Whalefall works because it gets beneath your skin. The ocean’s vast, indifferent darkness becomes a physical expression of the protagonist’s emotional predicament, and the film’s extraordinary visuals make the experience feel tactile enough to tighten every muscle in your body.

Clayface has a wonderfully nasty groove and feels like another fractured reflection of the same old Gotham tragedy: a person trying to survive trauma by becoming something else.

Eleanor leaves us with something more intimate than a behind-the-scenes record: a mother watching her daughter make a movie, and making another one alongside her.

Three hundred coyotes in waistcoats march through a mountain range; somebody moved every one of those legs by hand, one frame at a time, and then did it again. I was lost in the story when that shot arrived and it threw me straight out of it, which is the problem and the glory of Wildwood in a single image.

There’s a difference between a bad film and a bad time, and Verity is an excellent bad time.

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger is enormous, strange, technically dazzling and so determined to be itself that even its misfires have a certain electricity.

Matt Johnson’s Tony understands more than a conventional coming-of-age story, it is a film about a young man discovering, with increasing discomfort, just how little he knows.

The monsters are tactile, weird and genuinely disgusting, and Cregger lets them stay disgusting instead of cutting away. Hays and Ryan Holladay’s score does the synth-pulse thing that Carpenter invented, but the intelligence is in the placement.

Lowery’s answer is to refuse the psychological register entirely. Whatever sits unfinished between these two gets expelled as an actual vengeful presence, a thing with intent that has to be dealt with in the room.

Director Padraic McKinley keeps the value front and centre. The most abstract thing in a crime film becomes something with mass that pulls down on a spine.

My grandmother taped Looney Tunes off the TV onto three or four VHS cassettes for the grandkids, and we played them until the tape gave out. Seeing them again, in a courtroom, litigating: the tape is still running.

If a movie glimpses the magic of life, for fractions of seconds, it is worthwhile. “Amziah” is a dose I wasn’t ready for.

Nobody in this house locks anything. There's a pool, there are children, there's a killer renting across the road, and the gate swings free for 10 hours of television. The Bowdens are obsessed with their own security and incapable of practising any.

There are bigger movies, deeper movies and certainly more consequential movies. In the Grey doesn't seem particularly bothered. It arrives. It looks terrific. It moves.

Brand New Day remembers that sometimes the greatest superhero stories are the smallest ones, a kid swinging across a city because someone needs help. The movies finally remembered who Spider-Man is.

Christopher Nolan turns one of the oldest stories ever told into something tactile again. You don't just watch The Odyssey. You feel the weight of timber, salt and exhausted bodies.

Someone has accidentally made Babylon for nine-year-olds.

Sometimes a film's greatest achievement isn't what happens on the screen. It's what happens in your living room the next morning. 

These idiots love each other. That's the stunt that's always been hardest to fake.

About forty percent of Supergirl absolutely rips. It imagines a space western with two compelling young women at its centre and briefly convinces you that's exactly where superhero cinema should be heading. Then it remembers it's a superhero blockbuster.