The film wields its intelligence and style with total effortlessness, and its every move holds your gaze like a baton’s quivering tip.

Hitchcock's mischievous genius for audience manipulation is everywhere: in the noirish angularity of the cinematography, in his use of Bernard Herrmann's stabbing string score, in the ornithological imagery that creates a bizarre sense of preying and being preyed upon.

Baker’s tingling delicacy of touch makes it a subtly distinctive experience: it’s a film I already looked forward to revisiting while tiptoeing through it the first time.

Any movie that lasts three hours should have a damn good reason for lingering so long. At 182 minutes, Michael Cimino's Vietnam War epic is timed to perfection.

Christopher Nolan’s astonishing new film...is a work of heart-hammering intensity and grandeur that demands to be seen on the best and biggest screen within reach. But its spectacle doesn’t stop at the recreations of Second World War combat. Like all great war films, it’s every bit as transfixing up close.

And there we were thinking the stage recording of Hamilton was going to be the best thing on Disney+ this summer. Fools! Yes, Hamilton has songs, but does it have motorbikes? Synchronised swimming? Beyonce singing on the moon in diamonds? Naomi Campbell? I haven’t even got to the poodles yet.

It’s an astonishing achievement. Linklater and his cast, who helped refine the director’s script, perfectly execute how long it takes us to become the lead characters in our own lives, and how fumblingly the role is first assumed.

Much scarier than fellow possessed child flick The Exorcist, which predated it by three years, The Omen contains some of the most memorable untimely deaths in cinema history.

A sombre spiritual war epic which surges up to claim its place among the director’s most deeply felt, sturdily hewn achievements.

Jacques Tati's plot-free masterpiece is a long way from the crowd-pleasing comedy of Mr Hulot's Holiday, but patient viewers will be rewarded by a mesmerising symphony of sight gags and social observation. [24 Aug 2010, p.34]

At the root of that is Civil War’s greatest strength – and the reason it makes all thought of the recent Batman v Superman debacle evaporate on contact. The Russos’ film has an unshakeable faith in these decades-old characters: they’re not wrangled into standing for anything other than who they are, with no gloss or reinterpretation or reach for epic significance required. This is the cinematic superhero showdown you’ve dreamt of since childhood, precisely because that’s everything – and all – it wants to be.

Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch feels like four films in one, and contains enough ideas for at least another six.

Moonlight, the new film from Barry Jenkins, is a nuclear-fission-strength heartbreaker. It’s made up of moments so slight and incidental they’re sub-molecular – but they release enough heat and light to swallow whole cities at a stroke.

Stuhlbarg, who’s a treasure throughout, gets a fatherly monologue towards the film’s end that’s so observantly and tenderly performed, you can barely catch your breath. It’s one beautiful moment in a film that’s filled with them – gone in a heartbeat, but leaving the kind of ripples that reach across a lifetime.

Few film directors can resist the urge to "open out" a story, to broaden the view and bring in as wide a variety of sets and locations as the narrative - and budget - will allow. The genius of Sidney Lumet's astonishingly powerful 12 Angry Men is that he does exactly the opposite: he takes an already small, claustrophobic space - a jury room - and makes it even more confined.

This art-form has long been thought to have reached its twilight years, but Yonebayashi’s film brims over with the bounce and spark of childhood.

Strickland has made something uniquely sexy and strange, built on two tremendous central performances and a bone-deep understanding of cinema’s magic and mechanisms.

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.

He remains a master of composition, subtly guiding your eye towards details that reveal the kind of stories we might usually overlook – in life as well as in the cinema itself.

A science-fiction thriller of rare and diamond-hard brilliance.

The film also has stunning car chases, choreographed like the dancing in a musical, as the Blues Brothers are pursued throughout Chicago, at one point even tearing through a shopping mall, in their 'Bluesmobile', a retired 1974 Mount Prospect, Illinois Dodge Monaco patrol car.

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.

Hawks was determined to capture the buzz of a newsroom with overlapping dialogue and rat-a-tat gags; it works marvellously. [30 Oct 2021, p.24]

Emotionally, the film operates in a classic Gray area, with barely perceptible eddies that build to a mighty existential wrench. All of which, it should be said, rests on Pitt’s shoulders – which feel like very different shoulders, somehow, to the ones that slouched so appealingly through Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. His performance here is as grippingly inward and tamped down as his work for Tarantino was witty and expansive – it’s true movie stardom, and it fills a star-system-sized canvas.

The premise sounds as though it must invite a satirical reading, and there are many well-aimed ironic jabs at aspects of the leaders’ national character and the box-ticking rigmarole of modern politics. But directors Guy Maddin and brothers Evan and Galen Johnson – three beloved cult Canadian experimentalists – also poke fun at the notion that their intentions could be so clean-cut.

The film’s focus may be tight – just a few tangled, formative years – but it encompasses so much.

Grisebach has an observational grasp of the male psyche – especially its pathological obsession with pride – that fairly takes the breath away.

There’s a superabundance of sparkling, often marvellously terse one-liners (when asked what the “O” stands for, Thornhill’s resigned and emotionally relevant answer is, “Nothing”) – and, my, how wittily Grant delivers them.