“... There are artfully self-conscious moments in Raúl Ruiz’s Time Regained (1999) which distract us briefly from the film’s amazing achievement: to reveal the last volume of Proust’s intellectual monument (and by implication the rest of the work) for the intricate social soap opera it also is, a universe of stars appropriately represented by Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Béart and others ...”

“... Where is the corpse? Who was the man? Why did this woman die? How did she die? These questions are all raised and answered in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once upon a Time in Anatolia, but they are constantly displaced during the running of the movie by other, more abstract riddles. Why is this film noir so preoccupied with light? Why is it so busy making squalor look beautiful? Is beauty a problem or a dangerous solution? Is it the film’s problem or its subject? We see a lighted room, three men eating ...”

“... I’m not much given to feeling that images make words look poor – often they make them look rich and friendly – but that was certainly my response to two recent viewings of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), to be screened again at the BFI Southbank from 29 April. Of course the words that look poor here are quite particular: the weakly loaded phrases of the screenplay; the large abstractions of propaganda; the miniature conceptual monuments Eisenstein seems to want to create through visual sequences that become de facto propositions ...”

“... The two characters at the centre of Rossellini’s Journey to Italy, seen in a restored print at the BFI Southbank, are so nasty to each other in their half-polite way that you long for them to flare up, throw things, become violent, turn the film into the melodrama it seems to want to be. They don’t, though. When they agree to divorce it’s as if they were ordering a meal in a restaurant they don’t like; and when they embrace at the end of the movie in a notional reconciliation, a rediscovery of their supposed affection for each other, it’s even worse ...”

“... Only God forgives’ could be the motto for many crime stories, starting with Dostoevsky and perhaps earlier. One of the most pointed if least high-toned of its meanings suggests that human forgiveness is bad for business in the underworld, because it undermines discipline and encourages rogue initiatives. Better leave it to God and stick to punishment instead ...”

“... We​ have seen so many other worlds in movies recently that shabby domestic realism, showing the details of a marriage and its break-up, real streets and familiar furniture, can come as something of a shock. The shock is all the greater when the leading characters, like Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, come from those other worlds ...”

“... The great​ Alasdair Gray novel on which Yorgos Lanthimos’s film Poor Things is based is clearly dated and located: the 1880s, Glasgow. The film is more oblique, offering a guessing game made up of costumes, travel by coach and horse, and a reference to Oscar Wilde. The last item is more informative than it sounds, more attentive to cinema and refraction, and a nice touch on the part of the screenwriter, Tony McNamara ...”

“... Mathieu Kassovitz’s​ film La Haine, regarded as a classic in many circles, is currently being shown in UK cinemas to mark the thirtieth anniversary of its release. ‘Classic’ may not be quite the right word for this scary, messy film – it’s about forms of rage that don’t add up to hatred, or indeed to anything – but this may reflect a deficiency in the word rather than the film ...”

“... Luis Buñuel​ worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York between 1939 and 1941. His job was to select documentary films to be sent to Latin America, but he also, more notoriously, edited Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935) with a view to turning its effect on its head. Heroic grandeur would become petty parading. The odds of success must have seemed good ...”

“... Everything​ talks in Brady Corbet’s films, especially the scenes and objects that are silent. A snowy Italian mountain face seems to be some sort of fable, the Statue of Liberty appears upside down in an empty sky, the world spins at the end of a French motorcade as if it had gone crazy. Corbet likes to shoot cars at night, where we see mainly a dark screen, and just a few moving lights ...”

“... Edward Berger​ ’s Conclave looks rather stately at first, a matter of grand buildings, Michelangelo murals and a simple question: the pope is dead; who will succeed him? But this impression doesn’t last long. Roman buildings start to whisper their histories, murals are spectacular but often threatening, and the question is not so much who as how ...”

“... The opening of​ Walter Salles’s haunting new film, I’m Still Here, places us a long way from its later concerns. The shots and action look like an energetic advertisement for Rio de Janeiro as a holiday destination, all beaches and volleyball and laughing children. When we move to a garden, the famous statue of Christ hangs like a blessing high in the air ...”

“... Judge ye,’ Ezra Pound says of a character in one of his poems, ‘Have I dug him up again?’ One answer is obviously yes. In ‘Sestina: Altaforte’, the old troubadour Bertran de Born – with his ‘whoreson dogs’ and ‘hell blot black’ – is as alive as any written character can be, and more alive than many of Pound’s actual contemporaries ...”

“... Jonathan Glazer’s​ Zone of Interest seems stately at first, even stolid, and a bit too restrained to raise real questions. Once it’s over we realise that its discretion is part of a careful, risky plan. ‘Based on the novel by Martin Amis’, as a credit line says, the film converts a cruel virtuoso performance of literary voices into a sort of belated act of espionage ...”

“... Emily Brontë’s​ novel, Wuthering Heights, ends in a graveyard where the narrator wonders ‘how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth’. Emerald Fennell’s film of the same name opens with a public hanging, and we wonder if things will quieten down. Is this a connection? Not really, except that both works deal in surprises, and readers and viewers are supposed to get things wrong ...”