“Belfast native and ‘British’ dramatic heavyweight Kenneth Branagh uses the wide-eyed gaze of his fictionalised ten-year-old self, Buddy (Jude Hill) to depict his homeland not as a problem to be solved, or even understood, but in the way that he experienced it: a close community defined by depth of feeling.“

“Joel Coen's vision turns the godlike powers of the entertainment industry to Shakespearean ends. Macbeth is destroyed by the false promise of a story to affirm his superior identity; Coen pulls off an equally stealthy and heinous murder on the viewer's ego.“

“The studio prose that helped propel Death in Venice to critical and commercial acclaim across the Anglosphere sums up the spirit of the film, a spirit that seemed as profitable in 1971 as it smacks of toxicity now. Death in Venice is a love song to decadence, and a passionately self-indulgent answer to a timeless question: what does pleasure mean?”

“The ‘villain’ appears only in the soft, maternal, eminently huggable form of Olivia Colman, turning her varied ability to draw tragedy from the most bizarrely banal characters to maximum effect: as a woman who does not love being a mother, her great crime (and the source of the traumatic guilt, rage and violence simmering in her harmless-looking head) consists of leaving her daughters with her husband to pursue a career.”

“Rather like the fashion line whose unlikely resurrection it chronicles, Ridley Scott’s latest modern drama clings onto a shred of substance under its gloriously tacky trappings, thanks to the toxicity of the domestic politics bubbling at its heart.”

“American movies almost always revolve around power; rarely do they pause to determine what ‘power’ might actually mean.”

“We must pay homage to him,” say the Wise Men. “We were led by a star.”

“Led by a bottle more like”, retorts Brian’s mother, slapping her mortal progeny around the head after a failed attempt to scam the visitors out of the Messiah’s gifts. And so begins cinema’s unsurpassed depiction of a British Christmas.

“By using science fiction to overturn the genre’s age-old belief that biological difference can justify abuse and oppression, District 9 highlights the potential of its medium to challenge the status quo.”