Liam Lacey

At its simple core, Sleeping Beauty is a perfectly pitched chamber piece about the menace of voluntary oblivion.

While you can admire the “House of Mirrors” structure of The Whistlers and its ironic mix of glum and glamorous, there is little emotional purchase here. This is a flatter, more arch experience than Porumboiu’s devastatingly absurd earlier films, and the entire exercise feels more about ingenuity than art.

With the bigger story and more fully developed relationships than the previous films, this is the first Twilight film that feels like a real movie in its own right.

The lack of clear identification of interview subjects and amorphous shape of the film can be frustrating. A segment on the history of book-burning, for example, feels gratuitous but, for the record, everyone in the film is against it.

A father-son academic rivalry provides fodder for this caustic comedy set in the Talmud Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The title comes from prosecutor Ferencz, who compares his work to that of the 16th-century astronomer Tycho Brahe, who said he watched the sky so future generations could use him as their foundation.

An odd and irresistible documentary.

By the end of the The Spectacular Now, you’re not quite ready to let these characters go. Instead, like director François Truffaut did with his character Antoine Doinel in a series of films, you want to check back with them every few years, to see how how they’re getting on.

A twofold story of heroic achievements and personal failings.

Both an homage to his dad and a backstage story rich in Hollywood lore.

Director Scott, flashy, fluid and at his best in the steely-blue claustrophic battle-training scenes, immerses the viewer in the process.

To some extent, the performances elevate the script.

You have to feel pleased just for the existence of a film like Tim Burton's Frankenweenie. A 3-D, black-and-white, stop-motion animated film, it's a one-man blow for cinematic biodiversity.

Alps, in spite of its title, is a very flat film, from the shallow focus photography, to the actors' monotone delivery.

The excesses are easy to forgive, both for the humour and charisma of Rourke's outsized performance and Aronofsky's canny low-key direction, which make for a combination that is irresistible.

Surprisingly touching and funny.

Somewhere between profound and ludicrous, kind of like a cross between "Waiting for Godot" and "Dude, Where's My Car?"

She Paradise, which runs a brief 71 minutes, is raw in more than one sense. The characters are thinly developed, and the dance sequences, as robust as they are, could be more dynamically shot. On the plus side, Nestor — with her watchful quiet manner — is persuasive as a young woman awkwardly finding her way, and the other women are forceful presence.

Subtly crafted and compelling, but it suffers from a case of split personality.

The voice that jerks out from Levy's throat suggests Lazarus waking from the dead.

Korean-American actor and former model Yune (who played a similar role in "Die Another Day," the last Pierce Brosnan James Bond film) makes a colourful villain – handsome and insufferably assured, and also an unchivalrous sadist who kicks around the Secretary of Defense (Melissa Leo in a pageboy wig) as though she’s a hacky sack.

After proceeding through the childhood epiphanies and observed details, Branagh’s memory journey stumbles in the last act as he attempts to elevate the material into scenes of climactic magical realism.

Like Martin Scorsese's "The Departed" or James Gray's "We Own the Night," The Town is a deliberately old-fashioned melodrama that echoes the pulpy mix of violence and romanticism of gangster films of the Thirties and Forties.

The focus of Invictus is less on Mandela's psychology than his willpower and political astuteness.

McNaughton's film, which has been described as "too arty for the blood crowd and too bloody for the art crowd," is an exercise in revulsion by an often skilled filmmaker. [8 Oct 1990]

Like the blues, you feel it first, and think of the meaning later.

As effective as Enforcement is on a visceral level, it comes up short in any deeper reflection on the social crisis of its premise.

Like circus acrobats who bounce up smiling, the characters end up on their feet, and you realize in retrospect that they survived because somebody, finally, stopped to think. A final thought on Go: Go.