The whole climax is a delight

Yamada makes a point of contrasting the agonising complexity of high-school life with the clean simplicity of the moments that really count: hushed conversations on a bridge in springtime, a shared roller-coaster ride under empty blue skies.

While it too often sands the complications off what you sense should feel like an uncomfortably splintery issue, in its best moments, it’s a quietly fearsome piece of drama.

A film as transporting, profound and staggering in its emotional power as anything I’ve seen in the cinema in years.

An alternative title for this one might have been Avengers: Encore, since the film knows its entire audience has been here for the long run – even beside Infinity War, Endgame would be completely impenetrable to a novice. Think of it as a kind of victory lap, in which a decade-plus of painstaking team assembly is re-run at top speed, then paid off with thermonuclear dazzle and force.

We’re stuck with Key, a stand-up virtuoso who is thankfully amazing playing a windbag who can’t read the room – a ludicrous ruiner of sunsets, or any other vaguely peaceful moment.

There’s nothing Saulnier does better here than unveil his premise and bring the siblings together for their handful of scenes, but his film remains deftly shot and dynamic to the end.

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.

This is bewitchingly smart science fiction of a type that’s all too rare. Its intelligence is anything but artificial.

Loznitsa’s construction of this world apart – which is, of course, a grotesque allegory for Russia itself – is as immersive as it is unnerving.

You emerge from this brutally unsentimental education with your chest pounding and your ears ringing – its radical empathy extends to putting us in not just the same room as its subjects, but the same helpless, despairing position. Some films are made to leave you speechless; for some experiences, there can be no words.

Audiard’s expressionistic flourishes are in shorter supply here than usual, although the shootouts have a dreamlike quality, with pistols blasting showers of sparks like miniature steam train funnels.

We are never distracted for long from the gaping sadness of the man and Hawke is brilliant at portraying that despair.

It’s almost certain to be the most existentially probing talking animal cartoon of the year.

Chariots of Fire covers arduous ground — faith, conviction and history (both the making of it and the living up to it) — but it does so with the same courage and sincerity that drives the two young men at its heart.

Watching this film as a child, the piercing image of Medina's wife Elizabeth's (Barbara Steele) wide eyes in the iron maiden stayed with me for years.

A sensationally funny and gently science-fictional German rom-com.

Acker and Denisof spar with each other in the best traditions of screwball comedy; worthy modern equivalents to Tracy and Hepburn. They’re the main source of joy in a film overflowing with treats.

Stars of the genre are interviewed here, alongside music historians and today’s artists who count themselves as fans. It’s a rich history, and heaven for music nerds.

Endless Poetry may not quite live up to its interminable billing, but there’s certainly lots of it, and a little goes a long way indeed. But a long way is the distance Jodorowsky wants to take you.

The middle stretch is genuinely scary, though, thanks to the film’s clammy aptitude for trapping us alone in the dark. Somewhere in here, there’s a thesis brewing about how predators ply their trade and cover their tracks while purporting to be the good guys. The product of their actions is ghastly, and it’s lumbering at us fast.

This is a simple and beautiful journey undertaken purely for its own sake, and approached in that spirit, Tracks will lead you to a place of quiet wonder.

The film’s narrative obliqueness heightens its gallery-piece surrealism. What payoffs we get are affecting, though.

This comedy-drama with a surrealist edge is more than strong enough to be worthy of praise beyond Byrne, who is legitimately fantastic.

Over two and a half hours, the pop-gothic intensity can get a little much – at times I felt like a fire extinguisher was going off in my face – but you wouldn’t necessarily want to lose any of it.

Rather dated now of course but absorbing none the less. [01 Jan 2011, p.31]

I can’t recall the last time I was so staggered by a film’s craftsmanship while feeling almost nothing else about it at all – little fear, less sadness, and barely a spark of actual excitement at anything beyond the high-wire nature of the filmmaking enterprise itself.

Perturbing truths about old age nestle inside an outwardly sentimental shell — it’s a less cosy or placid prospect than it seems.