Liam Lacey

Shot in black and white, with scenes of razor-wire barriers and terrified families hiding in the forest, Green Border evokes images of the Second World War and the Holocaust, the subject of Holland’s films Europa Europa (1990) and In Darkness (2011).

We can see Cold War as a look back on recent history, not through the lens of realism, but as a Hollywood fantasy, a kind of romantic protest against a political nightmare.

The character of Rosalyn – a mash-up of Carole Lombard, Lady Macbeth and maybe even Regan from The Exorcist – is by far the most hair-raising phenomenon in a movie bristling with high hair.

Actors Zhang Ziyi and Takeshi Kaneshiro are the kind of startlingly good-looking, glamorous stars that evoke classic Hollywood adventure films.

The project is a unique social experiment which we can all participate in, in a way, dipping back in time to connect with old acquaintances and, inevitably, measuring our own ups and downs in the interval.

While this is an autobiographical story about a young aspiring filmmaker and his skateboarding crew, it also speaks volumes about contemporary rust-belt USA, masculinity and abuse, weaving its themes and characters around scenes of the boys sailing through the near-empty streets.

"You're so lucky to live in Mexico," Luisa says. "Look at it -- it breathes with life." So does Y Tu Mama Tambien, both the pant of passion and shuddering sigh of regret.

Sosa, who shared cinematography duties with two other women, Judy Phu and Monica Wise, depicts a world of humble beauty, of sunrises and dogs and chickens and weed-strewn lots. With a measured pacing (the film was edited by co-writer Isidore Bethel), she has created a film that is more like an elegy than a simple chronicle of events.

The same didactic instincts that sometimes mar Lee's fictional filmmaking serve him well as a documentarian and eulogist, both with Four Little Girls and this film, a record of the worst natural disaster in American history.

At heart, though, every moviegoer can recognize a love story, no matter how unusual the context.

With elements of "A Star Is Born" and "Singing in the Rain," The Artist is a rarity, an ingenious crowd-pleaser.

For all its emphasis on doomed honour and grim death, Letters from Iwo Jima is also sentimental.

By the time we reach the climactic ending, the script clearly calls for an exorcist with a chainsaw to trim back this metaphor run amok.

Ghoulishness and innocence walk hand-in-hand in Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, a movie that digs into Hollywood's past to resurrect the antique art of stop-motion animation and create a fabulous bauble of a movie.

It feels unbalanced, a collection of often-compelling sequences stitched together in a way that is unpersuasive or sometimes simply puzzling.

Funny, fascinating, utterly unclassifiable film.

From the start, it’s clear Anderson is working with a new sophistication both in the vocabulary and structure of the film’s voiceover narrations.

Faithful to Chekhov, Ceylan spells out nothing except that unhappiness unrecognized is unhappiness compounded, and despite the film’s wintry chill, there’s a thrilling warmth in this struggle to shine a light on life.

The documentary of the year may also be its most hair-raising thriller.

Skip work to see it at the first opportunity.

A film rich in paradoxes. Much of the film's style is dreamy, from the snow-covered Ontario landscapes suggestive of a blanket of forgetfulness, to Julie Christie's pale, intoxicating beauty, to the ambient musical score.

The title – Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel – is fine as far as it goes. But if you leave out "octogenarian mammophile" and "calendar fetishist," you leave something essential out of the story.

Both a triumph of design and cinematic engineering and, at the same time, long, repetitious and naive.

Yun, a veteran Korean actress, gives a splendidly layered performance.

Yes, at its best, Birdman soars, swoops and flutters with life and invention, but it parrots more than it speaks. You long for a writer as reliably, elegantly witty as Tom Stoppard, whose dramas are typically “backstage,” or if not Stoppard, at least a verbal speed-puncher like Armando Iannucci, or if not Iannucci, someone as relentlessly inventive and obsessive as Charlie Kaufman to make you feel like somebody is trying to say something, rather than a writing team filling in the intelligent-sounding words to support the boisterous performances and the virtuosic camera dance.

Amadeus needs an additional 20 minutes running time like "The Magic Flute" needs a drum solo. Though the production is gussied up with more frills and decoration than a Viennese dessert trolley, Forman is generally workmanlike in his visual style and very uneven with his handling of actors.

Given all the on-screen risk-taking, Mission: Impossible - Fallout plays it pretty safe. What you get is essentially an action movies greatest hits package.

Compelling, disturbing.