‘My problem is how to communicate better,’ Paik notes and this documentary might have dug a little deeper to communicate who this endearing man was beyond his artistic legacy. Still, it does an impressive job of showing why Nam June Paik was a brilliant artist who remains worth listening to

McElwee's quietly reassuring voice dominates the film, but that doesn't mean he can't craft a magnificently eloquent image when he wants to, as in the moment when he frames Adrian, seated in a coffee shop, inside his own reflection in the shop's front window.

The enigma of the planet's history, juggled through Heston's humiliating experience of being studied as an interesting laboratory specimen by his ape captors, right down to his final startling rediscovery of civilisation, is quite beautifully sustained.

Rappeneau's movie-making demonstrates an unshowy confidence in itself and its subject that is wholly justifiable.

It's easy to think of comics, especially time-tested ones like Rivers, as mechanical laugh-generators. Stern and Sundberg allow her to reveal the deep-rooted humanity of those ever-present quips, and the effect is humbling.

Perhaps a more caustic picture was intended, but the film grows to like its characters, and the final result is amusingly indulgent and generous in a way few current American films are: one has to look to East Europe (especially the work of Milos Forman) for a similar quality of ironic compassion.

Strikes an intelligent balance between funk-scored pride and a more universal story of activism threatened by in-fighting and accidental celebrity.

In lesser hands, this could have easily been some seriously detestable John Wayne jingoism. But via Fiennes, the film is a spiky and complex counterweight to Hollywood sentiment and indie cynicism alike.

The 'Nashville' of its day, Grand Hotel's reputation has outgrown its actual quality, and it is now interesting only as an example of the portmanteau style: an interwoven group of contrasting stories allowing a bunch of stars to do their most familiar turns.

Page won an Oscar nomination for this, her first film role, but Wayne's guileless performance is even better: gently self-mocking, while still every inch the embodiment of the conviction that "a man ought to do what he thinks is best."

A Most Violent Year, Chandor’s absorbing no-bull NYC drama, further clarifies what might be the most promising career in American movies: an urban-headed filmmaker attuned to economies of place and time, with an eye on the vacant throne of Sidney Lumet.

Director Luca Guadagnino is having so much fun setting up the Kubrickian chill (even Barry Lyndon's Marisa Berenson is on hand) that when Emma and the much younger Antonio finally come together in warming Sanremo, their tryst almost sneaks up on you.

Stark social drama meets boy’s own adventure in this strikingly photographed African-set, Oscar-nominated adventure.

An unashamed sense of its own fantasy is coupled with classically mounted slapstick; nostalgia mixes with cynicism in seductive proportions; and John Belushi's central performance as brain-damaged slob-cum-Thief of Baghdad is wonderful.

It's a hypnotically perverse film, one that redeems your faith in studio smarts (but not, alas, in local law enforcement, tabloid crime reporting or, indeed, marriage).

The attention to detail is fine-grained, especially on the slippery slope of plea bargaining. Missing are two pieces that might have turned this into an urban classic.

It’s an intelligent and intriguing meditation on issues concerning what it means to be Chinese in today’s and tomorrow’s world.

To its credit, Wagner's Dream includes revealing footage of Promethean labors undertaken by cast and crew, misfires included.

The director is a huge fan of This is Spinal Tap and although Flux Gourmet isn’t up to the formidable standards of that masterpiece, it boasts one or two Stonehenge moments of its own.

It’s a timely and galvanising telling of a remarkable story that every football fan should know, and one that will hopefully go some way towards ensuring that Copa 71 finds its way into the sport’s history books.

A title like that needs balls of brass to back it up. Luckily, this fiery college comedy from feature-debuting writer-director Justin Simien, loosely inspired by a series of scandalous black-face parties at all-white fraternities, is full of punchy intelligence and barely concealed anger.

There are lovely moments – the Carpathian landscapes are stunning, Kinski’s performance is compellingly vile, and it ends with a stirringly weird, Fellini-esque plague festival. But some of Herzog’s choices are simply confounding: Isabelle Adjani has nothing to do except look pale and worried, Walter Ladengast’s Van Helsing is so decrepit as to border on pastiche, and there’s a grey, plodding quality to the film which sidesteps oppressive, doom-laden inevitability and goes straight to slightly dull.

Scorsese has hit the rare heights of Ingmar Bergman and Carl Theodor Dreyer, artists who found in religion a battleground that often left the strongest in tatters, compromised and ruined. It’s a movie desperately needed at a moment when bluster must yield to self-reflection.

With its high-energy music and graffiti-style graphics, The Crash Reel plays like the slick promos NBC uses to repackage every Olympian’s story into a pat narrative.

Alfred Hitchcock’s interrogator, the rising French director and critic François Truffaut, brought a fan’s passion and a colleague’s precision to his questions. The result remains a how-to guide for Vertigo, Psycho and a future wave of nail-biters inspired by their observations.

In conception the film remains highly original, and it does deliver enough of the goods to sail effortlessly away with the title of Britain's first official punk movie.

As you’d expect from the Mexican master, this is rich with macabre imagination and tiptoes between dreaminess and nightmarishness. In a contest with 2022’s other Pinocchio, Disney’s drab live-action redo, this wins by far more than a nose.

The death of le Carré feels like the end of an era. The Pigeon Tunnel is its enthralling epitaph.

As a sequel, it works for the same reasons that make The Empire Strikes Back so many people’s favourite Star Wars film: there’s a darkness, a bleakness, that makes the fist-pumping moments feel all-the-more earned.

Drive feels like some kind of masterpiece - it's as pure a version of the essentials as you're likely to see.

Superb adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel Ripley's Game, with Hopper as her amiably cynical hero.

You can't necessarily blame Wahlberg, as his modest performance is the one element that feels truly authentic and heartfelt.

Frank Pavich’s fun documentary captures an unbowed, exuberant Jodorowsky, who recalls his team of “spiritual warriors” with the camaraderie of a battle-scarred veteran.

Of course the film raises more questions than it comes near to answering, but its faults rather pale beside the epic nature of its theme, and Kingsley's performance in the central role is outstanding.

This is some flu: it plunges us into a deeply strange and unsettling version of reality. It’s undeniably confusing, but it leaves you with a powerful, if imprecise, feeling of a society that’s sick from something far worse than a passing virus.

There are none of the usual artist-biopic clichés here. Frame, as embodied by three uncannily-matched actresses, is bright but intensely, awkwardly passive, and inhabits a chaotic, arbitrary universe. Watching her hard, slow struggle for self-respect, happiness and peace becomes a profoundly moving, strangely affirmative experience.

If you have a weakness for exotic scenery (filmed in Canada, Scotland, Kenya), and some curiosity about the everyday life of prehistoric humankind, you will probably take some mild pleasure in this saga of the Ulam tribe's search for a way to light their fire.

As you’d expect from Kore-eda, it’s all told with the utmost detail and care, and a gentle score from the late Ryuichi Sakamoto only adds to the overarching air of thoughtfulness and empathy.

Richly entertaining and blackly funny but told with sincerity and heart, the half-dozen Western tales packed into The Ballad of Buster Scruggs show the Coen brothers loading up their six-shooter and firing barely a blank.

This is a brutal movie that finds unusual freedom in limitations, as do wiry bassist Pat (Anton Yelchin) and bleach-blond concert attendee Amber (Imogen Poots), who both turn out to be pretty handy with weapons. Chalk it up to their killer instincts.

The First Slam Dunk’s nimble storytelling and canny editing makes it work as both a sports movie, where you’re invested in the result, and a coming-of-age drama, where you care about the characters.

Beneath all the fun, there's a vision of humans as essentially greedy and dishonest, presented with a gorgeously amoral wink from Hitchcock, and performed to perfection by an excellent cast.

The man himself has rarely been profiled without noticeable reluctance, though documentarians Molly Bernstein and Alan Edelstein delve fairly deep by allowing their subject to guide them where he may.

Shot entirely on location with its child actors recruited from the streets, Salaam Bombay! enters into its subjects' lives with rare authority and absolute compassion, the material generated largely from workshops that Nair and her team ran for a period of months prior to filming. A revelation for audiences of any background.

If Jim Jarmusch’s languorous, laconic style isn’t your bag, his stone-faced vampire comedy won’t make you a believer. Those who’ve already been bitten, however, will swoon like the film’s toothy leads whenever their lips touch neck juice.

Thanks to some judicious plot tweaks and a full-bodied commitment to action, director Martin Bourboulon (Eiffel) has succeeded in making the best Alexandre Dumas adaptation in decades.

A magnificent melodrama, even more visually sumptuous and emotionally draining than the same director's earlier Red Sorghum, even though its cruel tale of adultery and revenge constitutes, to some extent, a blatant reworking of themes.

With so many ideas to work with, why does Bell infantilize her elsewhere-confident main character as yet another disheveled woman-child?

The film plays like a better episode of "Mad Men," pitch-perfect in its details yet fully lived-in: a universe of rolled-up shirt sleeves, sweat-laden brows and screams that don’t sound canned.

A near non-stop cycle of batsh*t stunts, slathered with enough grease, oil, fire and sand to leave you gasping for air.

This is a lazy, episodic, conventional but strangely charming variation on the old comedy formula of initially hostile misfits falling in love (here platonic).

Although the sub-religious gobbledegook (including a tiresome midget medium) is hard to take, it is consistently redeemed by its creator's dazzling sense of craft.

The whole second half suggests a new way of storytelling-like one of those Wes Anderson montages done by an obsessive fan of Hatari! To judge from Tabu's first hour, pacing is not Gomes's strong suit, yet the filmmaker who emerges might win you over.

Co-writers, co-directors and brothers Alex and Andrew J. Smith—who outdo The Revenant for sincerity, depth and gorgeousness—mount their tale with enough confidence to cut away from the action.

The understated film builds into a gut punch that’s more painful than anything in the superficial, recent Roger Ailes exposé "Bombshell."

The result is another great showcase for the animation house’s powers of non-verbal storytelling that’s a giddy delight for kids, and just witty and knowing enough for grown-ups.

Played as broad, noisy black farce, the film is about the deception of politics and heroism, dog-eat-dog morals and the propensity for violence, but one can't help thinking that behind the sometimes sensational apocalyptic imagery, there's less here than meets the eye.

The 20-year-old Hubble Space Telescope--whose repair mission is the subject of this chronicle--turns out to be a bit of a stage hog, and audiences expecting a blissout of swirling galaxies will wonder why so much time is spent on astronauts sweating over screws and bolts.

For a film that is primarily focused on one person at a time, speaking directly to camera, it is never remotely dull. The lean 73-minute runtime gives Smith all the time she needs to conjure a poignant and personal ode to these four women, and the experiences of Black trans women more broadly. We rarely get to see that on screen this powerfully and unapologetically.

This romantic weepie is both moving and effectively stylish.

If Wu is compelling as Destiny, Lopez is magnetic as her savvy mentor. It’s her most authoritative role since Out of Sight. The plot, in contrast to the stars, sags in the middle and there are a few more celebratory hang-out scenes than we need, but the gang is so charismatic, it’s no great chore to spend extra time with them. Some people would pay thousands for just a few minutes.

The movie works on a bedrock level that many ostensible action films forget. Let New Age viewers in your crowd get misty-eyed - there's plenty here for anyone.

The new Let Me In does more than merely preserve the original's mood; it actually improves on it.

Wilson’s play, about dreams deferred and a son seeking approbation (The Leftovers’ Jovan Adepo), could have used a more cinematic rethink. But even flatly presented, it has a richness of rage that’s unmistakable.

There's a wild, "Miami Blues"–like dreaminess to the movie that's addictive. If anything, it shows up exactly what "Little Miss Sunshine" lacked: plenty of ammo.

The feverish intensity of enthusiastic birdwatchers may seem better suited for a Christopher Guest movie, but director Jeffrey Kimball's lush cinematography makes Central Park's beauty no laughing matter.

Directed with real élan by Edward Berger – going two-for-two on literary adaptions after his take on All Quiet on the Western Front – Conclave is a film for the ’they don’t make ’em like they used to’ brigade.

Bong is so concerned with whodunit that his creaky genre mechanics diminish Kim's determined performance.

This is a drama about finding one's self-worth; you simply have to see it.

The film isn’t exactly rousing in its conclusion, but it’s always respectful: a serious ethical inquiry into matters of women’s choice, both imposed and seized upon. Check it out.

With his sharp eye for the bizarre and for vulgar over-decoration, it's always fascinating to watch; the thrills and spills are so classy and fast that the movie becomes in effect what horror movies seemed like when you were too young to get in to see them. Don't think, just panic.

So why is this songwriter, so articulate on vinyl, so vague and spacey in current-day interviews? Something happened here, deeper than an aborted quest for fame, and the documentary hasn't gotten to it.

Like an updated The Commitments in rouge (liberally applied), Sing Street nails the details.

Brawl then becomes a nightmare in scenes of skull-splattering violence that are truly sickening (and wonderful). Don’t look for a deeper meaning. Just soak up the grindhouse.

There's such a wide disparity of graphic styles from sequence to sequence. Some of them, though, still look terrific.

Justice is blind - but there are cases where fingers start weighing down the scales. That's the j'accuse that Ra'anan Alexandrowicz's documentary puts forth regarding Israel's rule of law in its post-'67 occupied territories.

If awards season gets up your nose, with its self-congratulatory speeches and luvvie back-patting, this playful and wildly entertaining Spanish satire on the filmmaking process is the perfect antidote.

Empathetic rather than judgy, Coppola’s relationship drama hands agency back to its young heroine.

It’s a document of a febrile time and a wake-up call for a fizzled revolution.

Both a baroque thriller set in New York's ballet demimonde and a portrait of artistry as schizoid perfectionism, Darren Aronofsky's new film percolates parallel lines of fine madness-but then, doubling down on duality is this movie's raison d'etre.

The truths that spill forth from this unlikely platonic love story are touching and deeply relatable.

It’s a near-perfect portrait of a domestic tragedy as a master-and-servant psychodrama, one that leaves catastrophic collateral damage in its wake.

Uncanny coincidental parallels with La Règle du Jeu abound, and although the film echoes Renoir's bark more than his bite, it has a superbly malicious script by Brackett and Wilder, gorgeous sets and camerawork, and a matchless cast.

Happily the cameo lowlife, an excellent manic beaver, the famously villainous Siamese, and classic songs rescue the film from dumb animal sentiment.

Forget the snark about him ransacking Eric Rohmer's bag of tricks; the gentle ironies and droll, bitter wit here prove Hong is the French New Waver's heir apparent.

What's most impressive is the simplicity and clarity of the enterprise - and, of course, the music.

While most film romances feel like a fait accompli, Enough Said’s tentative fumblings toward bliss require, and merit, fighting for; its wanderings are never less than pleasant and its final moments pack surprising emotional power.

Is Schimberg most interested in Cronenbergian horror? Psychological thrills? Darkly comic surreality? He’s gotten so much right that one more pass at the script could have pushed him to where he wants to be. But without a rock-solid core, A Different Man eventually succumbs to an insurmountable crisis of identity.

They get at the essence of Vertigo, haunting us via ghostly transmissions.

If, like Alan Partridge, you believe that Wings were ‘the band The Beatles could have been’, Morgan Neville’s propulsively upbeat music doc is a total treat.

It’s a hugely impressive debut and visually arresting from first to last.

A potent and moving depiction of contemporary survival.

It's the cattlemen vs homesteaders plot, present in all its particulars, but refracted through the star personae of Cooper and Brennan.

Not as awful as you might expect, since the nun's training is shown in fascinating detail and the later doubts are quite subtly expressed. Solid performances, too, but it's still a long haul (made no lighter by Franz Waxman's abominably insistent score) for anyone not committed to theological problems of faith, conscience and obedience.

Minor grumbles aside, few Hollywood reboots can boast this blend of nostalgia, freshness and adrenaline. You will want to high five someone on the way out.

As an exploration of what motivates people at work – and what doesn’t – it’s smartly and subtly observed.

Far from gloomy fare, this debut from an American independent offers humour, wry observation and sympathetic characterisation. Without patronising her characters, writer-director Anders captures the frustrations of both generations, and the concluding optimistic note isn't forced. Delightfully oddball and strangely sane.

For those masters of small-scale vérité social dramas, it’s such a bracing sensation to see them tiptoeing into genre terrain, you’ll forgive the fact that the villains are two-dimensional and that the ending is jarringly abrupt.