Donald Clarke

No sensitive viewer could deny the spirit of the original remains, but Jeremy Sims’s charming cover version reverberates with unmistakably Australian harmonies.

We end up with a philosophical comedy that is not afraid to aim the odd joke below the belt or, as resolution looms, to give in to sentimentality. It’s a little bit Capra. It’s also a little bit Beckett.

If you scrunch up your eyes and tilt your head you could imagine yourself watching an avant-garde animation at a Brooklyn art house. But there is also, about it, something of the charming work that Oliver Postgate did for British children’s television in the 1970s.

It is the relationship between Grace and Cian that most engages. Galligan, seen recently in the TV series The Great and Kin, exhibits a rare charisma and a gift for dry comedy that should take her far.

It remains, nonetheless, a pleasure to see a good yarn played out in such professional fashion. Just try not to think of the awful pun in the title.

The three leads demonstrate absolute belief in romantic absolutes as we drift towards a class of sob-heavy denouement Hollywood now rarely attempts. The Irish director’s best film yet.

Now 85, Scott again proves there is nobody so efficient at pressing contemporary technology to the limits. He also draws heroic performances from fleshy human beings

I Never Cry works best as a showcase for a terrific young actor with a nuanced grasp of a complex character.

Appearing opposite Nora-Jane Noone in a film that twists the actors round each other like competing bindweed, McGuigan could hardly have delivered a more bracing final performance. So savage is her turn that you expect water drops to hiss off her broiling skin.

There are endless nuances and ironies throughout. Though stories are told, In the Shadow of Beirut is more a mosaic than a narrative tapestry.

Jolie’s fragile brilliance is not to be questioned.

Trash this classy doesn’t come along often enough.

We are left with a properly entertaining drama that gets across the technical details with great efficiency. A good job of work by a reliable Hollywood professional.

Not every tweak and shave works — there is a brief, unfortunate vacuum in the closing scene — but Spielberg has given us more than most of us deserve. Here is a fitting, accidental tribute to Stephen Sondheim, whose lyrics still crackle above Leonard Bernstein’s score, a few weeks after his death.

Does it all add up? The cleaved-brow Fiennes, who does inner torture better than anyone, makes something believable of Lawrence’s battle for truth and integrity. Isabella Rossellini works magic with a minute supporting role. But few will survive the final scenes without pondering the Italian for “magnificent hokum”.

There is a lot here about how female sexual desire is repressed and sublimated. There is an implied, though not exactly hopeful, treatise on the promise of the later 1960s. Not every risk pays off. But all were worth taking.

Few so economical features – 80 minutes, with only three significant characters – have had such unsettling fun in the dark, dark woods. Don’t let it slip you by.

Theater Camp is itself shamelessly infatuated with the great American musical, but it also enjoys poking affectionate fun at the kids’ creative tunnel vision.

Rather than just pushing the characters through their familiar beats, the well-judged narrative arc takes them on something like a proper journey.

A clever concept carried out with great invention and some emotional honesty.

Though there are some clunking flaws... Cicada has the compact shape of an elegant short story – open-ended, yet not incomplete.

Raiff is brave enough to not give us all we desire from the story. He accommodates a star in the ensemble cast without allowing her to unbalance the character dynamics. But the film is a tad too obtuse to capture the attention of awards voters. Oddball here wins out over mainstream.

Turning Red remains a charming film that will win friends and trigger worthwhile conversations. The right sort of feel-good.

This charming, beautifully made drama gets about halfway (maybe a little more, maybe 60 or 70 per cent) towards confirmation as a classic of English reserve before a stunningly uninteresting subplot concerning less charismatic characters arrives to deaden the closing scenes.

Perhaps overwhelmed by interviews, experimental movies and live footage, Winter allows few compositions to play at length. But the full man emerges in all his contradictions and confrontations.

This remains a careering exercise in mid-ranking Yorgosia that just about justifies its many indulgences. We should remain grateful that a talent so odd remains somewhere adjacent to the mainstream.

You couldn’t sincerely argue that The Outrun brims over with plot, but its rough, maritime texture is never less than diverting. It needles. It provokes.

Detailing the cold shoulders offered to a young woman after she becomes pregnant in 1960s France, the film works evocative period detail in with implicit warnings against contemporary backsliding on reproductive rights. The relentless clockwork of human biology lends it an awful tension. The actors give in to no cheap options.

A bracingly original, notably creepy film that leaves you brooding on its knotty messages.

A grim thrill rounded off with a chilling last shot.

It is not unreasonable to wonder if Mission: Impossible is moving into its Spy Who Loved Me phase. After all, Tom Cruise and the series itself are more than a decade older than, respectively, Roger Moore and the Bond Cinematic Universe at the time of that film. Have we reached cosy pastiche? Is it now all just one big guffaw? On balance, no. The exhaustingly titled Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is certainly aware of its own occasional ridiculousness.

This is often a difficult film to watch. The subject’s physical frailty is palpable, and his resistance to even the least intrusive advice is infuriating. The atmosphere of fug, filth and peril is suffocating. But Chambers selects the footage cunningly to always allow whispers of charm to filter through the stubbornness.

An exciting and often powerful piece of mainstream film-making that allows its heroes to emerge as normal people who make everyday mistakes. Highly recommended.

A perfect late-summer diversion.

A small film about great matters.

Energy does not buzz around this film, but it swells with decency, humanity and quiet bravery.

The directors do good work in conjuring up a remote era and teasing out still extant racial tensions. One does, however, end up yearning to hear a little more about how the legal team went about their work. A good complaint to have.

A film that is no less thrilling for its sober rigour.

This is an uncomfortable film, but one that sweeps you along in its momentum.

Horrible, silly, reprehensible, enormously good fun.

So joyous and inventive is each scene that it proves easy to disregard the ambling lack of plot.

Veiel structures his film with grace and guile.

The latest film from the Dardenne brothers, a heart-rending tale of misused immigrants in contemporary Belgium, arrives just two weeks after Frank Berry’s Aisha pondered similar misfortunes in Ireland. Both are roughly in the social-realist mode, but the tone and the perspectives are quite different.

White Riot is here both to educate and to serve the nostalgists.

A fine yarn that arcs towards a memorable denouement.

What most sticks in the brain is the film’s incidental meditation on the mythology of England from distant past to speculated future.

The Creator sticks to a strong, pulpy narrative that never lets up in pace. There are vast action sequences and intimate, scruffy fight scenes. The film is, however, as memorable for its cinematic texture as its twists and turns.

Nothing Fancy is a rare documentary one would wish longer. The contemporary Kennedy is marvellous company: awkward, intelligent, amusing, realistic about mortality.

It’s not exactly a world you would want to live in but Jumbo, nonetheless, is awash with a sympathetic visual aesthetic that gives us some sense of where the odd passion springs from. It needs a strong actor to compete with that madness, and Merlant does not disappoint.

Dunne’s script, co-written with Malcolm Campbell, packs too much plot in its final 10 minutes, but it hits the emotional beats with gusto throughout. It was, when it was shot two years ago, an effective comment on an absurd crisis. Sadly, it is still that.

The picture, shot in Ireland and Spain, will prove a blast for those who like their horror propulsive, transgressive and (in a good way) nauseating. Cronin and his team haven’t quite solved the age-old problem of what to do with the Mummy, but they have confirmed that it remains a dilemma worth tackling. The film deserves the pharaoh’s ransom it will undoubtedly make.

Already established as a wizard with buried irony, Pugh politely steals the film with a witty performance that makes sense of even the silliest moments.

The result is neither as sentimental nor as moving – if those adjectives can be separated – as the director’s more personal 20th century films. It does, however, feel complete in itself. Cleanly shot. Immaculately performed. And, no, you probably don’t need to know Spielberg from Carlsberg to have a good time.

The monkey conceit is a success on several levels. It presses home that sense of Williams being an agent of chaos in any environment.

Not everyone will approve of the big swing here. But few will resist the richness and fullness of [Arnold's] characterisation.

A gentle, complex film that will pay rewatching.

Bentley, whose father and grandfather rode, has done an exemplary job in recreating that world.

The picture doesn’t reach out and grab you. It doesn’t fling viscera in your face. It hangs around outside your house, half hidden in shadow, and gradually insinuates malaise. So, no, not comfort food.

The cool, often static shots and unhurried editing are characteristic of a school of documentary film-making that allows the viewer complete freedom to shuffle significances. There is a beauty in the empty precision.

Flow needs to make no specific points about human misuse of the planet. Its generalised sense of environmental dread reminds of something we all know and constantly pretend to forget.

Peter Bebjak’s disciplined film is forever reminding us of arbitrary cruelties and absurd outrages.

See How They Run is not quite so self-regarding as Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, but See How They Run is a delightful, shamelessly affectionate deconstruction of ChristieLand that outstays not a second of its welcome.

As the band explains in this excellent documentary from Frank Marshall (whose odd career has taken in Arachnophobia, Congo and Alive), it took them five months to go from obscurity in Australia to careering about swinging London with The Beatles.

Made within the communities it satirises, I Blame Society thrives on its own crotchety energy.

Blue Road is most memorable for its crisply edited evocation of unlikely triumph.

The film has sad stories to tell about Minnelli’s marriages, but there is often grim humour in the footage.

Though it doesn’t have the complexity of Zodiac or the resonance of The Social Network, this may be Fincher’s sleekest and most uncomplicatedly entertaining film of the current century.

The film is at its best when incorporating text from the play with oddly appropriate gameplay.

At the heart of Pillion, a very English class of reasonableness brushes against an equally English interest in hierarchical kink. Nothing wrong with that sort of thing, but doesn’t it play terrible havoc with the knees.

Revelling in bright fabrics and seductive horizons, the director, despite all the conflicts, is here to argue for both the warmth of traditional families and the excitement of contemporary youth culture. No film other than Sirat has, this year, made such compelling use of music.

Murray and Watts make something genuinely touching of Iris’s quest to discover what prompted the writer to end it all.

A humane work devised by serious minds.