Liam Lacey

If Apocalypse Now was criticized in the past as a series of impressive sequences that don't quite add up to a tidy story, the new additions put this in perspective. It's a filmed epic, not a filmed drama. [10 Aug 2001, p.R1]

Call it what you like – a modern Russian epic, a crime drama, a black comedy or a scream in the dark – Leviathan is a shaggy masterpiece.

Eventually, Toy Story 3 finds its way back to that theme of the power of childhood play. There are a few worrisome moments en route, though, when not only the characters but the filmmakers seem to have lost their way.

This fictional "rockumentary" about a mediocre, aging heavy-metal band's last tour of America is surprisingly modest, subtle and funny. Not only is this the kind of satiric treatment rock music has been crying out for, it may be one of the most original film comedies in years. [20 Apr 1984]

Mendonça, a former film critic, has crafted a film steeped in seventies’ cinematic references, especially Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, David Cronenberg’s body horrors, and the paranoid American political thrillers of the era, stuffed with affectionate care for depicting the fashion, cars, décor and music of the era.

Behind the shell game of motives between the three main characters, there are subtle perceptions about class, youth alienation, and disposable people in contemporary Korea.

Certainly, it’s a welcome call-back to grownup movies of 1960s and 70s, about adult intimacy and meaning-of-life concerns. Shot with crisp, unfussy clarity inside a car or in boardroom offices and the streets of the modern urban Japan, it’s a drama about the intricate ways love, performance, and work merge into each other.

Once in a rare while a film comes along that is boldly original, communicates an important idea in an elegantly simple fashion and happens to be highly entertaining. Such is the case with Moolaadé.

It’s a stripped-down French legal drama, with a carefully controlled, expanding emotional impact, touching on matters of motherhood, gender, immigration and race.

Arguably, Lost in Translation is the American answer to Wong Kar-wai's masterpiece, "In the Mood for Love," though less about history, more about infatuation.

Phoenix, for long scenes, is onscreen by himself, lost in his thoughts and those of the operating system moulded to fit his psyche. With his wounded awkwardness and boyish giggles, he seems authentically vulnerable, but the character’s emotionally arrested development also begins to weigh the film down.

Working "lobbed" and "scimitar" into that same sentence hovers near the empyrean of genius.

This is a no-cable, no-wake-up-call, cash-only dump of a film, where you breathe through a hankie and bring your own Lysol.

Anyone looking for an uplifting story in the mode of Spotlight or Erin Brockovich won’t find gratification in Ross’s sombre film. Nickel Boys, a film that impresses and occasionally perplexes, is not a story of delayed justice achieved, or the suffering of others appreciated from a safe historical distance.

Both complex and rawly immediate, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Laura Poitras’s film about the 69-year-old photographic artist and activist Nan Goldin, is a great documentary and maybe the most essential film of the year.

A road trip movie that refreshes and elevates the genre, Hit The Road follows a squabbling Iranian family on a life-changing journey. Though it would be a stretch to describe the film as the Iranian art cinema’s answer to Little Miss Sunshine, this deft hybrid of crowd-pleasing fun and poetic melancholy comes close.

No doubt, there's a certain theme-park appeal to this use of technology to reconstruct a facsimile of the past, but it's shockingly immediate, seeing those old monochrome images of anonymous men in mushroom-cap helmets turned into images of pink-cheeked youth staring back at us through the camera lens.

A poetic drama about the lives of three Maori girls from the 1950s to the 1980s, Cousins is a heart-breaker, tempered with hope.

The movie bridges the traditional Restoration comedy to the political satires of Armando Iannnucci (Veep, The Death of Stalin). Comedy also entwines with tragedy here, and bold touches of absurdism and iconoclastic revisionism.

A horror movie based on history, offering some of the most spectacularly brutal, viscerally intense battle scenes ever brought to a Hollywood movie.

This is a movie that was made not because the director had anything to say, but because she wanted to get a movie made. Even at that, the script is slapdash. Only one character has any dimension (Frances O'Connor's Mia), the plotting is the usual sub-screwball comedy with obligatory pranks and misunderstandings, and the overall tone is bland, smug and connivingly cute. [11 Apr 1997, p.C6]

No film this year has offered quite the cerebral tickle, weird invention and slaphappy gusto.

An impressive film accomplishment, a combination of technique and extremely specific detail that reminds viewers how potent a rhetorical force the medium can be.

The winner of Cannes’s top prize, the Palme d’Or, and the international critics prize at the same festival, the film was hailed as a breakthrough, a graphic and emotional love story, the first same-sex feature ever to win the Palme, in the week after France legalized same-sex marriage.

The best American movie so far this year.

In summoning the artist and his eighties’ art-scene milieu, the film also serves as memorial to the generation of creative voices silenced by the AIDS virus.

Essentially agenda-free, My Perestroika has the quality of a candid conversation with long-lost cousins from another country.

Watching The Souvenir: Part II is a wonderful tonic for those feelings of ciné cynicism, a reminder of film as a means of discovery.