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Tattoos. Attitude. Muscles. Cueball noggins. Action sports. Attitude. Guns that look like willies. Evil Russians. Tattoos. Biggest-grossing US movie in blah-blah-yadda-yadda. Indeed, if Dubya and Dick Cheney had made their very own post-9/11 patriotic propaganda movie for the teens they need as globalisation fodder, then this would be it. Xander Cage is XXX is Vin Diesel is an action sports hero who has a problem with authority. Augustus Gibbons is Jackson with a comedy scar, who is an agent for the National Security Agency who forces XXX to foil some Russian goths who plan to plunge the free world into anarchy. Argento is the Bond Girl. Like the old action franchise, it has gadgets and explosions and one-liners and sex with women who don't talk. But don't bust a gut because you'll miss the jaw-dropping action set pieces, where Diesel's head is superimposed on to things that look a bit like snow and sky in a series of death-defying, um, stunts.

Both ‘Interstellar’ and ‘Gravity’ took us out of this world, but the reputation of Stanley Kubrick’s classic – now re-released – is safe. It’s not that ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ doesn’t look dated – it does, a bit – but it remains as intelligent and provocative as ever, bearing years of conceptual dreaming. Until today’s equivalent of novelist Arthur C Clarke commits a hefty chunk of time to envisioning the beginning of human civilisation, as well as the far future, there will be no new film to supplant it. Though it was showered with praise for its technical achievements, ‘2001’ lingers more potently in the mind as a tall, black riddle: where are the new bones, the new tools, that will take us higher? Douglas Rain’s clammy voice work as Hal 9000, the murderous machine, remains one of Kubrick’s snazziest pieces of direction.

Is there a film clip more often shown than the title number of this most astoundingly popular musical? The rest of the movie is great too. It shouldn't be. There never was a masterpiece created from such a mishmash of elements: Arthur Freed's favourites among his own songs from back in the '20s and '30s, along with a new number, 'Make 'Em Laugh', which is a straight rip-off from Cole Porter's 'Be A Clown'; the barely blooded Debbie Reynolds pitched into the deep end with tyrannical perfectionist Kelly; choreography very nearly improvised because of pressures of time; and Kelly filming his greatest number with a heavy cold. Somehow it all comes together. The 'Broadway Melody' ballet is Kelly's least pretentious, Jean Hagen and Donald O'Connor are very funny, and the Comden/Green script is a loving-care job. If you've never seen it and don't, you're bonkers.

Chantal Akerman's feature is one of the few 'feminist' movies that's as interesting aesthetically as politically. It covers three days in the life of a bourgeois widow who supports herself and her somewhat moronic son by taking in a 'gentleman caller' each afternoon. Much of the film simply chronicles her ritualised routine, but does it in an ultra-minimal, precise style that emphasises the artifice of the whole thing...and gradually the artifice (coupled with the fact that Delphine Seyrig plays the woman) shifts the plot into melodrama, so that the film becomes a bourgeois tragedy.

Review by Joshua RothkopfThe current golden era of high-school movies is offering the ‘Breakfast Club’ generation serious competition. Some of these films are good enough to land multiple Oscar nominations (‘Lady Bird’). Some sneak heartache into comedy (‘The Edge of Seventeen’). Some are sharp-edged and sassy (‘Easy A’). ‘Booksmart’ could be all of the above. Scripted by an inspired quartet (Susanna Fogel, Emily Halpern, Sarah Haskins and Katie Silberman), ‘Booksmart’ invents a socially awkward, Ivy League-bound duo, Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and Molly (Beanie Feldstein from ‘Lady Bird’). The two pals’ smugness rings hollow: their equally nerdy peers have also got into exclusive universities, but those classmates who spent their time necking beer bongs and having tons of sex along the way? They got in too. How did the two never learn to multitask? In her behind-the-camera debut, actor-turned-director Olivia Wilde shows off something rarer than technique or comic timing: she’s got loads of compassion. The classic high-school  ‘types’ – the spoiled loner, the spaced-out drama chick, the buff bro – are all given the chance to evolve into genuine characterisations. And it all happens within the space of a single sex-positive night. People, demand a ‘Booksmart’ cinematic universe! 

A gorgeous, pin-sharp remaster for poet-dramatist-artist-director Jean Cocteau’s giddy, sumptuous 1946 retelling of the Freudian fairytale about a helpless girl and a kindhearted monster. Slightly pompous preamble aside, this ‘Beauty and the Beast’ is pure joy, a self-conscious but never precious attempt to revisit childhood fantasies and half-remembered dreams. The Beast’s ornate, decaying castle – ringed with thorns and filled with grasping hands – is a place of terror, wonder and mourning, the perfect reflection of its tragic, noble occupant. The tug of love between the monster and the maiden is never overplayed, but neither does the film shackle this beast – he remains unpredictable and threatening throughout. ‘La Belle et la Bête’ has been accused of valueing style over substance, but place the film in historical context (alongside, say, ‘A Matter of Life and Death’ and ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’, both released the same year) and its true intent is revealed: in the wake of unimaginable horror, this kind of fantasy is still achievable, and perhaps more important than ever. Tom Huddleston

An everyday story of Mafia folk, incorporating a severed horse's head in the bed and a number of heartwarming family occasions, as well as pointers on how not to behave in your local trattoria (i.e. blasting the brains of your co-diners out all over their fettuccini). Mario Puzo's novel was brought to the screen in bravura style by Coppola, who was here trying out for the first time that piano/fortissimo style of crosscutting between religious ritual and bloody machine-gun massacre that was later to resurface in a watered-down version in The Cotton Club. See Brando with a mouthful of orange peel. Watch Pacino's cheek muscles twitch in incipiently psychotic fashion. Trace his rise from white sheep of the family to budding don and fully-fledged bad guy. Singalong to Nino Rota's irritatingly catchy theme tune. Its soap operatics should never have been presented separately from Part II.

We begin down a hole. It’s 1898 in the Southern Californian desert and Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) is a lithe, daddy-long-legs of a man, a lone-gun silver prospector whose tools, as he scratches around in the dark, are a pickaxe, a rope, some dynamite and sheer will. The scene, like many in the film, is gruelling, elemental, horrific even. He falls, breaks his leg and gains a limp that will stay with him for the rest of this bold, epic film. We hop forward to 1902, and Plainview is digging again, only now he’s on the hunt for something else: oil. He strikes black and brandishes his filthy hands to his accomplices. The dirt under his nails is a badge of honour, and one never to be removed; he wears it years later, even when he’s moping around a mansion, his mind driven loopy by success and paranoia. Another hop and it’s 1911, and we reach the meat of the movie. A smarter Plainview, a fedora on his brow, is in the shadows of a meeting of folk in Little Boston, California on whose land he wants to dig. ‘I’m an oil man…’ he implores, the first noise we hear from his mouth, not a word wasted, barely a breath not invested in his success. His voice is simple but mellifluous, its stresses and dips unusual but alluring. It’s the first hint in this long, odd and stunning film that this character – this wicked creation, this symbol of a nation, this quiet monster – will lodge in your psyche long after the movie cuts dead on an ending that’s strange and sudden, irritating and ple

The first miracle of Barry Jenkins’s exquisite coming-of-age drama ‘Moonlight’ – and this heartbreaker of a film is filled with miracles – happens around a kitchen table. We’ve already seen quiet, sullen Chiron (Alex Hibbert), a 10-year-old with frightened eyes, being chased by bullies. The two adults sitting around the table aren’t his parents (one of them is actually the drug dealer selling crack to Chiron’s addict mum), but somehow they know the exact words to say when the boy softly asks them, ‘Am I a faggot?’ Jenkins, an indie director whose first feature, ‘Medicine for Melancholy’ (2008), delved into a whole universe of African-American issues rarely explored onscreen, now goes even further, and with an uncommonly poetic voice. The barely-getting-by Miami of ‘Moonlight’ – a place of needle-strewn drug dens and cheapo diners – bears little resemblance to the one we usually see in the movies. But the film is more radical for articulating an internal sexual turbulence that doesn’t fit the stereotype. It’s not the one laid down by ‘Brokeback Mountain’ or other key gay stories but something new, seething with anxiety, similar to the vibe you feel in the tense, ticking beats of Frank Ocean. Chiron grows into a pinch-faced, haunted teenager (Ashton Sanders), the second portrayal of the character, who is played by three actors in the film. (Trevante Rhodes’s muscle-bound adult Chiron, hiding his pain behind a scary facade, is yet to come.) The script is based on Tarell McCraney

The flying statue of Jesus, hovering over Rome via helicopter; Anita Ekberg, voluptuously traipsing around the Trevi Fountain; that climactic metaphor of a bloated, beached sea creature, staring dead-eyed at Marcello Mastroianni's fatigued urban Candide. It's so easy to reduce Federico Fellini's three-ring satire of the Euro-chic "good life" to iconic scenes, or to accept the movie simply as a canonized classic (of course it's great; they teach it in college courses!), that you can forget what a damning indictment of This Mondo Modern World it really is. Yes, Film Forum's two-week revival of il maestro's groundbreaking work should be considered mandatory attendance anyway, given that this new 35mm restoration is gorgeous; the movie's aristocratic filth has never looked so pristine. But the real reason to wallow once more in its parade of faux Madonnas and real whores, rich junkies and jerkwads, parasitic paparazzi (a term the film coined), dim-bulb starlets, drunken louts and the lowest of the low---that'd be journalists---is to recognize, with stunning clarity, the morally bankrupt, media-fried here and now. Historians can laud it as the transitional pause before the director fully abandoned any neorealistic flourishes and dove into the psycho-personal surrealism known as the Fellini-esque. Yet everyone else will simply admire, in slack-jawed stupor, the way this 51-year-old time capsule thoroughly predicts the era of TMZ, Paris Hilton and celebutante overload. Everything ha