Brad Wheeler

Eddie Mensore has not made a masterpiece of the genre, but there’s a poignancy to his gritty calamity tale that makes Mine 9 worth watching.

This is a prequel superior to its predecessor – we’re not bored with board-game ghoulishness yet.

A supernatural winner.

This half-throttle documentary might better be called The Fast and the Uneventful.

It’s quite a film Stephens has made.

The film’s calm brutality is effective. Plot-wise, some punches are telegraphed, while others are not. The satire is a spinning wheel kick I didn’t see coming. Black belts all around.

Like Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven," the underlying tension involves the protagonist's journey to regain his humanity. Hostiles, a hotbed of hostility.

It’s a fantastically bonkers story told excitedly in The Lovers and the Despot, a stranger-than-fiction yarn that would make a hell of an opera.

From the cult Oklahoma director Mickey Reece, the horror film Agnes is funny – both funny ha-ha (in sly ways) and funny-peculiar all around.

The Mumbai-set Photograph is a gentle romance cleverly told, and not without humour.

Spiritual questions and thoughts on the importance of flesh-and-blood relationships are raised, but the strength of the you-can-run-but-you-can’t-hide drama is the dewy charisma of the two young co-stars.

Budreau constructs with imagination and pleasing fluidity, painting a portrait with a soft, sympathetic focus while steering clear of worship.

A well-layered film makes a fascinating case for forgiveness and a sharp rebuke of Bible-taught eye-for-an-eye revenge.

The cast is solid; Everett’s acting in particular is deep, indelible and award-worthy. We smell Oscar, one might say.

That feelgood story of a long dormant musical dream finally realized was enough to earn major press attention, but is it enough for a feature-length film? Probably not, which is why writer-director Pohlad piled on the melodrama and leaned into clichés.

Show tunes meet "Shaun of the Dead" in the delightfully gruesome Scottish horror-musical Anna and the Apocalypse.

While Rhys Ifans chews scenery as a scruff-faced foreign correspondent, Knightley plays it taut and believable, and, as we know, nobody walks on cobblestones better than she. The end result is a professionally made film that is whistle-blowingly relevant, starring an excellent actress who successfully comes in from her Pride & Prejudice past.

What it is, is a delicious black-widow mystery, in which the deep-gazing actress Rachel Weisz rocks the veil.

The film is a level-headed look at artists who promoted joy but lost their own.

Entertaining but manipulative.

The result is a stylish, watchable film, but one with a slow pulse. Game, set and almost a great movie.

The problem with Shyamalan’s spin on dissociative identity disorder is that for all the dissociation, why are all 23 identities cool with locking terrified girls in a basement?

There’s something delightfully clever in a narrative that is easily transferable to modern times. Speaking of which, seeing Alpha on as big and splashy a screen as possible is advisable, preferably with children who can handle occasional scenes of intense peril.

Ultimately the film is as much about the mother and parenting as it is on the hot-plating Doogie Howser. It’s good food for thought, even if the film doesn’t quite come together.

The soundtrack is effective and overt – from the badass rock blare of Billy Squire, Bad Company and AC/DC to the atmosphere compositions of the indie musician Julia Holter to the riveting nu-blues of Willis Earl Beal. The camera work is slick, too; tricky sound-editing notions are pulled off with aplomb.

For fans of horror maestros John Carpenter and Stuart Gordon, nothing fills a void like good, old eighties-fashioned gore. Which is what we get from the writer-director team of Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski, unabashed fans of Reagan-era blood, slash and goo.

A post-tour lawsuit levelled against “motherly” Madonna by two dancers is barely dealt with; the Express Yourself singer herself isn’t interviewed. As a result, the affecting film is absent of the truth or dare it had the potential for.