The story of A Star Is Born may be as old as show-business, but it is also electrifyingly fresh – a well-known melody given vivid, searching new force.

For Hollywood’s armies of unsung craftsfolk, Nope turns the blockbuster rules on their head: an expansive science-fiction thriller whose heroes rise up and claim their heroism from behind the scenes. For the rest of us, it’s an outrageously good time.

Mikkelsen, who is not given to sympathetic roles, has never been better. This is cinema that sinks its claws into your back.

Shot and edited by Spielberg and his team in less than six months, The Post is very evidently a strike-while-the-story’s-hot kind of project, and it finds the master filmmaker at his most thrillingly supple and intuitive.

The Muppet Christmas Carol's warmth, wit and obvious affection for Dickens make it one of the greatest Christmas films – and literary adaptations – of all time.

Poignantly lyrical as a city symphony, it branches out for a sequel, when the characters abscond to the coast to figure out what to do: at once a respite and a reckoning, ghostly and mysterious.

The film itself is a mesmerisingly gripping and controlled parable-thriller in which the paranoia, misogyny and rage of the Iranian state are mapped seamlessly onto an ordinary family unit.

Mark Sandrich's musical, written and scored by Irving Berlin, is a stone-cold festive classic. [07 Dec 2018, p.35]

Great animation can communicate wildly complex ideas with head-spinning clarity and wit, as Docter capably proved with Inside Out – a film which staged the interplay of emotions in an 11-year-old’s head like a vintage sitcom. If anything, Soul pushes this capacity for revelation even further: there are moments of true Blakean mystery and wonder here, expressed with a crispness that feels like a lightbulb snapping on above your head.

There are gripping chases and balletic combat scenes, painstakingly realised by Oshii’s animators, but the mood is mostly cold and melancholic, as Kusanagi broods over the fleshly implications of living in a world of data

It tests our presumptions, makes us squirm.

It’s the sort of film that rattles you in three ways at once: through the grim candour of its themes, the chill precision of its craft, and the nightmarish throb of its images.

His tender, witty, wondrous The Phoenician Scheme is the most Andersonian Anderson film to date – but then again, they all are, and that’s the fun of them.

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.

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.

Writer-director Alan Parker's utterly delightful, tongue-in-cheek love letter to the gangster genre.

Beyond the troughful of fun tics, Spall makes Turner tenderly and totally human — the effect of which is to make his artistic talents seem even more extraordinary still.

A sick joke, an urgent warning and a roar into the abyss, Mother! earns its exclamation mark three times over and more.

Bessa’s contained fury goes haywire in this stretch, and brilliantly so: it’s a tour de force of social-realist acting to be notched up with the likes of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves.

Disguises, time bombs, runaway trains: Cruise, his director Christopher McQuarrie and their collaborators are very consciously working in a century-old tradition here, perhaps to show the business and art of stunning audiences can – if we choose – be much the same now as it ever was.

The film may handle differently to its predecessor, but it’s clearly been tuned by the same engineers. After the pared-down drag racer, here comes the juggernaut.

There are some of the very finest character actors that Warner Brothers could muster and a rich, detailed screenplay studded with an indecent number of sparklingly quotable lines. It is a movie to play again, and again.

How Jarmusch takes this match-stick house of nothings and fills it with such calm and wisdom is a mystery with only one real answer: he’s an artist.

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]

Roofman has heart, energy and personality fit to burst. If the cinema gods decided that it was finally time for Channing Tatum to have a chance at an Oscar nomination, they could hardly have equipped him better than with this role.

It’s a stunningly confident piece of filmmaking, which holds on to vital clues about how much time has elapsed, and what’s happened, then springs them on us. The performances slay you.

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.

Toy Story 4 reaffirms that Pixar, at their best, are like no other animation studio around.