Flies buzz, sweat trickles, negotiations continue, and you feel your breath dry up.

Keegan chose a man of few words to make his stand, and Murphy, very much the man of the moment, steps up to play him with a heroic understatement that could move mountains.

Beyond its waspish wit, a dastardly roll-call of suspects and Daniel Craig’s dapper efforts as our presiding sleuth, the film gives nothing away until the bitter end, thanks to a head-spinning tricksiness of plotting that even Agatha Christie might have conceded was rather ingenious.

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.

Challengers must be the most purely pleasurable film of the year so far.

Giamatti isn’t playing a type, so much as a man who has taken refuge inside one in order to armour himself against the more exposing aspects of human existence. It’s a riotous but also slyly moving performance of a performance – and, along with Randolph’s, is rightly being talked about for awards.

Nothing about the sound in Sound of Metal is ordinary.

It earns respect and a cumulative awe in its intently amused vision of reality: it’s a commanding and intellectually gratifying piece of work.

With a story that straddles two generations and stretches from Trump’s United States to the Vietnam jungle, Da 5 Bloods is one of Spike Lee’s most expansive films to date. But it’s built with the precise, snap-shut mechanisms of an ancient moral fable – a Pardoner’s Tale made about and for unpardonable times.

This is by some measure Anderson’s weirdest concoction ever, in all sorts of good ways. And it probably counts as his most daring, too.

No other British director is making films quite like this.

A highly entertaining, though undemanding mixture, of sci-fi, romance and comedy, which could hardly have come off at all at any lower artistic level, nor without such a happy choice for the central part as Christopher Reeve.

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

[Sachs'] subtle, often quite special film shows us a shared life as a series of impositions: sometimes we’re imposed upon, and sometimes we do the imposing, and love is the net result.

Daniel Roher’s shrewd portrait makes the point that Navalny is half-politician, half-journalist; blending the two with his affable charisma on camera, which even extends to goofing off on TikTok, he has exactly the man-of-the-people touch that would be most likely to qualify him as a political threat.

Silk curtains flutter and fall, candles glow, fires crackle softly in the grate. Every scene, every shot, has been composed with total, Kubrickian precision, and calibrated for maximum, breath-quickening impact.

Captain Phillips is a triumph of solid, professional and sometimes inspired film crafts, deserving of all the plaudits that come its way.

The action always feels rooted in the greater story of the city of Shiraz itself: even a scene as simple as Rahim walking through a shopping centre becomes naturally soundtracked by a musical instrument salesman tuning a dulcimer in his booth.

Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t – Alexander Skarsgård's Prince Amleth rampages through a mythological epic of savage beauty.

This Iberian spin on the Snow White legend is a curio and a wonder; a silent fairy tale woven from softest velvet.

With its thickly-accented voiceovers, re-recorded into English by Mathieu Amalric, the film is a pleasingly eccentric watch, and one full of rare insights.

Guiraudie’s film is acutely brilliant on the funny, scary machinery of desire, and how easily humans can get caught up in its cogwheels.

Sacks, humble and charming to the end, makes for such agreeable company that it’s hard to object to the hyperbole.

There’s not much fault to find with Sicario on the level of craft or performances, just its rather sputtering momentum, and the lack of a higher purpose.

The terrific close-up showing Harold's look of appalled realisation – and resignation – is unforgettable.

The combination of satire and savagery is pretty fierce and intriguingly unique.

That Blade Runner 2049 is a more than worthy sequel to Scott’s first film means it crosses the highest bar anyone could have reasonably set for it, and it distinguishes Villeneuve – who’s masterminded all of this, somehow, since making Arrival – as the most exciting filmmaker working at his level today.

What's clearer about Duel now is its rawness and bleakness as a picture of American life and troubled American little-man masculinity. [19 Mar 2005]