Liam Lacey

It is to Costa’s credit that she provides a soothing, reflective tone to the subject, both in her poetic voiceover and a hypnotically smooth editing that movies from drone shots of crowds, congregations, rallies, and protest marches to handheld closeups of politicians clawing their ways through teeming throngs of admirers.

As anodyne as it is, Timothy Green may represent the last gasp of a genre, the live-action family fable, that has been an entertainment staple for a couple of generations of moviegoers.

Ultimately, Certified Copy – with its unresolved loose ends – is a puzzle box without a key.

Narratively, the film’s last two thirds feel somewhat scattered, or perhaps “shattered” is a better word to reflect the catastrophe at the center of the story. The key to holding these fragments together, and avoiding making the movie’s grim turn unbearable, is the deeply fascinating performance of Vicky Krieps as Clarisse.

Ernaux’s precise and thoughtful commentary connects the images to memories, discovering yet another harvest from the well-cultivated field of her autobiography.

The mostly non-professional cast do a credible job of depicting a family growing progressively more anxious under increasing pressure.

It's also mysterious in fresh ways. Like Hillary, Yates and Simpson climbed the mountain because it was there -- but what strange deity sent down a Boney M song to help Joe Simpson get home?

Le Havre, offers the director's usual humour, pitch-perfect acting and compassionate message, with a Gallic twist that should win new converts.

Unfortunately, Da 5 Bloods’ impassioned civics lesson is grafted on to a slapdash B-movie action plot.

The old carnival phrase "Close, but no cigar" comes to mind when watching The Brothers Bloom , a globetrotting heist film that starts off terrifically and then progressively deflates.

Shot mostly at night, in high-contrast images, punctuated by rock-video collages, Intacto is nothing if not hip, but its questions are more coffee-shop hypothetical than genuinely profound.

Though it’s impossible not to see the documentary as a kind of prequel to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, on its own, Navalny is a lively, absorbing mix of original and archival footage with elements of real-life thriller set against the backdrop of the current disinformation wars.

Odd but meaningful, Secret Mall Apartment, is an entertaining documentary about how a group of eight young artists secretly maintained an apartment — from 2003 to 2007 — in a hidden nook in the Providence Place, Rhode Island, shopping center.

Captain Phillips manages to expose us to a few things that are unusual in a thriller, including sympathy for the enemy and, in Hanks’s performance, the frailty that is the other side of heroism.

While the story, shorn of its supernatural elements, is mired in abuse and tragedy, its effect is sensual and superficial.

Peck’s fleet approach briskly compresses a great deal of information without clumsy interview setups and joins the dots between Black political and artistic freedom then and now while literally gives an important activist-artist a voice again.

If the word masterpiece has any use these days, it must apply to the film Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, a mature, philosophically resonant work from Turkey's leading director, 53-year-old Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Climates, Distance, Three Monkeys).

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

Two parts pain, one part pleasure, a masochist's life with cystic fibrosis results in a weirdly tender documentary. [14 Nov 1997, p.D4]

The set-ups and sight gags are deftly handled, though the after-effect is more dispiriting than cathartic. Like Bong-Joon Ho’s Parasite, it’s a film that feels of the moment, that leaves us with the question. And after all this is through, then what?

Extracting big drama out of small events is Mike Leigh's forte, and with his latest little masterpiece, Another Year, the English director pushes himself to the extreme.

At under 90 minutes, Make Up doesn’t include much action but the skin-crawling effect of the film reverberates until after the credits roll. The entire technical package — the menacing visuals, the rumbling soundscape, the brief disorienting sequences of flashbacks and dreams — are anchored in naturalistic, understated performances.

The voice that jerks out from Levy's throat suggests Lazarus waking from the dead.

The film's forced quirkiness constantly threatens to derail the entire enterprise, making this another minor American indie exercise in family eccentricity. But it keeps being put back on track by the apparently effortless performance of a great young actress.

Hackman is unexpectedly hilarious. With protruding top teeth and a professorial beard, he's a motormouth, badgering and abusing one minute, wheedling and fawning the next.

Although The Dissident is, arguably, unnecessarily juiced-up with the editing and scoring of a Hollywood thriller, the excesses are balanced by the procedural rigour worthy of a crack prosecutor.

This is a remarkably good-looking near-corpse of a film, with a pulse that fades in and out.

A stylish melodrama and feminist lament.