Kate Taylor

Disney’s live-action revival of the Beauty and the Beast franchise is nothing if not lively, albeit occasionally overwrought: The dinnerware’s number, Be Our Guest, turns into a hallucinogenic sequence worthy of Busby Berkeley.

To watch German documentarian Thomas Heise’s marathon family memoir Heimat is a Space in Time, the viewer has to continually analyze the relationship between text and image.

Today’s YA generation is unlikely to appreciate the monosyllabic performances and stately pace, but Pilote delivers a beautiful film in the tradition of the Quebec canon.

Colette is a satisfyingly conventional biopic about a highly unconventional woman.

Love, Gilda reveals this but does not probe it. With various soft and admiring interviews, it relies mainly on Radner’s own words to hint at how dark things got.

For all that it tells a highly unusual story, Hidden Figures is a classic Hollywood feel-good movie. This has been a year of notable achievement for African-American performers and stories, from the surprising observations about masculinity in Moonlight to the gently told civil-rights saga of Loving. In that sober-sided company, Hidden Figures is a face-licking puppy dog of a film.

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.

Along the way, the narrative does drag at times, but mainly the film slowly and steadily impresses as two excellent reporters – and two excellent actresses, Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan – go about their work.

The charming Johnny Flynn ultimately struggles to find the right tone for the boyfriend, not helped by a director who hasn’t quite mastered the rhythm required for his surprise ending.

With its claustrophobic unity of time and place, the disintegrating party feels highly theatrical and, of various classic screen adaptations from the stage, this wonderfully performed black-and-white film recalls in particular Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf." Yet also, Potter's comic dissection of the London intelligentsia's personal and political angst is completely of the moment.

A fine bilingual cast, haunting period detail and a provocative approach to a twisting story carry the day.

The dialogue is often mundane...and the actors' lurching delivery of these lines, often flattened, sometimes speechifying, sometimes rushed, but never naturalistic, forces the viewer to question the point of the action as Lanthimos crafts a dark satire about responsibility, justice and retribution.

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.

Directed by Foley’s childhood friend Brian Oakes, the doc does raise some difficult issues – albeit very tactfully.

Based on the 2015 book of the same title, The Hidden Life of Trees is a documentary both simple and startling.

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.

[A] fascinating documentary.

The rugged emotional territory (and the Yorkshire accents) prove heavy-going in an uncompromising film that elicits a lot more admiration than enjoyment.

Luckily, none of the inconsistencies in tone and atmosphere can overwhelm Matilda's charm. The power of its narrative and the self-composed presence of Wilson in the title role -- DeVito has persuaded the child to underact the part so that Matilda is precocious, not obnoxious -- carry the movie resolutely to its happy conclusion. [02 Aug 1996, p.D2]

Haneke's ensemble is uniformly excellent – the film is packed with intriguing and provocative encounters between its various oppositional characters – and the actors succeed in the difficult task of making these unpleasant people engaging enough that we stick with them throughout a film that the director successfully balances on a knife edge between satire and drama until its final (hilarious) conclusion.

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

In short, there are an awful lot of subplots and comic characters but none of the actors in this star-studded cast is allowed to build his laughs and the Coens just abandon several of these vivid personalities along the way.

This carefully massaged doc, with its spectacular aerial views of the landscape and the hunt, is a heartwarming story about perseverance and talent – if you believe it.

Of course, this is social satire and some bits are very funny...but the message is too obvious and the humour too gentle for the whole affair not to feel like so much white male whining.

Both shocking and beautiful, the film impresses itself on the viewer with the awesome scale of the imagery – and with the urgency behind it. We have entered an epoch in which human activity is shaping the planet more than any natural force. Anthropocene bears witness that something’s got to give.

Much to an audience's discomfort, Ingrid's desperation to bond with the phony Taylor soon breaks the bounds of sanity – until the film rebukes her warped world view with a highly moral ending. The critique is clever but the limit is the one so common in satire: it's hard to care about the fate of a character this exaggerated.

In RBG, a lionizing biography of the U.S. Supreme Court judge, Ginsburg emerges as a woman of remarkable intelligence and fortitude – who can get by on very little sleep.

The film will make highly informative viewing both for those who get it – and for those who don’t.

The naively amenable character is wonderfully observed by Fonte, and early scenes show delicious whimsy and black comedy...but as the film’s numbing brutality takes hold the character’s passivity makes the action drag in places.

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.

For the conquering Sacha, no pack ice can prove too crushing nor hardened sailor too obdurate: It’s only the unusual setting and subtle animation that raise this adventure above the formulaic.

The rare biopic of a visual artist that considers the dilemma of the art more seriously than it considers the drama of the life.

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

The Bronze often feels like an extended skit, but Hope is so refreshingly unladylike and the movie is so refreshingly cynical about gymnastics that the results are surprisingly amusing.

The nerd’s coming-of-age is a well-established genre, as is humiliation comedy, yet Coky Giedroyc’s How to Build a Girl is different enough to stand out.

With a plethora of archival material and strong interviews, this documentary argues that the exuberant Julia Child was a protofeminist who invented the profession of TV chef as she introduced the notion that food should taste good to the land of the Jell-O salad.

For all its loud signalling of raunch ahead, Blockers is funnier that you might expect: It’s a reliable laugh machine that features enough jabs at contemporary mores, alongside a discreet social conscience and some successfully female-centric comedy, that it rises above the inevitable chug-and-vomit jokes.

Mozhdah empathetically charts Nisha’s despairing acquiescence and fitful rebellions, but it’s Adil Hussain’s work making her father not entirely unsympathetic that really stands out.

Tarantino is a masterful storyteller, painter of cinematic images and director of actors; the script, the cinematography and the cast of outlandish characters, created by a powerful ensemble dashingly led by Jackson, can’t be faulted in any way.

The laughs and the wisdom creep up on you in this small and subtle comedy about male relationships.

As he transfers his talents to a European setting and Spanish-speaking cast, Farhadi loses none of his remarkable ability to observe close relationships collapsing under stress.

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.

The lads from Edinburgh thrive in chaos and, for all their new-found maturity, they are still at their best when in full flight from both responsibility and time.

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.

Director Jon Watts is smart enough never to deviate from a narrow vision that he executes superbly.

This solid intellectual biography painstakingly follows the development of Arendt’s thought as she was forced to flee her privileged surroundings in German academia, where she was Martin Heidegger’s student and lover, to France and then the United States.

The movie trots pleasantly along, but it never races.

The overall results are unusually wholesome – and satisfyingly funny. Game Night is the kind of harmless comedy you rarely see these days, as happily entertaining as a good game of Pictionary.

With strong performances in a scheme of both sensible updates and clever revivals, Mary Poppins Returns is as impressive as the 1964 version it joyfully recalls – except in one key area.

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.

It's a decidedly odd, down-beat story and yet, if the sexes were reversed, we would think nothing of a young woman swapping the role of lover for that of nurse when her much-older partner fell ill.

It simultaneously operates as a symbol of the tension between private life and patriotic duty that is at the core of the man's disagreement with the military.

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

The heart and mind of Maudie are always in the right place.

Mainly the film is a tightly focused and tightly filmed neo-noir, as the script, which Akin co-wrote with Hark Bohm, neatly picks off parents and friends to leave Katja isolated enough to make her desperate actions believable.

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.

Unfortunately, the actual confrontations this project must have caused happen off camera, but the story of a determined quest is always enlivened by insights into the clawing animals, bizarre monsters and sinful humans that populate Bosch’s fantastical visions.

There is no tragic hero here; there is no overarching explanation, but a movie that offered either of those would seem pretty pat. Take it or leave, Everest is just there.

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.

Cumberbatch excels once again at breathing life into a sorrowful genius.

As her adversary, the ghastly Irving, Timothy Spall is excellent, creating a man of great insecurities hidden behind blustering self-confidence. The actor is happily willing to manufacture a thoroughly oily and dislikeable figure as he and Jackson successfully balance their villain on the knife edge of caricature.

This is a much more conventional film with fewer pretensions to high art. Violence exploited for mere entertainment is so commonplace it hardly seems worth noting.

The heavy Star Wars legacy sits lightly on Ehrenreich’s shoulders in a Disney-Lucasfilm movie that is finally having fun.

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.

Coixet occasionally overplays her hand – a dropped headscarf, a sudden death – as does a constipated Bill Nighy in the role of the reclusive widower who is Florence’s one ally, but overall, the film is stealthily impressive.

Director Karyn Kusama shifts dexterously between the present and the past, unspooling a satisfyingly twisted piece of storytelling by writers Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, who succeed in making both plots gripping. Kudos to Kidman for taking on an ugly role (both physically and morally) and for giving both versions of the character a convincing hardness.

The most remarkable element is surely the way Egoyan has seamlessly integrated footage from previous COC productions, that he shot himself at the time, into his new film to give it the breadth of a genuine stage performance.

If children will be entertained by the unwilling roommates’ narrow escape from cats, dog catchers and the Flushed Pets, it is the mass of surrounding detail, from the glittering Manhattan skyline and Gidget’s sleek modernist pad to the animals’ remarkable mastery of domestic technology, that will impress the adults.

Batra has drawn delicate performances from his ensemble in this adaptation of what was always an elliptical novel, but as a film, The Sense of an Ending leaves you hungry for something more than just the sense of an ending.

Bullock is firm as the preternaturally self-assured Debbie but little more than that; her performance as the con artist is reined in so tightly that she only finally appears to be having some fun when she gets to don a blond updo and German accent on the night of the ball.

Foodies will enjoy the window into fancy restaurants but, without any interviews other than Ducasse, the documentary never questions the evolution of the chef into a peripatetic artistic director rather than an actual cook, nor the realism of professing environmental frugality in a three-star setting.

Director Bharat Nalluri sets a pace as punishing as the title character's – the film is mainly a quick romp – even if he does indulge in some unnecessarily Dickensian melodrama along the way.

A Bond movie is all about delivering on expectations: to enjoy it you have to be pleased rather than frustrated by its predictability. In that regard, Spectre, Daniel Craig’s fourth outing as Bond and the second directed by Sam Mendes, can be deemed a solid success: not as darkly stylish as "Skyfall" but not as stupidly grim as "Quantum of Solace" either.

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.

Underneath all this mess there is some idea about the conflict between private love and public duty, between personal interests and those of the state, but the characters are so marginally observed by both the actors and the script there is no tension in the themes.

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 key to the franchise is that Mamma Mia! never takes itself seriously: This time out, the joy is giddy but the sentiments are cloying; the musical scenes are mainly delightful, but quieter moments often fall flat.

Both Page and Wood hand in tough yet delicate performances as, over the course of a year, adversity shapes their characters.

The main attraction here are the characters: well-observed animals of the zoo or the barnyard.

There are only two erotic scenes between the two women, and Macneill, Sevigny and Stewart handle them with conviction: For all the horror of her situation, Lizzie needed some larger motivation to wield her axe. Lizzie dramatically provides it.

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.

In a big, engrossing performance that is the film’s chief delight, the reliable Australian actress Toni Collette plays Milly.

An icy Sarah Gadon can’t plumb it, offering a quietly mannered performance where a beautifully furrowed brow and occasional tear suggest the character cares more about looking elegant than dying. Thankfully, in the warmer roles of Yoli and her resilient Mennonite mother, Alison Pill and Mare Winningham do find the big broken heart at the core of this story.

Frears has attempted to fashion a contemporary message of diversity and inclusion delivered by a tolerant and culturally inquisitive Queen in opposition to her hide-bound and racist courtiers, but in the end that theme is undercut by the film's own Eurocentric realities.

This time, Tykwer somehow manages to turn Eggers’s attempt at an era-defining story into a weird little cross-cultural comedy with romantic overtones while remaining largely faithful to the original plot and dialogue. Here, globalization’s economic devastation is just a nice backdrop for some amusing – and, thankfully, inoffensive – observation of one American abroad.

There’s nothing subtle about The Finest Hours, but much that is satisfying.

As film, the results are often fabulous. They begin with a deft use of flashback from the action’s dark conclusion; they continue with wonderfully detailed and lively camera work that catches the sparkle in Annette Bening’s eye as she plays the actress Irina dominating her many dependants, and follows the seduction of the ingénue Nina (Saoirse Ronan) as it moves out onto a rowboat in the middle of a lake.

Sometimes, the animators find an expressive style to match difficult content – a suicide, a mercy killing and several sex scenes – and sometimes they just make the images of Salomon and the refugee with whom she falls in love seem leaden in comparison to the artist’s sprightly line.

As her oddly unengaged zoologist husband, the Belgian actor Johan Heldenbergh appears to be working in a different movie altogether.

It’s a film that considers young heartbreak so earnestly, it risks taking itself too seriously, too.

Perhaps if Rossi had begun where he ends, with the bold assertion that this project is not about raising money for art but about using celebs to sell magazines, The First Monday in May might prove as enlightening as it is titillating. What does Rihanna get paid? We don’t know because, as a staffer names the actual sum, the filmmaker bleeps the words.

Besides psychological drama, besides thriller, social satire is another significant element in this sometimes erratic film and it’s one that, surprisingly and belatedly, rises to the top: Anyone who started out thinking The Dinner was a thriller will probably be disappointed when the evening wraps up with an ending that is more farce than denouement.