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

Sincerity and conviction are now rare qualities in the blockbuster field, but this is a film that puts its monkey where its mouth is.

Finally, a scary fillum that you genuinely, genuinely should watch. It's part werewolf, part Agatha Christie, part blaxploitation. [31 Oct 2013]

In staging the Jimmies’ various acts of violence (to which they refer, horribly, as “charity”), DaCosta may have taken a cue from Kubrick’s own parable of British decay: even toughened horror fans should find it disturbing, if not downright hard to watch.

By managing to keep faith with this fast-unravelling person, even in her most bozo moments of losing the plot, Wilson turns in her best and bravest work in films to date.

There’s a bicep-flexing quality to Landes’s direction, with its bursts of colour and chaos, its conjuration of a surreal experience out of tactile reality. You tumble out of it bruised, bewildered, mesmerised.

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.

This is Sachs’s eighth film and one of his best.

It is a head-spinning shock-and-awe satire that comes in hot then cranks up the thermostat to infernal – a Molotov cocktail of biopic, documentary and black comedy, with a thrillingly short fuse.

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

Deadwyler does magnificent work in it, making bold, risky choices to communicate a near-operatic range of emotion.

There's evident patience and intelligence to the filmmaking all over, as well as an engagement with genuine ideas about diplomacy, deterrence, law and leadership. However often it risks monkey-mad silliness, it's impressively un-stupid.

The fun of it – and Guardians of the Galaxy specialises in fun, served by the sugar-sprinkled ice-cream-scoopload – is in seeing this odd quintet bluster through space battles and alien brawls that would have defeated anyone smarter and better-equipped. Just as the team makes do with the junk they find around them, the film feels like a mound of gems culled from decades of pop-culture scavenging.

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.

Gloomy? Not even a bit. This is a glossy and sophisticated workplace comedy about the end of a gilded age of sophisticated froth – deftly written by Aline Brosh McKenna and fizzily directed by David Frankel, both returning from the first film.

It would be hard to overpraise Burghardt, a debuting actress on the spectrum whose scenes are so tender, relaxed and generally sweet she deserves at least half the credit.

All is True is a tongue-in-cheek title all the same, for a script which fills in factual gaps with its own blatant leaps of imagination: they’re just far more respectful and illuminating leaps.

Dupieux elevates it by seeding entire swaying crops of confusion: we can never be entirely sure where scenes end and the mess of making them begins.

It’s funny and touching, but feels like a missed opportunity.

Jackson inhabits the film beautifully, if more gently: in the role of peacemaker and sounding board, he’s the least pushy of all these performers, but finds the music in Wilson’s words and wastes none of it.

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.

Grimsby doesn’t ever wound quite as devastatingly as Borat or Brüno, but it’s a vital, lavish, venomously profane two fingers up at Benefits Street pity porn and the social division it fosters. I laughed, winced, gagged, then laughed even more.

Speeding vehicles are clunked and donked into one another with xylophonic zeal, while the camera snakes and tears between them faster than seems physically possible. I mean it as a compliment when I say there are entire sequences here which look as if they might have been shot by a monkey in a jetpack.

This strange, neglected Technicolor fable, with photography that’s edibly lush even by Jack Cardiff’s standards, wasn’t made by Powell and Pressburger, but feels as if it might have been.

Perhaps some blind spots were only to be expected: there’s more to this topic than a single feature could possibly cover, particularly a debut one. But Thyberg knows which angles she wants to work – and my goodness, does she go for it.

It’s Herzog’s uncertainty as a tourist in the field that gives the film its enticing charge, as surely as his wanderings in the Antarctic, or gropings in the dark to find the world’s oldest cave paintings.

Manning Walker’s wily command of tone and glistening sweat and DayGlo visuals do make you pine to be young again for the first half hour or so of this.

Loving is short on grandstanding and hindsight, long on tenderness and honour, and sticks carefully to the historical record. It also features two central performances of serious delicacy and depth.

This is otherwise rough-hewn, hard-bitten entertainment – with an irresistible puppyish grin on its face.

For an action movie to gear-shift between thrilling and comedic everyone must be in on the joke. The absurdity of Hobbs & Shaw is certainly not lost on Idris Elba, having fun as thinly-sketched baddie Brixton Lore.

Egoyan, working from a script by first-time screenwriter Benjamin August, works hard to steer the premise away from crassness – and in Plummer, he’s blessed with a lead actor who can express Zev’s interior struggle with delicacy and dignified understatement.

Put simply, you care about the Katwe kids because he does, and in the same way, too – not with high-strung melodramatic concern, but a warm glow of empathy in your gut. That’s stoked up in part by the film’s keen eye for telling, truthful-feeling detail.

The shape of its story is ultimately conventional, and the way in which it’s told can sometimes feel familiar – like a Sunday evening drama smuggling in big ideas. But the line it draws between the earthy and the ethereal stays with you: it’s a well-timed double dose of consolation and escape.

Human Flow makes a virtue of its vastness, creating an epic tapestry of souls that stretch from as far away as Syria, Kenya and Burma to the Calais ‘Jungle’ encampment on Britain’s doorstep.

It makes you wince at the fragility of life while simultaneously welling up at the wonder of it – and that unexpected mixing of the sentimental and the existential left me feeling what can only be described as aww-struck.

You’ve never seen a documentary like The Act of Killing. If you saw too many like it, your hold on sanity might fray, which is not so much the film’s fault as that of its bloodcurdling subject. This movie is essential.

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

This is in no way the remorselessly grim film its subject matter might lead you to expect – it’s full of life, irony, poetry and bitter unfairness. It demands respect, but it also earns it.

The Phantom of the Open is a rousing salute to a very English strain of nincompoopery – and a wise and witty reminder that that the pleasure of doing something spectacularly badly can outstrip the satisfaction of a job well done.

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

In the hands of the great Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer it becomes a potent saga of battered faith, vicious bullying and personal torment.

Despite a morose colour palette that can feel a little eat-your-vegetables at times, the film is beautifully performed and gripping in a chewy, nuanced, contemplative way – as its title suggests, the talking, as well as the thinking it kindles, is the point.

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.

Novello again, in an underrated road-to-ruin melodrama, plays a public-school rugby champ disgraced when he takes the fall for getting a waitress pregnant. Visual experiments abound and there's a justly famous scene with the curtains of a Paris nightspot being pulled back, exposing its superannuated regulars to the unsparing sunlight. [14 Jul 2012, p.4]

Abi Morgan's script – better, for my money, than her work on either Shameor The Iron Lady – elegantly straddles two timelines to illuminate a deliberately obscured life

Does it have many original ideas of its own? Perhaps not. But its greatest hits mixtape of other people’s has been compiled with such flair – as well as a sound comprehension of why they worked so well the first time – that it’s hard not to be swept up regardless.

The Suicide Squad (note the definite article) is such a drastic improvement in every respect that you almost – almost – feel sorry for the earlier version: it’s dazzlingly colourful and riotously crass, but also emotionally alive

This bright children’s adventure, loosely adapted from a picture book about a young boy whose drawings become real, feels like the sort of thing Jim Carrey might have made in his first flush of success. It’s silly, relentlessly amiable, and embraces the low-stakes playfulness of its conceit.

This makes a better case that she was the first model everyone found relatable.

The crash scenes have a horrible heart-in-mouth quality: it’s as if you can feel the tumble of gravity working on your own insides. And the same goes for the racing itself, which like the vehicles is somehow sleek and crunchy all at once – inches from disaster at any given moment, and all the more beautiful for it.

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

No director working today can carry out this kind of heavyweight emotional excavation with such feather-light flicks of his trowel. That’s Hong’s gift, as counterintuitive as it is unique: he makes molehills out of mountains.

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

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

Sophisticated, sharp and funny, Le Week-End achieves an unusual coup: it’s a film about two older characters that is neither deeply gloomy (like, say, Amour) nor twinkly and cheerily upbeat.

Just squeezably lovely.

It’s really the style and performances, more than the pseudo-experimental structure Layton has chosen, that keep the film grabby.

In lesser hands, Elysium might have played like a Lib Dem manifesto with extra spaceships, but the South African filmmaker wants to explore ideas, not wave placards, and whether or not you agree with the film’s politics, the fire in its belly is catching.

An entirely uproarious 90 minutes at the cinema which asks nothing more of its audience than that they keep their incredulity suspended for just a few seconds longer and keep enjoying the ride.

The further down the film descends, the more transfixing its images tend to get, as if Rohrwacher and Louvart have teamed up on an archaeological dig for their own treasures of texture and light.

Valerian is a film to wallow in, not follow, and if you’re tuned to its extra-terrestrial wavelength, you wouldn’t cut a second.

If you’re not staggered by the technique on display here – the stuff that sets Bay’s work miles above the Fast & Furiouses, X-Men: Apocalypses and Tom Cruise-chasing Mummies of this world – you’re not paying attention.

First-time writer-director Chloe Domont beats a sly, perceptive path across this tricky psychological turf.

Director Joe (Gremlins) Dante delivers some terrific spine-tingling chills on the way towards a disappointingly overblown climax.

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.

The moral maze of the premise is tautly negotiated. Shrewd casting helps, as does Eastwood’s trump suit: a forensic seriousness of purpose. Grappling with the mechanisms of justice and the workings of a lone conscience, he puts both in the scales, and no one’s off the hook.

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.

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]

It’s an intimate film with a roomy embrace.

Anyone interested in animation needs to pay attention to what these films are doing. The writing formula may be crude, but the whiz-bang aesthetic is sensational.

It’s the opposite of a gateway horror for the trepidatious. It beckons in the brave.

As for kindness itself, I can’t say much jumped out on a first viewing, unless it was of the you-have-to-be-cruel-to-be sort. But it’s exactly the sort of film that makes you want to look again.

It all pays off elegantly when Blanc delivers his grand summing-up, a sequence which in vintage Knives Out fashion playfully subverts the cliché – but not too briskly to break it and spoil the fun.

It’s the blockbuster of the summer.

Though Weathering With You tells a story of a makeshift family enduring uncertain times, its dominant emotion is amazement – at the power and persistence of first love, and the everyday wonders of the world in which it flourishes against the odds.

In terms of sheer energy and invention, it more than holds its own, and boasts action scenes whose wit, vibrancy and gracefulness make Lightyear look low on batteries.

The greatest trick this studio wants to pull, at this point, is to make more of the same feel either exhilaratingly fresh, or sufficiently retro-inflected to qualify as a nostalgia trip. As both, Thor: Ragnarok counts as some kind of double peak.

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.

The endgame could be… sharper. There’s an elaborate hoax that’s too easy to suss out – even for us, and we’re not the seasoned con artists on the receiving end. At this point, the film’s own confidence seems to falter just a fraction. Then again, the chinks in these crooks’ cynical armour are what give it texture, a mottling of human desperation. Instead of smug gotchas, it traffics in mistakes.

The animation is technically wondrous – the colour and detail amazes, while the Minions themselves have never looked more bouncily robust – but it’s always in service of the overriding slapstick agenda. Even the flat, side-on compositions – less than ideal for showing off graphical prowess – feel like knowing evocations of the deadpan staging of vintage cartoons.

The vast mournfulness of northern Jutland is wonderfully evoked by Arcel. Yet his true fascination is with Mikkelsen’s weathered face – every crevice and cranny is lingered over obsessively.

Sorrentino and his cast make these teenage recollections twinge with freshness. Like our own sharpest memories of adolescence, the haze of nostalgia doesn’t dull their edge.

While Paul Mescal impresses in Ridley Scott’s riveting sequel, a stellar Denzel Washington rather eclipses the rest of the cast.

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.

A good cop/bad cop action comedy with the funniest two-women-above-the-title pairing in memory.

Romulus might inject an appalling new life into the Alien franchise, but it won’t do much good for the national birth rate.

The Rise of Skywalker completes a saga no one sane screenwriter would have dreamt up from scratch, but does so with such pluck and showmanship that the result feels strangely precious: a busked epic whose every individual move comes straight from the heart.

Goro Miyazaki’s film is about the point at which we decide not what we want to be when we grow up, but who, and the way the tiniest moments in our lives often have the most far-reaching effect.

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

If Lopez’s screen career has often tended towards the unsurprising, well, here is the antidote: perhaps the least predictable film ever made. What’s most exciting about it, though, is that behind the lunacy, so much of it works.

For all The Falling’s period trimmings, its uncanny power resides in these ellipses and blackouts – in elements that cannot be easily rationalised.

“This isn’t your mother’s Mean Girls,” ran the mischievous campaign for last winter’s musical remake of that millennial hit. But this absolutely is your father’s (and grandfather’s) Beverly Hills Cop, and for all its brazen route-one idiocy I ended up wanting to give it a hug.

The Order also works as a gripping procedural in its own right – a long-form game of investigative join-the-dots, built around a series of lethally disciplined action scenes.

Off-beat and punk-spirited.

Think of The Nice Guys as candy noir: all the key ingredients from mysteries such as Chinatown and The Long Goodbye poured into a tall glass, then topped up with sugar syrup, a spritz of club soda, a sprig of mint and an ironic paper parasol.

Two decades after dinosaurs ruled the Earth’s cinemas, are we still capable of putting our phones away for two hours and being honestly amazed by them, without a glaze of cynicism or irony to keep us stuck? Trevorrow, his cast and crew would clearly like to think so. And in light of their efforts, you’d have to grinningly agree.

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.

An alternative title for this one might have been Avengers: Encore, since the film knows its entire audience has been here for the long run – even beside Infinity War, Endgame would be completely impenetrable to a novice. Think of it as a kind of victory lap, in which a decade-plus of painstaking team assembly is re-run at top speed, then paid off with thermonuclear dazzle and force.