A dizzying collage of all the changes in London’s social and architectural fabric since light was first trained through celluloid.

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.

The film unquestionably dices with slightness. But you don’t leave the cinema feeling that something was missing, and Tomlin, who appears in every scene, constructs a persuasive and highly watchable character.

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.

This is a film about human flaws. It should not be missed – whatever your views on Greenpeace.

Not everything in it lands cleanly, but even its misses excite, and its direct hits are knockouts.

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.

It’s here to burnish one performer’s legend while laying the foundations of another’s. But there’s still lots of fun to be had in its twisting, telescoping hall of mirrors.

McQueen’s work seldom features memorable lines; the moments that stay with you are the ones where nothing is said, and his camera stays fixed on an actor’s face.

Although overshadowed by his later classics Psycho and The Birds, Alfred Hitchcock's thriller is still a masterclass in suspenseful cinema. [14 Sep 2022, p.29]

Love Lies Bleeding’s total lack of filter is its greatest strength. It’s the sort of film you instinctively want to tuck under a mattress: hot, nasty and mouth-wateringly disreputable, this is cinema with nothing to lose.

For all the film’s merits, the suspicion persists that McDonagh’s a little too pleased with his own fulminating thesis. Time and again the writing is showing off for effect, delivering a fire-and-brimstone sermon with cocky swagger.

Suzume is perhaps Shinkai’s most spookily beautiful work to date, while remaining treasurably odd.

While occasionally too muted for its own good, Apples does benefit from not pushing its quirk factor too hard – that would only have set up a barrier between us and Servetalis’s hollow detachment. It’s a braver choice for Nikou to invite our empathy.

Mikkelsen, who is not given to sympathetic roles, has never been better. This is cinema that sinks its claws into your back.

Somehow Road Diary feels like a preamble, a warm-up act before the actual event.

[A] stately and ambitious ensemble drama.

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.

The Mustang could have held more surprises, but as a landscape study – “Prison, with horses” – it’s ruggedly stunning.

This is a heartbreaking story – how could it not be? But Frears’ film breaks your heart and then repairs it.

Dialogue aside, the craftsmanship is unimpeachable, and Gray takes a timeless approach to pacing and camerawork: even the sunlight is sepia-tinted. But the grand themes of loyalty and ambition never catch fire, and the film’s few truly memorable moments are invariably its smallest.

Once the significant shock of the film fades, what stays with you are its implications – the way it shows division digging in and self-perpetuating like cancer in bone, with each flare-up making the next more grimly probable. This is history retold in the blistering present tense.

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 follow-up doesn’t re-take the temperature of British society one generation on so much as vivisect its twitching remains.

The action sequences here are armrest-gripping fun, and you only wish DeBlois and his animators had been even more confident; held their shots even longer; allowed us to enjoy the whistle of the wind and the curve of the dragons’ flight paths without hurriedly cutting away to another angle, and another, and another. When the film flies, it soars.

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.

The film is nearly two hours long and passes in what feels like 45 seconds. It is wildly entertaining and blaringly ridiculous, and I want to watch it every night for a week.

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.

Most impressively of all, Peppiatt captures the raw power of a great rap song. Hard-punching and cheerfully riotous, the film directs a well-placed kick at the nether regions to anyone who insists music, politics and cinema cannot mix.

Don’t underestimate the knitwear in Maggie’s Plan. This comedy from Rebecca Miller says more about the human condition through its cardigans than most films this summer have managed in their scripts.

As a film, Testament of Youth glimmers with sadness, but also the apprehension of sadness: we know not all of these boys are coming back.

Like Someone in Love, is another miracle at close quarters. Its subject is the impossibility of intimacy in the modern world: chewy stuff, to be sure, but Kiarostami explores it with a depth and delicacy that recalls the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu.

Pugh is mesmerising.

It is beautifully shot, too: even the writing on the posters and graffiti observes the style of classical French écriture. Given enough time, maybe one could even grow nostalgic for the pomposity.

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.

Having slyly slipped the bonds of the past, Corsage eventually allows its heroine to make a very modern break for it in the film’s (wholly fictional) final act. It’s a fun, coolly outrageous manoeuvre – and the final shot is so freeing, it’s as if the laces on your own invisible corset had suddenly been cut.

Admirers of Baker’s earlier work will have a journey to go on here, first in missing the rowdy companionship of protagonists who weren’t wholly out for themselves. As spectacle, this study of a dirtbag running out of extra lives falls into the category of crowd-baiting, not crowd-pleasing. Mikey, repeatedly, is just the worst.

The movie is hauntingly romantic at heart, in the best spirit of a Gothic fairytale, but without the harsh shadows or hard edges.

There’s a Spielbergian showmanship to Bayona’s films, wedded to an unabashed emotionalism, and this one reaches for you down in the gut.

It’s the kind of handsome, rousing, rigorous entertainment you can’t help but play along with.

It’s a punchy, propulsive watch, blown along by snappy editing and a hip-hop-driven soundtrack that stresses that there’s still much fun to be had when hefty themes of inequality and geopolitics are being tackled. And honestly? There really is.

Every story here has heart, soul and grit.

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.

The film scores highly as a Highsmithian three-hander, and particularly excels at illuminating all the ways this trio have failed to grow up. It shimmers, convinces and thoroughly absorbs.

It’s an intimate film with a roomy embrace.

An assortment of myths are exploded in Zappa, the baggily engaging docu-portrait directed by Bill & Ted star Alex Winter.

Berger’s evocation of war and its horrors ultimately connects not at an intellectual level but where it truly matters: in the gut.

A timely, terrifically acted moral nail-biter.

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.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 is both a courtroom drama for the ages and an urgent shot across the bows.

The film tells the story as it is, without unnecessary frills or padding. It's the essence of the TT.

It’s the kind of filmmaking with rich confidence in its own professionalism, like a hired assassin purring with his own satisfaction after a devious, trace-free job.

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]

At the very end of Janicza Bravo’s Zola, just as you’re struggling to comprehend what on earth the film is supposed to amount to, there is a wonderful moment when you realise that’s the entire point.

There are no shattering revelations here – if Gibney’s canny gathering of various narratives, shimmering score and cool graphics give his film the goose-pimply intrigue of a spy thriller, it just happens to be one you’ve already seen. It’s also one in which the subplot, if anything, takes over from the main plot.

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.

The most haunting part of this riskily earnest film isn’t the unmentionable effects coup of its grand finale, but the quieter beats, all in close-up, that comprise its coda: atomised, spent, and sad.

For the most part, sound and image are irreconcilable, so you find yourself either listening in horror or watching with pleasure, only for the spell to be broken by some eye or ear-catching detail in the other temporal strand.

Wingard has the technique to pull this homage off, and the sense to build unease from somewhere in the core of America’s psyche.

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.

Perry somehow allows his cast enough space in this meticulously authored environment to work creative wonders of their own.

It's a great idea, and the supporting cast (including Sid James) is terrific, especially during the sight gags. It's very funny indeed. [22 May 2010, p.31]

The film comes and goes without commotion, but its magic settles on you as softly and as steadily as dust.

If the action in Wonder Woman comes less frequently than you might expect, it’s also thrillingly designed and staged, with a surging sense of real people, from all sorts of backgrounds, swept up in the wider conflict’s churns and jolts.

This illustrious courtroom drama, adapted from an Agatha Christie play, is directed by Billy Wilder, who wisely stands back and allows Charles Laughton to give one of his gloriously hammy performances as a barrister hired to defend Tyrone Power on a murder charge. Marlene Dietrich is also excellent as the accused's wife.

The 31-year-old Stewart – who will be instantly and justifiably awards-tipped for this – navigates this perilous terrain with total mastery, getting the voice and mannerisms just right but vamping everything up just a notch, in order to better lean into the film’s melodramatic, paranoiac and absurdist swerves.

I’m not sure The Revenant is quite as tough and uncompromising as it thinks it is: it's coffee-table existentialism, with psychological brush-strokes so thick they might as well have been put on with a mop. But there’s no question it’s an extraordinary, blood-summoning, sinew-stiffening ride.

With its single, ultimately blood-soaked day to cover, this wants to be a pressure-cooker thriller, but something’s a little off with the settings.

The point with van Gogh is that he produced mind-boggling art while stricken with doubt that he’d failed all his life. This film is his spiritual antithesis – so recklessly confident that it paints right over him.

Glorious.

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]

Redemption may have eluded Michael Corleone, but his third film was more fortunate.

It’s lots of fun until you notice it doesn’t quite add up.

A sick joke, an urgent warning and a roar into the abyss, Mother! earns its exclamation mark three times over and more.

That strange, conflicted tone of "operatic realism" that the critic and essayist Phillip Lopate found in the films of Luchino Visconti also runs through the core of Munzi’s film: there’s an almost theatrical grandeur to the plot, which was adapted from a novel by Gioacchino Criaco, but moment-to-moment it zings with realism.

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.

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

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

The film’s a satirical thriller, which is a novel enough entity in itself these days; it has a pungent, can’t-miss-the-point premise, and a big, weird, sharkish performance from Jake Gyllenhaal powering it up. It’s a must-see and a must-talk-about film, electrically overblown in the moment, if not wholly in control of its pay-off.

Gina Prince-Bythewood’s epic drama springs off the success of Black Panther and roars into action: it’s every bit as propulsive, as detailed, as richly imagined. It’s fast, and it’s loose, and it totally works.

It’s juicily ambitious stuff: imagine the familial tensions of The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited mapped onto an entire nation, but also playing out in multiple close-up vignettes.

It’s a critic’s instinct to auto-praise any blockbuster that tries to do something different, but Catching Fire is so committed to carrying on the fine work started by its predecessor that the applause flows utterly naturally.

Nouvelle Vague stylishly captures and celebrates a certain approach to making cinema – reactive, incautious, free-range – but leaves you wishing there was a little more of it in the film you just saw.

The film defaults to gentle comedy too often, and feels afraid to dig deep enough into its underlying themes to draw blood.

In her first outright lead role Goth is straightforwardly tremendous, and gets to move through the considerable breadth of her talent even within individual shots.

This foursome’s lives intersect in consistently thrilling and surprising ways, thanks in no small part to the fundamental volatility of contemporary young urban lives.

Some might criticise its narrow focus, but on its own terms Nothing Compares is the most potent and hard-hitting film about the travails of a woman in the pop industry since Asif Kapadia’s 2016 Oscar-winning Amy. And what makes it ultimately more heartening than that anguished documentary about Amy Winehouse, is that O’Connor offers a story of survival.

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]

At a time when the corporation’s live-action output keeps doubling down on the franchise grind, here from just over the garden fence is a lesson in storytelling that feels at once elegantly classical and zingily fresh.

Cedar might have built up a broader satirical thesis from all this wheeling and dealing, but he’s happy to let the film rest gently on Gere’s shoulders – these days, a pretty safe foundation.

What makes Mistress America peculiarly frustrating, though, is what great potential it whips up – for a good half-hour it’s a fast and fluid pleasure, waiting to curdle.

Despite a wobbly handle on all this, it’s an intriguing film to wrestle with, it’s powerfully acted by Melander and Milonoff, and it sticks out for its undeniable outlandishness. After all, when was the last time a bearded troll baby posted from Finland was the closest thing to salvation?

It’s a stunningly confident piece of filmmaking, which holds on to vital clues about how much time has elapsed, and what’s happened, then springs them on us. The performances slay you.

The performances command respect, even when the script is caught feeding characters stock laugh lines you don’t quite believe, or seeming to fumble (or compress?) whole subplots to duck away from the melodrama it might otherwise have become.

Much of the film’s success comes down to Plaza, who has left that deadpan sphinxlike mode of hers some way back in the rear-view mirror. Grit replaces irony, and it’s fascinating to watch her think her way through every predicament here, deftly and in detail, weighing the percentages.

Off-beat and punk-spirited.

A story stretched thinly between two many characters, without the dynamism or momentum to keep itself charging onwards.

With a fresh joke in almost every line of the script, even if only one in five worked, you’d still be laughing more or less continuously through to the credits – and for me, at least, the hit rate was often considerably higher than that.