This cracking campaigning documentary makes a galvanising case for action – and without lobbing its audience overboard with an anchor weight of hopelessness yoked to their heels.

There’s no tidy moral to take away, because a story like this shouldn’t end in comfort. Instead, your skin’s left prickling by its deft deconstruction of the business of secret-keeping, and its perceptive setting out of the courage and diligence it takes to overturn it.

Inspired by The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a short story by Leo Tolstoy, this is a mournful masterpiece. Shimura's performance is central - he plods around like a gnarled tortoise, his weather-beaten head perpendicular to his body, his expression a downturned rictus of despair. [01 Mar 2014, p.36]

Few films are more fun to watch than The Wizard of Oz, and few have such a charming message either. [28 Aug 2020]

The action is underpinned by the men's nostalgic reminiscences and regretful ruminations. A masterclass in unobtrusive film-making. [17 Mar 2014, p.29]

The recurring fungal and archeological imagery suggest a conception of consciousness as a kind of mushroom patch, with human experience blooming from and feeding on the experiences that came before, all the way back to its unknowable cosmic beginnings.

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 When a sleepy California town is overrun, first by the outbreak of a strange delusion that people have been replaced by doppelgangers, but then gradually by the doppelgangers themselves, the film is brilliantly placed, however unwittingly, to illustrate America’s political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.

Polanski honed the screenplay, turning the picture into one of the towering achievements of 1970s cinema.

This is in no way the remorselessly grim film its subject matter might lead you to expect – it’s full of life, irony, poetry and bitter unfairness. It demands respect, but it also earns it.

A romance that stays memorable precisely because it couldn't go anywhere. Celia Johnson plays the married woman who meets Trevor Howard in a train station and falls in love; David Lean directs with forceful restraint. [24 Jun 2013]

You’ve never seen a documentary like The Act of Killing. If you saw too many like it, your hold on sanity might fray, which is not so much the film’s fault as that of its bloodcurdling subject. This movie is essential.

There’s zero latitude in the spare, naturalistic script for actorly showboating – but the performances, as captured by French cinematographer Hélène Louvart’s searching, empathic camera, are quietly tremendous.

“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”, Theodor Adorno famously wrote. Glazer’s film gives us the prosaic instead, refashioning it into the darkest, most vital sort of art it might be possible for us as a species to produce.

It’s a bleak but compassionate, glancingly comic and often satirically incendiary work about the pyramid structure of Russian corruption, with the little guy crushed helplessly beneath, and God, or at least the orthodox Church, perched at the top.

In tackling a story that is presumably, and perhaps painfully, close to home, [Hogg] has made her farthest-reaching film yet.

80 minutes of total joy, its momentum utterly uncompromised, every single second an invitation to snort uncontrollably. I can hardly wait to watch it again.

This is an essential companion piece to Oppenheimer’s earlier film; another astonishing heart-of-darkness voyage into the jungle of human nature.

Like carnival itself, The Secret Agent sucks you in and buffets you along, with every swing and sway making it harder not to submit.

This is Lee’s closest ever film to a thriller, but it defies expectations, offering multiple, murky solutions to a set of mysteries at once.

Hamaguchi has made a profoundly beautiful film about making peace with the role in front of you, and playing it with all your might.

The film has clout, vitriol and an impressive payload of blackly comic despair.

The film mounts its thesis while hardly needing to verbalise what’s going on: it mesmerises by reaching inside them to listen, even while others talk.

The film's effect is anti-emotional, and that's the point; it's about the insatiable process of humanity working to eradicate all traces of itself. There's no time left to weep, because the nerve endings are already dead.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a title so good you feel the film to which it’s attached should really have to earn it: happily it does so within three minutes.

It would be near-impossible to love Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women more than Greta Gerwig does.

Grand, propulsive.

This is a film which simply wouldn’t have worked in any medium but animation: in an hour and a half we come to know Amin intimately without actually setting eyes on him at all. It’s an ingenious way to tell a story that’s both extraordinary and commonplace: only with the teller’s anonymity tactfully preserved can the tale itself be hauled fully into the light.

All Quiet on the Western Front remains an essential piece of social history and a heart-wrenching film.