“... Many​ new films have deferred release dates, and cinemas keep reminding us to watch at home the films they can’t show. ‘The olden days,’ Anthony Lane said in a recent, very funny New Yorker piece, ‘ended a few months ago.’ Those were the days when ‘humans went to the movies’. It’s also true that the olden days had long been invaded by other habits ...”

“... In​ Aeschylus’ Oresteia, and in the myth he was staging, the Furies that drove vengeance and justice are appeased, and converted into the so-called Kindly Ones. Pier Paolo Pasolini accepted this story as still current in Italy in the 1960s, but with an important variant. The transformation did not mean the Furies were any the less ‘irrational and archaic’, only that instead of haunting our dreams, ‘they reign over works of poetry, of affective imagination ...”

“... The critic​ Richard Brody suggested recently that cinema needs to be de-Nazified, to abandon its habit of using Hitler’s followers as ‘instant avatars of evil’. ‘Some of the very worst movies of recent years,’ he wrote, ‘have used depictions of Nazis … as a short cut to gravitas.’ And not just those of recent years, we might add, and not just to gravitas ...”

“... Asmartly​ dressed man, wearing suit, tie and hat in the 1920s fashion, walks towards us along a New York street, accompanied by a stylish woman. Suddenly, he is flat on his back. He gets up, dusts himself off, and walks on as jauntily as before.What happened? Well, in the two-dimensional world in which he lives – this is a movie – he stepped on a banana peel ...”

“... When​ a film begins in a basement and ends in the mountains, we know that a spatial metaphor or two may be in the offing – as in Bong Joon-ho’s earlier work The Snowpiercer (2013), where social classes are marked by their location (front and back) on a long train, and defined by a grim and nasty talk (given by Tilda Swinton with a Yorkshire accent) about who is the head and who are the feet ...”

“... Ilearned​ only recently, from Charlotte Chandler’s biography, that Bette Davis had taken her first name from a Balzac novel, not knowing, apparently, that the character in question was ‘rather a bitch’. All too appropriate, we might think, since Davis referred to the people she played in movies as ‘all those bitches I had to take everywhere with me ...”

“... In​ 1979 the makers of Alien, Stalker and, it might also be said, Apocalypse Now invented worlds we thought we wanted to know about but couldn’t inhabit. Domestic quarrels and the musical had their day too (in Kramer vs. Kramer and All That Jazz), and we may feel that Roman Polanski’s Tess belongs to both old and new worlds, but still: it was a good year for otherness ...”

“... We may​ think all biopics are biofantasies, in which case the opening title card of Adam McKay’s new film Vice will have us laughing already. After all, he is the former Saturday Night Live writer who made The Big Short, a very funny movie about the 2008 financial crisis. The card says: ‘The following is a true story.’ If we aren’t laughing, we may be wondering, ‘True to what?’ And we certainly need to rework the narrator’s question, which we hear soon after: ‘How does a man go on to become who he is?’ We later learn that our narrator is dead at the time of speaking, so perhaps we shouldn’t be too hard on his logic ...”

“... And the humans,​ ’ a dark deep voice asks at the beginning of the film, ‘what can they do but burn?’ The answer is quite a lot, especially when they are defended by superheroes. Still, many of them do burn, and the film itself, The Avengers (2012), directed by Joss Whedon, quietly raises the issue of collateral damage. Did the superheroes have to fight their war to save the world on the streets of New York, amid crashing buildings, smashed cars and uncountable corpses? Later films in the series have had other battlefields, like an airport, or a lunar landscape where every combatant is a soldier of some kind ...”

“... Towards​ the end of Blade Runner the actor Rutger Hauer, playing a replicant whose programmed life is fading, says he has ‘seen things you people wouldn’t believe’. ‘All those moments,’ he adds, ‘will be lost in time, like tears in rain’: memory and knowledge, the replicant has understood, are part of what constitutes identity. The same actor makes what we might call a cameo disappearance in Jacques Audiard’s The Sisters Brothers ...”

“... A recurring​ effect in the films of Agnès Varda, especially her documentaries, is a kind of hesitation between photography and moving pictures. A shot looks like a still – the opening image of Daguerréotypes (1975), say, showing a couple behind the glass door of the perfume shop they work in. The wife shifts her head slightly but that’s all she does, and the man who strides past the shop down the street seems to belong to another world, miles away from the dreaming pauses of photography ...”

“... What does​ a wedding look like in an Ozu film? Two large hired cars outside an anonymous block of flats. Inside the building, father and elder brother in sleek Western morning suits, younger brother in smart but more casual clothes. Sister-in-law very tidy in black traditional Japanese dress. Bride cloaked in a mountainous confection of pink and white silk, topped by a hat that looks like a small but heavy monument ...”

“... Warning: Even more spoilers than usual. ‘One can feel​ that there is always a camera left out of the picture,’ Stanley Cavell wrote in The World Viewed, ‘the one working now.’ The proliferation of selfies has familiarised us with first-person photography but nothing so far has solved the problem of first-person narration in film. Whatever subjective-looking angles the image adopts, the filmed person is not the one holding the camera ...”

“... There is a mystery about Terrence Malick’s new movie, but it has nothing to do with life, death and the wonders wrought by the maker of the universe, which are the film’s modest ostensible subjects. The mystery about The Tree of Life is how a work that is truly terrible in so many respects can remain so weirdly interesting. Interesting only to some, certainly; and maybe not interesting enough even then ...”

“... Don’t be diabolical,’ a title card says at the end of the film. ‘Don’t destroy the interest your friends might take in this film. Don’t tell them what you have seen. Thank you on their behalf.’ This kindly instruction must refer to the tricky ending rather than the whole movie. It can’t spoil things if we say we have just seen Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques, soon to be shown in a new print at the British Film Institute and around the country; or that this is one of the great murder movies; or that France has never looked seedier on film ...”