Liam Lacey

Can a little-read 18th-century literary masterpiece be food-spittingly funny? Can it also include contemporary English actors riffing about their bad teeth, getting drunk and kissing their personal assistants? The answer is yes, as long as you agree that the best way to adapt an original book is with a correspondingly original film.

Good Night, and Good Luck may be simplified history, but it's almost consistently well-crafted.

The result is a film that is presented as a kind of a fable, and a microcosm of a country whose fortunes once depended on oil.

In another era, in a more dramatic coming-of-age story, we would expect something life-changing, possibly terrible to happen. But Gasoline Rainbow remains gentle, optimistic and free-flowing. It’s a vision of America that is almost banal in its lack of menace, an alternative kind of docu-fiction that belies the angry drama of the daily news.

Though Little Miss Sunshine is consistently contrived in its characters' too-cute misery, the conclusion, which is genuinely outrageous and uplifting, is almost worth the hype.

Too busy to be boring or deeply engaging, Tarzan is an efficient Disney treatment of a time-tested story. The results aren't bad, just not quite worth a chest-pounding victory yell.

Cow never makes any case for veganism or any other cause. Rather, the film is a product of the increasing scrutiny of our destructive hierarchical categories, including the unnecessary cruelty of factory farming, the growth in the legal studies of animal rights, and scientific interest in animal consciousness.

In a well-paced two and a half hours, Berg's film is an ambitious mixture of summary and fresh investigation.

Rocky Balboa scores a split decision: A familiar start, some flat-footed middle rounds and a solid, flailing finish. And since Stallone has promised to throw in the towel on the franchise, we'll add an extra half star in honour of his diligence in the gym.

The movie is often both smart and creepy, but it's still a novice effort. After an initially engrossing start, it stumbles through a series of implausible coincidences and murky events, barely held together by the magnetic performance of Javier Bardem.

At best, the film makes a more convincing case for the adventure of artificiality: Take Billy Crudup, add a little rouge to his cheeks and suddenly: Voilà, the guy can act.

Wife of a Spy is in some ways an imperfect film, sometimes stiff at the joints or broadly obvious, but it’s also carefully crafted and conceptually inspired.

The film is both a love story and a lament for the city where the director grew up.

For all that The Sessions does well, it offers some telling deviations from the real story.

Mank is not, ultimately, a movie to embrace or believe but to study with a certain uneasy fascination.

Parents of young children should be warned: Here's a family-values film that won't be much fun for the whole family.

Throughout the film, Cheadle's eyes are constantly scanning his environment for opportunities or anything that may be amiss.

It's a film of vigorous performances and provocative modern resonances, though it sometimes struggles to grapple with a grim, politically ambiguous, 400-year-old play.

A warm-hearted look back at one of professional sport’s most colourful folk heroes, the late Yogi Berra, the documentary, It Ain’ Over, is also a film with a score to settle.

Like that camel-hair coat Abel wears, A Most Violent Year is classy and commands respect, but a stronger pulse under the lapels would make us care much more.

Here’s another word for Gone Girl: “meta.” It’s a word Flynn uses, which means it’s a thriller about thrillers, and a narrative about narratives, especially the form of domestic violence relished by current-affairs television shows.

As long as Chbosky sticks to the story of surviving high school, Perks has a modest charm. But a melodramatic last-act bombshell about Charlie's troubled past, is jarring – like the giant foot of Godzilla descending to squash tender Bambi. It's a case of too much, too late and, ultimately, from a different kind of movie.

The pitch on Dear White People is that it’s “Do the Right Thing for the Obama generation,” which is both an oversell and a disservice to Justin Simien’s witty satire about race relations on a fictional Ivy League campus.

Ultimately, the edge that Navid is pushing is less to do with a rant against the Israeli government than in creating a cinematic depiction of a tortured psychological state, in both the individual and collective meanings of that word.

Cluttered, improbable, brash, silly and over the top, the film is far more fun than it should be. [19 July 1996, p.D1]

Tense car chases, action scenes handled with crisp panache and Canadian actor Ryan Gosling channelling Steve McQueen as an existential wheel man add up to make Drive one of the best arty-action films since Steven Soderbergh's "The Limey."

The night scenes are particularly resonant, mixing humour, suspense and textured visuals. This is the kind of film dream from which you feel reluctant to wake.

If the Miranda musical touches are getting familiar, they’re still a lot fresher than the script here, yet another story of a pet animal on a mission and its special bond with a lonely child.