Adam Smith

Some plot developments are more convincing than others, but it’s still a compelling drama with an impressive turn from Garfield as well as Shannon and Dern as Garfield’s concerned mother.

A highly enjoyable glance at Gotham's veteran haute couturists.

Likeable leads and the odd good joke makes this romance an amiable time-passer.

This would have been a striking calling card, and it’s still an impressively solid piece of genre filmmaking with great cinematography and score. But there’s not much here of the ambition of Animal Kingdom, leaving Michôd in ‘difficult third movie’ territory. Let’s hope he gets a move on this time.

Disappointingly dull account of a tale desperately in need of a sharper screenplay and some directorial vim. Might as well wait for the Blu-ray, Jules.

A quartet of pitch-perfect performances from a cast uniformly at its career best, together with a director on shockingly mischievous top form, this is a shot of pure, exhilarating cinematic malice. And if nothing else, it contains the most surprising puking sequence since Monsieur Creosote.

Whether you're after a comedy-drama about cancer or a Rogen laugh-fest with added heart, this does a remarkable job of balancing the odds. And the laughter/tears split? Call it 70/30.

Genuinely funny. A life lesson in never prejudging a man just because he's skinning a squirrel.

Oh alright, it ain't "Shane." But it is about as much shamelessly disreputable, stylish, ultra-violent fun you're going to have at the movies this year.

A typically quixotic documentary in which great unknown artists from 35,000 years ago collaborate with one in 2011. Profound, mysterious and utterly absorbing.

With a frustrating format and poor animation, it's still worth it for Franco and the chance to engage with a key work of poetry.

Surely cinema's first Mexican social-realist cannibal horror drama, it's grimly funny and at times horribly effective stuff. Ickily excellent.

An exhilarating fight-flick that, like its scrappy central character, is impossible not to root for.

Gothika never delivers anything more than the occasional, cynically engineered jolt and often drifts close to provoking giggles.

Even for non-Allen fans this has all the appeal of a good story well told and capped with a deliciously vicious little twist.

Among the plethora of innocent charms on offer, there's the near perfect script by Zemekis and Bob Gale which not only negotiates its time travel paradoxes with deft, exuberant wit but invests the light-hearted plot machinations with a seasoning note of honest drama.

There's the fact that First Blood is a first-rate, taught action thriller.

Halloween remains about as distilled, raw an experience in terror as is ever likely to be committed to celluloid.

In essence, Dark Star has what all great comedy has: a sense of desperation and pathos allied to an abiding humanity which elevates it high above the realm of mere spoof.

A decent enough little B-movie which delivers some pleasingly weird violence and endless plot reversals. But there’s still a mild sense of pointlessness to the whole thing and the feeling that in different hands it could have been much better.

Jarecki's film brilliantly illustrates the fallibility of memory, the slippery nature of 'facts' and even people's invention of events that may never have taken place.

The Wicker Man is, more than anything else, a film about what people can do in the name of religion or, more generally, belief. Its power comes not from appeals to the supernatural but from a deep understanding of our own undeniable nature. Horror doesn't get much closer to home than that.

Bold, gruesome and melancholic, this Gothic horrorfest offers us much to sink our teeth into: Cruise - who effectively disappears from the screen for half the film's duration - is terrific, Dunst eerily compelling, Banderas hypnotic.

Stone's film could have allowed political voices that are rarely present to get a fair, and critical hearing. Instead he near smooches them to death.

Hill, shooting by night and on location together with his OOP Andrew Laszlo, gives the film dazzling style. New York's oil-slicked streets become a labyrinth lit by pools of reflecting light, both scary and strangely beautiful - grimy realism it isn't. It also manages to humanize the gang-bangers to a surprising extent, illustrating the material and emotional poverty that forces them onto the streets in the first place.

Decent belly laughs occur, but they are spread thinly over a prolonged period.

Stands next to Young Frankenstein as Brooks' best movie, and, of course, boasts the god of all fart gags.

In seamlessly interweaving top-notch CGI and incredible stuntwork, Cohen has delivered some of the finest auto-action ever put on screen.

The film's real strength is the way it sounds, with Ry Cooder's jangling score competing with thunderous gunplay for the shell-like's appreciative attention.

Style over content, sure, but what style.

Suspiria is the perfect antipasto.

While The Godfather delivers certainty and a comforting dramatic resolution, Once Upon A Time In America delivers a profound kind of mystery. While Coppola's film delivers answers, Leone's asks questions. It lingers and plays on the mind; its meanings shift and change like a faded memory or a half-remembered dream.

Gorgeously realised, gripping and doused in De Palma’s familiar technical wizardry, this is only let down by the director’s equally familiar uninterest in the humanity of his characters.

Sure there are niggles, the most obvious being the length, which could have been reduced by trimming the prison sequences, but in the end this may be his finest moment so far which, by default, puts it in as having a strong claim on the title "best action movie ever made". Really.

This story is emblematic of the passion, obsession and solitary poetry of surfing.

Thoughtful, moving tale which places its spectacular effects within a humane, elegiac story.

Disappointing.

Nobody does vapid bollocks as enjoyably as Tony Scott, and while this isn't as inventive as "Man On Fire" or as compelling as "Crimson Tide," it's still the right side of dumb.

The distinguishing feature of what many people consider to be the funniest movie ever made is the sheer number of gags.

An exhilarating riff on the cop-thriller drama by a director at the top of his game -- Herzog is also at his most accessible here -- powered by an incendiary performance from Nicolas Cage. A very bad lieutenant, then. And a bloody good film.

At its heart, Candyman terrifies because of its ideas. It sinks its horrific foundations very much in the real world of poverty and racial alienation.

A director who can't decide whether he's aiming for high comedy or gritty noirishness combine to shoot the whole caboodle squarely in the foot.

The comparisons are inevitable, so let's get them out of the way. Hero is a better film than "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."

Certainly difficult to define, this period piece messes with genres, power relationships and your head.

Millions, like all kid-powered movies, stands or falls in the first place on the performances of its child actors, and Alex Etel and Lewis McGibbon both delight.

Scorses's skill as a scene-maker are fully evident and Lewis' quietly rageful performance offers to out-do De Niro in intensity, but neither funny enough to be an effective black comedy nor scary enough to capitalise on its thriller/horror elements, The King Of Comedy sits awkwardly between the two.

Competently made, and enjoyably played. But you do really end up wondering what the point was. Cinematic déjà vu is the most likely response.

The Keep wears its crap bits proudly on it's sleeve, its qualities are more hidden and emerge only once you've watched it, dismissed it and then found that it's atmosphere refuses to disperse.

Superb performances and a compelling script have made this film a strange mix of Oscar-winner and Cult Classic.

If you can see beyond the eye-scorching neon and don't mind the desecration of a superhero icon, there's a few crumbs of enjoyment to be had.

Smart, sassy and sweet. This showed John Cusack's promise as a romantic lead, and some.

Gilliam's dystopian epic remains among his best, blending his trademark visual inventiveness with a vicious brand of social satire. Unique and essential.

Painful, funny and beautifully acted, by Jeff Daniels particularly, who gives a career-best performance.

Huge ghostly fun, and a fine achievement from the early days of CGI.

As an exploration of cultural discord, Nagisa Oshima's film is pretty thin stuff, despite its reputation. Bowie is a potent irritant, but Tom Conti is solid in support and Sakamoto's mesmerising score sparkles anew.

A delightfully obscene alternative to the usual Christmas tosh.

A second-rate slasher, but it shows the odd bit of directorial promise and a great deal of ambition.

The film's amazing strengths easily outweigh the odd outbreak of hammery.

It's Bacon's astonishing performance that is a quiet, challenging and ultimately discomfortingly human voice.

Not to everyone's tastes then, but for fans of the show - big, big laughs.

As bad as cinema gets.

This is really Sly's movie as he slugs his way through a heartfelt performance and delivers some cracking punches, both literally and emotionally.

This campy extravaganza has it all - heroes, villains, beautiful women and high stakes. Laughably bad and fantastically good all at once, this is a guilty pleasure that everyone can enjoy.

Hard to call something this gratuitous entertainment but certainly lingers in the memory, thanks mainly to the bombast of Stone's script.

Brutal and brilliant.

Ignored for a long time, this film is now impossible to ignore. Mitchum is magnetic.

in the end, Paycheck never quite cashes out.

It’s occasionally sick-funny, but large swathes are unforgivably dull.

The powerhouse of the film is Tim Curry's cross-dressing alien, Frank N. Furter, who would never reach these kinds of gloriously demented heights again.

A perfect example of early Brooks firing on all spoofily comedic cylinders.

Aniston deports herself competently, here showing us nothing she hasn't on Friends, and Bacon is pretty much on autopilot as the company stud but it is Mohr who actually shines, skilfully giving an underwritten role a genuinely deft sense of nobility and charm.

Nothing Landis can do makes up for a limp plot bolstered by distinctly Cannonball Run-ish car smashes and an irritating sprog. And the movie's not even out in the year 2000.

Bart, the bear used in the dramatic attack sequences, gets top billing in the end credit crawl. Which is fair enough, but hardly inspiring.

Top Gun is not so much a movie in the conventional sense as an escalating series of masterfully crafted adverts: motorcycles, aircraft carriers, pectorals and planes all look as if they’ve been shot for a particularly luminous beer campaign.

A deftly directed, superbly acted and occasionally witty biopic which is not afraid to engage with the complexities of its central character.

Apart from an irritating plot glitch this is a solidly entertaining ride, more than competently directed and played.

Heavy but fascinating creepy drama, that lacks pace in the first half but has some genuinely thrilling moments.

Flimsy plot (as usual for Argento) but stunning set pieces and camera work.

Pacino simmers in this daring and brilliantly constructed treatise on the many facets of a crime.

There are effective moments, a dime clutching tot watching an ice cream van plough gently into a garden wall after its driver has a heart attack, gives a stylish laugh, but at the end of the day perhaps a trip to the bar will be more fun.

The Thing is a peerless masterpiece of relentless suspense, retina-wrecking visual excess and outright, nihilistic terror, placing 12 men at an Antarctic station while a shapeshifter takes them over one by one.

Cronenberg's best for a long time -- broad and entertaining enough for those unacquainted with the director's work, but layered with the themes of infection and mutation that have defined it.

Newman is at his very best, and the cinematography is backing him up every step of the way. Must-see material.