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“... Ever go​ to the movies?’ the gangster says to the waiter in a small-town diner. ‘Once in a while,’ the waiter replies. ‘You ought to go to the movies more,’ the gangster says. ‘The movies are fine for a bright boy like you.’ The gangster has just announced that he and his companion are going to kill someone who usually eats at the diner ...”

“... Joel and Ethan Coen often look like moviemakers in search of a movie; as if their perfect film were waiting for them out there and they had to do something while they were looking for it. What else could have driven them to their 2004 remake of the Ealing comedy The Ladykillers? Even if Tom Hanks is funnier in that film than our idea of Tom Hanks ought to allow, he’s not Alec Guinness ...”

“... If the world should end tomorrow,’ James Agee wrote in the Nation in 1947, ‘this film would furnish one of the more appropriate epitaphs: a sad, magnificent summing-up of a night city.’ A little earlier and in another paper he had called the film’s second part ‘half-baked’, and what’s interesting is that there is no real contradiction between the points of view ...”

“... The devil is in the detail, they say, and this is certainly the case with the films of Robert Bresson. And if the devil is there, God can’t be far away. Or can he? These are very curious details, bits of the real but not part of any attempt at realism, pieces of a puzzle that may not even exist. Feet, legs, hands, sand, straw, mud, laceless old shoes; dulled or hallucinating faces staring past the camera at some lost version of infinity; countless shots of the backs of persons walking away from us, or figures whose heads are out of the frame most of the time; sound effects that threaten to take over the whole movie; an old tweed suit that moves us far more than the fake blood on a man’s face; passing cars that are more interesting than a couple going through the motions of an embrace in the foreground; acting that is not so much unprofessional as non-existent, a mere reciting of lines from a too perfectly written book ...”

“... When I left the cinema I had a title of Flannery O’Connor’s running in my head: A Good Man Is Hard to Find. But there is another title that provides a much better clue to the moral preoccupations of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s first full-length film, The Lives of Others: Brecht’s Good Person of Szechuan. It was Brecht, too, who in response to the distribution of a leaflet announcing (in 1953) that the people of the DDR had ‘forfeited the confidence of the government’ wondered with mock innocence: Would it not be easier In that case for the government To dissolve the people And elect another? ‘You are a good person,’ an actress says to a Stasi captain in the film: ‘Sie sind ein guter Mensch ...”

“... Your town,’ the TV presenter says to her guest on a live talk show, ‘has the highest incidence of insanity in the whole of Spain. Do you think this fact explains the story you are about to tell us?’ The guest, as it happens, isn’t about to tell a story at all, since she suddenly decides not to spill her local beans and walks off the set. But we’re already laughing at the mock sociology of the question, and since it occurs about two-thirds of the way through Pedro Almodóvar’s new film, Volver, we know better than to take it as mere filling, or even as offering any sort of information ...”

“... As the credits appear at the end of the movie, it turns abruptly into what it was always longing to be: a musical. The bright colours and the noise become decor and disco. The railway station, once the location of panic and poverty and violence, becomes scenery. The beat is heavy and fast, the hero and heroine line up together, happily stomping and pumping in the front row of a vast dancing crowd; everyone’s moves are vivid and complicated and beautifully choreographed ...”

“... A spectre is haunting the action film these days. It’s not violence. There is nothing spectral about the ubiquitous crashes and bangs, the insistent maiming and killing of persons, the wholesale destruction of posh cars and real estate. The spectre is sorrow. From Batman to James Bond, every hero is grieving, stricken by a loss from which he can’t recover, whether of parents, mistress, wife or daughter ...”

“... The Class, known in France as Entre les murs, literally ‘between the walls’, more colloquially ‘inside’, as of a prison or a fortress or a city, is an intelligent, subdued film that sets out to trouble us. It certainly succeeded with me, but I’m not entirely sure I got the right trouble. There is a neat little irony in the movie’s being nominated for an Oscar as best foreign film because it was foreign before it reached the Academy’s attention; it’s all about foreignness in France ...”

“... Kathryn Bigelow’s​ impressive new film, Detroit, is full of disturbing violence, but its most disturbing moment is entirely non-violent. It comes too late in the film to help in any way, and just in time to worry us. It is a sentence on a title card explaining that some of the facts in the historical situation at the heart of the film are still in dispute ...”

“... Alfonso Cuarón​ likes to travel in his films: to outer space in Gravity (2013), to Hogwarts in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), to a bleak future world in Children of Men (2006). But in Roma he stays at home, or goes back home: to Mexico, to the past, to the family. The title may not suggest home to many of us: we’re not bound to know that Roma is the name of a neighbourhood in Mexico City, any more than we have to remember that Petty France is in London and Little Italy in New York ...”

“... Sartre​ published his novel Nausea in 1938. His plays The Flies and No Exit were first performed in 1943 and 1944, and Being and Nothingness appeared in 1943. This material is enough to eclipse almost anything and Sartre’s volume of short stories from 1939, The Wall, has not entirely escaped this fate – no doubt because, apart from the competition, we have been taught to think of Sartre as someone who uses fiction philosophically rather than someone who, let’s say, just writes it ...”

“... clearly you don’t have the brains of a seven-year-old.’ There is the dinner party for Michael Jackson at Hepburn’s New York townhouse, where the singer is silent on all topics except the pleasure he has in watching his pet boa constrictor eat small rodents. And there is the saga of Warren Beatty, with Berg’s help, recruiting Hepburn for Love ...”

“... Foolish Things’. The table was a wreck. Bleared glasses stood Half-empty, bottoms stuck to wood. Cigarette stubs: Ashes: Bits of bread: Bottles leaning, Prostrate, Dead. A pink stocking: a corkscrew: A powder puff: a French-heeled shoe: Candle-grease. A dirty cup. An agate saucepan, bottom up. The plot of The Wild Party is simple and elegant. Queenie ...”

“... The heart of Young Soul Rebels, visually and dramatically, is a scene in an East London club, noisy, cheerful, full of glitter and bounce. Punk and soul music alternate on the disco deck; punk and soul styles are jumbled on the dance floor. Men and women, black and white, gays and straights, mix easily if loudly, having a good time. Two men are seen kissing, but only a newcomer, and our camera, linger over the event ...”