Mirai bathes ordinary family life in a beautiful new light.

Disguises, time bombs, runaway trains: Cruise, his director Christopher McQuarrie and their collaborators are very consciously working in a century-old tradition here, perhaps to show the business and art of stunning audiences can – if we choose – be much the same now as it ever was.

The sheer depth of Sassoon's personal misery feels like a brutally unfashionable thing for a contemporary film to confront, but Davies, who’s never given a fig about fashion, confronts it head on.

A War does something brave and challenging in making its most sympathetic character responsible for the worst thing that happens in it.

It’s a film that could have so easily smacked of an exercise, but its beauty feels thrillingly natural, and its considerable emotional power is honestly earned.

The World’s End is a fitting end to the trilogy: it is by turns trashy, poignant and gut-bustingly funny, and often all three at once.

The acting quartet of Jones, LaPaglia and double Davis is just immense.

The Nest is good on a first viewing and special on a second, when its cramped horizons and avoidance of full-bore tragedy are strategies for which you’re prepared. Durkin’s use of Kubrickian dissolves makes the passage of time feel like no one’s friend.

No director working today can carry out this kind of heavyweight emotional excavation with such feather-light flicks of his trowel. That’s Hong’s gift, as counterintuitive as it is unique: he makes molehills out of mountains.

The film’s aim, to my eyes, is not to revel in, score points with or otherwise sensationalise the killing of a five-year-old girl. Rather, it confronts us with the dilemma the taped call itself poses: what are we, as humans, meant to do with it? More to the point, what can we?

The Mitchells vs the Machines is like an encounter with a sentient doodle pad, crammed with ideas that might be the cleverest things anyone’s ever thought of, or the most ludicrous, or probably a jumble of both.

The film that made Steve McQueen a superstar and revolutionised the car chase with its 10-minute split-screen, edge-of-your-seat race up and down the hills of San Francisco. [12 Jan 2017]

Fiennes is admirably open throughout, with seemingly no thought of a public image to burnish.

In staging the Jimmies’ various acts of violence (to which they refer, horribly, as “charity”), DaCosta may have taken a cue from Kubrick’s own parable of British decay: even toughened horror fans should find it disturbing, if not downright hard to watch.

Showy and ambitious, desperately sincere and self-absorbed, and bursting at the seams with potential, Waves isn’t merely a film about teenagers, it’s virtually a teenager in film form. It’s also the kind of cinema that keeps you young.

It’s a film about micromanaging, fixing things on the fly, and a lot of Ridley’s gruff, technocrat personality shines through.

It all pays off elegantly when Blanc delivers his grand summing-up, a sequence which in vintage Knives Out fashion playfully subverts the cliché – but not too briskly to break it and spoil the fun.

The free-range majesty and fine-grained, muddy-fingernailed detail of Fastvold’s film, though, is entirely its own thing: like Ann, I was left wobbly and breathless by its grandeur and nerve.

Wright seems determined to bring in some new blood, and his film is a thrillingly persuasive recruiting tool. For existing fans, it’s a fond and nerdily comprehensive celebration – or perhaps vindication – of the siblings’ extensive, courageously eccentric output.

The relentlessly one-sided emotional manipulation is grating.

Director John Frankenheimer pitches French resistance member Paul Labiche (Burt Lancaster) against German Colonel Franz von Waldheim (Paul Scofield) in this Second World War art-theft adventure that knocks spots off of George Clooney's modern misfire The Monuments Men (2014). [31 Jan 2021, p.31]

It’s mostly very charming, if perhaps a bit self-consciously so, given Fleischer Camp’s tendency to gurgle delightedly on camera at every other line.

When Good Time’s good, it’s properly electric, and the star turn goes off like an illegal firework.

This extraterrestrial version of The Tempest was in another league. [15 Jul 2017, p.32]

After the novelistic strengths of First Cow and Showing Up, Kelly Reichardt turns in something here that’s more like a short story – unhurried, pleasurable, and low key.

Wenders’ obvious affection for Tokyo itself, his keen feel for texture and neat avoidance of cliché all suggest Perfect Days is likely to age well as a portrait of a great city’s everyday side.

This is Sachs’s eighth film and one of his best.

Incendies is no one’s idea of a joyful ride, but it’s a remarkable work, and its complex story etches itself on the memory.