A surging tsunami-crash of creativity and beauty.

This unforgettable movie is not to be missed – though full of superb jokes, it has a weird integrity, something melancholy and serious, at its core that stays with you.

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.

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

Throughout, Quillévéré keeps asking her cast for the impossible, and gets it.

Alive to pulse-quickening details of body language and the conversational codes by which a dangerous friendship lives or dies, the film is a study in contrasts far beyond the monochromatic.

Heavenly Creatures, which remains Jackson's best movie, his most serious and his most daring, is 99 minutes long and doesn't waste a single one. It manages to be both shocking and intoxicating, a portrait of giddy teenage escapism which yanks itself free from reality in disturbing, and finally deadly, ways. Jackson has an obvious flair for fantasy - an obsession with it, one might say - but this is a film about its dangers, not just its temptations. [17 Nov 2012]

The sheer compassion of Zhao's direction is one of the film's most elemental pleasures, while McDormand is one of those rare actors who can somehow make the act of listening as thrilling as a barnstorming speech.

This triumphant adaptation, which premiered last night at Venice, strip-mines Gray’s book for all its funniest, fizziest and sexiest ideas, and leaves the chewier, more literary stuff on paper, where it belongs. I’d say purists might bridle, but speaking as one of them, I wasn’t just relieved, but overjoyed.

There’s a haiku-like purity to it: Look Back is as neat and yet also as overflowing as the four-panel strips in which its leads once diligently honed their craft. And if something so beautiful also feels too brief – well, that may be the idea.

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

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.

Perhaps the best (and certainly the most realistic and violent) of the great 1930s gangster films, with Paul Muni as an Al Capone surrogate. Directed by Howard Hawks at a flat-out pace, with thrilling shoot-outs and intriguing if depraved characters. [18 Jun 2013]

Perry somehow allows his cast enough space in this meticulously authored environment to work creative wonders of their own.

Werner Herzog's classic vampire movie Nosferatu will scare the living daylights out of you.

As music documentaries go, it’s one of the quietest you’ll see – but it’ll be ringing in my soul for a long while yet.

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.

The sheer unsparing intimacy of Gyllenhaall’s film gives its thrills an excitingly illicit quality. Watching it feels like reading someone else’s diary – and then finding yourself mentioned in its pages.

Entertainment of the purest kind, a picture so tightly plotted, wittily scripted and pacily directed that it's impossible not to dive in head-first and be swept gleefully along.

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

Miller finds grand, America-describing themes in the interactions between these three men: the extraordinary influence of inherited wealth, the hunkered-down ambition of working-class athletes, the equation of material success with honour and moral rectitude.

Agnes Varda's exquisite New Wave masterpiece, about an hour and a half in the life of a gorgeous, possibly dying chanteuse. [30 Apr 2010, p.31]

Although it is a spectacle film, the story of how a man takes on the tyranny of the Romans, with all sorts of horrible consequences to himself and his family, is powerful and gripping.

This whole film has a wizardry to it which you’ll be thinking about for days.

Hurt is brilliant as Merrick, projecting in his anguished eyes and mournful body language a humanity past the makeup that embodies so convincingly the pain of Merrick, the original elephant man, whose rare disease was exploited by the people running a Victorian freak show.

The thing about Spielberg these days is he makes this stuff look easy.

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

However genius may flourish, you know it when you see it, and Whiplash is it.