It has a straight-down-the-highway momentum, interesting stakes, and more textured character work than you can shake a stick at.

This triumphant adaptation, which premiered last night at Venice, strip-mines Gray’s book for all its funniest, fizziest and sexiest ideas, and leaves the chewier, more literary stuff on paper, where it belongs. I’d say purists might bridle, but speaking as one of them, I wasn’t just relieved, but overjoyed.

As Mulligan so deftly demonstrates, the story is in the characters, their failings and fragility, their heroism and nobility of spirit. It's in the depiction of heart-breaking cruelty and heart-warming humanity. It's in the innocence of a child's world overshadowed by the evil that adults do.

Braga has been presented with an uncommonly dense and multi-faceted role here, and she plunges into it with a kind of glossy-maned, leonine majesty, investing the character with a hard-won dignity that often has you stifling a cheer, but also exploring her flaws in gripping fashion.

Small-town America is portrayed with gentle, affectionate humour.

As with Jordan Peele’s Get Out, or Coogler’s 2015 Rocky spin-off Creed, Black Panther isn’t a novelty, but a fresh perspective on a well-worn format. Not to get all Rosa Parks about it, but the film walks into the multiplex like it’s insane that it hasn’t been allowed in there all along. And it is.

This is the same wondrous journey on which Apichatpong sends his audience: inwards and downwards, to a place where the simplest rhythms of everyday life become hallowed and mythic.

This is his and Swinton’s first film together: in fact, it is the Spanish master’s first English-language production. But the two are an obviously good creative match, each one well-versed in the interplay of depth and surface, and capable of switching moods from ripe to heartfelt in a blink.

The star of Brooklyn is Fiona Weir – not a person who appears on screen at any stage, but the woman who cast it.

Van Dyke's energy is prodigious (especially when he leaps around with a gang of sooty chimney-sweeps on the London rooftops) and the songs are classics.

If proof were needed that Barry Jenkins’s directing achievement was far from a one-off, it pulses and dances through every sequence of his follow-up, If Beale Street Could Talk, in all its gorgeous romantic melancholy and sublimated outrage.

Spectacular, star-powered cinema that makes us ask anew what cinema is for. Call it a "Dark Knight" of the soul.

It Happened One Night is pure delight.

It looks amazing, and the complex treatment of the issues marks it out from the shoot-'em-up standards of the time. [29 Jun 2013, p.32]

The film often rings hollow.

Grant's delivery of mordant mutterings is superb. The lines, from Bruce Robinson's semi-autobiographical script, are an oddball joy and mostly involve drink and the inevitable hangover.

The Velvet Underground is not the kind of music documentary that dutifully walks the viewer through the greatest hits and bitterest feuds. Instead, it re-conjures the moment that made the hits possible and the feuds inevitable, via a whirl of archive footage and interviews new and old.

OK, McQuarrie may not have De Palma’s sweat-drop precision, John Woo’s craziness or the impish wit of Brad Bird, but his mastery of logistics here is easily sufficient to make it the blockbuster of the summer.

Thirty-nine years on, it’s as vivacious as ever.

Agnes Varda's exquisite New Wave masterpiece, about an hour and a half in the life of a gorgeous, possibly dying chanteuse. [30 Apr 2010, p.31]

It holds the attention of the audience from brazen start to fantastic finish – well, not quite to the silly end, perhaps, but then we can’t have everything.

Romance and cinema are ideal bedfellows for all sorts of obvious reasons, but on screen, the beauty of friendship can be harder to pin down. This wise and wondrous (and wordless) animation does it better than any other film in recent memory – and in ways a six-year-old could effortlessly grasp.

The terror, panic and small town politics are all brilliantly done but this is also a film about bravery and friendship and the scenes in which the trio bond as they sit out at sea waiting to fight death itself are moving and witty.

It's hard to conceive of a sword-and-sandals epic with greater sweep or grandeur than Spartacus...For majestic, mind-blowing sequences, you're spoilt for choice.

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.

The sheer compassion of Zhao's direction is one of the film's most elemental pleasures, while McDormand is one of those rare actors who can somehow make the act of listening as thrilling as a barnstorming speech.

Farhadi’s films are like moral whodunits, and as Sepideh and her friends gradually unearth the truth, he expertly buffets our sympathies in all directions until the very last shot.

Young women have desires too, and the unsinkable, uninhibited Minnie finds that a little self-belief can make up for a lot of bad decisions.