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“... Everything​ talks in Brady Corbet’s films, especially the scenes and objects that are silent. A snowy Italian mountain face seems to be some sort of fable, the Statue of Liberty appears upside down in an empty sky, the world spins at the end of a French motorcade as if it had gone crazy. Corbet likes to shoot cars at night, where we see mainly a dark screen, and just a few moving lights ...”

“... The opening of​ Walter Salles’s haunting new film, I’m Still Here, places us a long way from its later concerns. The shots and action look like an energetic advertisement for Rio de Janeiro as a holiday destination, all beaches and volleyball and laughing children. When we move to a garden, the famous statue of Christ hangs like a blessing high in the air ...”

“... not a mystery, because it doesn’t have a solution, only multiple, intimated causes. The plot of Michael Haneke’s Caché, on the other hand, is a mystery, because it has several solutions, all dull. The dullest is the one the director himself seems to prefer: there is no solution, and only unsophisticated viewers will worry about such things, instead of ...”

“... directly and by anagram to the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail: Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent, who recently sued Brown’s publisher for plagiarism and lost. The third author, Henry Lincoln, didn’t sue. The book itself is mentioned in large capitals, and Teabing comments on it pedantically (‘their fundamental premise is sound’). Of ...”

“... abnegation is too much to expect of any director with two expensive stars on his hands. Remember Michael Mann’s thriller Heat, where Robert de Niro and Al Pacino get together for a totally inconsequential conversation just so we can see them together before they return to their posts on opposite sides of the law. The stars have to share serious screen ...”

“... superiority, however, is not the end of the story. The fact that both androids are played by Michael Fassbender, one as a stiff, friendly American guy and the other as the imitation of Peter O’Toole he had already perfected in Prometheus, adds to the riddle. And here, as in so many science-fiction movies, the decision to have the character of a robot ...”

“... no world, just the set or the simulation where the conversations take place. When directors like Michael Mann, whose movie version of Miami Vice has just opened, say they want to make episodes of television series as if they were movies, they mean, among other things, that they want to create a world, a location which is a kind of character. This is as true ...”

“... Many​ new films have deferred release dates, and cinemas keep reminding us to watch at home the films they can’t show. ‘The olden days,’ Anthony Lane said in a recent, very funny New Yorker piece, ‘ended a few months ago.’ Those were the days when ‘humans went to the movies’. It’s also true that the olden days had long been invaded by other habits ...”

“... In​ Aeschylus’ Oresteia, and in the myth he was staging, the Furies that drove vengeance and justice are appeased, and converted into the so-called Kindly Ones. Pier Paolo Pasolini accepted this story as still current in Italy in the 1960s, but with an important variant. The transformation did not mean the Furies were any the less ‘irrational and archaic’, only that instead of haunting our dreams, ‘they reign over works of poetry, of affective imagination ...”

“... The critic​ Richard Brody suggested recently that cinema needs to be de-Nazified, to abandon its habit of using Hitler’s followers as ‘instant avatars of evil’. ‘Some of the very worst movies of recent years,’ he wrote, ‘have used depictions of Nazis … as a short cut to gravitas.’ And not just those of recent years, we might add, and not just to gravitas ...”

“... Asmartly​ dressed man, wearing suit, tie and hat in the 1920s fashion, walks towards us along a New York street, accompanied by a stylish woman. Suddenly, he is flat on his back. He gets up, dusts himself off, and walks on as jauntily as before.What happened? Well, in the two-dimensional world in which he lives – this is a movie – he stepped on a banana peel ...”

“... When​ a film begins in a basement and ends in the mountains, we know that a spatial metaphor or two may be in the offing – as in Bong Joon-ho’s earlier work The Snowpiercer (2013), where social classes are marked by their location (front and back) on a long train, and defined by a grim and nasty talk (given by Tilda Swinton with a Yorkshire accent) about who is the head and who are the feet ...”

“... Ilearned​ only recently, from Charlotte Chandler’s biography, that Bette Davis had taken her first name from a Balzac novel, not knowing, apparently, that the character in question was ‘rather a bitch’. All too appropriate, we might think, since Davis referred to the people she played in movies as ‘all those bitches I had to take everywhere with me ...”

“... In​ 1979 the makers of Alien, Stalker and, it might also be said, Apocalypse Now invented worlds we thought we wanted to know about but couldn’t inhabit. Domestic quarrels and the musical had their day too (in Kramer vs. Kramer and All That Jazz), and we may feel that Roman Polanski’s Tess belongs to both old and new worlds, but still: it was a good year for otherness ...”

“... We may​ think all biopics are biofantasies, in which case the opening title card of Adam McKay’s new film Vice will have us laughing already. After all, he is the former Saturday Night Live writer who made The Big Short, a very funny movie about the 2008 financial crisis. The card says: ‘The following is a true story.’ If we aren’t laughing, we may be wondering, ‘True to what?’ And we certainly need to rework the narrator’s question, which we hear soon after: ‘How does a man go on to become who he is?’ We later learn that our narrator is dead at the time of speaking, so perhaps we shouldn’t be too hard on his logic ...”