It seethes with frustration on its subjects’ behalf – that for all the impact their stand has had, they still face a many-headed hydra on the road to real democracy.

Dramatic fragments, blasted our way, dance before us for the next two hours, rotating and glinting, colliding and connecting, like a puzzle in zero gravity. As a transition into flinty, supercharged genre filmmaking, it gets by on no more than electric confidence, high-fiving technical virtuosity, and a cast to die for. It’s very satisfying.

Chazelle has always specialised in virtuoso endings, and his sure hand and sharp eye brings this ambitious character study smoothly into land.

It’s less Star Wars as you’ve never seen it than Star Wars as you’ve never felt it.

Every shot of Stray Dogs has been built with utter formal mastery; every sequence exerts an almost telepathic grip.

For the usually irrepressible Miike, it’s remarkably controlled, even restrained. And yet it involves 200 bodyguards being annihilated every which way, in a sustained frenzy of blistering choreographic skill that Hollywood won’t top all year.

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]

As a demonstration of slighted masculinity being given an inch, taking a mile, and chewing it up with breakneck fury, the film could hardly be more timely or disconcerting. But it understands the ignition point of rage – not just its ugly momentum.

In emulating the two-strip Technicolor process, it creates a look that’s scratchy and primitive, but also, through the peculiar alchemy of Maddin’s craft, eerily rich and dreamlike, with the depth of an oceanic abyss.

It takes about three minutes – roughly the length of time it takes Hoffman to get down the moving walkway to Simon and Garfunkel's Sound of Silence and from the airport to the suffocating atmosphere of his graduation party, where he gets gradually trapped into a relationship with one of his parents' friends – to realise that The Graduate is actually a very nasty film, and a very, very funny one.

There are visual flights of fancy here as glorious as anything Miyazaki’s studio has created, but the story is rooted in a country trudging towards its own destruction.

The film needs no excess melodrama even at its bleakest, because the visual language Sharrock has constructed is inhospitable enough. It’s his concentration on these faces, in the 4:3 ratio of Nick Cooke’s gravely beautiful cinematography, that gives it all a redemptive glow.

Great animation can communicate wildly complex ideas with head-spinning clarity and wit, as Docter capably proved with Inside Out – a film which staged the interplay of emotions in an 11-year-old’s head like a vintage sitcom. If anything, Soul pushes this capacity for revelation even further: there are moments of true Blakean mystery and wonder here, expressed with a crispness that feels like a lightbulb snapping on above your head.

As a way of capturing the horrors of that night, the spareness of the film-making is powerful. But in terms of giving us the full picture, it falls short.

It’s a funny, insightful, sensationally acted account of art’s capacity to dissolve walls, and heighten, broaden and deepen the reach of our lives.

It works as beautifully as it does because the film’s comedy has been machined with Swiss precision, and all of its characters written with obvious love.

It’s the silent allegiances of sisterhood, a near-underground network operating to safeguard women’s rights, which exercise Haroun’s imagination throughout this excellent piece.

The film’s stark realism and bruising impact are enough in themselves, but the risk, and the real artistic payoff, is its bold sensory plunge into this Hadean inferno.

As an indictment of the industry, this is strong stuff.

It has got to be in a list of her best: the sheer freshness of her screen presence as young Velvet Brown who prepares a wild but talented horse for the Grand National turns Clarence Brown’s sentimental adaption of Enid Bagnold’s children’s classic into the one film that everyone who has ever heard of Elizabeth Taylor has probably seen.

Everything about The Lighthouse lands with a crash. It’s cinema to make your head and soul ring.

John Wayne gives an imposing and vivid performance. [07 Nov 2014, p.37]

Mandy exists in its own supremely unnerving horror dimension.

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.

My Name Is Albert Ayler is a loving and elegantly crafted documentary.

There have been countless adaptations of Emily Brontë's classic 19th-century romance but none of them captures the spirit of her novel quite like William Wyler's production. [10 Aug 2013, p.32]

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

So hauntingly perfect is Barnard’s film, and so skin-pricklingly alive does it make you feel to watch it, that at first you can hardly believe the sum of what you have seen.