“A spacious, restless American road movie that at once feels indebted to just about every landmark in that essential genre — from The Grapes of Wrath to Easy Rider — while forging its own untravelled route.”

“There’s been a lot of chat over the last decade or so about the Golden Age of Television. Much of it doesn’t live up to the hype, but now, adapted from Colson Whitehead’s masterful novel, we have The Underground Railroad, a series where the hype will instead struggle to live up to the show.”

“There's something resonant and recognisable in its tale of literally learning how to live again in the wake of disorienting trauma.”

“A real watch-it-with-family film, probably not suitable for very tiny kids, but otherwise containing enough caffeinated, mixed-media, hyper-frenetic fun to satisfy all but the most jaded of attention spans. Missed a joke because you glanced down at your phone? Don’t worry, there are another ten coming right up.”

“Black Bear is a film nightmarishly adept at capturing one of the least comfortable realisations it is possible to have while socialising: that spiralling, sinking sensation that you have been pulled unwittingly into somebody else’s cartoonishly brittle nest of neuroses.”

“Something like poetry: decades of a life, distilled and preserved, a record of presence for the absent.”

“This sound, which recurs throughout the film like a quietly despairing leitmotif, is a masterful piece of sound design, teasing out themes of vulnerability and ill-founded optimism, giving the film a kind of fragile organic pulse, underscoring the precarious nature of apparent security.”

“A film like Kitao Sakurai’s Bad Trip — a riotous, ribald hidden-camera comedy — can rely on the shortest of short cuts to human empathy, hot-wiring our ability to identify with the characters. ‘Thank god that’s not me,’ you think as Eric André takes a face-full of gorilla spunk at the zoo.”

“Kate Winslet slowly illuminates Mary from the inside, passion fighting caution beneath that classically composed demeanour. It’s one of the performances of her career.”

"Lili Horvát keeps any number of uncertainties afloat... She prefers to deconstruct her mystery woman from the inside out."

"It's as if a guillotine sliced right through her hair, before pausing at her neck with second thoughts."

“It’s honestly a sweet relief to watch a mainstream film that is primarily concerned with serving up a little romance and a little humour.”

“Panic gives way to the kind of eerie calm in which more silently dangerous things can happen.”

"Sighs and shivers and sometimes screams with the rage and pent-up poetry of a culture rarely given the microphone."

"Even while looking at precisely the same highly sensitive and disturbing documentary material, people are still nevertheless able to construct different realities in their own minds."

“Deliberately excludes the powerful person at the top of the pyramid to pull us tightly into the perspective of Julia Garner’s eponymous assistant, someone who is not able to be louche and charming and witty, because to do so would end her career.”

“You can really feel the teeth shatter, the bones crack and the skulls crunch as they give way.”