Guy Lodge

The Guest is not new, exactly, but Wingard knows just which buttons to push, and he pushes them with gusto. Stevens, meanwhile, has never been better.

It’s a thin premise that cues much cheery knockabout comedy, with ample scope for impressively whooshy 3D tracking shots.

An enthusiastic but low-fizz romantic farce that gets by principally on the charms of a cast speckled with gifted funnymen (and, more particularly, funnywomen).

There’s perilously little playfulness to be found either in the script or its otherwise handsomely ashen cinematic treatment.

This dynamically acted, unapologetically contrived pic reps the filmmaker’s best chance to date of connecting with a wider audience — one likely to share the helmer’s bristling anger over corruptly maintained class divides in modern-day America.

So involving is the raw content of The Look of Silence that some might view its formal elegance as mere luxury, yet the film reveals Oppenheimer to be a documentary stylist of evolving grace and sophistication.

The consistently celebratory stance of “Kink” is commendable, but also feels somewhat limiting.

Alluring if not especially illuminating.

Writer-director Jonathan English’s dank-looking film delivers enough amputations, decapitations and other instances of rusty-bladed gore to distract undiscerning genre fans stuck between seasons of “Game of Thrones,” but serves no other obvious purpose.

For all the philosophical and metaphorical shortcomings of his script, however, DeMonaco is an efficient orchestrator of action.

Earnest issue drama and pulpy B-thriller mechanics make awkward but not uncompelling bedfellows in Honour.

An altogether smashing sequel to 2011′s better-than-expected “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” this vivid, violent extension of humanoid ape Caesar’s troubled quest for independence bests its predecessor in nearly every technical and conceptual department.

Given an inch by the surprise success of his raunchy teddy-bear romp Ted, writer-director-star MacFarlane now takes a drastically overlong mile with a film that flatters his moderate talent and subzero leading-man charisma at every turn.

While this appropriately brief film unravels its enigma at a tidy clip, it gathers neither enough heat, nor quite enough of a chill, to linger in the bones.

Not merely a story of interspecies hierarchy, then, White God also puts forward a simple but elegant metaphor for racial and class oppression, as the outcast (or even outcaste) masses, sidelined in favor of the elite few, band together to assert their collective strength.

The upside for Saint Laurent’s admirers is that Bonello’s film reflects more of the designer’s tortured creative drive in its dark onyx surfaces; it’s the slightly deranged auteur portrait that a fellow artist and iconoclast deserves.

Neither as striking nor as fundamentally scary as its predecessor, this pumped-up, robustly crafted pic is still quite a ride.

It’s as handsomely shot as any film about an ace shutterbug ought to be, and Binoche infuses familiar internal crises with palpable pain and urgency.

There’s enjoyably smutty comedy to spare... but the film’s bleakest segments are actually its strongest.

[A] good, middlebrow adaptation — which, despite being scripted by Banville himself, sacrifices much of the novel’s structural intricacy for Masterpiece-style emotional accessibility.

The rare prestige pic that could actually stand to be longer.

Redundancy remains a problem, but this overlong superhero sequel gets by on sound, fury and star chemistry.

It’s an improbably exciting match of knife-edge storytelling and a florid vintage aesthetic best represented by Gabriel Yared’s glorious orchestral score.

Assisted by the superb performances of his two young, refreshingly unaffected leads, Carbone has a profound understanding of the close but conflicted bond that exists between brothers on either side of the puberty divide.

It etches a sweet, sad and solemnly fatalistic love story between feeding times.

Unexpectedly but effectively cast in a role that plays to his sullen strengths, Pitt has a palpable, playful rapport with Arianda, a Tony-winning Broadway ingenue whose warm, expressive features and tinderbox comic timing recalls the young Marisa Tomei.

[An] appealingly absurd thriller.

It’s all extravagantly daft, moves at a fair clip and is over before you expect it to be.

There’s digital wizardry galore in this Beauty and the Beast, but precious little magic.

Clothes make the man, but can’t save the film, in Yves Saint Laurent, in which the life of one of haute couture’s great innovators gets disappointingly by-the-numbers treatment.

A vivid, shivery survival thriller that turns the red-brick residential streets of Belfast into a war zone of unconscionable peril.

[An] amiable but flat-footed debut feature.

It’s a less playful enterprise than the original, but meets the era’s darker demands for action reboots with machine-tooled efficiency and a hint of soul.

The narrative’s time-travel element allows for plenty of fluffy, fleet-footed action.

It’s hard for the audience to invest in a protagonist this solipsistic.

Salaciously watchable but finally hokey.

Ultimately story is secondary to Russell’s delicious detailing of character and milieu.

[A] stunningly joke-free comedy-horror hybrid.

This complex, compassionate film finds both wicked humor and, less expectedly, transcendent hope in America’s gaudy fixation with Christmas spirit.

It’s a film that purists might insist isn’t horror in the strictest sense, though this slow-burning investigation of unseemly goings-on at a rural Christian commune is frightening in any genre language.

The voice ensemble is game, if not especially well matched.

A virtual remake, down to the final shot, of Michael Winner’s 1974 exploitation hit ‘Death Wish’ – and lacking even that film’s adolescent grasp of street justice.

At least Cameron Diaz gives it some welly as the gold-toothed femme fatale who may or may not hold all the cards.

Attention is retained by the commendably unhistrionic leads, who convincingly etch the pair’s enduring devotion even when passions run dry.

Powered by a vigorous, image-shedding lead turn from James McAvoy as a coked-up Edinburgh detective on the fast track to either promotion or self-implosion, this descent into Scotch-marinated madness begins as ugly comedy, segues almost imperceptibly into farcical tragedy, and inevitably — perhaps intentionally — loses control in the process.

A straightforward account of the show’s journey from conception to rehearsal to Great White Way triumph, it effectively doubles as a traditional let’s-put-on-a-show musical in its own right, albeit one with heavier guitars.

A measured, moving account of a brief period in the later life of the troubled sculptress, could hardly be the work of anyone else, with its sparseness of technique and persistent spiritual curiosity.

Michael Polish’s Big Sur offers an elegantly muted take on the midlife ennui of Kerouac’s autobiographical 1962 novel.

Avranas’ film employs an irony-free meter that certainly distinguishes his work from that of Lanthimos or Athina Rachel Tsangari, and lends the film’s most explicitly severe sequences of domestic and sexual abuse a kind of cumulative numbing power.

It’s the rare film about adolescence that doesn’t seem exclusively targeted either to teens or to adults. Rarer still, it’s one that takes an interest in the nourishing qualities of female friendship.

Tsai here seems to be stripping his ornately eccentric style down to formal fundamentals. A certain pictorial grace remains; his sense of humor, sadly, appears to have been largely tossed out with the bathwater.

Simply relating the narrative of Andrew Dosunmu’s seductive immigrant drama Mother of George would do little to convey the film’s stark, poetic power, much less its extraordinary visual and sonic acumen.

Though the film comprehensively details the political and economic subtleties of what it declares “the crime of the century,” its narrative remains primarily a human-focused one, highlighting the stories of selected steadfast victims, as well as the heroic movers and shakers in the struggle.

That We Are What We Are steers just shy of silliness even at its most outrageous is in large part thanks to a committed cast of non-disposable character actors.

This turgid return papers over the previous film’s narrative, but creates little in the way of a fresh character arc.

It’s a testament to the duo’s jazzy comic chemistry that they wring some laughs from this dated, frankly sinister premise.

The film keeps its good-evil borders compellingly supple, at least until a wobbly finale that requires Sarah to act like the Hollywood heroine she has so strenuously avoided becoming. It’s a minor blot on a film otherwise propulsively alive with prickly politics.

Its repetitive qualities are beyond reproach. Every bit as amiable and disposable as its predecessor, it recycles everything from slapstick gags to its own voice cast.

A glossy, well-meaning but dramatically listless study of class relations in contemporary Paris.

If the final effect is somewhat less nuanced than his previous work, it's a good deal more vigorous.

The film’s turn toward the tragic is hardly untelegraphed, but its emotional blows still land with crushing precision.

The film is easier to admire than it is to invest in emotionally, though its pulse quickens with a dramatic, and boldly untelegraphed, feminist twist in the rural-set final reel.

A sly, insidious and intermittently hilarious domestic thriller.

There’s typical grace and good humour in Kore-eda’s handling of this all-but-impossible situation. But the film’s critical lack of dramatic nuance undercuts its emotional resonance.

It’s a broader, starrier project than either of Nichols’s previous films, and he handles the transition to the major league with relative confidence.

Icily disquieting rather than scary, the film is less an exercise in narrative than in tonal mastery.

The alternately playful and elegiac Stories We Tell is wholly of a piece with her fiction work, and just as rewarding.

Don’t tell Liam Neeson, but someone had the gall to make a violent Euro-thriller about a rampaging American dad without him. And not a bad one either.

The thrills and the effects are cheap, but this is in hard-driving, good-humoured command of its own silliness.

Well-meaning but dated and frequently risible issue-drama.

Hostage thrillers are all-too-often shrill affairs, with clock-watching screenwriters wringing maximum melodrama from spiraling disorder. Not so Tobias Lindholm’s superb A Hijacking, which actually grows more chillingly subdued as its nightmare scenario unfolds.

A proficient but personality-free policer that demands little of either its audience or its enviable best-of-British cast, this simplistic urban morality tale miscasts the appealing James McAvoy as one good cop whose dogged pursuit of Mark Strong’s alpha criminal only uncovers the rot within police ranks.

Soul music’s alleged redemptive powers are fully at work in this jumbled, sketchily written but vastly appealing true-life musical comedy.

Just about every charge of social negligence leveled at Spring Breakers can be countered with an arch claim of intent, which makes it at once playful and wearying; enjoyment is contingent on how little you're willing to fight it.

A blockbuster melange of Motown, metal, hip-hop, world and gospel influences, bound by trailblazing production, "Bad" has stood in its predecessor's shadow too long, and Spike Lee convincingly makes the case for reassessment with this exhaustive and entertaining if less-than-penetrating documentary on its creation.

This is unabashedly virtuoso, show-off filmmaking, as cocky as the misguided young men at the film’s center, who, at least for a period, saw their lives as a Hollywood romp in itself.

The frustrating nine-year wait for new material from Martel has done nothing to blunt her exquisite, inventive command of sound and image, nor her knack for subtly violent exposure of social and racial prejudice on the upper rungs of the class ladder.

Directed with even-keeled intelligence by James Marsh, and buoyed by a performance of customary reserve and resolve from Colin Firth, The Mercy tells its story...about as well as it can be told. Yet there’s no denying it’s a muted, disconsolate affair, one that by necessity shrinks before viewers’ eyes into something less rousing and noble than what they were initially promised.

Unfolding over a faintly indulgent but never dull two hours, this is a rare children’s entertainment that isn’t afraid to perplex kids as much as it enchants them, down to a coda that prompts a certain level of junior existential contemplation (not to mention a mournful tear or two).

Hushed, deliberate and realised with considerable care and beauty, the resulting film has its heart entirely in the right place; its pulse, unfortunately, is far harder to locate.

Night Comes On is, true to its title, blanketed in a dim, crepuscular state of waiting. Fishback, her film career unfurling clearly before her from scene to scene, blazes a way out of it.

With a surface dusting of realist grit hardly covering for the strained contrivances and one-note characterization propelling its lurid narrative, Riso’s sophomore feature never shakes the artificial, soapy aroma at its core.

Bekmambetov’s cumulatively hysterical film begins as a study of terror before lurching into something closer to horror.

A refugee portrait that piles contrivance upon contrivance to somehow land at a place of piercing emotional acuity.

In essaying Julie, a character at once watery and opaque, shaped by everything around her but vocally resistant to influence, Reinsve has a tricky assignment that she nails with remarkable fluidity and grace.

Look into Ivor Novello’s haunted, kohl-rimmed eyes in Hitch’s most overtly Hitchcockian silent film – his first of many ‘wrong man’ mysteries – and you can see generations of matinee idols coming full circle.

U – July 22 is designed to be as immersive as it is exhausting, and largely succeeds.

Long, loud and lurid, with a distinct whiff of week-old quesito colombiano, Fernando Leon de Aranoa’s pulpy Pablo Escobar biopic promises an alternative spin on familiar material by taking the perspective of the drug kingpin’s glamorous journalist lover Virginia Vallejo. Yet she turns out to be as stock a presence as anyone else in this blood-spattered chunk of cartoon history.

There are some raw, stirring interludes here...but the film’s sheer mass of similar material rather reduces their impact.

At once exhausting and astonishing, this no-holds-barred adaptation of British junkie-turned-pugilist Billy Moore’s Thai prison memoir is a big, bleeding feat of extreme cinema, given elevating human dimension by rising star Joe Cole’s ferociously physical lead performance.

Agnostically observant in its approach to spiritual matters, but more devout in its quiet celebration of human compassion, this film’s most complicated lines of inquiry largely play out on the young, unformed face of its protagonist Thomas — impressively played by breakthrough star Anthony Bajon.

If Pity doesn’t quite have the shock of the new on its side, then, its sharpest passages nonetheless exert the bracing, mouth-shuddering tang of neat ouzo: You know how it’s going to taste, but it leaves you wincing anyway.

As a final, permanent showcase for a role Everett was born to play, then, The Happy Prince does the job. For all its passion-project hallmarks, however, it makes a shakier case for him being the filmmaker to bring it to screen.

Another gorgeous three-hour study of young, attractively housed hearts in often turbulent motion, Mektoub is a frequently seductive sensory epic of equivalent ambition, yet despite its woozily pleasurable set pieces, the fraught emotions binding them are less urgent, and the perspective of its protagonist far less immediate.

Gustav Möller’s short, taut debut feature never leaves the claustrophobic confines of the call center, but builds a vivid aural suspense narrative through the receiver, all while incrementally unboxing the visible protagonist’s own frail mental state.

Distracted for long stretches with ribbons and bows, “Silent Night” never uncovers its harshest possibilities: It’s sober and well-behaved even when the party falls to pieces.

If there’s a slightly pat arc to the tetchy father-son bond driving the narrative that smacks of indie script workshopping, Garagiola’s direction is more impressively watchful and flinty, drawing keen, complex performances from her two well-matched leads.

It’s a cool, hard trip, icy in the fullest glare of the afternoon sun, in which even the pallid, expensively tacky interior of the villa — hats off to production designer Josephine Farsø — invites tension and judgment.

Eva begins as hot buttered nonsense of the least resistible variety before, echoing the writer’s block that propels its daft narrative, it runs drily out of ideas.

Though Tuza-Ritter somewhat overeggs the urgent genre stylings: The human story she unfolds is nerve-rattling enough before it’s cranked up to quite this extent.

Its trick is to generate considerable suspense while withholding nothing from the audience. Its pleasures are not profound ones, but there’s enough dimensionality up on the screen to compensate. [2013 3D Release]