Liam Lacey

A charming oddity starring Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch, often feels like an al fresco stage play. It’s an intimate two-hander with lots of dialogue, humour and poignant revelations, set against a backdrop of rugged woodland beauty.

More entertaining than Mission: Impossible or the last Bond film, Goldeneye, it brings back the humour and sang-froid that makes the genre work.

Julia Jentsch offers a brilliant example of what actors call "not playing the ending," and the awful suspense of the piece is watching as she realizes, in increments, that this is all much worse than she thought.

Is The Trip to Italy the second Godfather of comedies, or a retread? Neither, exactly. The concept is no longer fresh, but the scenery on the Amalfi and Sorrento coasts is more transporting, and their convertible Mini Cooper is a more amusing vehicle. Finally, the fact that the only singalong CD for the drive is Alanis Morissette’s 1995 album Jagged Little Pill is an unexpected master stroke.

To quote Bill Murray’s song again, “Star Wars/ those near and far wars” checks the boxes of a lot of the audience’s base, while seeming unburdened by real gravity.

Directed by Alli Haapasalo and written by Ilona Ahti and Daniel Hakulinen, it is an empathetic, almost sociological portrait that could be shown in health class in a progressive high school.

While We’re Young is more commercial and less innovative (or whimsically self-indulgent, depending on your tastes) than Baumbach’s last feature film, 2012’s "Frances Ha," though it shares some common ground.

At its best moments, it provides a warm contemporary take on intergender friendships and almost lives up to its philosophical pretensions.

A feisty domestic comedy about a curmudgeon with a heart, looking back over his misspent life.

Suffused with clever lines, characters with neurotic tics and a pervasive, jocular black humour, The Savages is more about craft than art, but the craft, especially in the writing and acting, is at a high level.

Easily the best scene of Nymphomaniac occurs in the first two hours, when Joe finds herself the other woman in a marriage breakup.

An ultra-cheap movie, ingeniously promoted through the Internet -- is notable primarily as a model of guerrilla-style niche-marketing.

Energetic, eager-to-please culture-clash comedy.

The Guard is guilty of being overly cute, but it brims with talent and a freshness that extends beyond the clever script.

Cynical, hip, politically opportunistic and loaded with kick-ass comic action.

Redemption, not crime, is the real theme here, for this handful of courageous men and women who have rescued their own lives, and just possibly may help save the blighted neighbourhoods in which they labour.

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

Only by stepping back is it possible to see how peculiar and relatively original the movie is: A politically radical black youth drama for mainstream consumption; dissonant entertainment for fractious times.

Headhunters is slick and spritely, a mixture of corporate skullduggery and low-life slapstick that plays like "The Firm" meets "Blood Simple."

Mamet's stylized dialogue, elaborate plot puzzles and the angry cleverness of his characterization makes for an invigorating, if not exactly likeable, mix.

A rollicking good story set a millennium ago among Australian aborigines, Ten Canoes is one of those cultural-building exercises that genuinely entertains.

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

Overnuanced, a world of delicate cruelty, where most of the wounds take place without breaking the skin or even a sweat.

The lanky action star of the cult television series "Alias" is assigned a tired playbook in this film, but she finds room to manoeuvre in a performance that exceeds expectations.

Everything about Mid-August Lunch is simple and unpretentious, from the black-out scene transitions to the folk-dance score, as the four isolated, elderly women, over a couple of days and meals, become a circle of companions.

English director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz), takes the approach that movies have been far too reticent. His new film, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, is as vibrant as a cluttered wall of graffiti, jumpy enough to risk retina damage.

Sugar Daddy impresses as an idiosyncratic film with a forceful visual style and sound design, attached to a familiar story about the ways of bad men and a young woman getting lost in the fast life.

In its mocking but acutely observed style, Hobo is a well-designed cinematic mess: There are whiplash jump cuts, patches where the sound almost disappears, and the whole thing is projected in a queasy, faded Technicolor.