“... John Turturro​ ’s Fading Gigolo is a delicate movie about indelicate matters. No, wait, perhaps it’s an indelicate movie about delicate matters. The uncertainty does the film no harm but it seems to have prompted critics to simplify their doubts and decide they have seen it all before. It’s true the film owes a lot to Woody Allen, and not just because he has a major acting part in it ...”

“... Asked​ for his response to those critics who saw in The Wolf of Wall Street an undiluted celebration of the bad life – drugs, sex, money, jewels, a very large yacht and expensive suits – Leonardo DiCaprio said: ‘If they don’t get the irony of it, sorry.’ He was right to refute the idea the film is a simple celebration, but there isn’t any irony either ...”

“... Harold Shand​ , the fictional chief mobster in The Long Good Friday (1980), now showing in a restored version at the BFI, is played by Bob Hoskins in one of his great early performances. It’s hard to imagine that another actor could have displayed the required combination of energy and disarray so well. This character’s problem is that he doesn’t know what’s happening to him, and doesn’t even know that he doesn’t know ...”

“... Martians​ have been invading us for longer than most of us can remember; but when did we invade them? Or when did we become certain that there were no Martians to invade or be invaded by? The time setting of the story told by Ridley Scott’s The Martian is scrupulously unmentioned in the film or in the Andy Weir book it is based on, but nerdy fans have figured it out from internal evidence centring on the astral timing of Thanksgiving ...”

“... Georges Franju​ ’s Judex (1963), expertly restored and newly released by Criterion, invites us to time travel of a double kind: into the 1960s, when it was made, into the 1910s, where it is set and where its stylistic loyalties lie. The film was respectfully received when it first appeared – no French critic wanted to attack the man who, with Henri Langlois, had founded the Cinémathèque ...”

“... At​ the centre of a wide shot, near the centre of the film, stands Philip Seymour Hoffman: scruffy, genial, large, mildly enigmatic. He is in a city park, trees all around him, leaves beneath his feet. He is waiting for something, or watching for something. An abduction performed by members of his team, as it happens. But alone there in the shot, he seems to be waiting for us ...”

“... Majestic,​ awesome, sublime. Ah, the triviality of human existence compared to the aloof grandeur of the Alps. Words and thoughts along these lines are what the carefully stereotyped photography of two much discussed new films seem to want to provoke in us. To provoke and then dismiss. The point would be some sort of historical commentary. The romantic sublime left its viewers speechless ...”

“... Andrey Zvyagintsev’s​  Leviathan begins and ends as a harsh parable of the isolated individual’s losing battle against a corrupt, tentacular system. The director himself, in a press release, invites us to look to Hobbes for the meaning of the title. We have swapped our freedom for the security provided by a sovereign state – in this case an illusory exchange ...”

“... There​ are some fine shots of the title thoroughfare in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), a new release from the Criterion Collection. It’s all bushes and darkness and bends in the road, various cars’ tail-lights appearing and disappearing. Anything could happen there, especially since there are some very posh residences among the shrubs ...”

“... Gotta dance,’​ Gene Kelly shouts towards the end of a famous Hollywood movie. He’s right, he doesn’t have any option, he’s in a musical, and he’s been dancing (and singing) since the film started. But that’s not what the words mean for his character. They mean that dancing is his dream and his destiny, he will be nobody if he doesn’t dance ...”

“... Moonlight​ is full of amazing silences, at times almost a silent movie. Until the last section, when it is so obvious what the characters are thinking that they might as well be shouting. As in the Billy Joel song they are sharing a drink they call loneliness but it’s better than drinking alone. The first person we see in the film talks a bit but we learn far more from what we see of him and around him ...”

“... The Americans​ really know how to do things,’ the central character thinks in Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment (1968), now available in an elegant new print. He is a Cuban living in Havana in the days after the Bay of Pigs disaster, but he is not being sarcastic. He is not actually thinking about the Americans at all, and says later in the film that he already knows New York, while the true mystery in his life is what will happen in his own country ...”

“... Leo McCarey’s​  Duck Soup (1933) has one of the cinema’s great moments of sceptical philosophy. Chico and Harpo Marx, both disguised as Groucho, are in Margaret Dumont’s bedroom, though Chico is hiding under the bed. Harpo departs and Chico suddenly appears. Dumont is shocked. Didn’t he just leave? Chico says he didn’t, and Dumont says she saw him with her own eyes ...”

“... Watching​ Astaire and Rogers films again, especially the classic trio of Top Hat (1935), Swing Time (1936) and Shall We Dance (1937), leaves all kinds of old impressions intact. The air is light, the stars are perfectly matched in their plot-driven attempts not to get along with each other except when they’re dancing. Rogers needs to be sulky a lot of the time, but that makes her smile, when it appears, a sort of secret she herself is surprised to have ...”

“... It’s​ 35 years since Blade Runner was released, and we are now very close to 2019, its once futuristic setting. In this framework the sequel seems a bit overdue, and the time of the sequel’s action, 2049, not all that far away. The new movie, directed by Denis Villeneuve, goes out of its way to bypass the first impression and to insist on the second ...”