Cath Clarke

With her funny, light-hearted documentary, Penny Lane lets the sunshine in, focusing on the Temple’s message of open-mindedness and inclusivity – LGBTQ followers speak of a sense of belonging.

The film is constantly defining what ugly is: freckles, crooked teeth, excess weight, glasses, clumsiness. At times it feels like an unintentional crib sheet for under-sevens bullying.

Weirdly for a film supposedly based on actual events – adapted from Dave Roberts’s football memoir about life as a fan of beleaguered Bromley FC during the 1969-70 season – a persistent whiff of fakeness hangs over it.

This is not social realism in the style of Ken Loach, but it is a film with a strong sense of outrage. Some might find it relentlessly bleak.

This Neil Armstrong documentary feels like unrequired viewing coming so soon after two cracking moon landing movies.

It is a thing of beauty: too beautiful perhaps, running a real danger of prettifying poverty.

The archive clips suggest Halston is a role Richard E Grant was born to play: the designer had a long-limbed loucheness, grandiose affectations and put-on accent, along with a fierce perfectionism.

The more the movie explains, the less powerful it becomes – ending with a Shining-like finale in the snow that for me was a letdown.

Cummings presents us with a guy whose heart is in the right place – he just can’t control himself. But, like me, others may find their tolerance for a clueless white man’s anger issues has maxed out.

Here’s that Hollywood rarity – a sequel that’s better than the original. It’s wittier, less frenetic and introduces fresh characters and a nice scene of strategic furball vomming.

Mélanie Thierry does her best in the lead as Duras, but her character is maddeningly flat and dull.

The film is fun, but, for all its inventiveness, it’s a bit tame, with its nice-but-dim hero. But Diamantino is never dull.

As per the two previous films, Stahelski cranks up the body count with a string of fight sequences so balletic you might forget you’re watching violence – until Reeves sinks a knife into a man’s eye. But, three movies in, franchise bloat is beginning to set in; the dead dog jokes are definitely wearing thin.

A couple of scenes in Destination Wedding fall so calamitously flat I had the disconcerting sensation I was watching the film dubbed in a foreign language or for a spoofed internet meme.

It’s overripe and improbable, but you’d need a flinty heart to resist the message of solidarity, that if you spend time with someone, anyone, you’ll find common ground.

It really is such a blatant copycat job, ripping off Cars note for note and lifting so many elements – from talking driverless cars to the dim-witted, buck-toothed sidekick – they might as well have called it Carz.

Everyone here emotes like they’re acting in an electric toothbrush ad.

But the storytelling is unevolved compared with the animation.

It’s written and directed by Liam O Mochain with the kind of inoffensive hot-water-bottle-laughs you wouldn’t think possible after Father Ted. Well, I say inoffensive, but one of the vignettes – about an uptight bridezilla whose sole character trait is her desperation to get married – is depressingly unfeminist.

Five Feet Apart, with its phoney emotions and baloney contrivances — these love-struck kids can’t even hold hands let alone get to first base because two people with cystic fibrosis aren’t allowed to touch — just didn’t do the job for me.

The script, inspired by Chomko’s grandparents’ marriage, throws up plenty of authentic-looking observations of life with Alzheimer’s.

None of the young stars shine as John Boyega did in ATB, but this movie is sentimental in all the right places, and impossible to dislike.

If gym buff Henry Cavill really is quitting the role in the movies, as has been rumoured, the film-makers could do worse than to follow the direction here, opening a vacancy for a skinny, long-haired Superman with an earnest hipstery vibe that screams Adam Driver.

This really is an incredibly cheesy remake—the original was already pretty cheesy—starring Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston and Kevin Hart, doing their best with a script that cranks out all the odd-couple movie clichés.

Mortal Engines really is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent slog, as characters leap unfeasibly out of planes on to bits of cities while a squad of rebel-fighter pilots straight out of Star Wars buzz around.

At two hours, the film feels a little long, but this is a heartfelt and human drama with the texture of truth and characters to care about.

Miraculously, Möller turns a handful of phone conversations into a nerve shredder.

More bah-humbuggery – which is a rational response to the wall-to-wall Christmas jumpers – and less zany antics here would have done the job better.

I have to admit to being helplessly enchanted – or suckered – for the most part. There’s wit here and The Nutcracker will take you from zero to Christmas jumper in the opening sequence. What’s missing is the melancholy darkness of ETA Hoffmann’s story. Instead, schmaltz-merchant director Lasse Hallström tugs at the heartstrings and ladles on the syrup.

The conceit is nicely done, and the film’s unexpectedly heartfelt message about empathy and looking at the world through someone else’s eyes just about makes up for its bland animation, smart-arsed script and generic clappy-blah songs.

What an intelligent, emotionally grown-up film. More of this please.

The film dies an agonising death long before it ever reaches Valhalla.

Talley strikes you as a man of sincerity and depth behind all the air-kissing and lamé.

Kendrick and Lively have never been funnier, snapping one-liners at each other like elastic bands; the script is hyper-alert to the undercurrent of competitiveness between stay-at-home and working mums.

There’s a made-by-a-mate feel to the film, which jumps around confusingly: if you’re not a fan it might help to read her Wiki page for context. Perhaps there is just too much MIA for one film to handle. One thing’s for sure, in an era of manufactured pop stars, she is resplendently unfiltered.

The movie is full of wackiness but contains only traces of comedy.

This delightfully entertaining and idiosyncratic music documentary ought to banish the stereotype of drummers as talentless thickos. It’s also one of those films you can happily watch without having a jot of prior interest in its subject.

Ego, money, drugs: Lavelle’s story has the makings of an entertaining account of the music business. But this film feels too much like a promo for a comeback attempt.

This bland and predictable animation about an outsider kid who makes friends with aliens pinches an awful lot of its ideas from superior family films, without reviving any of their wonder or fun.

Mandico has made a wildly strange debut, striking enough to make you sit up and pay attention.

It’s a thoughtful, dream-like film, but, in the end, I’m not sure what Distant Constellation is saying about age or memory.

Their film pushes the limits of documentary filmmaking and will likely push the tolerance of viewers. This is a demanding watch, the arthouse cinema equivalent of the marshmallow experiment, testing the attention span of audiences.

There’s really not much for the humans to do, other than flash brilliant white smiles, making the film feel like the world’s longest toothpaste advert. And it’s a toothbrush you’ll be reaching for after all so much sugary sentimentality.

Sigurðsson is no misanthrope and his humane message – that everyone is muddling along as best they can – makes all the feuding and bile easier to stomach. Some may prefer a little more bite.

This intelligent, honest documentary explores his complex personality without getting tacky or tabloidy, or ignoring McQueen’s dark side.

It is a poignant set-up but, disappointingly, Okada’s ideas about motherhood don’t cut as deep as they could.

Del Toro is the Ernest Hemingway of screen badasses: the less he says the better he is – he does his most convincing work while looking like he’s about to nod off. ‘Sicario 2’ sets up a future instalment centred on him: that sequel will be a must.

A difficult, depressing watch.

McKellen occasionally slips into the part of twinkly super-cool gay uncle that he tends to play in interviews these days. But mostly he’s thoughtful and self-reflective (and not at all gossipy about his theatrical chums, disappointingly).

What’s interesting about Revenge is that it’s told from a female perspective – and by a female filmmaker.

At times, there is something almost spoofy about this film’s relentless miserableness. Its 30-minute long hallucinatory dream sequence didn’t work for me – it might be that you need a degree in Russian history to make sense of its allegory on the nature of power.

Welcome to the Jungle is mostly great fun, with Jack Black outrageously entertaining as a teenage girl. But we need to talk about Karen. As Ruby Roundhouse, Gillan is stuck in less clothes than one of Rihanna’s backing dancers. It’s a dig at the hypersexualization of women in video games, apparently. If so, perhaps the male director (or one of the four male writers) can explain how fixing the camera on a skimpily dressed female character makes the point.

The animation is beautifully old-fashioned.

The performances are thoughtful, and like a pinch of chilli, heat things up from time to time. But director Oren Moverman’s portrait of smug, toxic privilege misses its mark – and at the end of two long hours, this feels about as fresh as last night’s chips.

It’s entertaining enough, but certainly didn’t have me reaching for a jumper.

It’s an interesting concept, but the characters are thin and nothing here feels insightful.

Why drag the franchise back now? The screamingly obvious answer is sheer cash-grab cynicism. Or perhaps it’s to cater to the generation of kids who’ve grown up riding the Saw-themed roller coaster at Thorpe Park. Either way, it’s depressing.

This is anaemic stuff, though perhaps its target audience won’t care.

Not much happens in The Midwife, but its depth and texture make this a moving film about families, time passing and shared history – and the handful of scenes in the maternity unit where Claire works, five or six little miracles of birth, somehow add to its sense of a life as mysterious and precious.

The whole thing is boring and phony, with just a couple of lines of dialogue that feel sharp.

The film isn’t perfect. It’s slightly too long and drifts a bit in the middle. But the final showdown left me in a cold sweat.

This is a fresh and un-stuffy period drama mostly, but it could have done with a pinch more danger.

The film also touches on Bell’s work for the British government, drawing up the boundaries of Iraq after WWI – which was to have consequences still felt today.

This really is Wonder Woman coming to the rescue of the DC Comics universe.

Thorncroft is a gem of comedy creation – played to perfection by Barratt.

Really, this is David/Walter’s show. For reasons too spoilery to give away, Fassbender is electric, giving a spectacularly skin-crawling performance.

The medical side of things is shown in documentary detail, and it’s fascinating.

Newcomer Florence Pugh is like a lightning bolt, totally electric as Katherine, who’s up there with Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina in the literary heroine stakes.

The gags here ought to have been put out of their misery and the we’re-all-in-it-together bonding between the kooks of table 19 is just painful.

Watching Raw is a bit like seeing a toddler crawl toward a four-lane highway. You can’t tear your eyes away, but at same time you want to squeeze them shut. This is a film that doesn’t just put you through the wringer; it scrapes your insides out. It left me trembling for hours.

This is a lavish pull-out-all-the-stops musical.

There is surely a sly attack here on the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin’s suppression of liberal values and demonisation of the LGBT community. As the tension escalates, there are some poking between the ribs questions too about free speech and facts in the post-truth era.

This forgotten chapter of history deserves to be better told.

Cameraperson’ is a thoughtful examination of the role of the documentary-maker, showing us how it feels to be that person behind the camera.

You want to know more about what Aisholpan is thinking behind that shy determined smile. But that’s not her way. You can imagine her as the gutsy heroine of a Disney animation.

This is a film with a big heart and an even bigger imagination.

As a memorable teen character, she’s almost up there with Cher from ‘Clueless’ or Ellen Page’s Juno. Watch and wince.

This entertaining first spin-off from the Harry Potter movies is both inventive and familiar – and Eddie Redmayne makes an endearing new wizarding lead.

It’s an emotionally involving rather than harrowing film, with scenes as beautiful as oil paintings.

[An] informative documentary.

Trolls is not break-the-mould brilliant like The Lego Movie or Toy Story, or a keeper like Frozen. But it’s a lovable and giddy guilty pleasure.

Like a fridge whose door’s been left open overnight, the film doesn’t feel chilly enough. It’s not terrible, but fans of the book may well be disappointed.

It is solid and watchable, and Radcliffe is genuinely ace, giving a smart, understated and intelligent performance.

If you’re the person who watches weepies with a cynical curl of the lip, this isn’t the film for you. Everyone else, prepare to have your heartstrings plucked.

I’ve never liked Renée Zellweger more as a warmer and wiser Bridget Jones – but still capable of making a total prat of herself.

What Morgan lacks in philosophy and ideas, it makes up for in bone-crunching violence.

While it’s often beautiful and moving, emotionally it never quite sticks.

There is a message here about celebrating differences, which would be a bit more convincing if they’d cast a smaller actor in the role – instead of using distracting CG effects on Dujardin.

The fish-out-of water moments are great fun, watching arthouse gods Depardieu and Huppert in tacky tourist hell.

This being a kids film, there is a ‘message’ – about the destruction of nature. But the eco theme genuinely works with the film’s wonder at nature.

It might not be note perfect, jazz fans will probably hate it, and whole chunks might not be true. But ‘Born to Be Blue’ feels like it’s somehow getting inside Chet Baker.

You can see why this girl-saves-guy storyline clicked with Watson’s feminism, and she brings pin-sharp intelligence to the role. But everything here feels inauthentic.

Intelligent and screwball-funny with clever and complicated female characters.

Everything here feels inauthentic, from the cast speaking their lines in English to the unthrilling final escape attempt.

Cruz has enough charm to melt a glacier, but she can’t rescue the shamelessly sentimental script by director Julio Medem (‘Sex and Lucia’). Ma Ma is going for the heartstrings, but don’t bother taking tissues.

How much you love this low-budget British effort will depend on your tolerance to quirkiness.

There are some funny-sweet observations about pets and our projections on to them. And the animation is expressive.... But the manic pace, piling on the action sequences, is exhausting.

It’s refreshing to see a movie like this directed by a woman, Eva Husson, so boys and girls are objectified equally. Which is not to say this passes the feminism test.

Makhmalbaf says he was inspired by the Arab Spring, and his film is pitched somewhere between allegory and satire.

Few films make you care about the characters like this one does.

It’s raw, funny and incredibly moving.

Director Stephen Frears sketches out her tragic backstory, and Streep in grande dame mode is not to be missed.

A candid, often shocking documentary portrait of the great photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

There are beautiful moments from David Hockney’s home-video stash in this thoughtful doc.

This Jungle Book has the bare necessities, and then some.

All told, ‘Winter’s War’ is not the fairest sequel, but it’s not so terrible that it deserves to be taken out to the forest and finished off.

There are more than a few false notes here.... Still, the sight of Emma Thompson, wearing old-lady prosthetics and a leopard skin coat as Barney’s mum...is not to be missed.

Is there something creepy about Franny’s aggressive generosity and need to be needed? In a film with a better script, yes.

There are a few ideas knocking about in the script – including repression of childhood trauma – but the silly, hand-me-down scares just don’t chill.

As modern dating movies go, How to Be Single gets a lot right.

The average lifespan of a chipmunk is five years – which means the kids’ cartoon franchise about the trio of singing superstar rodents has already outstayed its welcome.

The top-notch cast keep calm and carry on, but this TV remake is a waste of everyone’s time.

Sisters is too strained for a comedy starring two of the funniest people alive.

Nine years in the making, this impressive doc pieces together the story of the biggest global protest in history.

Lawrence is gritty, real and totally genuine. And, after ‘Brooklyn’ and ‘Carol’, here’s another film that passes the Bechdel Test for proper female characters with flying colours.

When it’s playing for laughs, ‘A Royal Night Out’ is harmless good fun.

It’s a film with the texture and truth of life, and at its heart is a beautiful performance by Cliff Curtis, who never in a million years will be nominated for an Oscar, but deserves one.

Rather than letting the CGI do all the graft, Hardy unleashes a beautifully handcrafted army of puppets and animatronic demonic creatures. Too many, too soon, really. It’s overkill and pretty quickly you’re suffering from fiend fatigue.

Even just watching this impressive documentary, you feel a little unhinged by the scale of suffering.

This Macbeth is ferociously well acted. Fassbender’s prowling energy electrifies the film.

Clarke directs fights in weird slo-mo and is generous with scenes of himself in his undies.

A wonderful Maggie Smith plays all this dead straight, poker-faced for maximum laughs. It’s a peppery, unsentimental performance. She’s hysterically funny, till she’s not – flooring you as the regret and tragedy behind Miss Shepherd’s vagabond life is revealed.

It’s a nail-biting story, but this doc isn’t as gripping as it should be.

Writer Abi Morgan ('Shame', 'The Iron Lady') and director Sarah Gavron's ('Brick Lane') tough, raw, bleak-looking film makes the suffragettes' dilemma feel immediate and real.

You forget how limited so many movies’ ideas of women are until Amy Schumer launches into an extended tampon joke: nothing is off-limits as she kapows through expectations of female characters.

Pacino gives his most natural performance in years.

What a ballsy film and honest too.

This woman has plenty of blunt wisdom to share.

It works and then some, making for a noirish and complex emotional thriller. And Hoss is incredible, playing Nelly with the shuffling gait and haunted expression of a dead woman walking.

Missing – and missed – are Matthew McConaughey as snake-hipped strip club owner Dallas and director Soderbergh, who gave the original its lived-in feel.

What makes The New Girlfriend special is that is has something to say about sexuality (feminine, masculine, gay, straight, and everything in between – it’s complicated).

Sir Ian McKellen is a pleasure to watch as an elderly Sherlock Holmes, though the drama isn't as compelling as it might have been.

It's silly rather than scary, more insipid than insidious.

For a film posing the metaphysical biggies, there is tenderness and laughs. Its bonkers approach to storytelling and life may drive some nuts. The rest of us will soar with the birds.

Like Bujalski’s early mumblecore work, this is sensitive and meandering – and just a little bit patience-testing. But it’s also infectiously sweet and honest-feeling.

Bell is so goofy and likeable I found myself willing the film to keep up with her. But the funny bits are never quite funny enough, and the script loses feminist points bigtime for its sour bitch ex-wife character.

Pitch Perfect 2 is totally goofy but very sweet.

Far from Men is a character study — a two-hander expertly acted by Mortensen and Kateb (best known for the terrific French cop show Spiral).

The Water Diviner is solid and old-fashioned.

The pressure for minimalist Simons to succeed in the ultra-feminine world of Dior is intense.

Dreamcatcher is harrowing.

What a waste of Shailene Woodley the Divergent franchise is turning out to be.

If it wasn’t so violent, the simplicity of the metaphor – how the abused and outcast will rise up – would work for young audiences. And you won’t beat it for dog acting.

It’s all very sweet and harmless, though you can’t help wishing that Cinders got her happy ending for more than being kind to her digital mice and weathering a lot of crap with a never-ending smile on her face.

Don’t watch this doc for a lesson in the crisis. Maidan is hard work, with no voiceover or interviews and just the odd scrap of information written on screen to guide you through.

Some people will hate Trash for being not grittily real enough, but Daldry’s point – a hope-against-hope optimistic one – is that the energy of young people can change Brazil.

It aims for a loose, French New Wave style but settles for muddled and rambling. It’s tortured for all the wrong reasons.

“Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre,” Roth wrote in Everyman, but other than a few jokes about Axler’s limp erection and thrown-out back, we don’t see much of that.

A beautifully acted but disappointingly stiff period drama.

It’s a thoughtful, well-acted and perceptive drama. However, for a film about a love triangle the sparks don’t exactly fly.

Into the Woods starts better than it finishes but it’s a great-looking film, with a nicely old-school, easy-on-the-CG feel.

The film is frantic and silly and our biggest gripe is that all the penguins look the same.

Jolie has assembled an A-list team – Roger Deakins behind the camera, the Coen brothers in charge of the script - but while her film is perfectly competent, it hardly dazzles.

This isn’t much more than a series of ridiculously dotty sketches, and might have worked better as a sitcom, but it’s surprisingly hilarious.

Even now at 50, Jarvis is a man who remains head-on crushable while dry humping an amp like your geography teacher on the Bacardi Breezers.

You’ll walk out of this electrifying documentary about the Arab Spring with your blood boiling.

While it definitely takes its foot off the action, Mockingjay – Part 1 goes deeper and darker.

In the end Horns is weird without being interesting.

Diehard romcom fans will have their socks charmed off, but this is no ‘Notting Hill’.

We don’t invest anything in either character, and with barely any tension, Serena grabs neither head nor heart.

Brad Pitt pulls along this gutsy, old-fashioned World War II epic by the sheer brute force of his charisma.

As a thriller, Before I Go To Sleep is perfectly effective, but while director Rowan Joffe keeps the twists coming, something about Kidman’s blank, frosty performance is unconvincing.

You can watch The Innocents twice and walk away with different conclusions. Psychological horrors have imitated its ambiguous ending ever since. Few have pulled it off half as creepily.

Entertaining but never quite thrilling, this actually feels like the second film in a franchise, coasting along, but saving the best bits for the next episode.

Wade’s dialogue is totally convincing, all in-jokes and boarding school banter... The trouble with The Riot Club is that dramatically it never quite comes together.

The 3D effects are dazzling, but the script creaks and the characters are thin.

It's dazzling and rambling, intimate and sprawling, and it's carried along by an infectious, off-the-cuff jazz score. As soon as it ends, you'll be dying to fly with it again.

Simon Pegg plays the world’s most unconvincing psychiatrist in this fluffy, irritating Brit comedy.

This sentimental Michael Caine drama is so dull that doctors could prescribe it to treat insomnia. What the hell, they could probably use it to medically induce a coma.

What makes it special is that it’s not another romance about finding a man. It’s about finding your people, about being a bit lost in your twenties and not knowing who you are or what you want to be. And it’s got bucketfuls of charm.

This snore-bore doc follows the year-long world tour of Kevin Spacey’s Old Vic production of 'Richard III’ directed by Sam Mendes ('Skyfall'). Critics dusted off all their big words to praise the play. But we don’t get to see much of it.

Like Restrepo, this troubling and thoughtful documentary asks tough questions.

Stick with it and writer/director Alice Rohrwacher’s first feature reveals another side: taking a small town as a microcosm of Berlusconi’s something-rotten-at-the-core Italy.

The film’s Groundhog Day-meets-Independence Day plot is actually pretty genius.

As arthouse coming-of-age films go, this is brilliant – smart and sensitive with a screw-you feminist streak. And it’s beautifully acted by two first-time actresses playing Eka and Natia, who have been friends forever.

Tracks might be a bit slow for some, but it’s one of those films that quietly creeps up on you.

The film can’t match the novel’s elegant, startlingly excellent Booker-Prize-winning writing, but a first-class cast (including Charlotte Rampling and Sinéad Cusack) make this an absorbing watch.

This Brit comedy has the watchability factor of a mediocre TV sitcom.

There are a couple of decent jumps and a few giggles, but nothing armrest-clenchingly scary about The Quiet Ones.

[A] wickedly funny black comedy, all fatalism and gallows humour, with both a beating heart and an inquiring mind lingering beneath its tough-guy bluster.

Sadly, this polite film, though touching in places, is so desperate not to offend, it’s the film equivalent of sensible shoes. Diehard fashionistas may disagree.

What keeps this out of Nicholas Sparks bumper-paperback territory are terrific performances and Reitman’s control of the drama.

The novel A Long Way Down is not-quite-vintage Nick Hornby. And this is a disappointing film version, a bit hokey and fake.

Every emotion is bang-on; every scene unfolds grippingly and naturally; and by the end, these characters feel like people you know.

There are some gorgeous comic touches.

In this heartfelt film, Fleifel shows us the human cost of the conflict.

There are some gorgeous Disney touches, rabble-rousing songs on the pirate ship and the usual ‘best friends for ever’ message.

Her is a keeper of a film, quietly dazzling.

What will take your breath away is how viciously Armstrong crushed and humiliated anyone who dared to make allegations against him, and that includes former teammates he’d doped with.

Bale is as good as it gets, Harrelson shows us why he is Hollywood’s favourite psycho and Willem Dafoe is terrific as a sleazy drug dealer. The rest of the film is without a bat squeak of authenticity.

The actors – who seem to have been involved in a hideous industrial accident that’s left them with the superpower of repelling all comic timing – are spectacularly unfunny.

This is a whistle stop tour that leaves you wanting more.

In Firth’s every grimace and flinch you feel the torment of Lomax’s private world, but emotionally ‘The Railway Man’ feels trimmed and tidied up.

Moretz is unnervingly talented, but Carrie is not a role she was born to play. She hasn’t a victim’s bone in her body and fluffs the early scenes when the mean girls pick on her.

The whole thing goes down with a few bucketloads of sugar. What keeps it from becoming sticky schmaltz is Thompson, who plays Travers with wit and warmth, adding a spoonful of spoilt child to help the battleaxe go down.

Like so many campaigning doc-makers he’s much more interested in throwing darts at the other guys – the anti-nuclear brigade (who have better slogans: ‘Hell, no, we won't glow’) – than giving us a balanced film.

Catching Fire looks and feels epic. Hands down it’s one of the most entertaining films of the year.

This painful, beautiful doc chronicles the fightback.

It’s a touching film and a fascinating glimpse into one of those couples you can’t quite believe are still together.

The problem with the film is that Potts’s life story has been put through the Hollywood meatgrinder. Awkward details have been changed or erased – they’ve made Potts Welsh (he grew up in Bristol) and eliminated his siblings.

Nicole Holofcener has a reputation for making Woody Allen-ish chick-flicks. Which sounds like a snidey compliment. Enough Said is her best yet.

Heldenbergh and Baetens pull you in with committed performances ­– their raw pain and grief is totally believable. But all that honest, intense emotion is thrown away as the film outstays its welcome by 40 minutes or so, piling one tragedy on to another.

Love, Marilyn blows out of the water the impression of Monroe as the helpless dumb blonde.

Intelligent and moving.

The story is a bit predictable and rough around the edges. But it’s heart-on-the-sleeve sweet.

Kevin Macdonald’s slightly drab adaptation of Meg Rosoff’s popular teen novel would be nothing without Saoirse Ronan.

What marks out director Mike Newell and writer David Nicholls’s version is its impeccable acting.

You’ll be left scratching your head wondering what a naked girl draped in a purple net curtain in a cemetery has got to do with frocks. Not many revelations here.

A right royal mess.

‘Bodies’ gets under your skin and stays there. And the gospel handclapping soundtrack feels like it’s drawing you into a dream.

The message to take home: put a pot of lavender on your windowsill. Save bees!

It's très chic and charming but a bit disappointing when you see where it's headed.

From the opening voiceover to the out-of-their-heads party scenes, it’s utterly generic.

It doesn’t even qualify for dumb fun.

This tense New York drama from the co-directors of Bee Season and The Deep End is sensitive and almost unwatchably perceptive about dysfunctional families – and it’s acted with knife-sharp precision.

[A] thin, slightly exasperating documentary.

Doctor Zhivago has the most irritating soundtrack in the history of cinema and yes, it’s old-fashioned and sappy. But it’s impossible not to swoon. This is a love story to sink your teeth into.

Now Breakfast at Tiffany’s is iconic in fashion circles and Holly Golightly seen as a proto-Carrie Bradshaw – a trailblazer for women who use their ovens for shoe storage. Re-released by the BFI, it’s as ditsy and delightful as ever – with charm enough to forgive it plenty. [Review of re-release]

Director Daryl Goodrich has access to all the right people, and his footage is nicely chosen, but ‘Ferrari’ is unlikely to convert non-petrolheads.

Billy Wilder’s 1959 comedy is still perfect all these years later.

Loud and zappy, The Jungle Bunch trots out predictable be-kind-be-brave platitudes, but lacks anything distinctive of its own.

It’s a handsome film, but in the end perhaps Wes Anderson’s pastiche approach in The Life Aquatic (in which Bill Murray’s character is a tribute to Cousteau) more vividly brought to life the era of the last great adventurer-superstars.

No one watches Gone with the Wind for historical accuracy. What keeps us coming back is four-hours of epic romance in gorgeous Technicolor.

The film feels more like an authorised biography than a documentary, and for that reason it’s a little dull.