Here's where it's easiest to see Clouzot's advantage over his more famous peer, as he combines nail-biting action scenes - calibrated to the millimeter - with a Hawksian command of earthy performances.

A hilarious, deeply relaxed comedy about male bonding, Richard Linklater’s baseball-minded latest ranks right up there with his masterpieces.

A slow cinema treat, Two Prosecutors rewards patience, with endless waiting rooms and antechambers both a limbo state and a last-chance saloon for Kornyev. It’s a haunting, mesmerising, pessimistic piece of work.

It’s almost impossible to describe the narrative specifics of The Past without making the movie seem ridiculously hammy. Indeed, several twists involving Samir, a dry cleaner with plenty of his own troubles, tip a bit into hoary melodramatics.

Pillion starts as it means to go on; aligning its oddly innocent nature with extreme, hardcore imagery, and managing to give screwball humour an emotional gravitas.

With this quick-witted and sexually supercharged espionage caper, Steven Soderbergh and his screenwriter David Koepp (Jurassic Park) have just remade Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy for the Industry generation.

As usual, everything is slightly glossy, soppy and hearty, yet not a string is left untwanged.

At once darkly comic and quasi-tragic, Imamura’s often brilliant tale of Eros and Thanatos is perverse, powerful and subversive.

Although there's a slight suspicion that (as in Rossellini's work from this period) the plight of children is being used as a sort of emotional shorthand, the integrity and moving effect of this piece is never really in doubt.

However great is Tarkovsky’s mastery of mise-en-scène, or astounding his use of sound composition, it appears dehumanised and not a little egocentric, closer to a study of madness and self-delusion than, as I believe Tarkovsky hoped, an illustration of the power of faith and self-sacrifice.

Unfortunately, its 39 minutes unfold in such motor-mouthed haste, it feels like a dad belting through a bedtime story while the football’s on downstairs.

The Tree of Life enthralls right from the start.

Wei is magnetic as the would-be killer who uses her patchy Korean as an additional smokescreen to manoeuvre behind. She ties the detective in knots, a shapeshifter whose true nature is beguilingly unclear.

Spielberg gets the chance to do something he’s never done before and make a miniature high-school film full of giddy subversions and emotional truths.

It is a spectacular achievement hung on a remarkable performance by Savage. Like Barton’s startling artistic vision, Blaze is a masterpiece.

The film reeks of the authentic stuff of jazz, smoky with atmosphere and all as blue as a Gauloise packet.

Stripped to a minimum of editorializing (but, like "The Hurt Locker," flush with sympathy), this Afghanistan-shot war documentary takes its cues from the unblinking style of cinema verité.

The level of brainwashing, privation and systemic abuse makes for an enraging, confronting watch, but it’s refreshingly focused on the people, rather than geopolitics. Just like for its two fleeing families, Beyond Utopia is an emotional journey.

As always, Tarkovsky conjures images like you've never seen before; and as a journey to the heart of darkness, it's a good deal more persuasive than Coppola's.

Rousing, devastating, invigorating, painful, joyful, soulful--all those adjectives don’t even begin to describe Passing Strange, but it’s a start.

Meek's Cutoff has found its passionate defenders, those who admire it almost because of its meandering, heavily politicized nature. Yet you might try it-and try it again-and still only grab a handful of dust.

Coogler, who grew up in the same neighborhoods as Grant, evokes a tangible sense of place, and his staging of the climactic incident hits like a fist in the gut. It’s not enough to wipe out his reduction of this real-life figure into a composite-character martyr or the lukewarm filmmaking that’s come before, even if you’re left shaken all the same.

I’m Still Here takes you right into the machinery of a repressive regime, showing just enough of its dank jail cells and casual cruelties without overwhelming its deeper story of loss.

Ironically, the very slickness of the film and the attention grabbing 'sensitivity' of Hans Zimmer's score at times become intrusive. Essential viewing, none the less.

Witty, warm, but never sentimental, it also benefits from being set in the fading glories of the resort town of the title: grand seaside facades behind which lie more mundane realities, surrounded by decay and demolition.

It doesn’t all work: The pace can feel a little slow, and there are points where Park tries to have his tasty feminist cake and eat it too. But mostly, this is smart, sumptuous and wonderfully indulgent.

The effect is eerie, profound and emotional. As a mirror back onto humanity’s foibles and criminal excesses, EO is the perfect heir to Bresson’s long-suffering Balthazar.

Another gem (given his consistency in style and subject, how could it not be? ); the atypically emphatic music alone disappoints. [06 Aug 2003, p.74]

The pace is so plodding, and the general effect so stultifyingly unsubtle, that one is left impressed only by the fine landscape photography and Dean's surprisingly convincing portrayal of a middle-aged man.

Fortunately the story of an alternative future is realised with such visual imagination and sparky humour that it's only half way through that the plot's weaknesses become apparent

Though Lee's deft expertise keeps things pacy and (mostly) plausible, the material can't avoid a certain predictability and, in the end, a preachy sentimentality.

It’s uncompromising. It’s disturbing. But it’s also deeply human, allowing for many glimpses of human kindness and human frailty beyond a wall of anonymity and pain.

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is full of delights, poignant, peppery and plain life-enhancing. For anyone navigating the rocky journey into young adulthood, or any parent trying to help, it’ll feel like a hand stretched out in solidarity. Just like Judy Blume intended.

It’s full of symmetrical Anderson-like compositions, memorable characters and offbeat laughs. And stitched in are some smart, fly-on-the-wall observations about the often-abrasive relationship between capitalism and tradition too.

First-time director Shaka King stages Hampton’s fiery speeches with a crackle and energy you can practically taste. He also has a nice eye for Scorsesian violence too, knowing when to lean into his film’s crime thriller elements, and when not to.

With excellent performances (Davis and Pollack in particular), it's his finest film since "Hannah and Her Sisters."

This recasting of The Servant as a war film, with Courtenay playing the working-class deserter whose helplessness traps the liberal middle-class officer (Bogarde) assigned to defend him at his court-martial, fails precisely because the sexual element in the relationship, so explicit in The Servant, is so repressed.

It sits at the mature end of Tarantino’s work, bringing his tongue-in-cheek storytelling together with exquisite craft and killer lead performances from Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio. And yet, it’s still very much a Tarantino film, trading in genuine emotion one minute, unapolegetically silly the next.

Anderson's romantic fantasia is after something much more complicated and profound-an ever-renewing balance between the hopes of youth and the disappointments of age.

Horse Money is an ordeal, but you’ll be glad that Costa was there to help Ventura’s words find their way through the cracks.

Appropriately operatic, Chen's visually spectacular epic is sumptuous in every respect. Intelligent, enthralling, rhapsodic.

You’ll get several movies for the price of a single ticket in Ryan Coogler’s (Creed) period drama-thriller-romance-musical Sinners. And while some of these disparate elements are more successful than others, the combination is audacious enough to leave you simultaneously awed and overwhelmed by his outsized ambitions.

Few cinema artists have delved into their own lives and emotions with such ruthlessness and with such moving results.

This intelligent, honest documentary explores his complex personality without getting tacky or tabloidy, or ignoring McQueen’s dark side.

Humane to the last, Earth Mama is a vital but all-too-rare exploration of Black motherhood struggling on the margins of American society. Hopefully, there’ll be many more to come.

Actor-turned-director Olivia Wilde (shockingly, this is her behind-the-camera feature debut) shows off something rarer than technique or comic timing. She’s got loads of compassion and has somehow managed to make a high-school movie without villains.

Tragically, desperately funny: this adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's novel is John Huston's best film for many years.

The cast lend the film an authority that Yates' curiously pedestrian approach fails to provide, and Mitchum's agonies over codes of underworld honour segue perfectly into his subsequent explorations of loyalty and obligation in The Yakuza.

With no formal film training, Satter has crafted a claustrophobic thriller packed with such nail-biting tension there should be an emergency manicurist waiting outside each cinema.

Perhaps marginally less beguiling than Great Expectations, but still a moving and enjoyable account of Dickens' masterpiece, which gets off to a memorable start with Oliver's pregnant mother battling through the storm to reach the safety of the workhouse.

Quietly epic and sad but never sentimental.

Much will depend on how far you’re willing to go with the wild swings the film takes in its second half, but if you’re down for a trip, Sirat is The Wages of Fear meets The Vanishing on shrooms; startlingly original, jarringly hilarious and deeply disturbing.

It clocks in at three hours but not a scene feels superfluous as its central quartet – dad, mum, two teenage daughters – squabble, fall out and finally implode in a subversive final act.

Admirers of Playtime won't be too disappointed, but for the Tati heretic it's a long, slow haul between the occasional brilliant gag.

For all Kurosawa's splendidly colourful recreation of 16th century Japan, and though Nakadai's performance is impressive enough, it's all ultimately rather empty and tedious; it could easily have been cut by almost an hour, while the grating Morricone-like score only serves to underline the fact that the director fails to achieve the emotional force of his finest work.

In combining video, surveillance footage and her own 8mm family memories, Heart of a Dog quickly accesses a realm of ideas that vault it far higher than mere sentiment would allow.

[Farhadi and cowriter Mani Haghighi] prove to be stronger on atmosphere than on structure, aided by crisp, unnerving camerawork.

Inevitably softened by hints of self-congratulation concerning the success of Woodward and Bernstein's uncovering of the Watergate affair, Pakula's film is nevertheless remarkably intelligent, working both as an effective thriller (even though we know the outcome of their investigations) and as a virtually abstract charting of the dark corridors of corruption and power.

The movie's success lies in Huston's very sure manipulation of mood and tone, somehow connecting black comedy, tongue-in-cheek acting, heavy irony, and even high camp into a coherent story.

The supporting cast is flawless, with a special mention owed to Brad Dourif as poor, doomed Billy Bibbit. But the script lacks the woozy, otherworldly subtlety of Kesey’s book, relying instead on pop psychology and finger-pointing: once again, it turns out women are to blame for pretty much everything.

The abiding memories of Don't Look Back are lack of privacy, dull cliques, stumble-drunkenness, very insecure British artists (Price, Donovan), and Dylan's bored, amused sparring with anyone trying to point him in the direction of Damascus.

The film’s subject is almost too horrible to contemplate, but it finds a way to space out the blows without softening them.

It remains as intelligent and provocative as ever, bearing years of conceptual dreaming.

Occasionally too busy and loose with its logical rigor, Toy Story 4 doesn’t quite connect all the dots. Still, the film earns a distinct spot in the chain, foregrounding Bob Pauley’s pristinely lit production design, one that showcases a kaleidoscopic carnival and a dusty antique shop swarming with hilariously nightmarish ventriloquist dummies.

The story is a complex and potentially ongoing one – Simmons has since moved to Bali, which has no extradition treaty with the US, while Reid has offered an apology of sorts – but its takeaways are much easier to parse: women like Dixon must be believed, empowered and supported. On the Record isn’t an easy watch but it’s an important one.

The White Ribbon comes dangerously--wonderfully?--close to playing like an evil-kid flick.

Graced with a throbbing orchestral score from Philip Glass and John Bailey’s luminous photography, this is appropriately monumental filmmaking.

Surprisingly dry and droll. Aldous Huxley's contribution to the script undoubtedly helped, but it is the cast which carries it.

The editing is sharp and director Jon M Chu, who captured Singapore as a celebratory melting pot in Crazy Rich Asians, repeats the trick for New York, packing a tonne of warmth and summery vibes into every shot.

This film is about wonder, not balance, and it turns us delirious in the white heat of this pair’s chaotic, unflinching passion.

A remarkably assured debut for Coen, formerly assistant editor on The Evil Dead.

Organizing the mercurial emotions and tics is director Joachim Trier, making good on the promise of his 2006 feature debut, the lit-related drama Reprise. This one's even better-it's about the honesty that often takes root in survivors, a rarely explored subject-but Oslo, August 31st is not an easy film.

Like Nomadland, another film that maps out rocky terrain with impressionistic grace, Hamnet is a deep-felt ode to loss and resilience. Zhao doesn’t just tell you about the healing power of art, she shows you. Prepare your tear ducts accordingly.

The Witch is one of the most genuinely unnerving horror films in recent memory because Eggers has the guts to earn your fear.

As time-travel action films go, here's one that's brainy, stylish and carries itself with B-flick modesty - all of which feels like some kind of alchemy.

The film doesn’t quite cut loose to hit emotional high notes, but Regina Spektor’s velvety cover of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” poignantly completes a sweet, generous film.

There is always an interesting tension in Cameron's work between masculine and feminine qualities. When it finally hits the fan here, we're in for the mother of all battles.

In retrospect, this adaptation of John Braine's Bradford-set novel, with its moral melodramatics as Laurence Harvey cheats his way to success (a good marriage) via the death of his 'true love' and the bed of his mistress (Signoret), may not stand the test of time. But it remains intriguing as a sort of Brief Encounter, '50s-style.

Coming after her uneven "We Need to Talk About Kevin," Ramsay’s latest — a complete return to form — reminds us of a hugely audacious and imaginative talent, one that only needs to find the right material to glitter, darkly.

Lowery is committing to nothing less than the scope of eternity; frankly, sometimes it feels as much. But by doing so, he does more to explore supernatural sadness than any thriller I can think of. He’s crafted something strange and wonderful, with a romantic metaphysics all its own.

The Square offers more than just pictures of a revolution; it lets you into the mind-set of those fighting for their future, and that makes all the difference.

It’s a lot of plot for one sitting, but Widows will remind you of how massively entertaining crime movies can be, especially when they’re animated by the spirit of cool-headed capability, on and offscreen.

It gets far closer to the sights, sounds, smells and rhythms of Soweto life than an entire Attenborough of white liberal movies. Needless to say, it's banned from SA cinema screens.

It’s a bleakly familiar message for our times.

Ozu's pessimism is deeply reactionary, and the idiosyncrasy of his methods is more interesting for its exoticism than anything else; but anyone who finds the socio-psychological problems of post-war Japan engaging will find the movie both fascinating and rather moving, simply as evidence.

The twist at the end is devastating, forcing you to view the film as a character study rather than a thriller, which places it in the Detective Story and The Offence bag...Gripping, though.

The real strength of Cohen’s occasionally didactic drama, though, is in the way the film redirects your focus to the periphery and reminds you of the richness that resides there. It was an achievement Bruegel mastered early on. And it’s what makes Museum Hours its own work of art.

This is an exquisite portrait of a family navigating the wreckage imparted to them by one of their own.

Let those who come to the theater counting American flags get incensed over nothing. They’ll miss something more provocative: a moment when the nation pursued excellence and, in turn, was celebrated for how smart it could be, and how big it could dream.

From the slam-bang direction to the relentless pace to the not-a-word-wasted dialogue and even the driving synth score, everything else about The Terminator just works.

As so often with adaptations of Williams, it frequently errs on the side of overstatement and pretension, but still remains immensely enjoyable as a piece of cod-Freudian codswallop.

Sprung from a 1982 French graphic novel and bearing its era’s trickle-down tensions, Snowpiercer is a headlong rush into conceptual lunacy — but you’ll love it anyway.

While some episodes are protracted, many are unforgettably funny, wonderfully observed, and always technically brilliant.

A superbly crafted melodrama, even if it never manages to top the moody montage with which it opens.

There is so much to like and admire in Edwards' intricate comedy about sexual identity which is neither vulgar nor preachy, combining a Clouseau-esque bedroom farce - and the prospect of characters coming out of the closet in all possible ways - with a convincing love story and just enough show-stopping musical numbers...Don't miss this one. It sends sparks.