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.

You just have to watch it, then grab a net and try to coax your soul back down from the ceiling.

The film’s craft, with its shivery wooded landscapes and deep focus, is consistently strong, and the acting – especially from State, but also many of the bickering village ensemble – spices up what might have been a route-one polemic.

The film is stupendous: as antic as Boogie Nights and Punch-Drunk Love, but with The Master and There Will Be Blood’s uncanny feel for the swell and ebb of history.

It’s a compact and obliquely moving film, deftly constructed to let the dying of the light arrive, not as sunset, but a kind of dawn.

If this is, indeed, the last act, the documentary packs quite a punch. Slickly produced, at times quite flashy and schmaltzy (as was, to be fair, Tina’s musical oeuvre), it nonetheless digs into one of the most shocking, painful yet ultimately triumphant stories in rock history with real zest and flourish, and a determination to face the brutal truth.

The quietly ingenious ending is the opposite of having your cake and eating it, and leaves your stomach rumbling for a resolution this film is too smart to provide.

It’s really a radical experiment in non-fiction cinema – not seeking to enlighten or inform, but to disorientate us, practically to drown us, in a nightmare vision of the ocean’s power.

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.

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 tests our presumptions, makes us squirm.

It is unquestionably Nyong’o’s film, and the 12 Years a Slave actress gives a nerve-flaying double performance. As Adelaide, every facial expression seems to embody an emotion in its purest, uncut form, while her evil double has a twisting, buckling physicality that comes close to avant-garde butoh dance.

It’s a film of strange and moonlit beauty, and touches you like an icy whisper on the back of your neck.

Mendes...lets the quieter moments breathe.... But Mendes is rather good at being loud, too, and his nine times Oscar-nominated cinematographer Roger Deakins makes the wildly ambitious action sequences the most beautiful in Bond’s 50-year career.

Gray’s film is itself no paper tiger – yes, it’s a fondly conceived throwback, but its claws are real.

Through all of it, Vega – a singer and performance artist whose advice Lelio initially sought in devising his story – makes an indelible impression, absorbing each sling and arrow with a fatigued air of having suffered worse, and hoping for better. She and her film make a powerful case for deserving it.

The only way to understand it is to swim in it for yourself, feel your own heart braid around these two interwoven lives, and gaze up in awe at the silvery arc those falling stars trace across the sky.

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.

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.

It's halfway-strong, just under-dramatised; goodness, though, if it doesn't show what O'Connell is capable of.

Mirai bathes ordinary family life in a beautiful new light.

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 sheer depth of Sassoon's personal misery feels like a brutally unfashionable thing for a contemporary film to confront, but Davies, who’s never given a fig about fashion, confronts it head on.

A War does something brave and challenging in making its most sympathetic character responsible for the worst thing that happens in it.

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.

The World’s End is a fitting end to the trilogy: it is by turns trashy, poignant and gut-bustingly funny, and often all three at once.

The acting quartet of Jones, LaPaglia and double Davis is just immense.

The Nest is good on a first viewing and special on a second, when its cramped horizons and avoidance of full-bore tragedy are strategies for which you’re prepared. Durkin’s use of Kubrickian dissolves makes the passage of time feel like no one’s friend.

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.

The film’s aim, to my eyes, is not to revel in, score points with or otherwise sensationalise the killing of a five-year-old girl. Rather, it confronts us with the dilemma the taped call itself poses: what are we, as humans, meant to do with it? More to the point, what can we?

The Mitchells vs the Machines is like an encounter with a sentient doodle pad, crammed with ideas that might be the cleverest things anyone’s ever thought of, or the most ludicrous, or probably a jumble of both.

The film that made Steve McQueen a superstar and revolutionised the car chase with its 10-minute split-screen, edge-of-your-seat race up and down the hills of San Francisco. [12 Jan 2017]

Fiennes is admirably open throughout, with seemingly no thought of a public image to burnish.

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.

Showy and ambitious, desperately sincere and self-absorbed, and bursting at the seams with potential, Waves isn’t merely a film about teenagers, it’s virtually a teenager in film form. It’s also the kind of cinema that keeps you young.

It’s a film about micromanaging, fixing things on the fly, and a lot of Ridley’s gruff, technocrat personality shines through.

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.

The free-range majesty and fine-grained, muddy-fingernailed detail of Fastvold’s film, though, is entirely its own thing: like Ann, I was left wobbly and breathless by its grandeur and nerve.

Wright seems determined to bring in some new blood, and his film is a thrillingly persuasive recruiting tool. For existing fans, it’s a fond and nerdily comprehensive celebration – or perhaps vindication – of the siblings’ extensive, courageously eccentric output.

The relentlessly one-sided emotional manipulation is grating.

Director John Frankenheimer pitches French resistance member Paul Labiche (Burt Lancaster) against German Colonel Franz von Waldheim (Paul Scofield) in this Second World War art-theft adventure that knocks spots off of George Clooney's modern misfire The Monuments Men (2014). [31 Jan 2021, p.31]

It’s mostly very charming, if perhaps a bit self-consciously so, given Fleischer Camp’s tendency to gurgle delightedly on camera at every other line.

When Good Time’s good, it’s properly electric, and the star turn goes off like an illegal firework.

This extraterrestrial version of The Tempest was in another league. [15 Jul 2017, p.32]

After the novelistic strengths of First Cow and Showing Up, Kelly Reichardt turns in something here that’s more like a short story – unhurried, pleasurable, and low key.

Wenders’ obvious affection for Tokyo itself, his keen feel for texture and neat avoidance of cliché all suggest Perfect Days is likely to age well as a portrait of a great city’s everyday side.

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

Incendies is no one’s idea of a joyful ride, but it’s a remarkable work, and its complex story etches itself on the memory.

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.

Emotionally, the film operates in a classic Gray area, with barely perceptible eddies that build to a mighty existential wrench. All of which, it should be said, rests on Pitt’s shoulders – which feel like very different shoulders, somehow, to the ones that slouched so appealingly through Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. His performance here is as grippingly inward and tamped down as his work for Tarantino was witty and expansive – it’s true movie stardom, and it fills a star-system-sized canvas.

Pohlad’s film is good at probing the line between radical creativity and mental disarray; arguably less good at getting Wilson back on the safe side of it. But it leaves you in no doubt that the man’s a genius.

You could also argue that this almost intentionally exhausting film is too much of a good thing. But there’s amazingly little of it you'd want to live without.

The film is mature, relatable and risks being terminally uncool – full of evident chagrin from Holofcener that she can’t be a new voice these days, but also comfortably embracing the old one.

A sombre spiritual war epic which surges up to claim its place among the director’s most deeply felt, sturdily hewn achievements.

The film doesn’t stint on emotional complexity, but it might be Baumbach’s most accessible to date.

An acutely compassionate account of unshakeable guilt.

From the off, JJ Abrams’s film sets out to shake Star Wars from its slumber, and reconnect the series with its much-pined-for past. That it achieves this both immediately and joyously is perhaps the single greatest relief of the movie-going year.

A social conscience movie with real cinematic bite.

[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.

A late narrative gambit made me worry that Hansen-Løve was pushing her conceit a little too far into the realm of the meta, but it pays off with thrilling clarity and elegance.

Greta Gerwig takes on feminism and the patriarchy in this hilarious, deeply bizarre film.

Landing the perfect ending is a challenge for any such story; A Star is Born, for all its guts and pathos, peaked early. Wild Rose holds its horses, and lets Rose-Lynn soar only when she’s worked out who she is.

The Eternal Daughter is a minor film at least partly by design, but it leaves an ethereal trail of sadness and creepiness.

On a first viewing, I wasn’t quite convinced by some of the glitchy japes Bonello deploys here and there . . . But perhaps he wants us to think of the film itself like its torn heroine: a strange machine whose ghost refuses to give up.

It’s the rapport between the actors – or the anti-rapport, to start with – that makes this such a winning diversion.

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

This is a complex, bewitching and melancholy drama, another fearlessly intelligent film from Assayas.

It’s a powerful testimonial to a fading way of life.

Its relentless, almost hallucinogenic craziness makes it a hard film to engage with, and the viewer drop-off rate when it launches on Netflix later this year will undoubtedly be steep. But as a mad satire of movie-world tumult, and a furious love letter to the business that made and unmade its maker, it could scarcely be improved.

For all the placidity of its cud-chewing subject, Cow has a thrillingly alien charge.

Junger’s film is a decent, heartfelt tribute.

It’s Dano’s handling of the actors, unsurprisingly, which shows the most confidence.

This Ireland-set fantasy adventure, starring Albert Sharpe and Janet Munro as a father and daughter vying with a local clan of leprechauns is benign and deeply genial stuff. [25 Mar 2020]

There are no good guys in this quietly gripping adaptation of Ted Lewis's 1969 novel Jack's Return Home, but cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky brings out the stark beauty of the North-East while capturing their attempts to kill each other. [09 Mar 2020]

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.

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

Portman’s high-tension acting, her inability to relax, suits the material down to the ground. It’s one of her best performances, moving through credible grief and bewilderment, but facing up bullishly to her fears by the end, and finding some kind of exhausted resolve to interrogate them.

It's the stuff modern romantic dramas have turned into cliche, but that here feel anthropological and fascinating. [21 May 2018]

Electrifying.

It’s a nocturnal fantasy, seductive and ablaze with threat.

Garrone knows exactly where he’s leaving both his heroes and his audience: on the agonising cusp of a happily-ever-after his film makes you want to will into existence.

For all its simmering malice and buried secrets, it’s worth remembering that this is David Fincher in fun mode: unnerving, shocking and provoking for better and for worse, in sickness and in health, but mostly sickness.

Its generation-spanning story has serious power, and, in its masterful opening chapter and final sequence, brushes against greatness.

Kahn never allows his filmmaking to pull focus: at times, the camerawork could almost be documentary footage. But his craft is crisp, and the supporting cast so well picked that the arrival of each witness on screen comes with the satisfying thunk-y feel of an arrow hitting its target.

Flux Gourmet plays like a gonzo skit, and is hilariously unabashed on that level, but there’s clearly a level of commentary here regarding the crazy whims of artistry, the trouble with getting funded by people whose opinions you despise, and the shrivelled incompetence of anyone paid to write about your work and consume it when it’s served.

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

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.

There’s enjoyment to be had watching McKellen, 86, gamely pecking away at the role, snacking on morsels in every scene. If only he’d been given a fuller feast.

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.

The script, co-written by Del Toro and Patrick McHale, is perhaps a little slick when it comes to hustling the plot towards the next moral lesson. But the storytelling itself is unashamedly old-fashioned, and forays into the political and the macabre are all carefully tailored to younger viewers.

Le Carré’s relationship with his father is the focus of the film. This is well-worn territory, and yet it proves impossible to tire of le Carré talking about the old devil.

Denis Villeneuve's sequel to his 2021 sci-fi epic is a bold and visually astonishing piece of filmmaking.

The film can get so emotionally and spiritually punishing that it needs Elba’s industrial magnetism to keep you on side. And vile as the Commandant may be, he’s a strong showcase for the actor’s talents.

It’s warm, cosy and very Linklater: it definitely exudes more chill than urgency.

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.

Half-fish, half-fowl and altogether inspired, it is a dazzling mosey through the creeks and canyons of the Coenesque, whose scattershot format and by turns bizarre and macabre sense of humour belies a formal ingenuity and surgical control of tone that keeps the viewer perpetually off-guard.

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.

The real reason to see this is Swinton and Hiddleston’s sexy, pallid double act: two old souls in hot bodies who have long tired of this Earth, but have nowhere else to make their home.