Kate Taylor

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.

Like "Everest," Adrift is a movie throbbing with an audience’s anxiety – and yet it is not particularly dramatic.

The fault in the film lies as much with Cretton’s script, which he co-wrote with Andrew Lanham, as it does with his direction.

The problem is not so much Satrapi’s theatrical approach to the subject, which veers wildly from the overwrought to the dramatically compelling, as it is Jack Thorne’s abysmal script, full of clunky exposition about isolating elements, curing cancer and refusing sexism.

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

If his direction is erratic, the script he wrote with Annie Mumolo (Bridesmaids) has gaps you could drive a truck through and dialogue filled with painfully obvious exposition of plot, motive and theme.

The heavy-handed score, narrow performances (Nicole Munoz as the repeatedly terrified daughter; Laurie Holden as the dense mum) and weak dialogue all fail to justify a provocative ending that overturns the exorcising conventions of the genre.

The core trio are smooth and amusing in their roles, but the larger plot is filled with painful stereotypes, from a tough female cop to various black gangsters. Meanwhile, as the sympathetic criminals try to outwit police, the social theme remains unfocused – despite heartfelt pleas for street people, especially the homeless Inuit of Montreal.

Foster, recovering nicely from her last directorial outing in the surprisingly unfunny "The Beaver," proves her smarts by managing to balance these different strands of humour while keeping the action ticking along.

Leong’s documentary realism is powerful – if tough on an audience – but his fiction skills are erratic in a film that relies too heavily on Sister Tse’s narration, much repeated flashbacks and heavy exposition of the characters’ motivations.

We all love Winnie the Pooh; that is why we are interested in the story of the real Christopher Robin. To learn that public affection all but destroyed his childhood makes an audience uncomfortably complicit in this cuddle-free origin story of the world's most famous teddy bear.