Though there isn’t a single word of dialogue in the film’s 80-minute running time, the big questions it asks, about ambition, acceptance and the beauty of companionship, ring loud in every heart-melting frame.

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.

Achieving the gossamer profundity of one of Alice Munro’s short stories, her film is about the uninterrogated privileges success brings and the envy they can easily spawn.

This new Elvis Presley concert movie is an intimate, sweaty and explosively joyous experience that revives the King’s reputation as one of the greatest performers of all time.

In its own ingenious way, One Cut of the Dead cleaves true to the most important zombie rule of all: survival has always been a team effort.

Jerome Robbins’s legendary choreography needs the biggest screen it can get; when the movie’s firing on all cylinders of music, lyrics and motion (twice: “America” and “Gee, Officer Krupke”) there’s little to touch it.

It’s about acting, denial, wrongdoing and the age of consent, but also about growing up, and the different ways we tread through that process, or fail to.

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

What makes the film so charming is the comic interplay between Matthau and Lemmon.

Deftly adapted by director Audrey Diwan from a novella, Happening is a period piece, but it’s acted and shot with a shivery immediacy.

Franklin J Schaffner's superb war epic charts US General George S Patton's role in the Second World War. [06 Jun 2015, p.32]

The sheer unsparing intimacy of Gyllenhaall’s film gives its thrills an excitingly illicit quality. Watching it feels like reading someone else’s diary – and then finding yourself mentioned in its pages.

The film bears its real-world resonance as lightly as a button, thanks both to the steady supply of well-turned one-liners and the rippling chemistry between Nanjiani and a never-better Kazan, who’s so disarmingly funny here that I kept catching myself pulling puppy-dog faces whenever she was on screen.

Ceylan expertly draws your eye and ear to the drama behind the drama, and gives the most gently naturalistic scenes the weight and grain of visions. The word visionary has been flogged by the film business to the point of redundancy, but with The Wild Pear Tree, Ceylan reminds us he has earned every letter of it.

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.

First Reformed doesn’t come off as pastiche, or a raking-up of old ideas – largely because Schrader and his cast commit to the project with sharpened and unblinking seriousness, even when the going gets mesmerically weird.

The mechanisms at work in Baby Driver, while calibrated with hair’s-breadth precision, are nothing new. Here’s what is: the sheer glee with which the film prods around in its own clockwork to show you what spins what.

Magnificent melodrama. [11 Feb 2012, p.34]

Seydoux has unfakeable chemistry here with a perfect-as-usual Poupaud, the leading man in French cinema who seems most incapable of putting a foot wrong.

It’s tense, absurd, desperate and daft, all at once: seldom have so many contradictory tones been so gainfully employed.

A Real Pain is a very welcome throwback to a type of indie comedy-drama that had all but disappeared. It manages to be ruefully perceptive and laugh-out-loud funny, often at the same time: that’s not easy. It also presents characters with issues we grow to understand, and doesn’t set about artificially “fixing” them: how refreshing.

Beautifully done, I think, with a completely appropriate and consistent style.

It has a slippery elegance, an ambitious way of nudging its nose into magic realism, and some unforgettable images.

The film’s addictive needle-drops and sassy ensemble – including a sparingly used Cara Delevingne as Peter’s cutting business partner, and The Night Manager’s Diego Calva as an extremely obliging social worker – make it nothing if not easy to like.

Each vignette has the subcutaneous prickle of folklore – unapologetically weird as they are, you can feel their hooks snagging on your psyche’s most deeply buried regions.

It’s the women who steal the film, collectively recalling Grey Gardens (1975) in their distinctive, damaged mannerisms.

Hawaiian waves crash over a high-calibre Hollywood prestige drama, sharp and sobering, with top-drawer work from Lancaster, Clift and Sinatra.

In a breezy chat, the quartet are mostly unwilling to dwell on unpleasant subjects, so Michell uses archive footage to spell out the subtext.