There are some of the very finest character actors that Warner Brothers could muster and a rich, detailed screenplay studded with an indecent number of sparklingly quotable lines. It is a movie to play again, and again.

It’s an astonishing achievement. Linklater and his cast, who helped refine the director’s script, perfectly execute how long it takes us to become the lead characters in our own lives, and how fumblingly the role is first assumed.

Profound, penetrating and unfathomable rather than (quite) perfectly formed art. Vertigo pioneered that camera effect, known as the dolly zoom, whereby the viewer (the point of view is always Stewart’s) appears to fall into an infinite abyss while remaining quite still...The film itself is that abyss, and we’re still falling into it and for it.

Still the wittiest of all the MGM musicals of the 1940s and '50s.

Jacques Tati's plot-free masterpiece is a long way from the crowd-pleasing comedy of Mr Hulot's Holiday, but patient viewers will be rewarded by a mesmerising symphony of sight gags and social observation. [24 Aug 2010, p.34]

Moonlight, the new film from Barry Jenkins, is a nuclear-fission-strength heartbreaker. It’s made up of moments so slight and incidental they’re sub-molecular – but they release enough heat and light to swallow whole cities at a stroke.

There’s a superabundance of sparkling, often marvellously terse one-liners (when asked what the “O” stands for, Thornhill’s resigned and emotionally relevant answer is, “Nothing”) – and, my, how wittily Grant delivers them.

In the hands of the great Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer it becomes a potent saga of battered faith, vicious bullying and personal torment.

Overblown and melodramatic, it somehow achieves more than the schmaltz of its parts, thanks to a spirited modern heroine, the spoilt Scarlett O'Hara, and its refusal to give us the neat conclusions you'd expect from a 19th-century saga of "cottonfields and cavaliers."

Throughout the film the sense of Vienna as a frazzled echo of its glorious past is underpinned by Reed's greatest trouvaille – the discovery of Anton Karas's zither melodies, used as the only musical accompaniment. Half-jaunty, half-melancholic, they epitomise, like the film itself, a world gone sadly to seed.

It lampoons a crazed warmongering machismo that never goes out of style.

Hitchcock's mischievous genius for audience manipulation is everywhere: in the noirish angularity of the cinematography, in his use of Bernard Herrmann's stabbing string score, in the ornithological imagery that creates a bizarre sense of preying and being preyed upon.

A raucous and blood-splattered social satire.

The Maltese Falcon might not have been the first film noir, or even the most stylish, but all the genre elements are smartly in place here: the dark streets, the treacherous female, the monogrammed office door, the breathless smart talk. Bogart saying "When you're slapped you'll take it and like it" should feel like a cliché, but the freshness remains, the thrilling sense that nobody had ever talked like this in a movie before.

American Graffiti is more a collection of vignettes than a straight forward movie, and the quality of the different plots is a bit hit and miss. But American Graffiti's appeal has less to do with plot and more to do with seeing the USA of the early 1960s faithfully recreated in celluloid, and Lucas gets every detail right. From the diner waitresses on skates to the hokey-sounding slang to the sock hop line dances to the gorgeous soundtrack (which is a aural treasure trove of late 50s and early 60s pop), Lucas doesn't put a foot wrong.

Few film directors can resist the urge to "open out" a story, to broaden the view and bring in as wide a variety of sets and locations as the narrative - and budget - will allow. The genius of Sidney Lumet's astonishingly powerful 12 Angry Men is that he does exactly the opposite: he takes an already small, claustrophobic space - a jury room - and makes it even more confined.

Every individual scene feels filled with the lucid detail of a formative recollection or a recurring dream.

Elicits from McQueen a directing job that's compellingly humble but also majestic, because his radical showmanship is turned to such precise, human purposes.

Lonergan is so precise with his actors, the sense of place, and the level control of tone that you feel him methodically striving here to avoid false notes.

Mercifully, The Philadelphia Story then transmogrifies into one of the smartest, sassiest - and sexiest - movies ever.

The film has the heft of Shakespearean tragedy, but a more generous cosmic outlook. Maternal love goes a long way. [14 Mar 2015, p.10]

John Carradine's mercurial whiskey preacher and Jane Darwell's salt-of-the-earth farmer are sharply etched, and Fonda's quietly authoritative performance has stood the test of time.

Stanwyck, in her absolute prime, is hard to touch - even Katharine Hepburn, or Claudette Colbert, who was originally supposed to play Jean, might have struggled to make her quite such sly and mesmerising company. Sturges feeds her subtle innuendos by the cartload. [19 Mar 2013]

A science-fiction thriller of rare and diamond-hard brilliance.

This is a bold work that seeks to educate its young audience about classical music. But it is also playful and delightfully imaginative.

Thanks to both its mesmerising cast and McQueen’s flawless command of atmosphere and mood, it pulls off what I can only describe as a kind of cinematic jiu-jitsu – heaving you back to that precise moment in history, then lifting your soul out of your skin in one seamless move.

This madcap urban warfare thriller has heists, showdowns and two of the best car chases in years.

A peachy-perfect example of what a movie musical should be.

Sciamma’s splendid, multi-layered conceit manages to carry equal weight as a love story and a manifesto of sorts for feminine art.

The film has a beguiling looseness – it captures that familiar holiday feeling of good days and bad days, or moods turning for no particular reason, other than maybe spending a bit too long in each other’s company.

Rocks would rather reckon with – and in the end, celebrate – youthful potential itself, and its extraordinary ability to flower in even the most unpromising soil.

Film noir is the most intoxicating of Hollywood cocktails, and none is more potent than Double Indemnity...It breaks the rules of filmmaking with breathtaking confidence and is all the more satisfying for

Hawks was determined to capture the buzz of a newsroom with overlapping dialogue and rat-a-tat gags; it works marvellously. [30 Oct 2021, p.24]

Carol is gorgeous, gently groundbreaking, and might be the saddest thing you’ll ever see. More than hugely accomplished cinema, it’s an exquisite work of American art, rippling with a very specific mid-century melancholy, understanding love as the riskiest but most necessary gamble in anyone’s experience.

Where we might have expected a gentle or rueful coda, we get a battle of the sexes as blistering as the best of Tracy/Hepburn, and infinitely more frank.

If Amazing Grace can’t fathom the inner depths of Aretha in any definitive way, it grants her a great deal more than a little respect.

Christopher Nolan’s astonishing new film...is a work of heart-hammering intensity and grandeur that demands to be seen on the best and biggest screen within reach. But its spectacle doesn’t stop at the recreations of Second World War combat. Like all great war films, it’s every bit as transfixing up close.

This story is about whether secrets can be survived, whether the knowing or not knowing is more injurious. Haigh’s very fine, classically modulated film keeps these questions alive until literally its last shot, and lets them jangle their way through you for days afterwards.

Beyond the troughful of fun tics, Spall makes Turner tenderly and totally human — the effect of which is to make his artistic talents seem even more extraordinary still.

Robert De Niro is sensational in Scorsese's history-making mob masterpiece.

This is a humane and heart-wrenchingly beautiful film from Docter; even measured alongside Pixar’s numerous great pictures, it stands out as one of the studio’s very best.

Sunset Boulevard, one of the greatest movies about the movies, may be a fiction, but rarely is fiction shot through so glitteringly with real life.

Wilder’s intoxicating script, co-written with IAL Diamond, flows like finest brandy, and Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine shine as two essentially good souls trapped in a tangle of office politics.

It is mystical, daring, poetic, thrilling, appalling and never less than utterly mesmerising.

Nothing at the cinema this year has a hope of beating Past Lives for romantic delicacy, the cosmic yearning it puts into the three words, “I missed you.”

Stuhlbarg, who’s a treasure throughout, gets a fatherly monologue towards the film’s end that’s so observantly and tenderly performed, you can barely catch your breath. It’s one beautiful moment in a film that’s filled with them – gone in a heartbeat, but leaving the kind of ripples that reach across a lifetime.

Marriage Story may often resemble a tug of war between its stars, but it’s on both of their sides.

The construction has a mocking fatalism that might have felt oppressive, but Malle and his actors keep you constantly on the edge of your seat, wondering what curse will befall the desperate lovebirds next.

La La Land wants to remind us how beautiful the half-forgotten dreams of the old days can be – the ones made up of nothing more than faces, music, romance and movement. It has its head in the stars, and for a little over two wonderstruck hours, it lifts you up there too.

True to its title, this film is about a nest, every twig that was used to build it, and what flying out of it might mean and cost, to parents and child alike. The detail is in those twigs, and if Gerwig is capable of all this in her first solo feature, who knows what feats of woodwork she'll craft for us next.

Poignantly lyrical as a city symphony, it branches out for a sequel, when the characters abscond to the coast to figure out what to do: at once a respite and a reckoning, ghostly and mysterious.

Shoplifters is compassionate, socially conscious filmmaking with a piercing intelligence that is pure Kore-eda. This is a film that steals in and snatches your heart.

Alfred Hitchcock is at the height of his skin-prickling powers in this brisk spy story, seasoned with oodles of humour and a dash of kink. [14 Jun 2013]

The film’s sweetness and bitterness are held so perfectly in balance, and realised with such sinew-stiffening intensity, that watching it feels like a three-hour sports massage for your heart and soul.

It is the most arrhythmia-inducingly tense film I have seen in years: by the end, I felt as if I’d spent the last two hours being dangled by my ankles over a crocodile pit.

This is instant A-list Coens; enigmatic, exhilarating, irresistible.

Moving but funny, serious but light of touch, it's a classic. [18 May 2024, p.22]

The film wields its intelligence and style with total effortlessness, and its every move holds your gaze like a baton’s quivering tip.

Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman won Oscars, but the work of Eileen Brennan and Timothy Bottoms is even more cherishable.

Though it delves into the worst extremes of human ugliness, German’s film is exhilarating, moving, funny, beautiful and unshakeable – a danse macabre that whirls you round and round until the bitter end.

This cracking campaigning documentary makes a galvanising case for action – and without lobbing its audience overboard with an anchor weight of hopelessness yoked to their heels.

There’s no tidy moral to take away, because a story like this shouldn’t end in comfort. Instead, your skin’s left prickling by its deft deconstruction of the business of secret-keeping, and its perceptive setting out of the courage and diligence it takes to overturn it.

Inspired by The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a short story by Leo Tolstoy, this is a mournful masterpiece. Shimura's performance is central - he plods around like a gnarled tortoise, his weather-beaten head perpendicular to his body, his expression a downturned rictus of despair. [01 Mar 2014, p.36]

Few films are more fun to watch than The Wizard of Oz, and few have such a charming message either. [28 Aug 2020]

The action is underpinned by the men's nostalgic reminiscences and regretful ruminations. A masterclass in unobtrusive film-making. [17 Mar 2014, p.29]

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.

It’s the very open-endedness of the film’s subtext that gives it power. When a sleepy California town is overrun, first by the outbreak of a strange delusion that people have been replaced by doppelgangers, but then gradually by the doppelgangers themselves, the film is brilliantly placed, however unwittingly, to illustrate America’s political paranoia from both ends.

Polanski honed the screenplay, turning the picture into one of the towering achievements of 1970s cinema.

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

This is in no way the remorselessly grim film its subject matter might lead you to expect – it’s full of life, irony, poetry and bitter unfairness. It demands respect, but it also earns it.

A romance that stays memorable precisely because it couldn't go anywhere. Celia Johnson plays the married woman who meets Trevor Howard in a train station and falls in love; David Lean directs with forceful restraint. [24 Jun 2013]

You’ve never seen a documentary like The Act of Killing. If you saw too many like it, your hold on sanity might fray, which is not so much the film’s fault as that of its bloodcurdling subject. This movie is essential.

There’s zero latitude in the spare, naturalistic script for actorly showboating – but the performances, as captured by French cinematographer Hélène Louvart’s searching, empathic camera, are quietly tremendous.

“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”, Theodor Adorno famously wrote. Glazer’s film gives us the prosaic instead, refashioning it into the darkest, most vital sort of art it might be possible for us as a species to produce.

It’s a bleak but compassionate, glancingly comic and often satirically incendiary work about the pyramid structure of Russian corruption, with the little guy crushed helplessly beneath, and God, or at least the orthodox Church, perched at the top.

In tackling a story that is presumably, and perhaps painfully, close to home, [Hogg] has made her farthest-reaching film yet.

80 minutes of total joy, its momentum utterly uncompromised, every single second an invitation to snort uncontrollably. I can hardly wait to watch it again.

This is an essential companion piece to Oppenheimer’s earlier film; another astonishing heart-of-darkness voyage into the jungle of human nature.

Like carnival itself, The Secret Agent sucks you in and buffets you along, with every swing and sway making it harder not to submit.

This is Lee’s closest ever film to a thriller, but it defies expectations, offering multiple, murky solutions to a set of mysteries at once.

Hamaguchi has made a profoundly beautiful film about making peace with the role in front of you, and playing it with all your might.

The film has clout, vitriol and an impressive payload of blackly comic despair.

The film mounts its thesis while hardly needing to verbalise what’s going on: it mesmerises by reaching inside them to listen, even while others talk.

The film's effect is anti-emotional, and that's the point; it's about the insatiable process of humanity working to eradicate all traces of itself. There's no time left to weep, because the nerve endings are already dead.

It would be near-impossible to love Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women more than Greta Gerwig does.

Grand, propulsive.

This is a film which simply wouldn’t have worked in any medium but animation: in an hour and a half we come to know Amin intimately without actually setting eyes on him at all. It’s an ingenious way to tell a story that’s both extraordinary and commonplace: only with the teller’s anonymity tactfully preserved can the tale itself be hauled fully into the light.

All Quiet on the Western Front remains an essential piece of social history and a heart-wrenching film.

In the end, I was nagged by a question posed by Polley’s sister Joanna in the film’s opening minutes. “I guess I have this instinctive reaction: who cares about our ----ing family?” The answer, of course, is Polley herself, who smilingly tells us that a story like hers can never truly be tied down, even as she screws every last piece into place.

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.

The folklore underpinning The Boy and the Heron is crazily sui generis: it rushes and sparkles and sploshes like a child’s imagination, making the sort of synaptic leaps in both image-making and storytelling that should be impossible for an adult brain to pull off.

Whatever one’s familiarity with this searing chronicler of lives on the margins, the film is riveting and essential.

By applying cutting-edge restoration techniques to footage shot at the time, Jackson has crafted an historical portrait of matchless immediacy and power, in which young souls lost in a century-old war stare out across the years and meet our gaze.

Every character in Anora might be an utter nightmare, but they’re also a joy to spend time with, and the cast understand them down to their smallest behavioural tells.

This is a skewer-sharp and scabrously funny film, stuffed with quotable deadpan exchanges, often punctuated by that now-trademark Lanthimos camera manoeuvre, the wide-angle whip pan that seems to ask “now what?”

The network of links he builds, and the film’s ever-deepening empathy for those whose search can’t be satisfied, are persuasive enough to banish doubt, leaving you humbled, shocked and moved.

As a state-of-the-US historical epic, it boasts all the thematic heft of Once Upon a Time in America or There Will Be Blood. (How did the wave of postwar immigrants remake America in their image – and how did America remake them in return?) But it’s also acted with the colour and fizz of a classical Hollywood comic drama, and shot with the loose, rangy energy of a 90-minute indie cult hit. The tonal mix feels completely unique, but it works.

The further down the film descends, the more transfixing its images tend to get, as if Rohrwacher and Louvart have teamed up on an archaeological dig for their own treasures of texture and light.