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Cinema Paradiso bleeds the sort of pure, unassuming love of film that greater movies may have tackled with more ambitious visual artistry, and yet Giuseppe Tornatore’s majestic coming-of-age fable nevertheless inspires a rousing sentimentalism which erodes all traces of cynicism in even the harshest critics.

It is within Gravity’s restless, floating camera and moving allegory for grief that Alfonso Cuarón evolves it into a cinematic wonder, teasing out the compelling tension between barren emptiness and a determined embrace of life in one astronaut’s fraught journey back to Earth from the merciless void of outer space.

The awareness of storytelling conventions that one lonely scholar brings to her meeting with a Djinn in Three Thousand Years of Longing offers George Miller’s self-conscious metanarrative great passion for its artistic traditions, crafting an uneven yet vivid collage of fairy tale motifs greater than the sum of its mythological fragments.

With its light romance and dark tragedy moving along inverse trajectories, the archetypal narrative of A Star is Born may be the closest thing Hollywood has to a modern fairy tale, and it is in the precise balance of both that George Cukor’s vibrant take on it stirringly paints out the brief life cycle of…

Alcoholic writer Don Birnam may be totally infatuated with his vice, and yet the steady downward slide that Billy Wilder sets him on in The Lost Weekend sinks him deeper than he has ever been before, building out this compelling journey to rock bottom through intoxicating motifs and richly drawn characterisations that paint out an…