Kate Taylor

Park’s Handmaiden is a great big chocolate box of a movie in which a rich and satisfying narrative is enlivened by some piquant erotica and the sharp tang of politics.

[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.

The plot depends on an improbably interdependent set of acquaintances and events, but the cinematography, the dialogue and the performances, especially Adrian Titieni’s as an earnest and anxious Mr. Fix-It, are impressively naturalistic.

With this complex characterization, Bening looks like a shoo-in for a best-actress nomination come Oscar time, but she is also amply supported here with two performances that nicely capture the insecurities of earlier stages of womanhood.

A bold, if sometimes preachy, film that is stylistically daring, improbably entertaining and politically supercharged.

After successfully telling a complex story, Spielberg inevitably overdramatizes its [spoiler omitted] ending.

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.

Both leads fit their performances seamlessly into this destabilizing scheme, providing a provocative timelessness to the characters.

In the film's finest moments, as a generous Iranian host explains traditional Farsi poetry, the animation and the themes mingle and explode in a riot of cross-cultural colour as the stringy Canadian cartoon meets gorgeously rendered illustrations – and personifications – of Persian traditions.

In truth, as this film observes more and more of his compelling oeuvre, the viewer becomes more engrossed in the art than its cinematic presentation and the 3-D effect seems to fade into the background, necessary rather than impressive.

The Lobster is a brilliant piece of satire, but largely fails in an attempt to build its wicked wit into a more conventional romance.

There’s lots of wisdom here, but in the Icelandic barrens, good cheer has sometimes gone missing. Yes, there’s a price to pay for being stubborn.

Colombian filmmaker Ciro Guerra’s reimagining of the lives of lost peoples is compelling, but, despite many languorous images of river and jungle, this remains a bookish examination of the themes.

Anderson once again creates a uniquely whimsical visual environment; this time, it’s inspired by the classic Samurai movies of Akira Kurosawa and the stop-motion Christmas specials of Anderson’s childhood.

Stewart does an intriguing job creating a paradoxical character who explains herself without giving of herself, her very persona exposing the false promise of personal exposition.

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

The new film is the rare sequel that truly merits its existence, updating and expanding the themes of the 1982 original to bring them from the 20th century into the 21st. Yes, Blade Runner 2049 is one hard-working and deep-thinking replicant.

Labelling his film as a response to the impoverishment of ordinary people caused by the government-imposed austerity of 2013-14, Gomes explains his dilemma brilliantly at the start of Volume 1. How is a well-meaning filmmaker to effectively render the pain of the Portuguese with a documentary set in a town where the shipyard has closed just as alien wasps are attacking local beehives?

In the end, the family drama rolls on as the political metaphor wears thin so that the second half of the film is less striking and less interesting than the first.

As Miguel unravels the secret behind his family's ban on music and its relationship with de la Cruz, a story emerges that is both newly inventive in the way it deploys the skeletons and absolutely classic in the way it connects remembrance with immortality. Turns out these talking skeletons have a lot to say.

The ever-reliable Hanks sympathetically personifies all in America that is worth fighting for, while his British colleague’s surprisingly comic version of Rudolf Abel portrays the Russian spy as a man quietly steadfast in his loyalty to a different cause.

Gomes believes we should all take responsibility for one another and sees austerity as a government abrogation of social duty that ultimately turns citizen against citizen.

The detective plot is shaggy and never fully resolves itself, but the implications of the story resonate like a distant drum.

In the script Lelio co-wrote with Gonzalo Maza, the lover's family may be conveniently ghastly and the authorities who investigate the death puzzlingly erratic (as the film flirts unsuccessfully with mystery), but a quietly honest centre never wavers.

The dialogue is quietly scathing, and the production values are sumptuous. But Davies seems most interested in Sassoon as a symbol of hemmed-in Englishness. As a character, he remains poetically opaque.

It tells a well-crafted story; the new characters are invigorating; the old characters are reintroduced tidily. But it is also far too enamoured with the power of its own history.

This haunting Chilean documentary is more poetry than journalism as filmmaker Patricio Guzman compares the fate of the indigenous people of Patagonia with that of the disappeared of the Pinochet regime.

Arabian Nights is a remarkable achievement, but also an erratic one.