Eye in the Sky is a tick-tock suspense exercise as well as a neat little ethical echo chamber, a plea for reason in a world exploding too vigorously to give it the time of day.

Frantz is the work of a rascal, but a rascal in an unusually reflective frame of mind. Even with its mysteries solved, you can’t help but keep turning it over.

The film could have been an indulgent memoir, a scrapbook of a major (if stunted) leading-man career. But seeing so much of it through Kilmer’s own viewfinder gives it both focus and poignancy.

Kore-eda has crafted a piercing, tender poem about the bittersweet ebb and flow of paternal love, and his status as Ozu's heir becomes ever more assured.

First-time writer-director Chloe Domont beats a sly, perceptive path across this tricky psychological turf.

Put simply, you care about the Katwe kids because he does, and in the same way, too – not with high-strung melodramatic concern, but a warm glow of empathy in your gut. That’s stoked up in part by the film’s keen eye for telling, truthful-feeling detail.

Wheatley’s extraordinary film shakes you back and forth with a rare ferocity, but the net result is stillness.

Director Chris Smith builds the film around Ridgeley’s mother’s scrapbooks of photographs and memorabilia – and perhaps partly because of that, it ends up feeling like little more than a leaf through the milestones. It’s been made for the fans, but they’ll know every last detail already: it’s pop history as singalong.

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.

This film about the cult of celebrity in America strikes me as a uniquely intelligent ironic masterpiece – though, witty as it is, it isn’t a comedy, despite what the title and the casting of Jerry Lewis might lead you to expect.

Even with the steady supply of clichés and occasional leaps of logic, the dramatic scenes smoulder away nicely.

Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo don’t come close to defying gravity in this bloated, beige screen adaptation of the Wizard of Oz prequel.

Booth is simply outstanding, weighing up with deep shading the oppressive circumstances that have made Evelyn both torturer and captive, nemesis and potential lifeline.

It's as simultaneously chilling and warming as a slug of ice-cold vodka, and just as liable to make your mind swim and eyes prick.

When absurdism feels this wrong, you know it’s being done right.

Wind River confirms the director as a rising talent who can be trusted to beat his own enticing path through inhospitable ground.

It’s absorbing and well-acted enough that at times you could almost forget you were being asked to emotionally invest in which company gets to slide its wares onto a rich young sportsman’s feet.

Stuntman-turned-director Chad Stahelski honours the choreography first and foremost – there’s none of the choppy editing that can often cover for this-will-do blockbuster combat, but bravura long takes which push the stuntmen and Reeves (with a lot of digital assistance) to the limits of their presumed endurance.

Though the film resists easy categorisation, it often tumbles along like queer screwball, which chimes with its original French title: Plaire, Aimer et Courir Vite, or Give Pleasure, Love and Run Fast. It’s a fine manifesto, and Honoré’s film excels at all three.

There are gorgeous things about it, there’s one really good performance, and reminders of Davies’ transcendent style ripple through the film. But it also feels broken and cumbersome, weighed down by a number of decisions that simply don’t work.

Sophisticated, sharp and funny, Le Week-End achieves an unusual coup: it’s a film about two older characters that is neither deeply gloomy (like, say, Amour) nor twinkly and cheerily upbeat.

Kon Ichikawa's 1956 epic about Japan's surrender in World War II is a haunting elegy on the theme of defeat, an achievement fully meriting this high-definition transfer, and essential for war-film devotees. [28 Aug 2010, p.7]

If you want to watch an elaborate metaphor being wrung out like a bathing suit for an hour and a half, The Platform might be the film for you.

In short, the film actually looks funny. Remember when animations always did.

An emotional pounding this brutal leaves you yearning for a little softness, and by the time the film’s ending rolls around, a scene which by rights should be overly sentimental...feels not only allowable, but blissfully, cathartically welcome.

Eastwood doesn’t care about the legend. Instead, he shows us Kyle much as he saw his targets: with that strange combination of extreme intimacy and extreme remove that a long-range sight confers.

It’s all splendid fruit for a documentary, especially given two things: the remarkable filmed record of the expedition at the time, and the fact that seven of its members are still alive.

Effortless tracking shots, spasms of sickening violence and a perfectly pitched jukebox soundtrack are all conspicuously and stylishly deployed, sometimes all at once.

The undersung director, Emily Atef, does well to make the business of dying, which can be the hoariest of cinematic subjects, feel like a fresh quandary here for two people making up the rules as they go along.

A little of the new Spider-Man went an exhilaratingly long way in Captain America: Civil War last year. But a lot of him goes almost nowhere in this slack and spiritless solo escapade, spun off from an initially intriguing premise that deflates around you with a low whine as you watch, like a punctured bouncy castle.

There’s an entire pick ’n’ mix stand of eye candy here – more than enough to satisfy younger viewers. But alas, it’s all empty calories.

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.

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.

It’s Akhavan’s presence that elevates it above a crowded field. Her film’s a little bit different from the norm, and that – for now – is promising enough.

It’s one of his least crazy films in narrative terms, but you couldn’t call it subdued, because the colours and textures he’s coaxed from a new director of photography, Jean-Claude Larrieu, are even more intoxicating than ever – it’s like an unexpectedly dry martini in a dazzling Z-stem glass.

The crash scenes have a horrible heart-in-mouth quality: it’s as if you can feel the tumble of gravity working on your own insides. And the same goes for the racing itself, which like the vehicles is somehow sleek and crunchy all at once – inches from disaster at any given moment, and all the more beautiful for it.

Unusually for a contemporary western, News of the World makes no attempt to reinvent the wheel. Instead, it hammers it diligently back onto the axle, before striking out on a journey whose contours and pitfalls we already know well. Nevertheless, it’s a pleasure to experience it once more with companions like these.

I found the film both informative and profound.

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.

Perhaps the play’s overfamiliarity is the one thing holding this back in the end: you’re expecting it to cross the barrier from solid to gut-wrenching, and that never quite happens.

The film has an impetuous, let’s-try-it-on quality that makes it a modest pleasure.

It’s an engaging, sometimes touching, slightly narrow depiction of a great filmmaker in the winter of his career who’s intent on somehow recapturing the spring of it.

The Dubai section in Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, in which Cruise spiders his way up the face of the Burj Khalifa, then sprints down it as if trying to break the vertical 800m record, proves everything Cruise wanted it to, above all that he’s picked the right director to make these set pieces fly. It’s better still in Imax.

[Zlotowski] creates a situation, casts it perfectly, and backs out of a fully achieved story. As drama, it’s coitus interruptus, with a Geiger counter doing the interrupting.

Dead Pigs’s intermingling of grit and polish is hugely satisfying: a potent combination of pearls and swine.

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

Disney, when minded, can still do this stuff as well as anyone – and in the pleasurable spring and snap of its animation, its at-times-unsettlingly comely character design, and set-pieces that swarm with humour and panache, Zootropolis 2 is proof.

Confronting the horrors of history head-on can make for cinema that’s impossible to shake, but Katabuchi’s painterly, introspective film proves a sideways approach can be just as indelible.

The shape of its story is ultimately conventional, and the way in which it’s told can sometimes feel familiar – like a Sunday evening drama smuggling in big ideas. But the line it draws between the earthy and the ethereal stays with you: it’s a well-timed double dose of consolation and escape.

Everything’s told in shards, and Amalric does very well to create a sense of emotional continuum amid all the procedural detail. His own performance is fantastic, jittery and dishevelled.

CODA is way too busy playing things cute.

It’s the “rom” that’s the killing shortfall. But I must admit, Bros put me in such a sour mood that its “com” got sabotaged into the bargain. It’s distinctly smug about pitching itself as a landmark, while being really more of a setback, and a pretty low bar for the next one to surmount.

One of the finest films of the year: a shiveringly passionate period piece.

Tale of Tales dances on a razor’s edge between funny and unnerving, with sequences of shadow-spun horror rubbing up against moments of searing baroque beauty. The result is a fabulously sexy, defiantly unfashionable readymade cult item.

The moral maze of the premise is tautly negotiated. Shrewd casting helps, as does Eastwood’s trump suit: a forensic seriousness of purpose. Grappling with the mechanisms of justice and the workings of a lone conscience, he puts both in the scales, and no one’s off the hook.

Pumping Iron offers a revealing record of his [Schwarzenegger] earliest dalliances in the spotlight.

It’s an absorbing blend of comedy and tragedy.

Centered on Mara Wilson's extraordinary young girl Matilda, the kooky fantasy is comprised of charm, warmth and screwball comedy.

As ever with Scott, the film unfolds in a richly realised world and moves with an addictive, free-wheeling swagger. And his four main actors – Williams, Wahlberg and the Plummers old and young – have all been astutely cast.

The recommendation might be stronger if the mortifying moments for Craig didn’t make me, personally, want to cower rather than laugh.

A wild and righteous provocation.

It’s a casual breakthrough, normalising what was once a taboo.

Considine resists the usual narrative urges to bring down any kind of judgement or redemption, or to “make sense” of Matty’s story beyond the sense he himself can make of it. The film is not looking for a scapegoat. It just lets its characters live.

There's gambling, shootouts, shady characters and a bombastic score - what more could you ask for? [02 Mar 2016]

Marketed cannily towards Gen Z – for her meme value is beyond compare – M3GAN is essentially the anti-heroine of a catnip horror film which tips far more towards the “campy fun” end of the spectrum than the raw terror end. No one will be quailing under their seats during her campaign of slaughter, but that was never the point.

Mickey 17, about a hapless clone’s misadventures on a colonising mission, is a throwback to blockbusters as the late 20th century made ’em: a $100m boisterous sci-fi satire that neither belongs to a franchise nor cares to start one, but instead jams as many eggs as it can into one increasingly precarious basket.

The director’s game is level, and typically mischievous, but lacks something - and it’s not just the vicious sting at the end of, say, Hidden.

Risk doesn’t burnish the Assange myth – it injects you into the bloodstream of the Assange story.

Hogg withholds the specifics, and lets you decode things for yourself. Her camera rarely moves, but every shot is composed with total artistry, building to a final image that’s somehow both joyful and devastating.

Though Weathering With You tells a story of a makeshift family enduring uncertain times, its dominant emotion is amazement – at the power and persistence of first love, and the everyday wonders of the world in which it flourishes against the odds.

Piggy presumably aims to test our sympathies, but just forfeits them entirely, in the service of a facile plot and a heroine even the film itself can’t seem to stand.

These relationships are poised to be explored in more depth than they are.

The film’s nothing if not an argument-starter, with plenty of hot provocations – especially about the bargains underpinning black excellence – to toss out. They’re like firecrackers, though. You come out rattled, but half-certain you’ve been toyed with.

Beneath the charming sparkly wrap, there’s just more of the same underneath: an endless round of pass-the-parcel that never actually coughs up a gift.

The subject is an important one but would benefit from a shorter running time.

Hail, Caesar! keeps stumbling over its own best ideas as we stop to appreciate them – ditching momentum, preferring gaps for applause.

The anger of the protesters that day was clear but in this documentary they were a variety of calm, smug and deluded. It was the police and politicians who were the angry ones.

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.

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

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.

Christine, which asks a top-notch Rebecca Hall to play out the last days of Chubbuck’s life, dares us to hope that it’s somehow about a different Christine Chubbuck – one who made it out the other side of her own tragedy.

A large portion of Star Trek’s audience may well be satisfied by a film that amounts to not much more than an incredibly pretty and sporadically funny in-joke. But think back to the corny romance of that original mission statement, recited by William Shatner on many a rainy school night. Strange new worlds. New life. New civilisations. Boldly going where no man has gone before. That pioneer spirit? It’s gone.

Queer doesn’t scrimp on provocation and pleasure, but it’s also a beautiful film about male loneliness, and the way a solitary life can so easily shade into a life sentence.

Stone and Plemons prove ideal co-conspirators, with carefully balanced performances that have them taking turns as hero and villain without ever quite annihilating our sympathies or winning them outright.

Kaufman has rummaged about in Pixar’s Inside Out grab-bag and mussed up the elemental simplicity of Yarlett’s idea. It’s nicely personal as his spin on a Pixar film, but the downside is that he can’t help imitating too many of them at once – which makes it equal parts sweet and hectic, and not a little overambitious.

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

This is a fascinating and outrageous next step for Escalante, with a strong central concept and some oozily plausible special effects. It’s just a pity that its human side doesn’t measure up to its inhuman one.

More skilful docs get away with more ingenious cheats than this, which doggedly insists that Aisholpan is proving herself to everyone, and dangles proofs it doesn’t even need.

El Camino didn’t need to exist – but for fans who craved extra Jesse Pinkman in their lives, it hits the spot.

It’s the comedy of British middle-class embarrassment, executed here as deftly as anything in peak Richard Curtis. Like me, you may be surprised by how much you’ve missed it.

This follow-up to the acclaimed 1992 horror film of the same name has far more substance than your average popcorn chiller.

El Conde is a visual feast as much as a visceral one, but its artful poise belies its bloodlust. Larraín is making his points here not with fang-like precision, but a gleeful crocodilian chomp.

Time has been kind to Lindsay-Hogg’s film. I felt like I was viewing the period through a fresh perspective, perhaps simply because his editing style and choices (made contemporaneously, without benefit of hindsight or a deeply nostalgic agenda) felt quite radically different to Jackson’s. [2024 Restored Version]

Its conclusions rarely make your head spin, but it meticulously shows its working out. (If it was an exam paper, it’d be impossible to dock it any marks.)

If there was one thing last year’s occult shocker "Hereditary" taught us about its deviously gifted writer-director, Ari Aster, it’s not to trust him in the slightest. Think Midsommar, his much-hyped follow-up, looks like Aster’s answer to The Wicker Man? Well, it is, kind of – but that’s not to say you’ll come anywhere near predicting its singular, warped response.

Grand Prix is possibly the greatest motor racing film of all time.

Society of the Snow is wrenching, deeply harrowing, but crucially dispenses with sappy takeaways about the triumph of the human spirit.