As a film, Testament of Youth glimmers with sadness, but also the apprehension of sadness: we know not all of these boys are coming back.

Like Someone in Love, is another miracle at close quarters. Its subject is the impossibility of intimacy in the modern world: chewy stuff, to be sure, but Kiarostami explores it with a depth and delicacy that recalls the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu.

Pugh is mesmerising.

It is beautifully shot, too: even the writing on the posters and graffiti observes the style of classical French écriture. Given enough time, maybe one could even grow nostalgic for the pomposity.

The fun of it – and Guardians of the Galaxy specialises in fun, served by the sugar-sprinkled ice-cream-scoopload – is in seeing this odd quintet bluster through space battles and alien brawls that would have defeated anyone smarter and better-equipped. Just as the team makes do with the junk they find around them, the film feels like a mound of gems culled from decades of pop-culture scavenging.

Having slyly slipped the bonds of the past, Corsage eventually allows its heroine to make a very modern break for it in the film’s (wholly fictional) final act. It’s a fun, coolly outrageous manoeuvre – and the final shot is so freeing, it’s as if the laces on your own invisible corset had suddenly been cut.

Admirers of Baker’s earlier work will have a journey to go on here, first in missing the rowdy companionship of protagonists who weren’t wholly out for themselves. As spectacle, this study of a dirtbag running out of extra lives falls into the category of crowd-baiting, not crowd-pleasing. Mikey, repeatedly, is just the worst.

The movie is hauntingly romantic at heart, in the best spirit of a Gothic fairytale, but without the harsh shadows or hard edges.

There’s a Spielbergian showmanship to Bayona’s films, wedded to an unabashed emotionalism, and this one reaches for you down in the gut.

It’s the kind of handsome, rousing, rigorous entertainment you can’t help but play along with.

It’s a punchy, propulsive watch, blown along by snappy editing and a hip-hop-driven soundtrack that stresses that there’s still much fun to be had when hefty themes of inequality and geopolitics are being tackled. And honestly? There really is.

Every story here has heart, soul and grit.

Stand By Me is one of those films that stands up to the test of time. It may never top any critic’s “films of the century” list, like Citizen Kane, or Raging Bull, but it has a charm and depth that seems to resonate with each generation.

The film scores highly as a Highsmithian three-hander, and particularly excels at illuminating all the ways this trio have failed to grow up. It shimmers, convinces and thoroughly absorbs.

It’s an intimate film with a roomy embrace.

An assortment of myths are exploded in Zappa, the baggily engaging docu-portrait directed by Bill & Ted star Alex Winter.

Berger’s evocation of war and its horrors ultimately connects not at an intellectual level but where it truly matters: in the gut.

A timely, terrifically acted moral nail-biter.

Astutely judged for the most part, and reflective on what Reeve meant to people in all phases of his life, the British documentary Super/Man is an emotional rollercoaster with some undeniably walloping moments. The relationships that quite literally saved Reeve come to the fore.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 is both a courtroom drama for the ages and an urgent shot across the bows.

The film tells the story as it is, without unnecessary frills or padding. It's the essence of the TT.

It’s the kind of filmmaking with rich confidence in its own professionalism, like a hired assassin purring with his own satisfaction after a devious, trace-free job.

This is a film of piercingly perceptive moments, even if, as some say of Haneke's own work, it is cold to the core. [28 Dec 2001]

At the very end of Janicza Bravo’s Zola, just as you’re struggling to comprehend what on earth the film is supposed to amount to, there is a wonderful moment when you realise that’s the entire point.

There are no shattering revelations here – if Gibney’s canny gathering of various narratives, shimmering score and cool graphics give his film the goose-pimply intrigue of a spy thriller, it just happens to be one you’ve already seen. It’s also one in which the subplot, if anything, takes over from the main plot.

The film grabs your attention with verve, but also has a vision: it’s not mortal danger it finds freaky, but what’s waiting on the other side.

The most haunting part of this riskily earnest film isn’t the unmentionable effects coup of its grand finale, but the quieter beats, all in close-up, that comprise its coda: atomised, spent, and sad.

For the most part, sound and image are irreconcilable, so you find yourself either listening in horror or watching with pleasure, only for the spell to be broken by some eye or ear-catching detail in the other temporal strand.