Kate Taylor

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.

Perhaps this multilingual, almost-pre-AIDS idyll does not stretch credulity – the family is surely based on Aciman’s own internationalist clan – but it can try the patience.

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.

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.

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.

This is not a spoiler alert; it’s a tip: If you go to see American Ultra, stay for the credits, right to the end. They are animated and provide a mini fourth act for the film, a little action movie starring a super simian and a beautiful (human) damsel; they are an amusing addendum, but mainly they tell you a lot about where American Ultra’s heart lies, deep in comic-book territory.

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

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.

The storytelling is bald and the logistics remain vague. The adult characters, especially a sadistic prison guard, are laughably overblown and the simplistic dialogue betrays the script’s YA roots.

The key problem is the figure of Naomi, clawing her way to the top and desperate to stay there. Gunn plays her as mightily determined and potentially abrasive.

The culminative effect of the cinematography is inconclusive as the character remains trapped in grief.

The movie trots pleasantly along, but it never races.

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.

That is what makes the movie highly watchable – along with Hemsworth's affable presence, backed by the always reliable Shannon and with Michael Pena and Trevante Rhodes as two of the soldiers, providing wry commentary from the sidelines.

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.

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.

Form and content seem oddly divorced, but music – the Polish folk tunes, communist-propaganda anthems and Parisian torch songs – sets the mood and saves the day.

Having managed Berlin rather gracefully, Race often plods along the home front.

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.

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.

The brazenness of her actions and opacity of her emotions suggest a tragic heroine in the grand tradition – the novel is the basis for the Shostakovich opera of the same title – but the film lacks the propulsive drive to make her fate moving.

As other worlds reveal themselves, what started with a gripping premise slackens and goes limp.

A melodrama split, then cross-connecting, into three separate parts, Drunken Birds is a startling thing that just narrowly avoids whiffing the landing.

Avrich was probably wise to avoid lengthy digressions into Middle East politics, but if a great film takes the particular and makes it universal, this is not a great film. Given the war that has followed, this individual story must remain only that, circumscribed by the larger context that perforce it can barely acknowledge.

By the time we make it to the present, oddly represented by a towering digitized city and a handful of white children playing in an idyllic American setting, it becomes clear Mallick has little space for the multifaceted human race in his gorgeous cosmos.

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.

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.

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.