Liam Lacey

Ultimately, Potter's fable is about how a catastrophe forces us to ask what we believe and why.

"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.

Both the most bewildering of the three movies and also the most brutally compelling.

Forman's treatment is another matter entirely - infinitely more subtle and, using the intrinsic bias of film, far more naturalistic. [18 Nov 1989]

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.

One of the most original, good-hearted comedies in a long time, Rushmore is the sort of movie where the strangest sequences of discords somehow keep managing to reach giddily improbable resolutions.

Giddily impudent in its execution, pummelling in its message, To Die For is finally a comedy black enough for the tabloid television age.

A movie that gets wonderfully under your skin.

Can a little-read 18th-century literary masterpiece be food-spittingly funny? Can it also include contemporary English actors riffing about their bad teeth, getting drunk and kissing their personal assistants? The answer is yes, as long as you agree that the best way to adapt an original book is with a correspondingly original film.

Jonathan Demme's potent adaptation of Morrison's novel may be substantial, but it is also engrossing, a movie that plays at times like a combination of “Gone With The Wind” and “The Exorcist.”

The best American movie so far this year.

Call it what you like – a modern Russian epic, a crime drama, a black comedy or a scream in the dark – Leviathan is a shaggy masterpiece.

That's not to say that There Will Be Blood isn't something exceptional; it's just that the movie is jarringly erratic, ranging from moments of delicacy to majesty to over-the-top bombast.

Serves to champion human irrepressibility and unpredictability. It's the flip side to the defeatism of "Distant," but with parallels, both in the very deliberate pacing and moments of visual wit.

Though Brooks is tasteless as usual in To Be Or Not To Be, his remake of Ernest Lubitsch's 1942 comedy of the same name may be his best work since his debut film, The Producers. [19 Dec 1983]

The winner of Cannes’s top prize, the Palme d’Or, and the international critics prize at the same festival, the film was hailed as a breakthrough, a graphic and emotional love story, the first same-sex feature ever to win the Palme, in the week after France legalized same-sex marriage.

John Frankenheimer created this eccentrically brilliant thriller, an exercise in mid-sixties paranoia. [12 Jan 2002, p.R25]

Relentlessly dark but expertly rendered, it shares its cinematographer and quality of aggrieved compassion with another recent Romanian art house hit, "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu."

A French rat as a master chef? Absurd. But a brilliant French chef with an American accent? C'est grotesque!

Welsh director Euros Lyn’s reality-based steeple-chasing feature Dream Horse never deviates far from the expected course. But its off-kilter humour and an ace cast, led by the ever-credible Toni Collette, brings some fresh colours to this unabashed crowd pleaser.

One can see clear linkages between Undine to the nightmare weirdness of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, though it’s as if this similar story were drained of its passionate momentum and rendered abstract.

Dogman is essentially one long, twisted fuse burning toward an inevitable explosion. If the results are too conspicuously manipulated to feel cathartic, there’s no denying a certain dark poetry to this old-fashioned film with its whiplash of modern violence and bitter futility.

3 ½ Minutes, 10 Bullets, as well as being a compelling real-life courtroom drama, offers some clarity about race and injustice in the pre-Trump era.

As the movie travels from country to country over Fisk's career, it's not always easy to follow the chronology. But overall, Mike Munn's editing is astute, covering decades of work and complex multi-party conflicts with as much clarity as could be reasonably hoped for.

Ukrainian director Roman Liubyi’s Iron Butterflies is an experimental film, a memorial scrapbook and a forensic documentary that revisits the 2014 downing of the Malaysian passenger plane, Flight 17.

Most of the participants who knew Armstrong are dead and there’s something melancholy about realizing that the human being behind that voice is silent. What remains is a quality that Marsalis identifies as essential in Armstrong’s music, a gift which he was fully conscious of, conveying a “transcendent joy” through sound.

The triumph of a film like Upgrade, an unapologetic B-movie, is that it aims low and exceeds expectations.

On Swift Horses is best admired as a visual tone poem to the era, not so much a realistic story. The conceit of casting characters who seem too splendid for their surroundings evokes the movie melodramas of the fifties, the time of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift.