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“... I’ve​ gone off London this week,’ the central character announces in Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), released in a new digital transfer by the Criterion Collection. A local antique dealer wants to get away, to Nepal maybe. When told that Nepal is all antiques, she says she thinks she’ll try Morocco. The film itself doesn’t seem to share these moods at all, it can’t get enough of the 1960s city, with its alleyways, shops, arcades, old red phone booths, a pot-smoking party in Chelsea and a club performance by the Yardbirds that is so authentic it looks like a flimsy parody of itself ...”

“... The​ title of Gian Balsamo’s intriguing book is staid enough: Proust and His Banker. The subtitle – ‘In Search of Time Squandered’ – promises all kinds of adventures and invites us to toy with various riddles. When is an opportunity cost – a favourite term with Balsamo – not an opportunity cost? Perhaps when the opportunity turns out to be a disaster, or was never an opportunity in the first place ...”

“... Ihad​ misremembered The Scarlet Empress (1934), one of the thirteen Marlene Dietrich movies currently showing at the BFI. Or rather, I remembered vividly its latter stages, when Dietrich, playing the future Catherine the Great, rides her horse up the steps of a palace dressed as a Cossack in white fur and uniform, and demonstrates a ruthless appetite for rule ...”

“... There​ is plenty of angry talk in Regina King’s One Night in Miami – available on Amazon Prime and adapted from Kemp Powers’s play – but the cruellest remark is very discreet and goes unheard by the victim. Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr) is singing at the Copacabana in New York, fulfilling a lifelong ambition. Rather than opening with one of his hits, he chooses a song he thinks appropriate to the venue ...”

“... Hirokazu​ kore-eda’s film The Truth, released in France in January and now available online, feels like a respectable weepie, a mother and daughter story, except that it keeps being hijacked. We quickly realise that the hijackers are the writer-director himself and film history, but we still have to decide what to make of it.Of course, any film in which a famous actress (Catherine Deneuve) plays a famous actress, and another famous actress (Juliette Binoche) plays her daughter – who is a screenwriter, in the business but out of the limelight – is going to have its meta moments ...”

“... One of the​ most fascinating aspects of Wei Shujun’s film Only the River Flows is the continuing contrast between its look and its story, between the faithful realism of the first and the elusive options of the second. An early instance of the former is the picture of a police station in a provincial Chinese town in the 1990s taking over a closed cinema as additional office space ...”

“... is talking about, and it isn’t a dream at all, it’s a shifting picture of a dark and tangled wood. The supernatural powers are those of the camera, and the images begin to look like the portrait of the inside of a troubled mind, rather than the memory of a cherished place. And then the images begin to contradict the voice. ‘Time could not mar the ...”

“... the scene funny, absurd and curiously touching. Kris and Jeff seem to have found a path out of the wood without actually knowing what a path (or a ...”

“... and Duke Johnson’s stop-motion film Anomalisa, based on a play Kaufman wrote in 2005. When Michael Stone, the author of a bestselling book about improving human relations in business, has a psychological meltdown, we don’t quite know what sort of mind he is supposed to have, because he and everyone else in his world is a doll; the whole population is ...”

“... nothing.’ The suggestion is that nothing is just what an android needs, a mark of real class. Michael Fassbender plays David, the android, with terrific, elegant style, not as if he were Peter O’Toole but as if he liked Peter O’Toole – a fine distinction. His uniform makes him look like a prisoner rather than a servant, and the effect is that of one ...”

“... died in 1987. In the movie the performances keep pace with the glitter and the hokum for a while. Michael Douglas as Liberace acts up onstage and off, twinkles with a coy kindness that is all self-admiration but quite fetching even so; Damon is bewildered and wary and captivated in just the right proportions, and his shift from baffled gay guy into trinketed ...”

“... the go-karts was the British driver Terry Fullerton. No mention of Nigel Mansell or Niki Lauda or Michael Schumacher. Still less of Alain Prost. All Senna ever wanted, in this perspective, was to drive cars fast. Politics and fame were for other people; or perhaps just a cross he had to bear. He was fond of calling on God to help him, and of thanking God for ...”

“... Peter Suschitzky – but this only makes it feel more like a movie. The voices are a clue as well. Michael Fassbender as Jung and Viggo Mortensen as Freud speak with flawless English accents, as does Sarah Gadon as Emma, Jung’s all too perfect wife. Knightley speaks fluent American-Russian, and Vincent Cassel as the disreputable Otto Gross sounds as French ...”

“... stay at home, eat their potatoes – that’s all they eat – stare at the landscape, chop wood, do the ironing. They scarcely talk except to bark a command or a piece of information to each other. The wind continues to blow furiously, and its music is supported on and off by the same grinding tune we heard at the beginning of the film. One day father ...”

“... Songs​ by Sparks (or the Mael brothers) include ‘When You’re a French Director’, ‘Edith Piaf Said It Better Than Me’, ‘Angst in My Pants’, ‘Life with the Macbeths’, ‘Falling in Love with Myself Again’ and ‘I Can’t Believe That You Would Fall for All the Crap in This Song’. Any of these phrases could serve as the title for Leos Carax’s new movie, Annette, his first excursion into English-language cinema ...”