Dave Calhoun

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

Oldman is brilliant; Molina’s Halliwell less subtle; and the film’s dissection of cottaging quaintly amusing.

The wit is sharp . . . and the lament to times past, friendships gone and experiences lost is affecting.

Scarecrow’ feels like an existential fairytale squarely rooted in the reality of America’s fraying backroads and small towns. It’s all a little rambling and anarchic, but later scenes in a jail have real bite. And when the sadness behind Lion’s smile is revealed, it’s also genuinely moving.

It’s a heartbreaking work. Its cast are phenomenal; its songs flow through the film like blood; and Davies is unflinching in his hunt for truth and full of nothing but love and understanding for his characters. A masterpiece.

Alongside archive material and new footage of Chet shot in his signature romantic, B&W style, Weber elicits frank reminiscences from his subject and a host of ex-lovers and friends.

French actor-filmmaker Jacques Tati’s 1967 masterpiece still holds up as a feast of subtle sight gags, playful noise and, above all, visual wonders.

Well worth visiting, not least for its similarities to The Third Man.

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.

Any film that can combine questions of mortality with funny, fully alive scenes of sex, social awkwardness, professional screw-ups and throwaway fun is a rich one. Its brilliant, full-on performance from Reinsve deserves to be celebrated far and wide.

Hitchcock breezes through a tongue-in-cheek, nightmarish plot with a lightness of touch that’s equalled by a charming performance from Grant (below), who copes effortlessly with the script’s dash between claustrophobia and intrigue on one hand and romance and comedy on the other.

It’s no masterpiece, but it’s slick and tense, and the camerawork has something of the in-the-moment, on-the-ground immediacy of the French New Wave films.

It's a road movie where the origin feels more interesting than the destination, but it's never less than warm and likeable.

That Anderson, the film’s writer-director, whose Boogie Nights was a riot but Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love both noble failures, has come to make this intelligent and enthralling masterpiece is both a little surprising and intensely satisfying.

In style, the film’s ambition sometimes oversteps its ability, but it’s a rare London gangster film that has something to say about the city and says it with wit and little resort to bloodletting

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]

The film’s real success is that Puiu impresses both with his compassion for human behaviour and his tight grip on realist, documentary-style filmmaking.

Writer-director Francis Lee has drawn on his own farming background and his film is full of convincing detail. The lack of chat feels especially truthful.