Kate Taylor

[Buckley's] all-in performance is riveting, and well balanced by Paul Mescal’s quieter intensity as the Bard, making the film worth watching – but never rescuing it from the cheap biographical determinism of its third act.

For the first time in the series, Stallone did not write the script, yet director Ryan Coogler and his co-writer Aaron Covington aren’t exactly brimming over with fresh ideas: Worn thin with repetition, the sentimental old premise muffles suspense and dampens emotion.

Every scene is perfectly framed, every symbol lovingly shot, but the story and the characters remain opaque.

For all that Silence is a gorgeous film filled with imagery that is sometimes startling and often compelling, the director sadly fails in a passion project decades in the making: This is a long and dull costume drama that seems to think a contemporary audience can picture faith as easily as it does a cassock, cross or kimono.

If it weren’t for Binoche’s warmth, the film might easily sink beneath the stereotype of French culture as overly talky and sex obsessed.

And therein lies the difficulty of adapting Indignation for the screen; remove Roth’s prose from the equation and you don’t have much left. Writer and director James Schamus turns Indignation into a minor period piece, a precise but seemingly pointless evocation of the stultifying conventionalism of an American university campus in the 1950s.

Zootopia takes the cultural practice of posing animals as human characters to queasy new heights.

As the obscenities of wealth accumulate while a large cast of Asian and Eurasian actors render their many silly characters, the source of the laughter becomes troubling.

It’s ripe to the point of bursting and, with a plot that tilts to melodrama, Davies flirts dangerously with cliché, creating an over-wrought period piece where every wheat field is bathed in golden sunlight and every childbirth is announced by chilling screams.

It is a busy narrative machine that raises expectations of a tidy ending; instead Almodóvar offers an artfully mysterious conclusion that seems unearned by the movie that preceded it – except, of course, for that lonely stag.

It's a movie intent on telling us the hotshots were heroes, without sufficiently dramatizing either their professional decisions or their private lives.

As directed by Robert Zemeckis from a script he co-wrote with Christopher Browne, the film limps through its first two acts, putting in time until the big moment.

[A] bafflingly unbalanced film by American auteur director Alex Ross Perry.

In short, his film asks that an audience listen to a fair amount of ugly racism without offering much enlightenment or even entertainment in exchange. Words may build bridges but people have to cross them: Imperium remains safely outside the unexplored region.

There are unresolved questions and puzzling detours along the way, but Bikes vs Cars does show that cars, millions and millions of stationary cars, may yet prove the bike’s best friend.

As Kurt finds his true art in the West, thanks to the help of a fictional version of Joseph Beuys, the film turns gripping, but it ultimately reduces art appreciation to the autobiographical.

From a sympathetic perspective, let me say that sequel No. 3 shows how difficult it is to keep these franchises fresh while remaining true to their initial charm.

Only Tudyk’s dry humour in the role of the tactless droid K-2S0 makes Edwards’s darkly reductivist approach occasionally seem smarter rather than lesser. In the end, this hardening of the franchise seems likely to alienate both the fans and the uninitiated.

In the end, the power of Minervini’s pseudo-fiction gives way to a much blander version of pseudo-reality.

Ambivalent and tepid as it attempts to fashion a tick-tock thriller from Ailes’s downfall.

Miss Sloane is a powerfully conceived thriller with something dead at its centre: there is no reason a female protagonist must be good or well-behaved, but she must at least be interesting.

Gorgeously shot by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who takes much delight in exposing the blinding sunlight and dusky interiors of old Hollywood, the film is lightly entertaining but largely pointless.

If you can ignore an ending ripped straight from the AA playbook, there’s minor fun to be had along the way.

Hansen-Love’s ability to evoke the unspoken remains in full play as she returns to themes of young love and emotional crisis, but much of the film is in English and both dialogue and delivery feel stilted. Meanwhile, it’s never clear why being the object of a youthful crush might be a good cure for PTSD.

Perhaps you can accuse all historical fiction of presentism, the sin of applying contemporary values to historical events. Why does the past interest us if not for the comparisons it provides with the present? But with the example of "The Favourite’s" wittily anachronistic romp through the 18th-century court of Queen Anne so fresh at hand, it is hard not to judge the earnest Mary Queen of Scots for its ignorance of the problem.

A Perfect Day, the first English-language feature from the Spanish director Fernando Leon de Aranoa, is in many ways a remarkable film: a taut, darkly comic drama about the dilemmas of international intervention in civil war, all of it neatly symbolized by one elusive length of rope. It is also, sadly, a film much marred by its sexism.

No, Christopher Robin is not a naked cash grab, just a prettily clothed one.

The car-as-human idea was never Pixar’s biggest brain wave and as Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) hits the track for a third outing, the Disney animated franchise is running on fumes.