“This is the stuff of Kafka, of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, or of those recurring dreams you have where you simply can’t get to the corner shop because something always gets in the damn way — except filtered through an American comic sensibility equally indebted to Charlie Kaufman and Mel Brooks.”

“Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeesch’s slowly heart-crushing film tracks this friendship with a perceptive patience that defies many a screenwriting manual and holds us rapt anyway, across a hilly hike of a running time.”

“Being too keen to pin down and define a character, it’s easy for screenwriters to forget that real people’s characters shift over time, often quite dramatically, and that in any case, people act in ways that are supposedly out of character all the time.”

“Polite Society doesn’t trade in dull girlboss platitudes and empowerment binaries; there’s messy, compromised real life here, even when the comedy is at its most loudly heightened.”

“There’s this Book of the Dead, you see, and if you use it to summon the dead, the dead will be, you know, summoned, and guess what, they aren’t just any dead, they are… the evil dead.”

“That the time allotted to said tragedy must still compete with other pressures in the busy, ongoing tapestry of life as it lived gives the film some semblance of the gentle brutality of reality, rather than the sometimes artificial feel of fiction dealing with this kind of subject matter.”

“It’s a lot of movie, in other words, yet it never feels top-heavy or self-important: for a devoutly agnostic study of a Christian mission, it more than once achieves a genuine, shimmery sense of grace.”

“Amanda Kramer’s film isn’t just a cheesily retro grab-bag of reference points, as it fuses an assortment of musical theatre and underground cinema languages for a bracingly contemporary expression of awakened queer desire and expanded gender identity.“

“Rachel is played with typical precision and empathy by the gifted actor Virginie Efira (who you may remember from previous Films of the Week – Benedetta, Madeline Collins or Sibyl).”

“Martin Scorsese’s visually stunning adaptation, one of the greatest of all page-to-screen adaptations, breathes a lovely, resonant life into Wharton’s precise characterisation.“

“The film’s genre is as freely mixed and hybridised as its flavourfully blended, code-switching Afrikaans-English dialogue: it’s a girls’-trip road movie, a high-stakes coming-of-age tale, a detective story and a chase thriller, packing significant heat in all those modes.”

“The Red Shoes isn’t a children’s film at all: it’s that rare, now barely-existent hybrid that presents adult desires and conflicts with such an ebullient spirit of fantasy and ecstasy — saturated in colours that feel, in the moment, previously unseen on screen — that they become urgent and understandable to anyone.”

“This is a tremendously psychologically acute directorial debut from Georgia Oakley, with a fantastically layered and complex performance from McEwen.“

“It discomfits and provokes by bending and breaking the courtroom drama’s structural rules, in turn inviting its audience to consider who the judicial system is designed to benefit and protect.“

“A dumb, fun film in which Gerard Butler plays the impeccably named Brodie Torrance. You know the drill: he’s a scruffy, manly, no-bullshit former RAF bloke, now a commercial pilot relegated to flying crappy routes for a cheapo airline after punching out an uppity passenger. “

“The film [is] more beautiful for being a bit broken, a ludicrous tumble-down monument that gains something from the fact that it’s collapsing here and there, rather than a perfect, impenetrable citadel. “

“Not since Carol has Cate Blanchett got to negotiate this degree of inner turmoil on screen; not since her Oscar-winning turn in Blue Jasmine has a part stretched to both the most icily contained and hotly raging extremes of her range.”

“Inside the first three minutes, Wells plays with film format, POV, realism and timeframe with a lyrical ease and fluidity that calls to mind stalwarts of European arthouse cinema.”

“Apt to dismiss any handmaiden who doesn’t cinch her corset quite tightly enough in the morning, Sissi demands equally punishing rigour in all aspects of life — fastidiously strategising her diet, exercise regime and even her sex life — while simultaneously railing against a courtly, patriarchal lifestyle in which she feels she can’t breathe.”

“The little town of Bedford Falls is so brilliantly realised, so hermetically sealed in its own perfect universe, populated so effectively with such a plausible gallery of humanity, that it enables me to believe that I too live there, for a little while.”