felt it.

Every shot of Stray Dogs has been built with utter formal mastery; every sequence exerts an almost telepathic grip.

For the usually irrepressible Miike, it’s remarkably controlled, even restrained. And yet it involves 200 bodyguards being annihilated every which way, in a sustained frenzy of blistering choreographic skill that Hollywood won’t top all year.

The idea is an old one - coincidence leading to unjust incrimination - but Hitchcock's docudrama approach here is starkly atypical. [04 Oct 2014, p.36]

As a demonstration of slighted masculinity being given an inch, taking a mile, and chewing it up with breakneck fury, the film could hardly be more timely or disconcerting. But it understands the ignition point of rage – not just its ugly momentum.

In emulating the two-strip Technicolor process, it creates a look that’s scratchy and primitive, but also, through the peculiar alchemy of Maddin’s craft, eerily rich and dreamlike, with the depth of an oceanic abyss.

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.

There are visual flights of fancy here as glorious as anything Miyazaki’s studio has created, but the story is rooted in a country trudging towards its own destruction.

The film needs no excess melodrama even at its bleakest, because the visual language Sharrock has constructed is inhospitable enough. It’s his concentration on these faces, in the 4:3 ratio of Nick Cooke’s gravely beautiful cinematography, that gives it all a redemptive glow.

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.

As a way of capturing the horrors of that night, the spareness of the film-making is powerful. But in terms of giving us the full picture, it falls short.

It’s a funny, insightful, sensationally acted account of art’s capacity to dissolve walls, and heighten, broaden and deepen the reach of our lives.

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 the silent allegiances of sisterhood, a near-underground network operating to safeguard women’s rights, which exercise Haroun’s imagination throughout this excellent piece.

The film’s stark realism and bruising impact are enough in themselves, but the risk, and the real artistic payoff, is its bold sensory plunge into this Hadean inferno.

As an indictment of the industry, this is strong stuff.

It has got to be in a list of her best: the sheer freshness of her screen presence as young Velvet Brown who prepares a wild but talented horse for the Grand National turns Clarence Brown’s sentimental adaption of Enid Bagnold’s children’s classic into the one film that everyone who has ever heard of Elizabeth Taylor has probably seen.

Everything about The Lighthouse lands with a crash. It’s cinema to make your head and soul ring.

John Wayne gives an imposing and vivid performance. [07 Nov 2014, p.37]

Mandy exists in its own supremely unnerving horror dimension.

Morgen manages to stay clear of hagiography, instead compiling an exhilarating piece of film-making – one that’s fully in keeping with Cobain’s virtuosity.

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

There have been countless adaptations of Emily Brontë's classic 19th-century romance but none of them captures the spirit of her novel quite like William Wyler's production. [10 Aug 2013, p.32]

For a shot of pure forward-leaping, backward-dreaming animated pleasure, pick brick.

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.

A courageous and gritty police exposé. [11 Oct 2014, p.37]

King’s fluid direction of her four actors means the snug setting never feels dramatically constricting, while their jostling performance styles make each combination of voices feels like its own distinct treat.

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.

Moonage Daydream, a wildly creative tribute to everything Bowie achieved over four and a half decades, sets a sky-high bar as cinematic fan-service, and it leaves you buzzing.

A heady hybrid of comedy, polemic and period crime drama, it could have been scattergun stuff, and there are patches of preachy overkill. Much more often, though, there’s a rollicking drive and focus to it.

Baker’s tingling delicacy of touch makes it a subtly distinctive experience: it’s a film I already looked forward to revisiting while tiptoeing through it the first time.

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

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.

Vogt gives us a brilliantly slippery handle on the rules of this rather twisted game, but also makes it real, in that it’s coming from a place of authentic terror, anxiety and loneliness in Ingrid’s head. Intellectually exciting though his film’s gambits are, they feel like acts of tremendous imaginative empathy – lightbulbs in the dark.

In an age when films such as Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven are revered for their trickery, The Sting remains the definitive con artist comedy: as irresistible and ingenious as the scheme that hooks in Doyle.

Glass could hardly have asked for two more game accomplices than Clark and Ehle, who play the…well, the you-know-where out of their respective roles, and are both naturally attuned to the film’s murkily sensual, dread-laden wavelength.

Via breezy metaphysical farce, Palm Springs identifies this very recognisable strain of millennial malaise, before skewering it with merciless accuracy.

Despite borrowing cleverly from the best, It Follows still manages to feel like no other example in recent years - tender, remarkably ingenious and scalp-pricklingly scary.

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.

If you are asking an audience to listen to one man talking for an hour and a half, you had better make sure he is worth listening to, and minute-by-minute, Hardy has you spellbound.

There is a beguiling, melancholic quality to the film, mirroring Cave’s personality.

There's hardly a shot in Polanski's debut that isn't laced with purpose. [12 Jan 2013, p.10]

Like the 69-year-old Stallone hoisting his frame gingerly into play, Creed takes a while to move. But by the end, it’s genuinely moving.

While it’s fair to say that Transit isn’t aiming for a torn-from-the-headlines specificity about the issues of today, it could be accused of dodging some racial questions, and some of its Petzoldian gambits – including a love triangle that remixes Casablanca with sepulchral dabs of Vertigo – dampen its dramatic charge.

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 believability of this fractured family is clinched by Machoian’s casting.

Palo Pandolfo's folky score is appealing, and Guillermo Nieto's pale, crunchy photography is terrific. The film's conclusion, while a little hurried, is satisfying, too, making this a quiet but resonant mood piece.

Hit Man trips along on great writing, Linklater’s witty, light-touch direction and a rich sense of place, but what makes it especially pleasurable is Powell and Arjona’s naturally steamy rapport.

Reeves marshals more than his fair share of battle scenes and sweeping set-pieces, but never forgets the flicker of a face can provide all the spectacle that cinema requires.

The debut feature from 33-year-old Raine Allen-Miller adjusts and updates the classic Curtis formula to a small urban chunk of contemporary south London – and captures the place’s clatter and bustle with such undisguised love, it makes the blossoming of romance there feel like the most natural thing in the world.

Every frame has been composed with cerebral coolness, and the hotel and its surrounding forests are shot with a dream-like lucidity. I haven’t seen anything quite like it before, and I’m still not sure that I have even now. This is the kind of film you have to go back to and check it really happened.

It’s a black-and-white period piece invested with a supremely eerie folkloric edge – a bleak historical chapter made timeless, and all the more troubling for it.

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.

Everything builds with implacable skill up to, but not quite including, the finale, which is played for a table-turning punchline that feels more crowd-pleasing than strictly satisfying.

Çatak’s film turns out to be less intrigued by where the missing money actually goes than how the school reacts to its disappearance: as a sort of loose organism purging itself of impurities as its collective survival instinct kicks in. It’s a sound lesson in politics – or is it biology? – but more importantly, it’s a chalk-snappingly tense watch.

If films were gestures, this one would be a perfectly timed shrug, with the smile to match.

While it’s fully grounded as a family portrait, overlaid on it still is that type of cosmic optimism which makes Mills’s work so lovely. I’m not even sure we fully deserve it, but it would be sheer masochism to turn it down.

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

Keegan chose a man of few words to make his stand, and Murphy, very much the man of the moment, steps up to play him with a heroic understatement that could move mountains.

Beyond its waspish wit, a dastardly roll-call of suspects and Daniel Craig’s dapper efforts as our presiding sleuth, the film gives nothing away until the bitter end, thanks to a head-spinning tricksiness of plotting that even Agatha Christie might have conceded was rather ingenious.

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.

Challengers must be the most purely pleasurable film of the year so far.

Giamatti isn’t playing a type, so much as a man who has taken refuge inside one in order to armour himself against the more exposing aspects of human existence. It’s a riotous but also slyly moving performance of a performance – and, along with Randolph’s, is rightly being talked about for awards.

Nothing about the sound in Sound of Metal is ordinary.

It earns respect and a cumulative awe in its intently amused vision of reality: it’s a commanding and intellectually gratifying piece of work.

With a story that straddles two generations and stretches from Trump’s United States to the Vietnam jungle, Da 5 Bloods is one of Spike Lee’s most expansive films to date. But it’s built with the precise, snap-shut mechanisms of an ancient moral fable – a Pardoner’s Tale made about and for unpardonable times.

This is by some measure Anderson’s weirdest concoction ever, in all sorts of good ways. And it probably counts as his most daring, too.

No other British director is making films quite like this.

A highly entertaining, though undemanding mixture, of sci-fi, romance and comedy, which could hardly have come off at all at any lower artistic level, nor without such a happy choice for the central part as Christopher Reeve.

Throughout, Quillévéré keeps asking her cast for the impossible, and gets it.

[Sachs'] subtle, often quite special film shows us a shared life as a series of impositions: sometimes we’re imposed upon, and sometimes we do the imposing, and love is the net result.

Daniel Roher’s shrewd portrait makes the point that Navalny is half-politician, half-journalist; blending the two with his affable charisma on camera, which even extends to goofing off on TikTok, he has exactly the man-of-the-people touch that would be most likely to qualify him as a political threat.

Silk curtains flutter and fall, candles glow, fires crackle softly in the grate. Every scene, every shot, has been composed with total, Kubrickian precision, and calibrated for maximum, breath-quickening impact.

Captain Phillips is a triumph of solid, professional and sometimes inspired film crafts, deserving of all the plaudits that come its way.

The action always feels rooted in the greater story of the city of Shiraz itself: even a scene as simple as Rahim walking through a shopping centre becomes naturally soundtracked by a musical instrument salesman tuning a dulcimer in his booth.

Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t – Alexander Skarsgård's Prince Amleth rampages through a mythological epic of savage beauty.

This Iberian spin on the Snow White legend is a curio and a wonder; a silent fairy tale woven from softest velvet.

With its thickly-accented voiceovers, re-recorded into English by Mathieu Amalric, the film is a pleasingly eccentric watch, and one full of rare insights.

Guiraudie’s film is acutely brilliant on the funny, scary machinery of desire, and how easily humans can get caught up in its cogwheels.

Sacks, humble and charming to the end, makes for such agreeable company that it’s hard to object to the hyperbole.

There’s not much fault to find with Sicario on the level of craft or performances, just its rather sputtering momentum, and the lack of a higher purpose.

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

The combination of satire and savagery is pretty fierce and intriguingly unique.

That Blade Runner 2049 is a more than worthy sequel to Scott’s first film means it crosses the highest bar anyone could have reasonably set for it, and it distinguishes Villeneuve – who’s masterminded all of this, somehow, since making Arrival – as the most exciting filmmaker working at his level today.

What's clearer about Duel now is its rawness and bleakness as a picture of American life and troubled American little-man masculinity. [19 Mar 2005]

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

Grisebach has an observational grasp of the male psyche – especially its pathological obsession with pride – that fairly takes the breath away.

Modest as it may look, this is boundary-pushing cinema in all the best ways, and what a thrill it is to hear those boundaries creak.

This is riveting, dizzying stuff from Villeneuve.

Weapons manages to keep its powder dry – a feat of crafty editing by Joe Murphy – for a knockout finale that’s twisted, hilarious and savage, all at once.

I’ve rarely felt more impaled on the fence by a film, because, exactly as promised, it’s everything at once – good and not good; fresh yet still a formula; cramped, strenuous, full to the brim.

Even while making a heartfelt statement that will put Khan deservedly on the map, the film cries out for a different shape, so that these three could grieve, bond and come to an understanding without the plot’s cloak-and-dagger machinations.

Close is a great film about friendship, but perhaps an even greater one about being alone.

What with all this material, and the focus on Cengiz and Abdulaziz as key players in the ongoing story, The Dissident has a lot to juggle. We can forgive Fogel if his portrait of Khashoggi himself seems a touch incomplete: with its restless style of activism, the film arguably builds on his legacy better than it would have done as a work of retrospective biography.

The monster mayhem scenes are obviously the main draw, and they’re terrifically staged, with clean visual effects that look anchored to the real world. And a careful balance is struck between spectacle and horror.