Liam Lacey

Hornby is a fine craftsman and his dialogue sparkles, though occasionally the scenes are too calculated.

An emotionally powerful if somewhat divided experience. The grimness, the sweat, the panic are there in Saving Private Ryan-level intensity. At the same time, you never entirely lose the sense that the movie is a formal and calculated cinematic exercise, something of an illustrated argument.

Ash Is Purest White — constantly dislocating and unpredictable moment by moment — feels all of its 135-minute running time but long after, the individual sequences hang in the memory.

Charm, humanity and a passel of filmmaking insights are all here, rewarding both the dedicated fans and newcomers to Varda, who achieved a new level of public profile in her last decade.

Sciamma (Water Lilies, Tomboy) gets unaffected performances from her non-professional cast.

The film is not about the audience's shared experience, and a lot more about how cool it is to have a backstage pass.

Looking like some gorgeous fan painting come to life, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring is pictorially spellbinding.

One of the pleasures of Support the Girls is that it explores the constant fender-benders of sex, race, class, and age without ever coming off as preachy or lecturing.

The movie isn't just about Schmidt as a personality, it's a portrait of his world, and Payne and co-writer Taylor show a rare compassion for the superficially comfortable.

In the end, the spectacular martial-arts epic seems to signify nothing much more than its own beauty, as brilliant and ephemeral as a fireworks display.

Hale County, in the best sense, is the kind of film that asks more questions than it provides answers for.

While the characters and events are real, the artful design of this film and its allegorical resonances seem to put Honeyland in its own genre – that of a real-life fable.

Mixing bravura filmmaking with flat clichés in about equal amounts, The Dark Knight is all about dualism. Appropriately, the movie's half-inspired, half-frustrating.

Both Smith and his son are appealing presences, but The Pursuit of Happyness seems to take place in a sociological vacuum. Gardner's insight into his difficulties begins and ends with the thought that, in the pursuit of happiness, there's a lot more pursuit involved than happiness, and unasked political questions seem to dangle ominously over the entire movie.

Historical hindsight lets us predict where this kind of train ride inevitably ends.

For about two-thirds of the film, The Past’s release of information and emotion is almost perfect. Then, in the last third, it begins to feel contrived, as if Farhadi is trying to show a long chain of guilt, and to see how far it will unspool. The drawn-out revelations feel like overkill, though not enough to spoil what’s very good here.

Both rudely funny and soppy in a terribly English way, Pillion is a rough-sex romance that will be relatable to anyone who has fallen hard for an emotionally distant lover.

The first 20 minutes of the South Korean film The Host represents one of the most entertaining movie openings in memory. It's the same kind of pop-culture thrill provided by Steven Spielberg's "Jaws," with the same sense of astonishment, fear and pleasure at something genuinely new.

Beanpole makes you feel its two-hour-plus running time, with drawn-out scenes full of off-centre framing and claustrophobic close-ups, but there’s an exhilaration in the audacity of the filmmaking, as the boldness of its portrayal of the survival drive.

In I’m Still Here, Walter Salles’ first feature film in a dozen years, the Brazilian director manages an impressive feat of teleporting, placing the viewer inside the cheerful chaos of a large Brazilian family.

The Last Days' major flaw, perhaps, is its conventionality: It takes us over the same horrific ground in the usual way. The shock is familiar. [26 Mar 1999, p.C6]

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.

Shows how our family fictions sustain us, and how some truths are better left unspoken.

What draws us in is the inventive and luminous cinematography from Michal Dymek (with additional footage by Pawel Edelman and Michal Englert), using drone shots, fish-eye lenses and red and blue filters. Accompanied by an unsettling electronic score, the donkey-in-a-disco effect is trippy, a hallucinogenic projection of what it might be like to live in an animal’s consciousness, including its dreams and flashbacks.

The story may stretch credibility until it's ready to pop its seams, but Patel conveys the simple confidence of a prodigy who has learned everything important in life, except how to lie.

Sington's smartest decision was to let 10 of the astronauts speak for themselves. The film juxtaposes their personal stories, both their doubts and machismo, with the titanic achievement of the lunar landings.

Featuring terrific performances from Get Out alumnus, Daniel Kaluuya as the young revolutionary Hampton, and LaKeith Stanfield as FBI informant, William O’Neal, the film is a revelation from King, a director, who until now, was known for his television work and the 2013 comedy, Newlyweeds.

Wistful, funny and complicated in interesting ways, Quentin Tarantino’s new movie, Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood, may be his warmest film since Jackie Brown - which may not be what you expected to hear about a movie set against the background of the 1969 Manson murders.