This is an often shoulder-shudderingly funny film, whose comic dialogue is dazzlingly designed and performed. But McDonagh leaves fate itself with the last, black, bone-rattling laugh.

It’s flat-out hilarious – find me a funnier screen stab at Austen, and I’m tempted to offer your money back personally. Gliding through its compact 92 minutes with alert photography and not a single scene wasted, it’s also Stillman on the form of his life.

This is categorically not a film that will be universally admired – but even as it cleaves to old formulas, it transports your mind to new terrain that feels genuinely and frighteningly hostile, and leaves you with plenty of mental souvenirs by which to remember the trip.

What makes the film so special is that Ford and Tommy Lee Jones (as his chief pursuer, US Marshal Samuel Gerard) are such beautifully matched adversaries.

Very dark and very British, with strong performances all round. [28 Aug 2010, p.30]

As parable, the film’s slippery quality catches you off guard in the best way. And it summons profound love for a character – a village idiot it would never let you describe that way – without congealing even slightly into sentimentality. It clings on to Lazzaro like the only hope in a benighted world.

It's so rare in British cinema to see the "L" in "LGBTQ+" up there in such bold type, which makes Blue Jean not only a biting look at this historical moment but a riveting act of redress.

Of all Shakespeare’s plays, Macbeth may be the best-served by cinema, with terrific, distinctive adaptations over the years from Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Roman Polanski, and most recently Justin Kurzel, with Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard. Coen’s is something different again – though new would be entirely the wrong word. It resonates with the ancient power of a ritual.

Particle Fever offers enough broad explanation to keep lay persons up to speed. Where it excels is in depicting the various personalities involved.

Flow might be a digital confection, but it’s also open, alive, elemental. In every sense, it’s a breath of fresh air.

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

Like the best bath you’ve ever had, it sends tingles coursing through every part of you that other films don’t reach.

The on-screen chemistry between Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy was so powerful that they ended up making nine movies together, to huge public acclaim. But in no other film did that chemistry produce such delightfully explosive results as Adam's Rib.

Strickland has made something uniquely sexy and strange, built on two tremendous central performances and a bone-deep understanding of cinema’s magic and mechanisms.

Mightily clever in its rather theatrical structure, but bracingly cinematic in its formal approach, the movie has a bold, ambiguous final act.

Among Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's formidable oeuvre, this early romcom stands out for charm and quirkiness. [20 Aug 2020, p.20]

Vitally, Wandel doesn’t ramp up the misery here for dramatic effect, but rather successfully makes the fairly everyday unpleasantness feel as chest-clutchingly hopeless as it would to – well, a seven-year-old.

It radiates a candour, immediacy and tongue-scalding sex appeal that a bigger budget would have only smothered.

It ought to be a triumph. Somehow, though, it lacks the flooding emotional force Donoghue gave it on the page.

A masterly reconstruction of a Brooklyn bank siege on August 22, 1972, built around arguably Al Pacino's finest screen performance.

Renaissance is not just a film about a concert, it’s a film about making a film about putting a concert together, an odd mix of powerhouse mass entertainment and navel gazing cine verite art documentary that tilts wildly between crowd pleasing blockbuster and pretentious vanity project.

This whole film has a wizardry to it which you’ll be thinking about for days.

You couldn’t accuse the film of outstaying its welcome for even one of these 81 pristine minutes.

This is a resounding return to form for Payne: there are moments that recall his earlier road movies About Schmidt and Sideways, but it has a wistful, shuffling, grizzly-bearish rhythm all of its own.

The animation is state-of-the-art – but isn't it high time superheroes stuck a pin in one reality and ripped up their passports?

Heavenly Creatures, which remains Jackson's best movie, his most serious and his most daring, is 99 minutes long and doesn't waste a single one. It manages to be both shocking and intoxicating, a portrait of giddy teenage escapism which yanks itself free from reality in disturbing, and finally deadly, ways. Jackson has an obvious flair for fantasy - an obsession with it, one might say - but this is a film about its dangers, not just its temptations. [17 Nov 2012]

Longinotto and editor Ollie Huddleston stitch it, with lightness and dexterity, into a wholly edifying, often stirring tapestry of survivors’ stories.

Fifty Shades of Grey can only dream of being as erotic a work as Powell and Pressburger's tale of repressed desire and simmering passions among a community of nuns at a convent in the Himalayas. Jack Cardiff's cinematography, with its rich, dark interiors and mountains painted on glass, is among the most beautiful in film. [09 Mar 2020]