Dave Calhoun

It's a bold film, full of energy and spunk, but a patchy, half-formed, rambling one too.

The writing and direction lean towards the obvious, but there’s much to chew on regarding tradition, progress and the power of the white lie.

War Dogs simply doesn’t dig deeply enough into the duo’s personalities to be more than a fitfully entertaining escapist spin on a ripped-from-the-headlines yarn.

If you’ve never been to a burlesque show, now you know what you’re missing. The dedication and warmth of the performers are infectious.

The film’s best scenes are a series of hilarious father-son encounters where the son wants to be loved and the dad just doesn’t get it.

There are no interviews, characters nor narration, and after an hour it can feel like a chore. Yet the images are staggering.

If its script is a little unwieldy and overwrought at times, Broken is still a work of delightful moments and strong promise for many of those involved. Norris works hard to inject some joy and wonder into what could easily be a much more dark and miserable experience.

Visually, it’s never less than arresting. Gently amusing, too, is the relationship between Keitel and Caine, even if the dialogue Sorrentino writes for them often displays a fondness for empty epigrams.

A lively, uncomplicated jukebox movie. Bohemian Rhapsody is a feature-length earworm that leaves “Don’t Stop Me Now,” “We Are the Champions,” “Another One Bites the Dust” and the rest of them wriggling in your cochlea and helping to drown out any inner whisper suggesting that you’ve just had the wool pulled over your eyes by these masters of rock theatrics.

Luckily, there are just enough truths about ageing beneath its corny, farcical surface. Also, it’s hard not to enjoy two hours in the company of this cast.

The word exploitation comes to mind.

This is a smart, meaningful first film, with nods all over the place to classics like The Shining and Rosemary’s Baby, as well as more recent obvious touch points like Get Out. It’s not all subtle, but then neither is prejudice.

This new version features the voice of Pharrell Williams as the narrator, dipping in and out of Dr. Seuss’s warming rhymes. That binds to the film to its authentic source, but the gaps between the spoken verse still remind us that this is a slender story s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d into a feature.

Thematically, White Elephant is a vague animal and its true interest never truly comes into focus.

If the crime element feels like little more than a red herring, it’s the characters that give the film its appeal.

There are no great upsets or fireworks here, just a tender sketch of what it means to (probably) be gay as a school kid. The storytelling style is as inoffensive as the music (Arvo Pärt, Belle and Sebastian), and the performances are amiable and relaxed.

The unusually extended shooting period and Winterbottom’s decision to cast siblings as the kids make for a strangely intimate and powerful depiction of time passing and the peaks and troughs of childhood.

Yes, The Lobster is arch: this is cinema in quotemarks, tongue-in-cheek storytelling that uses absurdity to hold a mirror to how we live and love. At its best, it has incisive things to say about how we shape ourselves and others just to banish the fear of being alone, unloved and friendless.

The mix of fact and fiction is a little confusing, but a strong sense of warm enquiry pulls it through.

It’s a sad project, a testament to lives cut short and stories half-told.

Just the name ‘George Galloway’ – this doc’s presenter and co-writer – will have some vowing to go nowhere near this lively character assassination of Tony Blair. But anyone expecting wall-to-wall ranting and raving might be surprised by it’s relative sobriety.

There are some genuine laughs, and the air of deep-frozen cynicism reminds you that Niven’s book was on to something behind the violence and farce.

The result is a soil-under-the-fingernails, forest-bound mindmelter – with bonus pagan chills.

Beyond the shocks and games, there's not a great deal to take away in the form of meaty ideas or lingering themes, and its catchy premise doesn't really deliver in the end.

Loushy’s project can feel repetitive, a bit too in awe of his admittedly significant sources. Perhaps most striking are their prophecies that this was only the beginning of an intractable conflict that could only get worse, not better.

Luckily, Hawke and Delpy remain as charming as ever, and their combined goofiness is more endearing than annoying. Winning, too, is the sense that this peculiar project, though imperfect, could grow old with its audience and its cast.

The film’s said to be autobiographical, but that’s entirely left to us to guess.

Only Lovers Left Alive drags its feet and shows serious signs of anaemia as a story.

Cloying at times – but always good-natured.

Skarsgård himself is fairly bland as Greystoke, delivering a po-faced Byronic spin on the character, all velvet coats and dreamy romantic stares at his belle while sitting barefooted in the boughs of trees. But at least the animals are memorable – best of all is a pack of scene-stopping silverback gorillas digitally created for the movie. This Tarzan isn’t quite the jungle VIP – but it’s got a little swing.

It’s anarchic, sometimes amusing, intermittently tedious, with ideas about digital alienation and the corruption of technology that too often feel blunt and tired.

As storytelling, it’s pristine: it moves like a reptile playing the long game. But its cruelty is tough to bear.

This good-natured hagiography isn’t anywhere near free of pomposity, but even Bono seems to know when it’s best just to keep quiet and move on.

This slapdash but endearing doc about the rise, fall and resurrection of '80s pop outfit Spandau Ballet is an inside job, packed with strong archive footage yet lacking anything you'd call truly incisive.

Fitfully entertaining, with some grabby trial scenes, the film struggles to find a proper, engaging focus.

This is an unapologetically fluffy film that never digs deep into its characters’ lives. Its pleasures are patchy. Keaton offers an endearing performance, even if her chemistry with Gleeson (not on top form) is weirdly lacking.

Some prior interest in Berger would help, but even newcomers should find this an infectious portrait of independent thought and living.

Some clunky coincidences and unlikely events confuse the film's mission, and it lacks the clarity and parable-like meaning of the brothers' best films.

It’s a winning yarn, but Osmond has to crack the whip to get it over the finishing line.

Treat Benedetta as a pile-up of shallow pleasures undercut with a sardonic wink and some fairly obvious comments on power and corruption, and there’s fun to be had. Look for any deeper logic and you’ll be disappointed.

There’s something sloppy and sluggish about ‘Irrational Man’, even by Allen’s patchy standards.

It’s an important story, of course, but only mildly engaging as cinema.

Don’t think too much about the plot; it’s about as water-tight as a corporate-pension scheme. All three stars deliver exactly what you expect from them — nothing more, nothing new — but their onscreen familiarity is a strange comfort in itself.

Hitchcock matches the play's compassion for women suffering in the face of feckless men, especially in the film's powerful final shots. [07 Oct 2010]

There are times when it feels underpowered or unfocused... but this is an intelligent, sensitive debut.

The creature effects are charming.... But the pig-chasing antics and cartoonish corporate nastiness that dominate much of the film become seriously grating.

Ayoade tips his hat to so many other filmmakers and writers that he leaves little room to consider anything other than what a good job he’s doing of distilling all his references into an effective Pinterest board of paranoia and alienation.

As history, I’d take this account with a pinch of salt – it feels too enamoured by certain elements of its antihero’s story and blinkered to others – but as an exercise in capturing the man’s self-engineered legend, it’s energetic and engrossing.

There’s plenty of warmth and compassion here, and the true story is a belter, but this ‘Lion’ doesn’t quite roar.

What stops David Cronenberg’s grotesque noir Maps to the Stars, written by LA insider Bruce Wagner, from feeling tired is that it’s deliciously odd.

Some who found his last two films an eccentric romp might end up feeling like some of the unfortunate folk in this – bruised, battered and stuck – but anyone who shares Lanthimos’s pleasure at swatting his humans like flies will surely extract wry pleasure from it.

Its bitty flashback approach to Fife’s earlier life feels shallow, and the dynamics around the recording of his memories too often feel bogus, with Thurman’s character’s complaints feeling especially repetitive and one-note. But the sting of mortality is felt just strongly enough, and Schrader offers an unsentimental, clear-eyed view of the near-impossibility of finding a neat closure on life’s mistakes and failures.

It’s Bulger whose grim appearance and even grimmer behaviour ‘Black Mass’ indulges. But it’s the quieter, more complicated Connolly who offers the film’s subtler pleasures.

It ends up as a sweet-enough movie, and one that’s full of joy and invention – but also one that feels like a lot of effort has been put into serving a tale that maybe doesn’t fully deserve it.

It's to Ozon's credit that he never serves up easy answers.

You have to swallow some inadequacies to get the most out of The Promise. It is appealingly photographed and boasts some stunning location work, yet it’s also saddled with the tone of a biblical epic, invisibly watermarked with the label important.

Demange is a strong storyteller and masks the script’s tendency to nod to every opinion and social division by offering a masterclass in tension as soon as his dramatic bomb starts ticking.

To enjoy the film's arresting musings on language, time and how much we can ever understand others, you'll have to close your eyes and ears to the wealth of schlocky hokum surrounding them.

It’s such a loopy endeavour overall that Annette will likely have some audiences running from it screaming as much as it will have others worshipping at its altar. It’s a hard film to adore, but an easy one to thank for its very existence.

Let’s not kid ourselves: cast-iron interpretations of Malick’s recent filmmaking are risky. It’s also a matter of taste. You either slip into the pretty, dreamlike, wistful groove of his later films or you don’t, and even hardened arthouse film lovers may find Knight of Cups way out of their comfort zone.

This is a valuable companion piece to other accounts and a vivid collage of in-the-moment imagery.

As a storyteller Cronenberg usually tells stories with more verve and storytelling power than this.

It’s adequate and often fun, but no match for Cumberbatch’s talents: physically, his Assange is far more complex and intriguing than most of the things we hear him say or see him do.

Hats off to Dreamworks for offering some bold surprises in a respectable sequel filled with moments of humour and emotion among its ample noise and movement.

There's little humour, and strip away the styling and what it has to say about fashion has been said a thousand times before. But there's a mesmerising strangeness to Refn's vision that can't be denied, and Fanning does an especially good job of portraying innocence lost in the belly of the fashion beast.

In the end, Love is more silly than sordid, and even a little soppy in its late – too late – love-filled moments. Many teens will love it; most adults will roll their eyes.

As drama, The Salesman wanders, meanders and searches, mostly pleasurably, until it hits an over-engineered final chapter.

Put your fingers in your ears when the talking starts, and you might enjoy the view.

The list of co-stars – Jane Fonda, Octavia Spencer, Aaron Paul – is so impressive that it’s hard to know what attracted everyone to such a soapy, cloying script.

Writer-director Billy Ray (the writer of Captain Phillips and the first The Hunger Games) honours the Argentine original with keynote scenes set in a mirrored lift and a crowded sports stadium, but the mood is too often sluggish and pedestrian.

Directed by Gillies MacKinnon, this new version lacks the mischief of the original and feels like a sluggish museum piece.

Burton lets Waltz run wild, sucking the air out of every scene with his hysterics, and the always-endearing Adams is left looking like a rabbit in the headlights.

There are scenes that grab – Abrahams’s dash round Trinity quad; the chats between Gielgud and Lindsay Anderson as dons who dress up prejudice in fine words. But the parallel stories tend to cancel out, rather than complement, each other. Oddly, for a film about triumph over adversity, there’s nothing as uplifting as the opening and closing jogs along a windswept beach.

Sentimental and shallow, although just passable as a kids’ movie.

The elements are all in place – superb acting (lead actor Konstantin Lavronenko won the best actor prize at Cannes in 2007), masterly camerawork, an ethereal score, ghostly locations – but the problem is that the story never really connects.

There are rousing landscape shots, a fair amount of bone-crunching, and a dash of brooding patriotism – and a welcome attempt to look at history from the view of ordinary folk – but the storytelling is downbeat and basic.