John Bleasdale

Despite its manifold flaws, Jackie & Ryan is still oddly watchable.

Although there is certainly tension at moments and Driver once more proves himself an actor of great promise, Hungry Hearts falls between two baby chairs - neither satisfying as a thriller nor convincing as a drama.

When Good Kill takes aim at US foreign policy and the advances in military technology, it creates moments of chilling and powerful drama, but this is dissipated and compromised by its mirror-punching domestic drama and its bizarre need to bring about something like a happy ending.

The film is heartfelt and sincere in its concern to understand conflict and the plight of good men when they're forced to make impossible choices.

A well-behaved and unashamedly populist film, the kind that could be shown in schools and community centres, Akin's The Cut remains an undeniably important film regardless. What it does extremely well is to movingly illustrate a terrible moment in history which has been sadly neglected in the West and actively suppressed in other parts of the world.

An unfunny undead comedy that in harking back to the days of the classic B-movie would be flattered to be classified as an E-movie.

Intermittently entertaining and laudably short, for all its best intentions Cymbeline is cursed by doing again what others have done better.

The result is a beautifully entertaining film. It is witty and the scenes between Gerwig and Pacino fizz alternately with flirtation, humour and occasionally rage.

It may be stuck in the past, with its hoary clichés about the call girl with the heart of gold and the incurable romantic, but the whole thing fizzes with such joie de vivre that the anachronisms only add to its overwhelming charm.

[Bahrani's] created a complex and thoughtful political drama with the speed and tension of a good thriller.

The style, one senses, is overcompensating for a narrative slackness that has nowhere particular to go other than anti-climax. That's not to say that Manglehorn isn't a good film - it is. It's just that Pacino's seasoned performance deserved a great film.

Oppenheimer's first film maintained a passive detachment, allowing the killers to re-enact their own atrocities and metaphorically hang themselves with their own words. The Look of Silence takes a far harder line, probing the killers more deeply and confronting them in an attempt to shake some sense of remorse out of them.

Birdman is a rich, startlingly clever and multi-layered collage, with Iñárritu creating a meta-universe of mirrors and performances upon performances.

Ultimately, Memphis is a bold and bewildering conjuring act, that might mean nothing at all, but the sleight of hand is worth the price of admission.

Ultimately, Benson's Eleanor Rigby disappears into the gap between its rom-com and drama stools.

The acting throughout is supremely naturalistic, and the social milieu of both family life and the theatre are carefully observed and lightly rendered.

At its very best his Venus in Fur is a clever and often comical two-hander, with Amalric and Seigner both giving tour de force performances.

Party Girl may tread familiar ground but Theis-Litzemburger is utterly convincing as the self-absorbed, beguilingly unaware lead.

As you'd expect from an actor-director of Amalric's pedigree, the performances are brilliant throughout and Mathieu himself has a wonderful eye for the telling tick and/or the revealing gesture.

The film isn't just bad - it's awful - ineptly directed (Olivier Dahan), terribly written (Arash Amel) and bafflingly acted by an assortment of miscast faces.

This is the kind of oddball midnight movie that could easily gain a cult following and there are delights to be had in the midst.

Sissako's film is at turns funny, poetic and deeply moving.

A fluid, dreamlike tone poem of mothers and fathers, death and continuance.

There's no doubting Hazanavicius' sincerity in trying to bring the Chechen conflict, the war crimes committed against the civilian community and the indifference of the international community to light, but it's this righteousness that gets in the way of The Search working as a film first and foremost.

The characters of Jimmy's Hall aren't really characters as much as archetypes: the saintly mother, the sweetheart, the hero, the villain. This is the kind of film where people don't argue - they debate - speaking in lines from manifestos and creating an incongruity.

With The Homesman, Jones has produced an original and cantankerously offbeat western which becomes increasingly beguiling as the road stretches on.

Both actresses are excellent, with Binoche given more to do and she flips between attempting to get into the skin of her character and back to her normal self. Stewart, on the other hand, has an easy naturalism as she moves from devotion to rebellion without ever being able to fully express herself.

The trajectory of success and excess followed by last act redemption is familiar to the point of parody, and the ploys with time come over as gimmicky attempt to inject an element of surprise into the otherwise predictable narrative.