Jonathan Romney

Once we realise what’s at stake, and where it’s all likely to go, this grim study of a damaged duo, and of the screwed-up society they live in, offers diminishing returns.

The episodic, ruminative and very talky mood suggests something between Chekhov and Eric Rohmer – or at moments, Woody Allen without the humour. That’s not to say that the film is entirely dry, but there’s an earnestness about it and occasionally a leadenness in the acting.

Undeniably well-meaning and impassioned about the country, its people and its struggle, documentary Superpower is a cluttered account of the war so far, the facts distractingly filtered through the dominant idea that the Hollywood actor is there on the ground, filming history as it happens.

An all-star cast and some showstoppingly horrible hair can’t save Ridley Scott’s medieval epic.

“Surprise and speed is the key,” someone comments at one point; the only surprise is how unspeedy and unsurprising this project turned out to be.

The Holocaust has undergone some awkward treatments on screen before, but one of the most ungainly recent examples must be Andrei Konchalovsky’s Paradise, a well-intentioned but very soft-edged mess of romance, metaphysics and historical theorising.

The film unpacks few surprises, although Argentophiles may applaud a ludicrous and copiously gory climax.

Equals just about passes muster as a solid vignette of love against the odds, but when it comes to futurism, its vision is dustily archaic.

Michôd’s film is a determinedly solemn and violent affair, which makes a sober political point at the end – but not before it has treated us to two hours of bleakly realistic historical reconstruction and some lugubrious drama.

The narrative would be sufficiently daunting to follow if the film didn’t make such heavy play on the thin line between fiction and reality; the frequent blurring between the two Saturday Fictions – Lou Ye’s and Tan Na’s – is muddily executed to begin with, without the play being so unconvincing as a piece of stage drama.

A sometimes mesmerisingly intense lead performance by Alena Mikhailova is the trump card of this sprawling, sumptuously mounted revisionist drama ... But for all its sometimes-crazed energies, it feels ponderous and overwrought.

In all fairness, the film is hard to enjoy, not least because its handful of intriguing ideas are so self-indulgently gussied up with ostentatious visual execution.

Jacquot at his best is a master at teasing us with tantalising narrative mazes and false threads, but here we soon find ourselves losing interest in the riddle of where things are headed: the film takes what feels like a very circuitous route to a dead end.

There's a lot wrong with The Brave, with a pace that may be intended to evoke desert languor, but is often plain leaden. Yet The Brave is oddly haunting, if only for its eccentricity. [13 May 1997, p.2]

The ultimate problem with this flamboyant, yet oddly oppressive-feeling film is Carax’s bleakly Romantic world view – even working with exuberant wits like the Maels, he’s unavoidably committed to the dark abyss himself.

There’s a thin, and very jagged, line between the radical mosaic approach to editing and narrative of a film like Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color and the impressionistic jigsaw vagueness of Woodshock, which simply seems reluctant to commit itself to mere coherence, as if that simply were too unchic.

Modi’s ramshackle romanticism never remotely convinces, and – given that it’s about artists who suffered for their radical modernism – it feels terribly dated, stylistically and in content.

Despite meticulous visuals and a strong central performance by Mark Rylance, the film feels dramatically ponderous and emotionally inert.