What’s most winning about ‘The Club’ is how Larrain manages to allude to the wider structures, behaviour and corruption of the church without ever making this claustrophobic, moody and very local story feel anything but crucial, thrilling and disturbing.

Best of all is Steven Spielberg’s direction: the camera moves like a predatory animal, gliding eerily across the surface of the vast Atlantic, creating sequences of almost unbearable suspense.

A magnificent movie that transcends its familiar tale of a reformed gunman forced by circumstance to resume his violent ways.

It’s one of the most insightful films ever made about the British class system.

This is Hitchcock at his best. Full of subterranean hints as to the ways in which people cage each other, it's fierce and Freudian as well as great cinematic fun.

He invites viewers to laugh with him at him: rather a subject than an object of ridicule, he lances his neuroses preemptively, controlling the exposure. It’s a limited strategy, but still glamorising in its way – if you can’t be Bogart-smooth in all things, such a fund of wisecracks is a start.

This is a story of identity, and the lack of it. And it’s fascinating.

Billy Wilder’s 1959 comedy is still perfect all these years later.

Gestures, looks and touches carry enormous weight, and Blanchett and Mara, both excellent, invite micropscopic readings of their every glance and movement.

Lang’s direction is never heavy-handed. Instead, he glories in the magic-weaving possibilities of cinema, from gorgeous visual effects – there’s a lovely flying carpet sequence – to expressionist sets, dreamy dissolves and postmodern looks-to-camera. This one will haunt your dreams.

This is quite simply one of the saddest movies ever made, a tale of loss, grief and absolute loneliness, an unflinching stare into the darkest moral abyss.

This is the director’s most vivid, most emotional and humane film, and perhaps his best.

It's stunningly beautiful, mesmerising, exhausting, uplifting, amazing - all the things you could possibly expect from a masterpiece.

It’s an exploration of all things surface, yes, but it has soul too.

It’s an intoxicating marvel, strange and sublime: it combines sci-fi ideas, gloriously unusual special effects and a sharp atmosphere of horror.

Lyrical, satirical and hugely entertaining, it deserves a wider audience.

The film’s no-nonsense, visually plain documentary-style of shooting feels utterly appropriate to its sly evocation of the absurdities and banalities of modern life. Just brilliant.

[A] calm, reflective, gorgeously uneventful slice of nostalgic romance.

The Coens have given us a melancholic, sometimes cruel, often hilarious counterfactual version of music history. It's a what-if imagining of a cultural also-ran that maybe tells us more about the truth than the facts themselves ever could.

An extraordinarily inventive fantasy in which schoolboy Warnock is rescued from a dull suburban existence by a band of renegade dwarfs, who emerge from his wardrobe and whisk him off on an incredible journey through time and space. Sometime Monty Python animator Gilliam fills the screen with bizarre images, and directs with a breathless ingenuity.

Undoubtedly the zombie movie to end 'em all... The horror/suspense content is brilliant enough to satisfy the most demanding fan, and the film uses superb locations like a huge shopping mall to further its Bosch-like vision of a society consumed by its own appetites. But take no munchies.

It’s a film of small moments and tiny gestures that leaves a very, very big impression.

That Anderson, the film’s writer-director, whose Boogie Nights was a riot but Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love both noble failures, has come to make this intelligent and enthralling masterpiece is both a little surprising and intensely satisfying.

This is a magnificent, career-capping achievement from one of the great storytellers of our era.

It’s a more subtle, damning film for implicating the media – as much as the church, the courts, the legal profession and other Boston institutions – in the systematic, wider cultural cover-up it describes.

If you’ve ever sat at your desk wondering whether there’s more to life, or been kept awake by an insidious hum in the darkness, this will speak to your soul – even as its enveloping, disturbing, uplifting story sends your mind reeling with giddy possibilities.

What Dominik gives us is a portrait of an artist and a man and a family at a low. He doesn’t try to understand, but he does find some beauty and truth among the chaos and despair.

The film’s real success is that Puiu impresses both with his compassion for human behaviour and his tight grip on realist, documentary-style filmmaking.