Kate Taylor

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.

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.

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

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

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 whole thing feels like a late-night, dorm-room gab fest, except that the four women in question are well over 60, which is the gag.

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.

I Feel Pretty paints the most garish and unflattering portrait of contemporary female culture.

The plot is cursory, the dialogue is repetitive and the psychology is cheap. Hanging in for the wanton violence may prove too much for anyone not seriously addicted to the guilty pleasures of cheesy sci-fi.

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.

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

The drama is memorable but often feels grimly unpleasant rather than moving. And, as always, it’s frustrating to see Montreal cast as some anonymous and unilingual North American city.

The story is both fresh and archetypal; the landscape both hard and delicate – and beautifully observed. Memories and premonitions are intriguingly inserted into the action and the performances...are note perfect.

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.

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.

Foxtrot is an admirably precise yet dreamlike film, probing the trap in which contemporary Israel finds itself. It is deliberately designed, superbly filmed and affectingly acted by Lior Ashkenazi and Sarah Adler as the stricken Feldmanns.

This pretty movie feels convenient rather than meaningful.

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.

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.

Yet for all that the director's unflinching vision, the cast's excellent performances and Mikhail Krichman's unerring cinematography impress themselves upon the viewer, there is something out of balance in Loveless.

The cast of aliens, led by Matsuda, has great fun playing the humans-in-training, but it's Nagasawa's defeated young wife who really stands out as the performance that elevates the film.

So, romance-novel boilerplate that sounded clichéd on the page becomes outright laughable as it's transferred to the screen.

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.

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.

Even Clarkson's work on the intriguingly ambiguous Paige is starting to wear thin this time out; the combination of flat characters, a young cast and a director whose strengths lie elsewhere means that the overall level of performance is painfully low.

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.

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.

This Paddington, so sweetly voiced by Ben Whishaw, is just ursine enough on the one hand and just teddy enough on the other to reproduce the charm of the original.