Liam Lacey

Not surprisingly, it's a cinematic mash note, but apparently a deserved one.

Timoner offers a resonant, often painfully funny, drama about two good friends who become enemies against the backdrop of the pop-music business.

At 128 minutes – Almodovar's longest film to date – Broken Embraces is an easy film to bid farewell to.

Too loud, too long and too busy but – here’s the good part – also wonderfully silly.

The portrait of the ailing artist is bittersweet, but when Helms sings or plays, the look on his face is pure joy.

Though the subject of immigrants from persecuted minorities fleeing their homelands is topical, what elevates I Carry You With Me above most social dramas is its finespun, artisanal quality.

Frothy, but deceptively dense, Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story focuses on Liza’s psychology and her friendships and teachers through the 1960s and 1970s.

What's fun about Benson Lee's documentary Planet B-Boy isn't just the amazingly athletic displays of B-boys he puts on screen, but the film's sense of cultural discovery.

There’s nothing new in noting that crime and dirty politics are fast tracks to success. (“Is it the same in your country?” Balram asks the viewer). What’s more interesting here is how The White Tiger explores the paradoxes of the master-servant dynamic. Singer-actor Gourav is marvelous in capturing the duality.

Led by Reisman’s deadpan, uningratiating performance, Retrograde is a funny, uncomfortable portrait of young millennial, struggling with her loss of status and clinging to the wreckage of her past aspirations.

Dreamgirls is one of the best movie musicals in memory.

Highly entertaining.

There are plot turns, double crosses and, appropriately for the online world, threats of live streaming torture and echoes of video battle games. But there’s at least a half-hour too much of it.

A solid, if not revelatory portrait of contemporary Russia through the story of exiled oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Feels like a bit of an emotional mugging.

The movie seems much, much longer than its 90-minute running time. [15 June 1998]

With its glum litany of naked corpses and mutilations, and understated actors looking bluish under the morgue's fluorescent lights, Nightwatch drains the fun out of horror. [17 Apr 1998]

Though it occasionally gets a little repetitive in its use of archival devil movie and tabloid television clips, Lane’s film is mordantly funny and certainly persuasive in making the case that religion should be kept out of politicians’ dirty hands.

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.

While Wojtowicz’s shape-shifting character is the major source of fascination here, the archival footage, including with is terrifically effective in evoking the tumultuous era and occasionally providing a reality check to the Dog’s boastful version of his life.

Occupied City is designed not so much to provoke emotions as to challenge our capacity for paying attention (“It’s okay to drift in and out,” recommends McQueen in the film’s production notes.) When we focus, we’re compelled to connect the double strand of the narrated past history and contemporary images in front of our eyes.

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.

Fitfully interesting, occasionally cringe-worthy, this is the sort of stagy production that mixes ribaldry and campy overacting that evokes summer theatre productions.

If there’s a low-key disappointment to Vic and Flo, it’s that the film teases the mind and pleases the eye without requiring emotional commitment.

As a story about a war that is unresolved, it seems better suited to a provisional “To be continued” than the certainty of “The end.”

Boys Go to Jupiter, the debut feature film from American 3-D animator, video game designer, and illustrator Julian Glander, is both jaded and fresh, a Gen-Z version of Richard Linklater’s early slacker comedies with a sprinkling of Studio Ghibli’s childlike fantasy.

Ultimately, the best thing about (500) Days of Summer isn't its gimmicky script. It's the constant performance of Gordon-Levitt, who shifts, scene-by-scene, from moments of ebullience to abject dejection.

Coherence was hard to establish but the memory prompts, the lurid colourization and off-beat editing held the attention.