Jonathan Holland

Lively, entertaining and well made, pic is thankfully neither mawkish nor grueling, though its refusal to confront some of the harsher realities of its dramatic situation does leave it feeling somewhat bland.

Showing a stylistic bravura and confidence rare among upcoming Spanish helmers, Ramon Salazar's campy 20 Centimeters is a self-regarding but vastly entertaining sophomore effort that fuses a wide range of influences -- Hollywood musicals, neo-realism and early-Almodovarian kitsch -- into a distinctive, giddy whole.

Longtime Pedro Almodovar followers who have secretly been hankering for a return to the broad, transgressive comedy of his early work will be thrilled by I’m So Excited, a hugely entertaining, feelgood celebration of human sexuality that unfolds as a cathartic experience for characters, audiences and helmer alike.

The surprisingly watchable delight strikes universal chords.

Ambitious in scope, carefully crafted and featuring several fine performances ... But despite the worthy seriousness of its intentions and the parallels with the present it cleverly draws at every turn, the final impression is of dramatic opportunities left unexplored. While War’s dutiful sense of responsibility to its source material is laudable, it feels limiting.

Ambitious script is stranded between entertainment and intellectualism, leaving us with a magnificent folly, thoroughly watchable for its visuals but ultimately hollow.

An uneven but exuberantly anarchic comedy homage to the spaghetti Western.

Lightness of touch, vibrant performances and a sharp script are the hallmarks of this delightful femme comedy.

A lively, well-packaged but meaningless amusement.

A nicely contempo mood, engaging characters energized by solid perfs from a good-looking, high-profile young cast, and genuinely witty scripting are let down only by over-length and some generally turgid tunes.

One of the most unsettling things about Queen is how awkwardly it tackles all this painful, historical material: it’s as though Trueba’s script knows that homage must be paid to it, but it feels shoehorned in.

It’s an impressive backdrop to what’s otherwise a polished period piece without much of a bite to it, hitting all the right notes but doing nothing that feels exciting or out of the ordinary.

Though it is intermittently witty, visually playful and laudable in its attempt to appeal to both head and heart, Laws abandons its characters to its big concept.

As homage, the film is visually striking, littered with moments of real cinematographic intelligence, and always watchable, in a nasty sort of way, but as a thriller, its ambitions of intensity are thwarted by a plot which becomes increasingly out-there as the twists and turns pile up.

Though it slickly offers up drama, black comedy and enjoyable performances in due measure, the picture never develops much bite, though it does bare its fangs.

Cruz’s aces performance apart, very little about this extremely disappointing film feels real, and some of it is risible.

The stellar cast can do little to paper over the cracks in an awkward, unevenly-paced script that is composed of a series of sometimes-attractive scenes with little emotional undertow.

Though pic boasts decent perfs, potent atmospherics and eye-catching visuals, both psychology and plot are bargain-basement.

Studded with moments of character-driven charm, with sparky 6-year-old Marina Pastor a particular joy to watch.

Buoyed by Andre Horta’s often documentary-style camerawork, the script is respectful of the truth, refusing to exaggerate for the sake of the drama even when there are multiple opportunities to do so.

Offering a refreshingly low-key take on an idea that could too easily have become strident, noisy and melodramatic, the virtues of Carlos Lechuga’s second feature are the quiet, human ones, the script carefully and respectfully training its gaze on two unwilling outsiders struggling to live a life that the system has stolen from them.

The real horror in Veronica is not in the CGI visuals, or in Pablo Rosso's frantic cinematography, or in the aural bombardment of sound effects and music; it’s in the relationship between the children.

Skin plays out with the clarity, simplicity, rawness and grim poetry of a folk tale, tackling on the way some pretty elemental themes, but it’s a tale as told by a very dull speaker. By the end, viewer sensations are mixed, with pleasure at having entered a strange new world, but also frustration at its sheer lack of drama.

One of those thrillers that sets itself some tricky problems early on and fails to successfully solve them later, Daniel Calparsoro’s math-based The Warning nevertheless knows exactly which buttons to press, and is an enjoyably undemanding ride for most of its length.

Partly a visually stunning celebration of nature and partly a record of Diaz’s triumphs and trials, both practical and psychological, Days, which takes its titular cue (and nothing else) from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, aims at reconsideration of our relationship with nature and our place in it and, despite going overboard on the grandiose drone images, mainly does so in a winningly down-to-earth way.

Driven by a cracklingly energetic, committed performance by Sofia Gala Castiglione (more commonly known in Argentina as Sofia Gala) as a character whom we very quickly start to care about, events come at the viewer entirely through the heroine’s dislocating perspective, making the film a viewing experience of great immediacy, one with the rare capacity to dislodge prejudice.

Enjoyably over-the-top, well-played and in some passages an homage to those acid, preposterous Ealing comedies, Weasel Tale’s script cleverly pits two kinds of actors against one another — traditional movie star vs entrepreneurial whiz kid — to see who comes out on top, and the result is often sharp, funny and never dull, though it could have shed about 20 minutes.

Ramona is both wonderful and appalling, and Vazquez’s edgy performance drags us entirely into her relentless, thoughtless world, with her flaming red hair, her smoker’s cough, her gravelly tones and her unfailing ability to bring joy and despair to those around her.