Jonathan Romney

A stripped-down drama built around a powerful and sometimes troubling performance by Christopher Plummer.

Some intricately choreographed long takes - Eric Gautier’s photography is superb throughout - enhance a project which is both vivid in its evocation of the recent past, and razor-sharp in the light it sheds on the way that religious and nationalistic fanaticism continue to exert a dangerous sway.

It’s above all a character study, as well as an elegant technical achievement that puts a distinctive stylistic slant on its realist subject matter.

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.

Using techniques of distanciation that sometimes make it an alienating, even confusing experience, László Nemes’s cogent, strikingly confident debut is harrowing, but cinematically rewarding.

This is an exuberant manifesto that celebrates the infinite possibilities of what cinema can be.

It’s very much its own thing, intelligent and inventive if somewhat ragged round the edges

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.

An ostensibly old-fashioned family drama that proves, despite an awkward final act, to be one of his most satisfying recent films, and indeed the darkest.

The awkwardly executed English-language Loving Pablo is a brash but ultimately anonymous, sub-Scorsesean number from Spain’s Fernando Leon de Aranoa.

Dedicated, an end caption tells us, to the victims of martial law, Season of the Devil may be one of Diaz’s more downbeat, even languid works, but it’s no less angry and intense a cri de coeur, albeit one that’s often challenging to connect with.

In terms of execution and panache, Museum has the mark of a true original – at least, of a film-maker discovering his own voice through fearlessly trying whatever works, sometimes tipping his hat to tradition, sometimes following his own path with brio.

This slow-burning, pensively drifting evocation of the times of Sergei Dovlatov is not a conventional portrait, still less a biopic, but an imaginatively realistic recreation of a bygone era of Russian culture.

Younger fans of the modern actioner may find Manhunt a little old-school, especially in its unabashed romantic heart and flag-waving for the square-jawed good guys. But it’s breezy, handsomely mounted fun that shows that Woo has lost neither his mojo nor his sense of poetry.

Boisterous fun, with Day’s performance – as the song goes – as busy as a fizzy sarsaparilla.

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.

Best of all, though, the film is a reminder of how deliriously odd Les Demoiselles was, with its MGM-style dance routines, kitschy pastels, and Gene Kelly as honoured guest hoofer. [21 May 1993, p.4]