Lee Marshall

This spiky black comedy is smart, cool and occasionally funny, in a bleakly cynical way, but it’s also surprisingly dull for long periods.

The paradox is that in modernising Berlin Alexanderplatz, Qurbani has created an ambitious but also stridently melodramatic moral parable that seems oddly dated.

Dogman may have a more intimate, reflective tone than much of his work – at least until its final man-versus-dog showdown – but it struggles to get past that initial cool pitch.

Kurosawa remains a master of twilight-zone atmosphere, but this extended metaphor for the grieving process relies too heavily on ambience alone.

A handful of bone-crunching, arrow-whirring, neck-slicing battle scenes allow us some time off from trying to follow the convoluted narrative thread.

In Moverman’s hands, it becomes a contemporary American fable about savagery lurking behind civilised facades, about class and racial divisions in a country that calls itself united, and about ethical vacuums in a connected, online society. It’s also an unbalanced, uneven ride, a distracting hot and cold shower of intense scenes featuring four terrific actors and long, meandering passages of flashback filler.

Piranhas feels a bit like a teen movie that just happens to have a Cammora backdrop, rather than a serious, nuanced drama about the paranza system – essentially, the grooming of underage kids as drug runners and Mafia footsoldiers.

There’s an observational authenticity that is refreshing in an audiovisual culture whose attempts at self-analysis are too often skewed by melodrama. It’s also heartening to see such delicate stories of ordinary people come to the fore in a country whose filmmakers faces enormous hurdles; technical, financial and bureaucratic.

After the tense opening, coherent drama goes by the board.

What stands out in relief from the film’s flat characters and pedestrian storytelling is its dramatic core: the killing machine that death row had become in South Africa by the end of the 1980s, with 164 executions taking place in Pretoria Central Prison in the year in which Shepherds And Butchers is set, 1987.

With its uneasy and never-resolved conflict of interest between music star vehicle and music star drama and its lack of much at all to say about life, music or the creative process, Taurus ain’t rising anytime soon.

The final result won't fully satisfy either hardcore cineastes or those looking for soft porn in a pretty package - but the magic wand of art will help to broaden the film's commercial base beyond the cheap-thrill camp.

Egoyan is so impatient to cut through to the emotional truth that he asks us to take on board a series of lazy contrivances that will test even the most forgiving viewer.

Some moments of poetry and emotional truth lurk in among the pretentious high grass. But the sometimes baffling dialogue is a serious subtitle endurance test ­for non French-speaking audiences.

Sure, there’s a strong element of arch playfulness in the exercise, but that doesn’t make the end result any less tiresome. In Eisenstein In Guanajuato, Greenaway is good at making us look, but not at making us care.

If some of this loud horror material looks frankly absurd, that’s only, Amenabar would no doubt argue, because it reflects the hackneyed, trick-or-treats way in which we give form and body to our night fears. Fine, but for a thriller to thrill, such didactic admonishments are not enough.

little can be done to disguise the weakness of an undercooked script based on an idea Tornatore apparently had in his bottom drawer for decades.