Leslie Felperin

It’s all quite lovely to look at or even just listen to, making for something that can easily be experienced at home while the viewer is knitting or chopping vegetables.

The execution is dire, with cliche-riddled dialogue as cheesy as a packet of Kraft Singles, stodgy pacing, poorly developed characters and shonky acting.

The back half is all over the place and doesn’t seem to know what to say – but Connelly never ceases to be anything less than mesmerising as the kind of older woman full of spit, vinegar and shrapnel who could go off at any second.

This one has all the Norwegian drama of Yuletide in one tidy package, yes sir.

Perhaps the most remarkable moment comes at the end when the elderly Aurora reflects that she doesn’t want revenge, she just wants those connected to the genocide to be made accountable for it: “sat in the chair” of justice.

The direction by Nadine Crocker has all the authenticity of a daytime soap opera. But all the same, there’s no denying that Hedlund and, to a lesser extent, Fitzgerald are pretty good, offering better performances than the film surrounding them deserves.

In the end this feels a bit too much like a knockoff of a superior product, like something one of these guys would sell out of the boot of their car.

Sometimes God is just too on the nose when he makes his creations suffer; but at least Alberdi’s humane, profoundly empathic film-making offers some balm.

There’s nothing sentimental about this documentary, which looks at people with the clear, unflinching gaze of a portraitist.

The lack of cackle-worthy one-liners here and the entertaining but highly predictable last act make this a little bit snoozy for savvier viewers.

The Kitchen also has plenty of inventive ideas, creates heady atmospheres in both its dark and lighter moments, and features vivid performances with a large ensemble.

There’s a certain amount of nasty fun to be had watching the assorted couples get drunk and tear strips off each other, in a metaphoric sense at least, before the violence kicks off – as if Greene were aiming to make a cross between Scream and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Extensive archive news material is drawn on to explain key moments in the struggle over reproductive rights, but mostly the story emerges organically from the interviewees themselves.

There must be some limit to how much content you can generate from the franchise’s core formula, which always finds the titular pack of talking puppy heroes saving their perpetually endangered home town, Adventure City, from an assortment of perils.

Unsurprisingly, it all builds to a bleak conclusion, and the film as a whole is a powerful statement that lingers in the mind long after the final credits roll.

Like so many of his other movies, it’s pithy, punchy, a little shouty at times, but made with brio and swagger.

Indeed, it is not clear how interested director Rudy Valdez is in Santana, or whether he is just doing this gig as a means to an end.

Gasoline Rainbow pays homage to all the road movies that ever were but is still its own quirky thing, uniquely of its time.

Spall keeps the performance tight, projecting not just Jimmy’s damaged psyche but also his wit.

This is very bizarre stuff, even within the traditionally weird parameters of cultural representation in cartoons, but kids won’t mind as it’s one non-stop riot of colour and vroom-vroom movement.

In some ways, it’s one of Hopkins’ best performances from the last few years, beautifully underplayed, eschewing mannerisms or silly accents. It’s just a shame the film itself, directed by James Hawes, with a script by Lucinda Coxon and Nick Drake, is a bit worthy and diagrammatic.

While the landscapes, especially in the parched Sahara section of the story, are dazzling, Carnera’s camera always keeps the focus on the humans, sometimes specks seen from great distances moving through the sand and sometimes studied in close-ups that fill the widescreen canvas.

If cinema is an empathy machine, to paraphrase the late Roger Ebert, then Agnieszka Holland’s new film is one precision-tooled specimen.

This mostly competent but largely uninteresting, bordering-on-silly work upholds the Allen tradition of just carrying on as usual

If you were programming a season of the best of the worst from Nicolas Cage’s filmography – in other words, his most interesting/outlandish/crazed performances in low-budget films – this kooky thriller would certainly be a good candidate.

Given the chemistry between the two leads that could restart a dormant nuclear power plant, viewers are likely to come away sated with pleasure after seeing this delightful work.

Interviews with various journalists, local law enforcers, politicians and FBI agents lay out the nitty-gritty of the story. Lashings of onscreen text spell out the statistics and figures, which is helpful. The caricatures of the various grifters are distractingly tacky, though, and somewhat lower the film’s tone.

It’s nice to see the old tension between selling out and staying pure never goes away in any corner of the film-making world.