Kate Taylor

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.

The movie trots pleasantly along, but it never races.

There’s also not much chemistry between Skarsgard and Robbie in a film that hints at the Greystokes’ great sex life but barely shows it. Instead, we get flashes of flesh that are hilariously dated in their obviousness.

There remains a nasty whiff here of a movie that is trotting out lesbian love interests and clawing cat fights for male titillation. With fashion taking the place of ballet, The Neon Demon may well prove controversial in a "Black Swan" kind of way, offering a love-it-or-hate-it debate over the appeal of its melodrama versus the politics of its social critique.

DeGeneres goes much further, though, maintaining a delicate balance between Dory’s optimistic personality and the hovering anxieties created by her imperfect memory.

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

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 performances of Travis Fimmel, Toby Kebbell and Paula Patton as the warrior Lothar, the orc hero Durotan and the half-orc/half-woman Garona, all awakening to the evil forces around them, are meaty enough to hold attention.

As Alice, Wasikowska, who has lost the injured look that made her so effective the first time out, creates a character who is fundamentally sweet, likeable and loyal.

And, make no mistake, this is a movie that is supposed to be seen from the perspective of a small child.

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.

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.

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.

Unlike the smarter "Maleficent," a revisionist Sleeping Beauty created by the same producers, what The Huntsman series lacks is any intriguing psychology.

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.

The disappointment here is that an intriguing psychological premise about a personality swap is never used to do anything more than provide the juice for a run-of-the-mill action movie.

Director Jon Favreau (Iron Man) is highly adept at having his cake and eating it, too, throughout the film, wowing audiences with effects and amusing them with talking animals, all the while insisting The Jungle Book is a difficult story about a human whose presence threatens to disrupt the jungle’s peace.

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.

The trouble here is that neither Bryan Sipe, who wrote this highly original script, nor Vallée, remain true to the bitter whimsy with which they began.

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

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

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 are many plot lines here, but little tension.

The Program makes passing references to the power of celebrity and the Live Strong narrative – the cyclist admits to telling people what they wanted to hear – but it never goes deep on what it was that produced the awfulness that is Lance Armstrong.

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.

Its war scenes are plenty thrilling, but the film’s real achievement is its quiet authenticity.

Zootopia takes the cultural practice of posing animals as human characters to queasy new heights.

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.