“Whilst Goldman and director Rob Reiner softened the novel’s more shocking elements, the film retains a keen interest in the primal, uncivilised impulses to which, it suggests, modern people are more than capable of reverting under the right conditions. Paul and Annie’s relationship charts an unsettling course from benevolent mother-son territory to a taboo-trampling, chintzy Oedipal spectacular.”

“Elf probably chimes more than ever with millennials and Gen Z’s who can now relate all too strongly to its dismay about the ever-expanding grimness of corporate America, to which, the film implores, personal relationships and individual joy must not be sacrificed.”

“The New York Times compared the recalcitrant Trump, refusing to concede defeat and surrounded by a thinning flock of enablers, to Desmond at her end, when “the dream she had clung to so desperately enfolded her.” Wilder’s film plays on the change over two decades in a technology which in 1910 seemed endlessly fresh and benevolent; one hundred years later, social media has taken the place of the silent film, but the song remains the same.”

“Grave of the Fireflies is an unflinching survey of how innocence and imagination- in a word, the nostalgic, pure-hearted escapism with which Studio Ghibli is synonymous- cannot protect the innocent from suffering.”

“A world of sweaty, lissom bodies grinding indiscriminately against each other on jam-packed beaches is a distant memory; Spring Breakers has taken on the tone of a memorial to a lost way of life.”

“For all his failures- as an actor, and as an individual unable to move past a byegone era- Withnail has remained a weirdly intriguing, witty and touching point of reference for generations of young, reckless viewers, even as they age out of relating to him.”

“In true Allen form, he is in the film, though not literally; Vicky has many of the Allen quirks, each garnished with his incisive wit and crippling neurosis.”