Liam Lacey

Hanks and young German actress Helena Zengel (Shock System) play off each other faultlessly, with minimal dialogue, relying on gaze, gesture, and tone and we can easily understand how the twice-orphaned Johanna can look into Kidd’s warm, melancholy gaze and recognize a fellow misfit and survivor, accepting him as her protector.

The film employs a punk-inspired cut-and-paste collages, smashing together footage of police and protestor clashes, rock concerts, television shows and political marches, all annotated with animated handwritten letters, posters, newspaper clippings, and excerpts from RAR’s fanzine, Temporary Hoarding.

Anyone expecting a crowd-pleasing crossover movie from the French director of modern art-house landmarks like Beau Travail and 35 Shots of Rum may be ill-prepared for this perplexing, repellent/fascinating vision of bodies in tight spaces.

A first-person documentary about a Los Angeles couple’s decision to move to the country and start a farm overcomes its excessively preciously start to become a genuinely insightful meditation on agriculture, nature, and our precarious relationship to the planet that feeds us.

The Harder They Fall aims for, and mostly hits the target, with a double-barreled blast of entertainment and historical reclamation.

Though sometimes over-explanatory, the film gains in complexity as it progresses, raising thorny questions about the duty of victims to maintain their humanity.

The deliberate pacing, cinematographer Tómas Örn Tómasson's images reminding of the vulnerable human scale against the landscape and the skeletal narrative, bringing a refreshing purity to a classic predicament.

It is to Costa’s credit that she provides a soothing, reflective tone to the subject, both in her poetic voiceover and a hypnotically smooth editing that movies from drone shots of crowds, congregations, rallies, and protest marches to handheld closeups of politicians clawing their ways through teeming throngs of admirers.

Synonyms free-wheeling episodic structure can grow a tad wearying, but Mercier’s aggressively kinetic performance and Lapid’s take-no-prisoners dismantling of the Israeli macho mystique — or French hypocritical superiority — are, in the best way, outrageous.

Ridicule is, finally, a movie that shows it understands the mechanism of wit and hierarchy intimately, and rejects it unequivocally in favour of the more inclusive and gentle world of humour. [11 Dec 1996, p.C1]

At times, the film is unabashedly cloying, like a ASMR Forest Gump or a Minion with sensitivity training. But if you can get past that, there’s an admirable ingenuity to the technique, integrating live action and stop-motion with humour and an easy, natural flow.

The result is an intriguing hybrid, mixing a Japanese reverence for nature (a raindrop shimmering on a leaf is a visual haiku) with quaint Victorian architecture and a story featuring contemporary, Caucasian-looking Japanese characters speaking in American accents. Somehow, it all works.

At the end of Courage Under Fire, you feel torn between admiration and annoyance with the filmmakers.

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

Mixing bravura filmmaking with flat clichés in about equal amounts, The Dark Knight is all about dualism. Appropriately, the movie's half-inspired, half-frustrating.

Though the conclusion is foregone, Canadian screenwriter David F. Shamoon's script manages to extract suspense out of Poldek's ruthless, calculating nature.

For audiences tired of summer sequels that grind through the familiar motions, Stardust provides a dizzying antidote.

The acting throughout is exceptional, rooted in observed realism, but suggestive of more mythical agents at work through the lives of human beings.

A thinly plotted, amateurishly acted, cartoonishly violent and hugely entertaining array of jaw-dropping stunts and corny slapstick.

Bad history it may be, but Elizabeth is a movie that makes you want more, as it plays to the myth of history's great actress-monarch, a character who puts today's tinselly political heros and heroines (royal and not), to shame.

The End of the Line's most topical hook is its exploration of bluefin tuna, which, as a sushi delicacy, is sometimes called the "most expensive meat on the planet."

An uncomfortably fascinating document of a man whose bipolar disorder and artistic ambitions are inextricably connected.

You probably have a better chance of stuffing an octopus into a tea cup than capturing one of Dickens's fat novels in a two-hour movie.

Taken strictly as a movie, though, Selma is an uneven yet generally skillful effort that has probably drawn more praise and criticism than it warrants.

The studio set recreation of Hong Kong’s famous Bar Street, along with the gaudily delectable costumes throughout, give Master Z a dreamy heightened artifice. More than once, the film seems on the verge of breaking into a vintage Hollywood musical.

Morse, with his hulking frame, baby face and soft voice, has probably done too many of these villain roles for his own good. But how could you avoid casting him when he manages to present someone who's screamingly insane in the mildest, most pleasant way?

This is a human-sized drama about people with contradictory motives, trying to help or use each other.

Both a moving first-person essay and an artful exercise in political advocacy, 5 Broken Cameras is about the experience of West Bank protests from the inside.