The movie rattles with provocations.

There’s no need for Spielberg and Kushner to tease out topicality here. Aspects of West Side Story feel as pertinent today as they must have done on its 1957 Broadway debut. But relevance is easy: timelessness is the real artistic feat. And Spielberg has magnificently pulled it off.

Kapadia’s film is many things: a Sherlockian reconstruction of Winehouse’s arcing path across the skies of superstardom, a commemoration of her colossal talent, and a moving tribute to a brilliant, witty, vivacious young woman gone far too soon. But above all, it’s a perceptive examination of the singer’s need for love – from her friends, family, colleagues, husband and public – and the ways in which that need went unmet, or was exploited, at the times it ached in her the most.

It’s hard to remember the last time an actress aged as convincingly on screen as Zhao Tao does in the melancholic, gently epic Ash Is Purest White.

Night Will Fall isn’t simply a film about the war, it documents the power of emerging technologies to reveal and publicise war crimes - something that also feels acutely relevant today.

Varda by Agnès is unquestionably one for the fans ... But this film also serves as a tantalising crash-course for newcomers.

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]

A modern-day pilgrimage and profound comment on Englishness. [03 Apr 2021, p.20]

While Kayla Day is very much a teenager of her precise time and place, her gruelling anxiety – and Fisher’s wonderful yearning in the role – make her universally relatable anyway.

Girlhood carries you along with its characters, neither lionising nor demonising them, but allowing you to watch them live their lives and make their own decisions, be they rash or inspired or a terrifying mixture of the two.

It’s hard to recall a time when the state-of-the-art felt this much like art.

It manages a light, improvisatory mastery, an immaculate hold on tone, and a grave yet sunlit tableau of an ending, with each one of these faces turned in collective mourning, that I’ll never forget.

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]

Tran, a practised sensualist, is superb at depicting food as a vehicle for pleasure.

Mudbound’s brutal climax is a shock and an affront in all the ways it must be – and though the film is a little wobbly up front, it’s fully worth wading through.

Alive to pulse-quickening details of body language and the conversational codes by which a dangerous friendship lives or dies, the film is a study in contrasts far beyond the monochromatic.

This isn’t just good writing, it’s humane and honourable.

The film has a cumulative power that sneaks up on you even as you think you’re keeping track of it, and a twilit afterglow that hasn’t faded yet.

Unforgiven is dedicated to "Don" (Siegel) and "Sergio" (Leone) and it is a sombre, insightful, genre-reinventing western, directed by a filmmaker acutely aware of the western’s history, its limitations and the dubious truths of its legends.

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

Oasis Knebworth 1996 is a film to restore your faith in the unifying power of rock and roll.

Without a doubt, it gives us the oddest couple of the year in Alexander Skarsgård’s Ray and Harry Melling’s Colin. For that, and many other reasons, this fresh, funny and poignant pairing is one to be cherished.

It positions spycraft as a hybrid of occult ritual and parlour game – and perhaps also a grand-scale working-through of deep-seated national jitters. Happily, it’s also enormous fun with it, and has your mind whirring to keep up with David Koepp’s devious screenplay, which gives itself a head start and waits until the very end before willingly surrendering the lead.

An impressive and unconventional thriller. [4 Sept 2010]

This being a Wes Anderson film, it almost goes without saying the details are delectable.

The shot-making is sensational, and the film knows it; the camera does things you’ve never seen before, say with focus in an interrogation room mirror, and the whole saga’s edited as though Park can’t wait to show you what’s up his sleeve.

The thing about Spielberg these days is he makes this stuff look easy.

Round Midnight is too long and too slow. [25 Jun 1987]