Moving but funny, serious but light of touch, it's a classic. [18 May 2024, p.22]

Helped by a peerless script and a great team of actors (Alfie Bass and Sid James as professional thieves; Stanley Holloway as an oratory-inclined artist-scamster), the film is both a joyous comedy and a tense thriller.

This is instant A-list Coens; enigmatic, exhilarating, irresistible.

The film comes and goes without commotion, but its magic settles on you as softly and as steadily as dust.

The two stars generate an astonishing sensual charge in a brilliant addition to the Batman canon that refuses to behave like a blockbuster

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.

Glazer’s astonishing film takes you to a place where the everyday becomes suddenly strange, and fear and seduction become one and the same.

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

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

Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman won Oscars, but the work of Eileen Brennan and Timothy Bottoms is even more cherishable.

Inspired by The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a short story by Leo Tolstoy, this is a mournful masterpiece. Shimura's performance is central - he plods around like a gnarled tortoise, his weather-beaten head perpendicular to his body, his expression a downturned rictus of despair. [01 Mar 2014, p.36]

By applying cutting-edge restoration techniques to footage shot at the time, Jackson has crafted an historical portrait of matchless immediacy and power, in which young souls lost in a century-old war stare out across the years and meet our gaze.

Unless you’re a devoted fan, concert films can be a rather dreary experience but the sheer spectacle and energy of the her film is enough to convert even the most rabid anti-Swiftite.

The film is heroically unabashed about the power of love, expressed through extraordinary photography (by Jamie D Ramsay, who lifted Living), and a quartet of stars bouncing off each other to hit stratospheric acting highs. It shimmers, and it aches.

The film’s sweetness and bitterness are held so perfectly in balance, and realised with such sinew-stiffening intensity, that watching it feels like a three-hour sports massage for your heart and soul.

Few Westerns examine the depths of human feeling, but this film by George Stevens is one of them, and it has since become a cinematic landmark. [13 Feb 2020, p.29]

It’s a feat of pure cinematic necromancy.

They don't come sourer or sexier than Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (1947), a pretty much perfect film noir. [26 Jul 2014, p.4]

The script, co-written by Zvyagintsev and his regular collaborator Oleg Negin, scrupulously extends to each of its characters the dignity of complexity, and both excellent leads repay the favour tenfold, investing what could have easily been petit-bourgeois caricatures – the preening shrew, the oafish office drone – with riveting sincerity and nuance.

This story is about whether secrets can be survived, whether the knowing or not knowing is more injurious. Haigh’s very fine, classically modulated film keeps these questions alive until literally its last shot, and lets them jangle their way through you for days afterwards.

It works as beautifully as it does because the film’s comedy has been machined with Swiss precision, and all of its characters written with obvious love.

It’s a film full of tight close-ups of hands accepting gifts that comfort, inspire and bring succour to their recipients’ souls. That’s how we should receive it.

It takes about three minutes – roughly the length of time it takes Hoffman to get down the moving walkway to Simon and Garfunkel's Sound of Silence and from the airport to the suffocating atmosphere of his graduation party, where he gets gradually trapped into a relationship with one of his parents' friends – to realise that The Graduate is actually a very nasty film, and a very, very funny one.

Wilder’s intoxicating script, co-written with IAL Diamond, flows like finest brandy, and Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine shine as two essentially good souls trapped in a tangle of office politics.

It is one of the year’s very best films, a great, rumbling thunderclap of genius.

Mank feels like both a film for the ages and one hauled up from them: a forbidden tale grave-robbed from the Hollywood catacombs.

Jackie, the English-language debut from the Chilean director Pablo Larraín, shows you the past in a hall of shattered mirrors – fractured and unsettling, with every surface sharp enough to draw blood.

For its entire two and a half hours – which whips past in what feels like mere minutes – Safdie’s film had me vibrating like a tuning fork. It’s a joyous salute to life’s beautiful cacophony.