The pitch to the studio was "Romeo and Juliet on junk": fair enough, but it crackles with life, and this is a tremendous rediscovery.

Dramatic fragments, blasted our way, dance before us for the next two hours, rotating and glinting, colliding and connecting, like a puzzle in zero gravity. As a transition into flinty, supercharged genre filmmaking, it gets by on no more than electric confidence, high-fiving technical virtuosity, and a cast to die for. It’s very satisfying.

As hot and wet as freshly butchered meat: every second, every frame of its three-hour running time is virile with a lifetime’s accumulated genius.

As the Mini Coopers rock from side to side along a sewage tunnel, with £4 million in gold bullion in their boots and Quincy Jones's infectious score swinging away in the background, ask yourself this: is there a film - certainly a British film - that delivers a greater infusion of pure joy than The Italian Job?

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.

Close is a great film about friendship, but perhaps an even greater one about being alone.

When absurdism feels this wrong, you know it’s being done right.

The construction has a mocking fatalism that might have felt oppressive, but Malle and his actors keep you constantly on the edge of your seat, wondering what curse will befall the desperate lovebirds next.

The characters often come across as immature dolts, but the film’s humane enough to recognise that’s all part of being 18.

The odd scenarios keep coming, fast and thick. Phantom Thread is built along the theoretically familiar lines of gothic romance – if you had to pick a predecessor, it would probably be Hitchcock’s Rebecca – but it’s very hard in the moment to work out where on earth it’s going, or even how conventionally romantic Reynolds and Alma’s relationship actually is.

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.

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

Even by the series’ own now well-established standards, this widely presumed last entry in Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible franchise is an awe-inspiringly bananas piece of work.

The Gold Rush is a flawless example of Charlie Chaplin's masterly fusion of comedy and tragedy. [20 Apr 2024, p.23]

It’s a funny, insightful, sensationally acted account of art’s capacity to dissolve walls, and heighten, broaden and deepen the reach of our lives.

On paper, this looks like a flatly impossible task for DiCaprio: the film’s central character is neither hero nor charismatic outlaw, but a grasping, biddable, determinedly unreflective stooge, whose actions inspire revulsion and outrage.But he meets the challenge with one of the finest, most complex performances he’s ever given.

This tremendous follow-up to Trier’s 2021 international breakthrough hit The Worst Person in the World flows with a ravishing freeness through the many complex strictures it builds for itself: layered family psychologies; behaviours and secrets that recur and reform across generations; the therapeutic value of art to its makers.

Fiennes is admirably open throughout, with seemingly no thought of a public image to burnish.

It's hard to imagine now just how astonishing it was to interrupt the action with a sun-lit frolic on a new-fangled bicycle as the whimsical Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head burbles away in the background.

A shimmering coup de cinema to make your heart burst, your mind swim and your soul roar.

It shares a vague shape and a handful of specific, linchpin scenes with its predecessor, but everything about it lands differently: characters that were previously empty or ludicrous now have real grit and depth, while action sequences that were once incoherent, lightweight and garish now number among the most thunderously spectacular in the genre.

Elicits from McQueen a directing job that's compellingly humble but also majestic, because his radical showmanship is turned to such precise, human purposes.

Mandy exists in its own supremely unnerving horror dimension.

it’s often very funny indeed. The mood is often closer to the perkier passages of the Connery films, and the humour feels contemporary and British: the Phoebe Waller-Bridge script polish evidently yielded the desired result.

Shoplifters is compassionate, socially conscious filmmaking with a piercing intelligence that is pure Kore-eda. This is a film that steals in and snatches your heart.

Robert De Niro is sensational in Scorsese's history-making mob masterpiece.

Sweet Country is tough, spare and lyrical right down to the bone.... It is also a work of moral conscience that rules out easy answers, with acridly funny moments of black comedy and a sense of awesome natural spectacle that is inseparable from its dramatic impact. It has a power that makes the cinema shake.

Dispassionate engagement won't fly here. You either stagger out early or plunge in up to your elbows.