The shot-making is sensational, and the film knows it; the camera does things you’ve never seen before, say with focus in an interrogation room mirror, and the whole saga’s edited as though Park can’t wait to show you what’s up his sleeve.

A stickler might argue – not wrongly – that Havoc is ultimately a handful of astonishing set-pieces, linked by interludes of Hardy growling and ambling around. But as Howard Hawks once pointed out, all a good movie needs is three great scenes and no bad ones.

Franco is more skilled at getting us to think: not only about memory loss, but everything we choose to forget and can’t, and how these distinctions make us who we are.

Most impressively of all, Peppiatt captures the raw power of a great rap song. Hard-punching and cheerfully riotous, the film directs a well-placed kick at the nether regions to anyone who insists music, politics and cinema cannot mix.

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

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.

Serraille, whose debut feature Jeune Femme won the Camera d’Or at Cannes in 2017, has returned with a film that feels like a jewellery box of telling moments: there is precious stuff here, and real sparkle too.

This is an impressively clear-eyed and deeply moving portrait.

For all the stodginess, the action is dynamic – often shockingly gory – and enthusiastically marshalled by David Ayer.

There's gambling, shootouts, shady characters and a bombastic score - what more could you ask for? [02 Mar 2016]

Wright is both a gifted stylist and master technician, and Soho moves as smoothly as a Maglev train, gliding on an invisible cushion of its own meticulous craft. Its pristine pop-art finish occasionally feels at odds with the grit of its milieu; as it barrelled along, I felt a constant contact-high, yet little contact grubbiness. But the high is rich and giddying, and the weaving of allure and horror gleamingly assured.

[Dolan's] raised his craft, and made by far his best film yet.

This is a beautiful, bold, intently serious film.

One of the great pleasures of the collection is watching human ingenuity at work almost in real time, as each filmmaker in turn fathoms what’s possible, then keeps pushing, to regularly thrilling effect.

The whole thing reads as an indictment of the sort of upper class upbringing that Milne's children's books idealised, with only paid employees offering worthwhile parental affection.

It is grippingly unpredictable – a film with a glint in its eye and smoke curling from its nostrils and underpants. But you dismiss it, or miss it, at your peril.

It's directed by Michael Anderson (of The Dam Busters fame) with steely panache, and the clammy terror of the mission is well evoked. [11 Sep 2021, p.24]

Emancipation is a finely crafted, unflinching pursuit thriller about a slave seizing his freedom in 1860s Louisiana, and the first notable thing about it is that Smith is terrific in it.

This is mesmerically assured and tensile film-making, with two complex and plausible performances at its core, and the shin-stinging kick of a Chaucerian moral fable.

It wouldn’t be quite right to describe Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men as a horror film. Rather, it’s the kind of thing the victims in a horror film might watch, just after pulling it from the cellar of a derelict harbour cottage, and shortly before succumbing to some blood-curdling maritime curse.

Mickey 17, about a hapless clone’s misadventures on a colonising mission, is a throwback to blockbusters as the late 20th century made ’em: a $100m boisterous sci-fi satire that neither belongs to a franchise nor cares to start one, but instead jams as many eggs as it can into one increasingly precarious basket.

Greta Gerwig takes on feminism and the patriarchy in this hilarious, deeply bizarre film.

The energy, gruesome thrills and craziness of this flick are hard not to admire.

It’s Dano’s handling of the actors, unsurprisingly, which shows the most confidence.

A timely, terrifically acted moral nail-biter.

Not all of it clicks, but given how bizarre much of it is – Williams’s 2003 Knebworth gig is interrupted by a platoon of heavily armed monkeys, for instance – the hit rate is impressive.

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 film has lots of fun with its premise – until America beckons, then suddenly it seems to lose its head of steam. ... Yet it rallies in style for a beautifully judged and surprisingly moving finale.