Foster and McKenzie thoroughly convince in the hands of Granik, who moulds a subtle, assured, and often powerful tale.

Mackenzie goes western in satisfying style, while Bridges, Pine and Foster bring true grit to Sheridan’s tight script.

A funny, sad, bawdy, beautiful concoction that will haunt and provoke in equal measure.

A timely, inspiring parable of protest, directed with sinewy style and driven by Braga’s rock-solid lead performance.

Confident, assured and athletic filmmaking. And with Boseman on such dignified, dynamic form, his Infinity War return can’t come soon enough.

Colm Tóibín’s bitter-sweet novel of the Irish expat experience brought impeccably to the screen by Crowley and Hornby, with Saoirse Ronan excelling herself in the leaf.

Devoid of the ultra-violence so often associated with Korean cinema, Poetry is quiet and unhurried, making its portrait of social bleakness all the more impactful.

A superlative slice of ’70s social realism.

Iñárritu ditches time-hopping bleakness for a linear, if loopy, satire that buzzes with brio. If Mel Brooks, John Cassavetes and Terry Zwigoff co-directed a superhero movie, this might be it.

The powerful, vanity-free performances are the real thing in this bittersweet biopic.

Panh’s commentary – spoken in French by Randal Douc – searingly sets the context.

With his native Prague standing in for Vienna, Forman's images of icy beauty counterpoint the soaring music and grandstanding performances. [2002 Director's Cut]

Will Richard E Grant ever get a better role than bitter thespian Withnail? Has anyone devised a more iconic comic notion than the Camberwell Carrot? Has any screenplay combined so many quotable lines with such tear-jerking pathos or blatant homophobia?

Between bouts of partying and freeform dancing, newcomer Park Ji-min brings a near-musical virtuosity to this questing character piece.

Alluring and unnerving, Lynch’s horror-show reminds us how much cinema misses him. Watts is electric, too.

Rosi offers a simple, stark contrast between quiet moments of everyday life and tragedy as mass fleeing results in sunken boats, horrific injuries and death.

McQuarrie brings grace and grit, and Cruise brings it, period. This quick-witted, fleet-footed franchise shows no sign of flagging.

The greatest trick he pulls is making you think he’s not genuine: beneath befuddling, bracing digressions on Picasso, Howard Hughes, biography, confidence tricks, growing beards and “girl-watching” lies a searching interrogation of ideas of authorship.

Chadwick Boseman gives this muscular film, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, added punch and poignancy.

The drifty, dream-punctuated second half might puzzle younger kids, though its universal themes and visual gags are perfectly all-ages appropriate. As is the film’s sweet, un-snarky tone, free from sly Futurama satire or Bojack Horseman raunch.

With it comes admission into a stunning world of majesty and savagery; shame about the overbearing Philip Glass score.

[Bertrand Tavernier] pays heartfelt tribute to the directors, stars and composers who ignited his passion.

Another shrewdly gauged study of our capacity for deception and self-deception from A Separation’s auteur. Emotionally devastating.

Steeped in the bitter political divisions of the Civil War, Spielberg's thrilling film about hardwon freedoms is immersed in its own time, but speaks eloquently to ours.

Backed by a sparing Philip Glass score, Elena eloquently shows how, in modern Russia, even family relationships are at the mercy of business.

With no 3D, no friends and no hope, Redford and Chandor show how survivalist instincts can stoke thrilling, thoughtful cinema. If Gravity grabbed you, hop aboard and hold tight.

McDonagh’s latest is a worthy In Bruges reunion: smart, funny, deeply felt.

A tour-de-force turn from Toni Collette powers one of the most affecting horrors in recent memory. Genuinely unsettling in a way few genre efforts are: you’ve been warned.

Good enough to survive evoking "Bicycle Thieves" and "The 400 Blows," this small story contains universal truths, told with irresistible force.

A joyful, trippy new incarnation of Spider-Man that you didn’t know you needed, brimming with wit, soul and jaw-dropping visuals.

A truly cerebral fear flick, edgy, brooding, packing the power to freeze your bones and claim your sleepless thoughts at two in the morning.

The film’s power lies in its use of archive footage, voiceover and even Ebert’s computerised speech translator to keep the writer’s voice alive.

Del Toro’s Valentine to boundary-crossing love pours from the screen in ravishing torrents of feeling and style. And Hawkins is sublime.

A masterpiece of animation and imagination.

It won’t be for everyone, but Burgundy is rich, dark and could well lead to intoxication.

A minor-key appraisal of modern marriage that manages to be funny, sad and, sadly, true – just don’t watch it on your anniversary.

A prize-winning page-turner becomes a moving, harrowing and redemptive drama about the ties that bind a mother to her child. Be warned: one box of tissues may not be enough.

A pitch-perfect performance from Dern graces Alexander Payne’s latest roadmovie – another bittersweet meditation on the sad, comic futility of life.

Visually astonishing, emotionally daring, this spectacular sequel has enough wit, imagination and thrills to fill several worlds. But prepare to be left hanging till the sequel hits screens.

The drama gets overwrought but Shults stages the fallout artfully, stressing choppy montages and a nerve-rattling sound mix as tensions erupt.

A fun, heart-warming adventure.

Dudok de Wit and Ghibli have birthed a pan-continental marvel: a fable-cum-fantasy of a life adrift, aching with tender beauty and awed by nature’s extremes.

This blistering, Oscar-nominated documentary tells how its members refused to let patients become pariahs.

This chilly thriller is another highly accomplished feature to add to a formidable body of work.

Reichardt and Williams reunite to muted effect to create a portrait of an artist that feels a little unfinished.

Not only has director Christian Petzold assembled a fascinating hill of beans, but there's a moonlit scene that almost alone justifies his Silver Bear win at Berlin.

Evading easy categorisation, writer/director Jane Schoenbrun’s horror-hued follow-up to We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) can be read as a transgender allegory, one that compellingly explores the idea of being born into one existence, feeling you should be living a different one, but not knowing how to cross over to this other life where it seems you would be happier.

The film thrives on fascinating juxtapositions, Haynes striking a keen balance between true-life complexities and theatrical melodrama.

Splashes of overstatement aside, the ambition intoxicates.

Mixing a rom-coma into the romcom, this smart, sweet and highly personal love story finds a winning formula.

Combining laughs and thrills with plenty of verve, Ben Affleck continues his smart directorial career with a stylish, gripping hostage drama.

With potent performers and poetic visuals, Anderson has made the boldest American picture of the year. Its strangeness can be hard to process, but this is a shattering study of the impossibility of recovering the past.

One of [Hawks'] finest pictures: a swoony saga of fatalistic flyboys and the women who try to keep their feet on the ground.

Paul Schrader’s best for 20 years. A stunning study of one man’s flaws and an apocalyptic vision of mankind’s fate.

Crime, romance, fast cars, hot tunes... slicker than your chrome hubcaps, Baby Driver is the summer’s coolest movie.

It’s packed with in-jokes and lightly disguised portraits of real-life Tinseltown figures; Douglas’ character is reckoned to be across between David O.Selznick and Vallewton. But even without a knowledge of the background, this is sharp, cynical fun.

FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), brainiac cannibal Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) and tackle-tucking serial killer Jame Gumb (Ted Levine) make for one of cinema’s great ménages à trois.

Despite its hard-scrabble setting, eco-gloominess and dystopian story, this dark fairytale is engagingly vivid and life-affirming. An ambitious love letter to a Louisiana way of life that's being literally washed away.

It explores two of the filmmaker’s pet themes – the impossibility of true communication, the futility of art – and is set against the Vietnam War. Extraordinary.

The Double Life of Véronique makes the familiar seem extraordinary and memorably conjures up the sense of metaphysical forces guiding its characters’ everyday lives.

While the film occasionally pushes you to feel as deeply as Benji, something it can’t quite pull off, there is a profundity to David and Benji’s pilgrimage that leaves an unmistakable impression.

Sparse and intricate, it’s a study of judgement, of ‘honour’, of Emad’s own fragile masculinity; one paralleled cleverly by his role in a production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.

It lacks the subtlety of Night of the Living Dead, but deftly balances laughs and bloody thrills.

Spielberg lovingly restages the classic musical – but while the songs still soar, it feels more indulgent than essential.

Kapadia lays bare the tragedy of Winehouse’s story. It’s a tough, unfiltered watch but a thoughtful, thorough, feeling one.

As their early fights give way to growing respect, it’s a beautifully calibrated relationship, with small moments gradually building into something much bigger. A gem.

The footage – discoveries made by the Allies in the liberated Nazi camps during 1945 – is graphic, terrible, unforgettable.

There's much to relish here: a script which mixes pungent humour and tension, the pervading atmosphere of corruption and obsession, and a perfectly judged, tragically stoical performance from the sleepy-eyed Mitchum, not to forget Nicholas Musuraca's suitably shadowy cinematography.

It’s great to see a gritty girl-gang story that’s not a fingerwagging cautionary tale, or a grrrlpower fantasy. Sciamma finishes her coming-of-age trilogy on a high note.

Plays like an elegy for the demise of the cool, thick with the small-hours allure of addiction and infatuation but smart enough to see clearly.

Compared to the average family-friendly animation, this is very much an upgrade.

Whilst there is plenty of swordplay involved, it's the war of words and ideals that really captures the imagination here.

Here is a film where every frame feels individually designed, with saturated colour and symmetry reflecting the texture and natural wonder of the environment.

A visually stunning directorial debut that’s too intimidated by the original source material to be effective.

Beautifully animated, scored and written, Barras’ little movie has a big heart. C’est fantastique.

A surreal head-scratcher that'd make Luis Buñuel smile, it may not be perfectly formed, but there's no denying its fierce originality.

Let it be said that it’s such a fearless, fierce, menacing turn that comparisons with Jack Nicholson don’t come into it. This is the definitive Joker.

Everybody in Everybody smashes it out the park, playing dreamers who exhibit a voracious lust for life as they quest for identity. Well, these actors might have found theirs – the next generation of leading men.

Living up to the imposing enormity of its title, this doc stimulates both conscience and senses.

For all its Swedish trimmings, the long, syrup-slow takes are unmistakably Tarkovsky’s, and it’s these that provide this arthouse disaster movie with its mesmerising power.

Whimsy with a capital W that unleashes Anderson’s arsenal of quirks. Truly marvellous medicine for fans, but could be a broken record for those who aren’t.

Much of The Tree Of Life’s beauty is in its yearning and wonder. It’s an extraordinary grasping stretch – across space and time – to touch what will always be just out of our reach. It’s a captivating, unmissable experience.

A master filmmaker mines cinema’s glamorous past in a nostalgic neo-noir you don’t so much watch as surrender to.

While some might have preferred this story with its edges unsmoothed, The Fabelmans is better viewed as the tale of how Spielberg’s personal values inform his every artistic decision, and how he became who he is: The Greatest Showman On Earth.

A ravishing period piece that simmers with sexual tension while pulling off some dazzling narrative gymnastics.

What emerges is as riveting as it is revelatory.

In an era when many schoolkids are more concerned about gun violence (in the US), cyberbullying and sending nudes than the seemingly more old-fashioned growing pains of who you are and whether the popular boy fancies you, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. is a welcome, nostalgic throwback to simpler times.

Between its genre know-how and furious anger, King’s biopic makes damn sure you feel the weight of Hampton’s loss – and the need for his legacy to be honoured.

Tarantino’s ode to Hollywood is his best since "Jackie Brown"; an evocative and disarmingly heartfelt LA story, capped by a finale you won’t forget.’

The characters are unfailingly polite, whatever their grievances, and there isn’t a single false note in this generous, affectionate portrait of people making the best of their situation.

Fleet, funny, impeccably orchestrated: whimsical Wes returns on top of his game. Non-fans might call it over-familiar comfort cinema but with the craft so loving and new elements so well-integrated, his singular pitch remains a thing to cherish.

Fukada contrasts understated realism with haunting, dreamlike images. Unsettling and morally complex.

Playing the mental-hospital firebrand who rebels against monstrous Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher), Nicholson seduces in an anti-establishment classic with a gut-punch exit.

Whether you think it's pretentious or profound, you can't deny that Space Odyssey is a significant landmark in the history of cinema. It's also, as the original posters proclaimed, "the ultimate trip..."

Making his feature debut after directing a couple of Pixar shorts and co-writing Inside Out, Josh Cooley proves there’s life beyond the trilogy.

Anders Danielsen Lie gives a compelling, deep-etched lead turn, and you'll find yourself drawn in as he searches for a reason to continue living.

Robert Eggers’ measured, meticulous debut builds into one of the most genuinely scary horror movies of recent years.

The best sci-fi movie since "Moon." The best time-travel yarn since "12 Monkeys." And one of the best films of 2012. You'll immediately want to see it again.