A social-realist blockbuster – fired by furious compassion and teeming with sorrow, yet strewn with diamond-shards of beauty, wit and hope.

Their improvisation has been honed to the point where the jokes land solidly without losing naturalism.

It is eccentric, sad and stirring to the core. Oh yes – and incredibly funny, too.

The tapes – recordings of her 1964 interview sessions with her biographer, Richard Meryman – play out while we’re lavished with clips from Taylor’s films and newsreel of her looking fabulous. The tapes do lend an intimacy.

As hot and wet as freshly butchered meat: every second, every frame of its three-hour running time is virile with a lifetime’s accumulated genius.

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

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.

Dark Horse is a shuddering, but delicately handled, exploration of that most basic human desire: to leave a mark and to forge a legacy.

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

It holds up as terrifically fresh and constantly enjoyable, thanks to the collision of two social milieus that American cinema rarely puts side by side.

The Art Life shows us a lot about Lynch’s process, just in a different medium from the one that made him famous. His paintings are terrifying. One day, he just had the sudden urge to watch them move.

While the film never shocks it almost always compels, and Breillat crafts some images that keep tingling in the mind long after they’ve faded from sight.

Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch feels like four films in one, and contains enough ideas for at least another six.

As a statement, Benedetta won’t win any awards for coherence, but there’s just Too Much Verhoeven going on here for sensation hunters ever to feel short-changed.

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

In order to be “clever” – scare-quotes extremely necessary – the film sweeps away all of its hard-earned smartness, and the previously gripping uncertainty around the exact nature of Marlo and Tully’s connection is tidied up in a way that feels jarringly cheap.

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.

Precisely because it’s less emotionally coercive than Kore-eda’s last couple of pictures, it’s even more moving: rather than lunging full-bore for the solar plexus, the truths it’s telling creep up on you.

This is mesmerically assured and tensile film-making, with two complex and plausible performances at its core, and the shin-stinging kick of a Chaucerian moral fable.

Chapter 2 does its job entirely ably, without exactly doing much overtime.

For all The Escape’s weaknesses, it’s held together with real sinew by Arterton, who lives and breathes the stifling air of Tara’s habitat without needing to act up a storm at any point.

Send Help is a strained disappointment from Raimi, who proved in Drag Me to Hell that he could sock an original concept to us and go sensationally OTT. Motivation was always on the money in that one; here it goes berserk, and not in a fun way.

It’s a pity this one isn’t a little more distinctive and sharply honed.

Civil War moves in ways you’d forgotten films of this scale could – with compassion for its lead characters and a dark, prowling intellect, and yet a simultaneous total commitment to thrilling the audience at every single moment.

At the root of that is Civil War’s greatest strength – and the reason it makes all thought of the recent Batman v Superman debacle evaporate on contact. The Russos’ film has an unshakeable faith in these decades-old characters: they’re not wrangled into standing for anything other than who they are, with no gloss or reinterpretation or reach for epic significance required. This is the cinematic superhero showdown you’ve dreamt of since childhood, precisely because that’s everything – and all – it wants to be.

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

The animation (which owes a debt to Winnie-the-Pooh and The Little Prince) is gorgeous, bringing Mackesy’s ink and watercolour drawings to life. Tuning in does allow you to switch off from the world for half an hour. And if watching it feels like drowning in a vat of golden syrup – well, don’t we all overdose on sweet things at Christmas?

The film is oddly unmoving as a memorial, but as with Amy Winehouse, it inspires a collective mea culpa for the feeding frenzy of public judgement that only turned to sympathy when it was far too late.

The film squanders both of its casts, reeling from one fumbled set-piece to the next. It seems to have been constructed in a stupor, and you watch in a daze of future past.

It doesn’t have easy access to human emotion, instead deploying a series of techniques to fake it.

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

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.

While it never achieves, or even reaches for, The Lego Movie’s unexpected profundity and emotional bite, in purely logistical terms, The Lego Batman Movie is a thing of wonder. There are around four (great) films’ worth of action and jokes here, crammed into a story so streamlined it might have been assembled in the Lockheed wind tunnel.

A lot of the subplots and surroundings, which push the running time to an ungainly two-hours-plus, feel more like ways of stalling for time.

The first full run-through of the crisis, in the White House Situation Room, is perhaps a little dry. But as things replay from various angles, the steady build-up of context effectively compounds the tension, and soon we’re every bit as lost as President Elba, desperately searching for clarity in a chain of events that necessarily precludes it.

Okja is plenty of fun, and smart around the edges, but the girl-and-her-pig stuff can drag, and it feels like it’s pressing for resonance more than properly achieving it.

Titane is the kind of film that makes quibbles over plausibility seem foolish: you just have to sit back and enjoy being ridden over, or at least accept that’s what the exercise is about.

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]

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.

Its fuse fizzes dutifully from A to B, but the dynamite never ignites.

Just squeezably lovely.

The ultimate camp-Gothic bitchfight. Vastly entertaining.

Johnson and co-writer Mark Heyman may be exploring familiar territory but they do so with a warmth, subtlety and honesty that marks it out.

Dupieux is clearly aware there’s no real dramatic mileage in Mandibles’ absurd premise, but it’s the opposite of a problem: Mandibles becomes funnier the longer it wanders around aimlessly, kicking at rocks.

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.

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

A surging tsunami-crash of creativity and beauty.

Fans of the genre will enjoy the scene in which Robinson's moll sings Moanin' Low, about a woman trapped in a relationship with a cruel man. [06 Aug 2011, p.30]

Southside With You all but begs you to unpick every line and gesture for shivery echoes of the future, and it’s to first-time writer-director Tanne’s credit – and, equally, that of his perfectly chosen leads, Parker Sawyers and Tika Sumpter – that the film not only withstands but thrives under such scrutiny.

The script shuffles romantic complications around in a sub-Clueless manner, but it badly lacks a killer idea, unless bored teenage lesbians repeatedly punching each other (and then the opposing boys’ football team) is everything you could possibly want from a lowbrow comedy.

Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée has followed up one big, awardsy film from last year (Dallas Buyers Club) with another at lightning speed. That was a braver film, but it's the spaciousness of this one that distinguishes it from being just another mechanically pre-ordained adversity narrative.

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 film is crammed with so much transporting spectacle and visual invention, it feels epic even at living-room size.

Director Meadows (This is England, Dead Man’s Shoes) has crafted a rowdy, raucous documentary that complements the band’s combative image; bristling with energy, it celebrates their reformation after a 16-year gap.

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

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

Dunham’s film has the kind of winning light touch that’s impossible to fluke.

This art-form has long been thought to have reached its twilight years, but Yonebayashi’s film brims over with the bounce and spark of childhood.

His recollections are as sobering as his images, and a great many of both will embed themselves in your head.

While there’s still (arguably) some fun to be had with this independent comedy’s double-entendre-friendly title, the laughs – such as they are – don’t extend a great deal further than that.

Laugh for laugh, it may well be a series peak. I bow down to the perfection of one immaculately organised prank in a furniture shop, especially when innocent bystanders weigh in with their “He went all up in the ceiling!” comments.

As yarns go, it is all comfortingly chunky and luxuriantly spun – winter comfort viewing that treats its audience as gallantly as its heroes treat their mission, while taking itself just seriously enough.

Unrelated is an emotionally and sometimes wince-inducingly acute debut from British director Joanna Hogg that looks and feels and sounds like few other British films.

Russell, a revelation in Trey Edward Shults’s under-seen Gen-Z melodrama Waves, is career-makingly good here, while Chalamet’s tender, tousled allure and razor-edge of raw danger powerfully recall the late River Phoenix: his Lee is a hustler to the core, always calculating where his next meal is coming from, and who he’ll have to sink his teeth into in order to get it.

Denis Villeneuve's new adaptation of the 1965 Frank Herbert novel – starring Timothée Chalamet – is an awe-inspiring piece of work.

Rush has sex, glamour, a fair degree of wit and a breathless, pedal-to-the-metal spirit. But its greatest achievement may be to underline that there are real men, all vulnerable flesh and blood, inside those infernal machines.

Gray has taken a dicey risk here, by thinking through white guilt from such an unapologetically personal place. In this retrospective mea culpa, he’s trying to be honest about his own conscience and childhood regrets, but also examining the multiple failures of education that set these two kids on such divergent paths.

Nodding in that direction without going for broke, the film becomes an open-ended saga about rejecting family to pursue your own independent path, and keeps us wondering just how much scorched earth – or flesh, for that matter – Thelma intends to leave behind.

For all its promised rebellion, Colette’s story really segues into a more nuanced tale of outgrowing: not just a childish and bullying spouse, but an age of acquiescence.

While it's possible to fantasise a truly explosive, riskily disturbing version of The Workshop, that simply wouldn’t be what its own makers intended.

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

None of this quite counts as stop-the-presses stuff in the present day, but it’s enough to make this a sharp debut, with a shivery undertow.

Directed with what you might call resounding competence by Theodore Melfi, Hidden Figures isn’t pushing the cinematic boat out in any new directions, but it steers its prescribed course nimbly and nicely.

The pitch to the studio was "Romeo and Juliet on junk": fair enough, but it crackles with life, and this is a tremendous rediscovery.

This psychological thriller is far from Alfred Hitchcock's finest, but it is held together by strong leads. [13 Jun 2015, p.36]

The vignettes of rule-breaking and social exclusion have a funny and stinging force.

Interstellar is Nolan’s best and most brazenly ambitious film to date.

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

François Ozon and the late Ruth Rendell is a great match of sensibilities: it promises the French director’s winking subversion, wedded to the late crime writer’s slippery command of psychological twists.

One of Our Aircraft Is Missing is one of our greatest war films.

The problem isn’t that this unusual combination of genres doesn’t click. It’s that the jokes are so stale, the performances so broad, and the plot so greased up with improbable short cuts, that Audrey’s journey feels less like a voyage of self-discovery than a coach tour of the form’s dustiest landmarks.

You’ve seen almost everything here before, but never within the same film.

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.

The Duke is that rarest of things: a comedy that knows that a twinkle in the eye and a fire in the belly needn’t be mutually exclusive.

Borgli’s scenario might falter as it goes along, but Cage is a dream.

A jazz-loving kid from a musical family, Williams has been breathing music since he could talk and, though open and forthcoming as he recalled his enduring career, he was clearly happiest when talking about the nuts and bolts of his craft.

A melding of old and new modes of animation, in which the attentive artistry of the past coexists with the hyper-detailed, computer-generated present.

Will & Harper has laudable aims but suffers from a baggy, shaggy structure.

It comes at you baying and rattling like an early Pedro Almodóvar comedy, threaded through with an infectious love of full-throttle melodrama, and flinging its energy right back to the cheap seats, thanks to Dolan's customarily zippy design choices.

Quemada-Díez thinks in images, and his film is too offhandedly credible in its details to feel like a thesis he’s trying to prove: it’s poetry, not prose.

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.

Its control of tone can be a little uncertain, particularly during the ambitious epilogue – and I wish it had allowed itself a little more freakiness in its most savage moments. But at its best, it could be Bergerac reimagined by Nicolas Roeg, with its tangled character psychologies and great shudders of dread that seem to ring through the soil underfoot.

Joe represents a return to the independent-spirited storytelling that characterised Green’s early career.

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.

Personally, I couldn’t follow Arnold over the dotted line into violent magical realism, however situated it might be in a young girl’s sense of fantasy. It’s a miscalculation, like playing your weakest suit mistaking it for a trump.

While writers Lena Waithe and James Frey make Queen and Slim’s initial decision to flee convincing, and dramatically spiky – it’s striking that even a lawyer doesn’t fancy her chances on the legal route – their screenplay is rather less good at coming up with excuses for the string of colourful and picturesque pit-stops the two keep making afterwards.

There may be no more fitting snack for a film that exudes casual bon-vivant allure, but is fundamentally nibbles and froth.

It is carnage for connoisseurs. Nothing in the series so far can quite prepare you for the intricate sadism of these set pieces.