Jessica Kiang

The Bastards feels like what happens when an undeniably great filmmaker stoops to sensationalism -- it’s a smarter, odder film than someone else would make with the same material, but it’s still smart, odd sensationalism.

Marie never seems particularly interested in either man except for how they are interested in her and is revealed to be so self-centered in her pursuit of amours both fou and entirely rational, that she is far less likable than Binoche’s disingenuously bright-eyed and forthright performance can account for.

Entertaining though it is in parts, it can’t really be said to mark any particular growth for McDonagh as a filmmaker, being both less angry and more cynical that the brooding "Calvary" and consequently less memorable and relevant too.

Gondry’s film is really a huge Rube Goldberg machine, full of lights and buzzers and levers that ping and whistle endearingly but are connected to nothing and serve no greater function in the larger apparatus.

It may amount to less than a hill of beans, but Hill of Freedom is an amiable way to spend 66 minutes learning how even cultures that seem closely related to Western eyes, like those of Japan and Korea, can clash. And also how cultures like these, that seem so far from our own, can be trumped, by love, longing, friendship, sex and drunkenness, the same universal experiences we all share.

The film's own spin toward a liberal audience means it chokes into ineffectuality when it tries to take a less ironic and more active stance on society's biggest current white whale, because the persuasive sermon it preaches, it preaches exclusively to the choir.

An enigmatic and perhaps occasionally overly deferential documentary about one of the all-time great character actors, Sophie Huber’s Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction, is slow out of the gate, but gently, ever so gently, builds to a thoughtful portrait of a thoughtful man.

Niccol’s film takes a somber, nuanced and compelling look at the War on Terror as it is waged by U.S. drone pilots, right up until a final five minutes that, in a shower of pat resolutions and conclusions, delivers something of a surgical strike on the its credibility.

The fact is that both actors are very good, even if trapped in the amber of Hooper's overweeningly tasteful direction.

While tears will be jerked, heartstrings plucked and throats enlumpened, it has to go down as a disappointment in the director’s catalogue.

Overloaded with too many ideas, it does scant justice to the more interesting ones that crop up, while regularly diverting from any sort of central narrative to follow tenuous and ill-explained threads that end up in a foggy limbo. But just when it threatens to wholly frustrate, someone cracks an enjoyable inside-baseball meta movie-making joke and we're back on side for a bit.

Levitas’ unusually even-handed approach works to balance the film’s inspirational true story with its tragic real-world context, by refusing to overstate Smith’s personal heroics, while sensitively outlining the everyday heroism of the ordinary men and women most grievously affected.

Jodorowsky throws everything and several kitchen sinks into the film, yet it all has its place, and the overall effect is not of the headachey mess it would be in anyone else’s hands, but of a kind of joyous, absurdist melange of highbrow concepts, personal memoir and potty humor.

In a way it’s a shame that film builds backwards, because while it adds layers of tricksy narrative intrigue, that trajectory somewhat simplifies the thematic texture as the movie wears on.

13 Minutes is an elegant, expensive-looking, respectful history lesson that finds just enough interesting texture in terms of the religious, social, moral, and personal circumstances that led to the creation of this rogue ideologue, to save it from becoming dry.

Mektoub titillates without ever delivering the up-to-your-eyes immersion that the filmmaker’s best work deals in, and after three long hours, nobody’s changed, nobody’s learned anything and no one’s grown any older, except the audience.

Salvatore Totino's crisp 3D photography and Kormakur's way with a clear, fluid, thrilling action sequence show off the mountain in immensely impressive ways. But the humans involved get short shrift.

Marfa Girl is not going to convince Clark’s detractors, nor will it disappoint his fans, as most of what people consider his trademarks are in place.

The somewhat drab aesthetic and almost vanishingly understated performance style dull the potential pleasures of a good old-fashioned whodunnit to roughly the luminosity of an above-average feature-length episode of a TV procedural.

Nebraska is a small-scale quixotic adventure about the importance of dreams, no matter how pie-eyed, in which the outlined flaws could all be forgiven, if it just went somewhere a bit more surprising.

This film feels like one you discover late at night and watch for ten minutes before remembering you've already seen it, and yet we still kinda loved it.

It has warmth, it has flashes of insight, it even has moments of wit, all it really lacks is edge — which it lacks in large, whopping, huge amounts.

They may inspire near-religious fervour in some parts, but when it works, Made of Stone doesn’t tell the story of The Stone Roses’ resurrection or Second Coming as much as of their second chance: to play together; to reward the faith of their doggedly loyal fanbase; to be adored.

There is nothing underneath the glossy surface and no real insight into what made this man tick — and despite how creepy he looks here, Bulger was a man, not a devil.

Lemon is too in love with being oddball to really have any connection to the real, non-quirky world. And so while scene-by scene its absurdism can be drolly amusing, it never coheres into anything more than a series of sketches.

All of Wong's undeniable visual flair can't conceal the haphazard nature of the story.

It is certainly too long and too messy, too indulgent in some parts and too starved in others to be an unqualified success. But the surprise of it is that there are times, like the inspired first act, when it really does work, when it seems to have a kind of manic energy, a sheer joy at existing, which certainly makes it a far more engaging picture than Gilliam’s last.

The odd rhythm of very fast and slick followed by very slow and arty is difficult to settle into, and the film ultimately frustrates, willfully obscuring the apparatus of what appears at first to be a promising film noir framework.