If you're a fan of hers, you've heard it all before. Still, if you're a fan of hers, there is plenty here to enjoy.

It's part sex comedy and part critique of the social divisions of Thatcher's Britain and despite its politically incorrect nature, the film is keenly observed and funny. [09 Apr 2011, p.34]

Unashamedly rousing and immaculately crafted, The Swimmers is up there with Creed as a sports drama with more at stake than individual glory – a global-humanist purview to which it ascends without getting the slightest bit preachy.

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

Zombi Child is the kind of lithe and lucid dream that gets its tendrils round your brain stem, so that when all hell finally breaks loose, you can’t jolt yourself awake from its grip.

This wintry tale of art blooming in adversity is far from a schematic feel-good jaunt. . . it’s an anthem for doomed youth in a familiar Bennett key: wry, melancholic, sneakily profound.

As a toy-advert movie full of artistry and heart, it’s as slyly progressive as it is shamelessly nostalgic.

Elke Sommer is good as the devious maid Maria Gambrelli but it is Sellers who steals the show as the inept detective fumbling and bumbling his way around solving murder mysteries.

It’s an elegantly pleasurable period thriller, a film of tidy precision and class.

A seamless patchwork of reminiscences, tracing John’s voyage into darkness with an astute and sensitive cinematic imagination.

While a late twist may potentially dismay, it also allows Mackenzie to raise the stakes in a battle of wits whose participants previously felt more like opponents than foes. It gets personal – nasty, even – and this ice-cool throwback suddenly bursts into flames.

The script makes a heavy meal of Naru’s personal growth, where a concentration on pure survivalist reflex would have made it leaner and meaner. But when the film knuckles down in sequences of wordless action, it slays.

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

Onward may be middle-of-the-pack Pixar but it’s still a real pleasure.

With her actors, Belo captures moments of staggering grief that are moving in their restraint: we deal, usually, with the stricken aftermath.

Varda by Agnès is unquestionably one for the fans ... But this film also serves as a tantalising crash-course for newcomers.

Reflecting the mood of Nixon's America, the film plays on the anxieties of surveillance. [27 Oct 2012, p.36]

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

Much of the pleasure of the film is in procedure: watching someone work diligently and knowledgeably towards a goal that just happens to be murder. But a darkly fun tension emerges between its anti-hero’s internalised principles and how he actually behaves when pressed.

With its watch-through-your-fingers cringe factor, this is an excellent black comedy of amiss-ness all round. It’s about millennials, their fibs, and their failures.

With its deft blend of hilarity and humanity, Planes, Trains and Automobiles is Hughes' most satisfying work.

“We have to be able to enter the 1930s with our heads held high,” Dockery says – another hint that further Downtons may just keep roaring down the road, Fast & Furious-style. But it’s hard to believe that any could serve as a better send-off than this.

Acker and Denisof spar with each other in the best traditions of screwball comedy; worthy modern equivalents to Tracy and Hepburn. They’re the main source of joy in a film overflowing with treats.

The hesitancy of the storytelling, with its comforting lulls and odd delays, is a funny sort of boon.

It’s written, shot and acted with a hot-blooded urgency that reminds you the struggle it depicts is an ongoing one – and which shakes up this most well-behaved of genres with a surge of civil disobedience.

This is a film as delicate as dripping water, with depths that are quietly waiting to be plumbed.

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]

Forbes has a delicate but unsentimental approach, which gives her film the same infectious energy that blesses and curses Cameron. The end result feels good without feeling superficial.

John Wick has such stylistic assurance that even when it falters – the music’s a bit moronic, and the subtitles for Russian dialogue get a naff, pseudo-pulpy typeface – it mainly tends to remind you how much you’re enjoying everything else.

It’s testament to the artfulness of Moore and Johnathan McClain’s screenplay that your suspicions flit constantly between all four parties, and the denouement – which takes a surprising yet just about merited turn for the macabre – still manages to surprise.

Kim rattles you with this family’s bizarre and pitiful plight, and only then, from a place of agonised discomfort, does the laughter follow, in great whoops and roars.

The result is spooky, upsetting and revolting. Although it ends up crossing the line from unsettling to punishing, you still have to take your hat off to it, if only because a makeshift sick bag may be required.

Thanks to one of the most indestructible poster campaigns ever designed, the words Les Misérables can’t help but call a child’s face to mind.

When it’s in the mood, horror can be a sexually subversive genre; it can also be a flagrantly non-PC one. Freaky treads a treacherous line between the two with aplomb.

Metro Manila is so spellbound by its setting that it is a good hour before we discover what kind of film it is going to be. It begins as a swirling drama of survival in the Filipino capital — but then suddenly it slips off down an alleyway, only to emerge a scrupulously engineered, Christopher Nolan-ish crime thriller.

Overall, it’s joyous, uplifting – and as funky as the music at its heart.

A wild and righteous provocation.

Though the movie offers no new bombshells the filmmakers have nonetheless wrought a spare and unflinching feature that offers a fresh perspective on Knox without descending into the sensationalism that attended original coverage of the trial.

Occasionally things get a little overcrowded, particularly during a sticky final act, but Pan has a certain timeless buoyancy that keeps it bouncing back.

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]

Boiling Point grips remorselessly while it’s spinning all these plates, and somehow ladles onto them a smorgasbord of great, frazzled acting from all concerned.

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?

Kormákur captures the action in a series of long, prowling, hold-your-breath takes, which both convey a vivid sense of place (the whole thing was shot on location in South Africa) and afford the viewer endless opportunities to anxiously scan the background for lion-shaped ripples in the long grass.

What’s striking about the film’s tone is its redemptive warmth. Though the details are chilling, it’s as if a cathartic space has been opened for these girls and their families to explain what they went through.

Cooke’s sturdy, old-fashioned approach to staging and shooting pairs well with his leading actor’s precise, engaging performance, and makes scenes like this anxious backstreet exchange – or Greville and Penkovsky’s two visits to the ballet, each one serving as a clever psychological pivot-point – all the more fun and absorbing.

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

Its jokes, effects and sparkler-bright cast chemistry need nothing to fall back on.

Chaves has become a skilful enough craftsman that he deserves parole to pastures new. Meanwhile, Wilson and especially Farmiga, who have lent gravitas to so much that’s profoundly trumped up and silly, can take a long-deserved bow.

A supremely sweet and touching comic drama.

To call Fast X one of the most ludicrous action films ever made would be a borderline tautology for any instalment in the Fast and Furious franchise. But this one takes the cake.

From a premise of purest hokum, the Sixth Sense director wrings out an impressive amount of sweat – it's a real return to form.

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

Serious as Paddington is about meaning something, it’s even more serious about the business of having fun.

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.

The best thing about Destin Daniel Cretton’s blockbuster is how confidently it goes its own way: these call-backs to surrounding Marvel lore are sly without being smug, at least until the obligatory end-credits gesture ushering Shang-Chi into the fold.

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.

Collet-Serra’s rigorous craftsmanship and Lively’s muscular-in-every-sense movie-star performance – the film takes Olympic-level pleasure in watching her swimming, leaping, fighting, scrambling, enduring – ensure every attack and counterattack convulses and grips.

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.

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.

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.

Blade is arguably too much of a good thing. But hey, that’s immortality for you.

A social conscience movie with real cinematic bite.

The recurring fungal and archeological imagery suggest a conception of consciousness as a kind of mushroom patch, with human experience blooming from and feeding on the experiences that came before, all the way back to its unknowable cosmic beginnings.

The film’s comedy is loose and generous, and its esprit de corps sneaks up on you with a soft tread.

Over two and a half hours, the pop-gothic intensity can get a little much – at times I felt like a fire extinguisher was going off in my face – but you wouldn’t necessarily want to lose any of it.

Crucially, Kelsey Mann’s film, co-written by returning screenwriter Meg LeFauve, gets Pixar back to doing what they always did best: juggling big concepts in fun and ingenious but also surprisingly wise and moving ways.

A sensationally funny and gently science-fictional German rom-com.

If big-tech hubris is now a non-fiction Dewey classification all of its own, this was nonetheless an extremely well told tale of arrogance, carelessness and the destruction – not disruption, please – that follows in its wake.

It is a valentine to the kind of innocent adolescence that modern teenagers will never have a chance to experience.

Rush hurls himself into the film’s star turn with a cantankerous abandon that more than compensates for his slightly unsteady accent. It’s a wildly entertaining performance that feels vividly inhabited both physically and vocally.

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.

While Kayla Day is very much a teenager of her precise time and place, her gruelling anxiety – and Fisher’s wonderful yearning in the role – make her universally relatable anyway.

With a dearth of psychoanalysis, the jazzy pace barely lets up, but the result - essentially an Allen stand-up show that just happens to be set in the middle of a fascistic, architecturally stunning future society - is no less seminal for its slapstick ebullience: a lesson that the pursuits of making art and making a complete idiot out of yourself are not mutually exclusive.

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.

The movie rattles with provocations.

It’s hard to remember the last time an actress aged as convincingly on screen as Zhao Tao does in the melancholic, gently epic Ash Is Purest White.

There’s no bold genre reinvention afoot in this reboot, and its thwart-the-baddies plot remains bound to familiar equations, though at least now the equations actually balance.

Seydoux has unfakeable chemistry here with a perfect-as-usual Poupaud, the leading man in French cinema who seems most incapable of putting a foot wrong.

What fun it is to watch a film this expensive and not be able to quite work out where it’s going – or even if it might just stay put for a bit, and soak up the dustily poetic death-of-the-American century vibe.

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

[A] beautiful, humane and moving biopic.

What The Gorge does supply is a novel science-fiction premise and some captivating bursts of suspense.

Dogman unfolds its relatively straightforward story with both thrilling style and serious moral force: it’s a sensation judged on either bark or bite.

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.

The sum total is superior in every way to what he dished out last time. With a third one openly teased at the end, the fog has lifted: Hemsworth has landed on his Bourne, and this is his Supremacy.

Vitally, Wandel doesn’t ramp up the misery here for dramatic effect, but rather successfully makes the fairly everyday unpleasantness feel as chest-clutchingly hopeless as it would to – well, a seven-year-old.

Girlhood carries you along with its characters, neither lionising nor demonising them, but allowing you to watch them live their lives and make their own decisions, be they rash or inspired or a terrifying mixture of the two.

Aubrey Plaza is fantastic in this full-body sensory bath movie which follows a struggle for power among the elites of New Rome.

It’s a dizzyingly efficient blitzkrieg of family fun, crammed with barely connected haunted house, martial arts, 007, country club and superhero-spoofing vignettes.

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

Yamada makes a point of contrasting the agonising complexity of high-school life with the clean simplicity of the moments that really count: hushed conversations on a bridge in springtime, a shared roller-coaster ride under empty blue skies.

In this wildly promising debut feature from the 36-year-old British filmmaker Daniel Wolfe, the landscape becomes a kind of holy sanctuary for two young lovers fleeing a murderous plot.

The Informer is one of the year’s more pleasant genre surprises: a clenched fist of a crime thriller in the mode of The Departed or The Town, in which every element is just a notch smarter than you’d expect. Generic though the film may look, it holds together absorbingly, thanks to a sturdy script which ups stakes and adds characters with cunning and intelligence.

Both Fassbender and Vikander explore their characters’ various thorny moral quandaries and shifting states of mind in breath-catching depth, drilling down through the plot’s melodramatic crust to the swirling ethical magma underneath.

Hansen-Løve and Huppert cup a single life in their hands and ponder the mixed blessing of freedom from a philosophical position: the trade-off between self-sufficiency and aloneness that Nathalie finds herself negotiating.

[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.

It’s a film of few frills or flourishes, which never tries to dress up its subject or soften its blows. Yet in its rage and its pain, in the wire-brush scrub it gives to the movies’ woozily romantic notions of alcoholism, Glassland feels wholly honest and true.

This is a winningly eccentric film, as attuned in its own way to the rhythms of ordinary life as Jarmusch and Driver’s (even better) 2016 feature Paterson. But there is a pessimism gnawing away in its gut that can’t be laughed off.