Vogt-Roberts manages the neat trick of making his film feel both nostalgic and current.

It’s consistently absorbing as well as evocative to the harsh finish, with mordant plot surprises Connolly keeps smartly tucked away.

Handsomely shot and stopping just short of cloying sentiment, this is an accomplished, engaging work.

Allied, swathed in larger-than-life, luxurious imposture, is the real heart-racing deal.

The film is a whirl of pure pleasure that just keeps whirling: Sondheim doesn’t write show-stoppers but show-surgers, and from the moment the glorious opening number whips up, introducing the central players, the film cartwheels onwards until it lands at its unexpected but quite beautiful happy-ever-after.

It’s every inch a group achievement, and the film’s best scenes are its ensemble ones: prayers before bedtime, musical recitals, meals by candlelight.

Leslie Mann’s warmth and air of charming confusion have helped many a film before. But she gets some definitive moments for the clipreel here.

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.

As a feat of adaptation by Max Porter, from his 2023 novella Shy, it’s quite fascinating.

Great art it's not – but it's frisky, in charge of itself, and about as keenly felt a vision of this S&M power game we could realistically have expected to see.

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.

The scenario is so familiar it could have been the same old story, but the texture of all this street life gives it rather a special shine.

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.

There’s bad fun to be had in the final stretch – if you go in fully aware that the production flew off the rails.

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.

The Smashing Machine is a crunchily satisfying fight movie that innovates subtly.

Merlant’s film isn’t being unladylike: rather, it’s asserting that ladylike is what all of these things really are, and it’s high time cinema admitted it.

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.

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.

Rather dated now of course but absorbing none the less. [01 Jan 2011, p.31]

Junger’s film is a decent, heartfelt tribute.

Sharp, exacting, trenchant, and fascinating, it’s a shard of history which uses immense polish to make of itself a mirror.

Östlund’s film is a sleek rejoinder to Christian’s disastrous PR team, who believe cutting through the noise of modern life requires short, sharp shocks. The Square shows that slow burn, when it’s kindled just right, has a cumulative heat that makes you wilt in your seat.

Aatami is like some figure out of folk myth let loose on his persecutors, shaking off a ridiculous assortment of injuries between one set piece and the next.

The generational rewrite has been deftly done, with enough timeliness braided in to make it feel freshly relevant, but all the gags fans want to hear again left reverently intact.

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.

Gory, hammy fun. [16 Oct 2010, p.30]

Logan is a film for people, like me, who thought the only good bit of X-Men: Apocalypse was Michael Fassbender crying in the woods, and left the cinema wishing that had been the whole thing. It’s something no-one could have expected: a creatively risky superhero movie. And it deserves to pay off.

This is his and Swinton’s first film together: in fact, it is the Spanish master’s first English-language production. But the two are an obviously good creative match, each one well-versed in the interplay of depth and surface, and capable of switching moods from ripe to heartfelt in a blink.

Featuring a particularly strong central performance and great effects, the film has had an enormous influence on many subsequent sci-fi films.

This comedy-drama with a surrealist edge is more than strong enough to be worthy of praise beyond Byrne, who is legitimately fantastic.

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

Mom and Dad is both a torrid exploitation cinema throwback, and a metaphor for a generation of kids screwed over by their elders.

It has a straight-down-the-highway momentum, interesting stakes, and more textured character work than you can shake a stick at.

This is a film of piercingly perceptive moments, even if, as some say of Haneke's own work, it is cold to the core. [28 Dec 2001]

Yes, Evil Dead Rise indulges in the odd bit of homage, from its chainsaw-based final showdown to an amusing opening gag about Raimi’s trademark demon’s-eye-view tracking shots. But it mostly just wants to scare you witless – and (for this critic, anyway), resoundingly succeeds.

Astutely judged for the most part, and reflective on what Reeve meant to people in all phases of his life, the British documentary Super/Man is an emotional rollercoaster with some undeniably walloping moments. The relationships that quite literally saved Reeve come to the fore.

Piece by Piece is a razor-sharp pronouncement on the nature of stardom in 2024. That you leave the cinema wanting to buy toys and records isn’t simply the idea of the story: it’s the moral.

Billy Wilder's endearing film, ostensibly a parody, is seen by many as an important influence on the BBC's Sherlock series. [02 Dec 2017, p.32]

An absorbing film which aims to restore Jones to his rightful place as a central figure in the story of The Rolling Stones.

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.

The staging and tone are determinedly old-fashioned, and the atmosphere of romance and danger only amplified by the glorious French settings: lots of muddy byways, echoing courtyards and fine, candlelit interiors, and not a green screen in sight.

Rightly treating the book as a new American classic, Ross doesn’t try to supplant it so much as do the best possible job of illustrating it: a deference to the source that makes his film a modest triumph.

In a pivotal scene, the younger Nicholas explains to his colleagues that he has faith in ordinary people because, well, an ordinary person is all that he is. One Life’s wholehearted embrace of that sentiment is the root of its limitations – and its potency too.

The Last Duel, which was adapted from a non-fiction book by Eric Jager, is a knotty, stimulating drama with a piquant #MeToo edge and the heft and splendour of an old-school historical epic.

The animation is photoreal – startlingly and mesmerisingly so. And the depth of feeling the tale of their friendship evokes is matched only by your incredulity, as you paw at your eyes six minutes later, that you are crying about two computer-generated umbrellas.

Blanchett makes us feel the creeping horror of professional disgrace, the fear and stigma, however unfair Mapes argues her treatment may have been. We watch a polished professional come apart at the seams, caught up in self-incrimination and spiralling neurosis.

Army of the Dead is a kindred spirit of, rather than sequel to, Snyder’s earlier film – but it still cleaves faithfully to the Romero template, with its gaggle of abrasive, slippery lead characters that don’t obviously qualify as heroes, and its generous dousings of vinegary cynicism and apocalyptic dread.

This is an all-singing, all-sobbing weepie with sequins, featuring comedy, uproarious choreography, and a suite of soul R&B and gospel numbers that will have you bopping along in your seat.

Compellingly stumped by its own heroine, the film simply can’t make its mind up about Tonya Harding. If it did, it wouldn’t get away with being such a blast.

It holds the attention of the audience from brazen start to fantastic finish – well, not quite to the silly end, perhaps, but then we can’t have everything.

In the dramatic stakes, the dining table comes a distant second to the swimming pool: a place to undress, bask, flirt, vie for attention, compete, cool off and burn. It’s a shimmering tank of romance, jealously and intrigue, and A Bigger Splash plunges into the deep end.

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

Where this documentary gets it right is in refusing to act as PR for the man – it allows him to to give his side of events, but also his victims’ and the others deeply wounded by his actions. It films his frailty and flaws as well as his genius. Does he deserve to be absolved? Like Galliano’s explanation, there’s no clear answer.

If Blackbird shows us anything it’s that no matter how carefully we plan, life resists perfection, right up to the end.

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.

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

There’s nothing Saulnier does better here than unveil his premise and bring the siblings together for their handful of scenes, but his film remains deftly shot and dynamic to the end.

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

This is hardly the sound of artistic burnout. No mean videographer either, Hoon departed with a great deal left to say.

There are moments which directly recreate Oshii’s best scenes, with real sets and actors performing a balletic kind of stunt-karaoke. But the story is far more graspable – more streamlined – and the gracenotes, action-free, tend to be the highlights.

It’s a film that exploration boffins will cherish most, but there’s plenty of grizzled male hardship here to engage fans of The Terror or The North Water. Unlike in those, you’re assured of at least one happy ending, too.

Fifty-three years on it looks utterly magnificent, a glorious record of a group at the height of their powers that will delight every old rocker and should be required viewing for every aspiring young musician.

This is a simple and beautiful journey undertaken purely for its own sake, and approached in that spirit, Tracks will lead you to a place of quiet wonder.

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

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.

It’s summer-holiday eye candy with a sherbetty experimental fizz.

It’s the music that makes it particularly special, and appreciating that is entirely the point of the live-action remake.

Mightily clever in its rather theatrical structure, but bracingly cinematic in its formal approach, the movie has a bold, ambiguous final act.

Getting along with Hoard requires playing along with it too. But it’s easier to warm to than you might imagine, thanks to how well it captures the half-dazed tone and flow of early 1990s teenage life.

The Lost City is what could be described as knowingly dated: it’s a film designed to make you regret they don’t make ’em like this any more, even when “this” means escapist Hollywood fluff.

The film grabs your attention with verve, but also has a vision: it’s not mortal danger it finds freaky, but what’s waiting on the other side.

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.

If Miranda’s tendency towards showmanship can leave Tick, Tick…Boom! feeling a little insistent in places, it also means the film shares its hero’s jet-propelled determination to do his own thing – whether the world happens to be braced for it or not.

You needn’t have the faintest idea who Ilana Glazer or Michelle Buteau are. It’s enough that this pair of US comics spark and connect, hilariously, as two lifelong friends who complete each other’s sentences.

It's all wickedly tendentious mischief, but when it's this gloriously funny, the points score themselves.

As a repeat performance – even a cunningly subversive one – Folie à Deux can’t quite match its predecessor for dizzying impact. But it matches it for horrible tinderbox tension: it’s a film you feel might burst into flames at any given moment.

It’s all so giddily bizarre, the film deserves a health warning of its own: will induce (entirely pleasurable) lightheadedness and shortness of breath.

Scrapper rummages around with style. It puts bubbles in the kitchen sink.

Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal spar beautifully in Peter Bogdanovich's homage to screwball comedies of the Thirties. [11 Feb 2017, p.32]

Most of the film takes place in this vacuum-packed, Sartrean hell of other people, which Trachtenberg, his cast, writers and crew evoke with chest-tightening efficiency. Every sound and line rings with a tight, tinny echo; every room is felt out to its corners; every knick-knack drily noted.

One of those films whose plot and texture are entirely inseparable.

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

An impressive and unconventional thriller. [4 Sept 2010]

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.

That sense of gooey euphoria runs through everything that’s good in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2.

The film looks good and moves well. It earns its initially forbidding running time. It’s driven by human behaviour you might actually recognise.

As an empathetic snapshot of the current immigrant experience in France, the film is compelling right through, but it’s the central relationship that really digs its way into your soul.

Happily, what’s in no short supply is the same mix of uproarious failure and sledgehammer pathos that Brent at his best was always all about.

Nothing about it should work as a film, yet almost everything does.

The film is led by a performance of thrilling regality and nuance from Saoirse Ronan as Mary.

The great coup Washington delivers, beyond framing his co-star’s virtuous anguish so well, is the risky, brilliant, and frequently alienating performance he gives as Troy.

To watch it is to be waterboarded by joy. In terms of both visual dazzle and invention and sheer comedic stamina and pep, it handily surpasses the original Trolls from 2016, which itself set an impressive new standard for films based on novelty keyrings and pencil toppers.

There's an Oscar-winning performance from Ingrid Bergman, who is driven slowly mad by her husband (Charles Boyer at his smoothest), who's after her dead aunt's jewels. Joseph Cotten plays the urbane detective who smells a rat; Angela Lansbury is excellent as an insolent maid. [06 Jun 2020, p.20]

Nichols’ film delivers a grubbily glamorous blast of underworld machismo of the sort that Scorsese himself made a mid-career speciality: think wildly charismatic performances, elegant camerawork, regular jabs of barbarous violence, and a skin-fizzingly sharp jukebox soundtrack.

This is a handsome and mature entertainment, rich with novelistic intrigue, that asks for very little in exchange for its rewards.

Camping out at the film’s doleful core is a very skilled Baruchel, so crestfallen and cowed as Lazaridis that to watch him is to feel the years ebbing away in virtual real time. Rise-and-fall stories so often gloat after the bursting of the bubble, but this one is all condolences.

Against this enticing, enigmatic backdrop, the odd sops to mainstream taste – some comic shrieking, a sprinkling of toilet humour – feel unnecessary, but forgivable. It’s the sort of film you’re relieved to discover still exists.