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“... Andrei Tarkovsky​ made his last two films, Nostalghia and The Sacrifice, in Italy and Sweden, and never returned to Russia. He died in Paris in 1986, aged 54. He was out of favour with the Soviet authorities then, later lionised as a master, and placed in the company of Eisenstein and Pudovkin, though his approach to film can seem antithetical to theirs ...”

“... Horror movies are often about materialisation in a very particular sense, the grisly acting out of fears and phobias that in daily life are kept safely (if painfully and disastrously) in the mind. No director realises this more clearly than David Cronenberg. He is best known no doubt for The Fly (1986), Dead Ringers (1988) and his much vilified Crash (1996), but some of us have a soft spot, if that’s the term, for his early work The Brood (1979), a classic instance of the acting-out theory ...”

“... There are several excellent reasons for not wanting to make a film based on a book called Blindness, and Fernando Meirelles knows them all. But knowing them, and even treating them as challenges, is not quite the same as putting them to rest. Saramago’s novel (1995) is sly, oblique, consistent in its courtship of cliché, an apparent allegory that can’t be allegorised ...”

“... Gus Van Sant’s new film, Milk, is thoughtful, patient, funny and touching, and both Sean Penn and James Franco should get Oscars, but it doesn’t answer the questions any biopic raises for me: what’s it for and why now? Or perhaps it does have the answers, but we have to do our own digging for them. Harvey Milk was an elected official of the city of San Francisco, said to be the first openly gay man to hold public office in the United States ...”

“... The spacecraft hangs above Johannesburg, like a relic from Star Wars that couldn’t find the parking dock. It manages to look both otherworldly and scruffy, battered, rusting. Unplugged cables dangle down like weeds. It isn’t going anywhere, it can’t go anywhere. No one in the movie is very interested in the spacecraft, it just hovers like persistent bad weather ...”

“... Asghar Farhadi’s​  The Salesman is too poised and immaculate for its own good, but full of disturbing undercurrents all the same. Of course, since the film has just won the director his second Oscar – the first was for A Separation (2011) – we could also say it knows exactly what’s good for it, but the two thoughts are perhaps not entirely opposed ...”

“... One​ of the lasting impressions left by Abel Gance’s film Napoléon (1927), now showing in a new, digitally remastered print at the BFI and the Lumière, is that it consists solely of close-ups and crowd scenes. This impression is too simple, but it doesn’t go away when you correct it with the modest, more diffuse truth. There are shots that do not linger on iconic faces, on an agitated Danton, a hazy Joséphine de Beauharnais, an unnamed dying solider, or the ever-present destiny-filled glare of Napoléon himself ...”

“... Good humour​ comes to seem relentless if it isn’t interrupted once in a while, and this is one of the interesting effects of the film De Palma, a feature-length account of the director’s work. It opens with screaming orchestral music over the title, followed by a clip from the beginning of Hitchcock’s Vertigo – James Stewart climbing onto the roof from which his colleague is about to fall to his death ...”

“... One of the​ remarkable things about Alain Resnais’s film Muriel (1963), now released on Blu-Ray and DVD in a new print by Criterion, is that it doesn’t grow on you. It’s just as strange on a second or third viewing as on the first, and part of the reason is its cosy, well-dressed look. The characters wear fur-coats, silk scarves; they seem constantly on some sort of bourgeois parade – well, their hair gets ruffled when they are really upset – but almost nothing in their lives corresponds to this orderly image ...”

“... A middle-aged man​ looks insistently at a young woman. He doesn’t speak. He is smiling slightly, playing with her, but also seeking to trouble her. After a moment she says: ‘If you want to have a staring contest with me, you will lose.’ After a much longer moment he laughs. Has he found his match? Does she understand him, or does she just know how to play this particular game? The film in which this scene occurs, and in which a whole series of versions of it are offered to us, is Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, hailed as a masterpiece by some critics and viewers and deemed an annoying waste of time by others ...”

“... There is​ something very Far Eastern about this,’ William Empson says in Some Versions of Pastoral, meaning the manner of Marvell’s poem ‘The Garden’. The remark is mildly intriguing but pretty loose, and even if we think of Empson as having the thought while he lectured to his Japanese students before he wrote it down, the Orient still seems stereotyped and far away ...”

“... The​ first feature-length film by RaMell Ross, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, has been praised for creating a new genre within the documentary form and evoking with unusual clarity the life of a particular community. I wouldn’t dispute the general sense of these claims, but there is something too grand and final about them, an implication that we know what the film is about and how it works ...”

“... Spike Lee​ , as befits a film school graduate, is a master of montage. His cuts and juxtapositions often say more than his dialogue does, perhaps more than any dialogue could. This is especially marked in BlacKkKlansman, which has been widely hailed as Lee’s return to form after a spell in the movie wilderness. The film opens with a shot of a railway yard littered with bodies, wounded, dead and dying ...”

“... The film​ begins with some anxious jokes about the changing times. The ancien régime is mentioned, meaning both the political order before the Revolution and yesterday’s state of play in French publishing and digital media. The possibility is floated that Twitter will usher in a new golden age of the epigram, make brevity the soul of wit again, rather than give people permission to ramble for ever in short bursts ...”

“... The meanings​ of its title sit a little heavily on I’m Thinking of Ending Things, originally a novel by Iain Reid, which Charlie Kaufman has now adapted as a movie (on Netflix). Out of context, I’m Thinking of Ending Things strongly suggests the possibility of suicide. In context too, as it happens. However, in both Reid and Kaufman’s versions it also evokes time, ageing, dementia, loss, what things look like before they go ...”