As for Andrews, she is just a joy, conveying enough doubt beneath that brisk, clean exterior to stop her character becoming a prig; her comic timing and the way in which she convinces in her relationships with the children are so understated they can be underrated.

There’s so much in this seething cauldron of a film, so many film-industry neuroses exposed and horrors nested within horrors, that one viewing is too much, and not nearly enough. Cronenberg has made a film that you want to unsee – and then see and unsee again.

Thrilling, moving and gloriously Cruisey, Joseph Kosinski's sequel to the 1986 hit is unquestionably the best studio action film in years.

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.

For sheer theatricality, the very thing Weaver thought she was abandoning, Alien is difficult to beat.

Belle is a beautifully observed, dazzlingly animated sci-fi fairy tale about our online-offline double lives – it’s Hosoda’s finest film since 2012’s Wolf Children, and perhaps his best to date.

David Oyelowo has never given a better performance. He seems to penetrate into King’s soul and camps out there for two hours. He’s tremendous, of course, when electrifying his congregation at the podium, but a sense of fatigue is even more paramount.

Spectacular, star-powered cinema that makes us ask anew what cinema is for. Call it a "Dark Knight" of the soul.

Loznitsa’s construction of this world apart – which is, of course, a grotesque allegory for Russia itself – is as immersive as it is unnerving.

James Stewart is superb as a stubborn frontiersman turned bounty hunter called Lin McAdam, who wins a one-in-a-thousand Winchester repeater rifle in a Dodge City marksmanship contest.

It is mystical, daring, poetic, thrilling, appalling and never less than utterly mesmerising.

Style over substance? Not at all – it’s more that Fennell understands that style can be substance when you do it right. Cathy and Heathcliff’s passions vibrate through their dress, their surroundings, and everything else within reach, and you leave the cinema quivering on their own private frequency.

Its title refers to the mythical Islamic bridge across hell, on which one false step leads to certain damnation. The path trodden by the film itself is no less risky, but it styles out the crossing astonishingly.

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

As In Fabric transitions from one plot to the next, it is as if the film itself is nodding off, in order to reach a conclusion a conscious mind could never have found. The effect is wholly and deliberately bewildering, both in the moment and for days and nights afterwards.

It’s not an experience to relish, exactly, but it’s still one that’s fully capable of blowing you away.

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.

Emotions and moods are anchored to specific moments of stillness, and we feel them all the more intensely because of it.

Where Part I had a shimmering poignancy as a tragic love story, this is busy and dazzling: Hogg has never made a funnier piece of work or come to us with such fresh provocations.

Throughout the film the sense of Vienna as a frazzled echo of its glorious past is underpinned by Reed's greatest trouvaille – the discovery of Anton Karas's zither melodies, used as the only musical accompaniment. Half-jaunty, half-melancholic, they epitomise, like the film itself, a world gone sadly to seed.

Its salvaged parts combine into an internally incongruous but crazily unique whole.

The action is underpinned by the men's nostalgic reminiscences and regretful ruminations. A masterclass in unobtrusive film-making. [17 Mar 2014, p.29]

Denis Villeneuve's new adaptation of the 1965 Frank Herbert novel – starring Timothée Chalamet – is an awe-inspiring piece of work.

Thanks to both its mesmerising cast and McQueen’s flawless command of atmosphere and mood, it pulls off what I can only describe as a kind of cinematic jiu-jitsu – heaving you back to that precise moment in history, then lifting your soul out of your skin in one seamless move.

It’s a film that could have so easily smacked of an exercise, but its beauty feels thrillingly natural, and its considerable emotional power is honestly earned.

It's a great idea, and the supporting cast (including Sid James) is terrific, especially during the sight gags. It's very funny indeed. [22 May 2010, p.31]

Fennell has a sharp eye for outrage, and an even sharper one for hotness, crafting any number of scenarios and images here that may elicit sotto voce phwoars against your better judgement.

Scott’s Alien: Covenant is a mad scientist film – arguably, one of the maddest. It’s grandiose, exhilarating, vertiginously cynical and symphonically perverse.