Liam Lacey

This is like no movie you've seen before, a haunting mixture of horror, history and fantasy that works simultaneously on every level.

Bosnian director Jasmila Žbanić succeeds where many filmmakers fail in conveying the dimensions of a mass atrocity in a film that matches clear-eyed personal experience to history in a lightly fictionalized story.

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."

The real achievement of Roma is Cuarón’s bold conception of a memory movie, blending childlike detail and adult detachment, and the rich visual and aural design that make this one of the more sensually pleasurable films of the year.

There's a giddy, absurd charm to the story, in which the strange setting only enhances the comfortable familiarity of the narrative and characters.

Far from the push-button catharsis offered by most Hollywood redemption tales, the work is sober and deliberate, a mix of visceral intensity and artful design.

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

The Wackness is one of those Sundance coming-of-age films, with all that implies: a surfeit of forced edginess, kooky characters, cynicism-coated sentimentality and self-absorbed angst.

Gravity, a weightless ballet and a cold-sweat nightmare, intimates mystery and profundity, with that mixture of beauty and terror that the Romantics called the sublime.

Running a digressive two hours and 43 minutes, this idea-filled absurdist comedy, presented in the fragmented visual language of social media, ties together economic inequities of the European Union, political corruption and the exploitative labour practices of foreign film productions. Also, it’s seriously funny.

There's something about this story, and this war, that brings out the stripped-down conceptual artist in her (Bigelow): Against blank canvases of desert sand and rubble, explosive wires are linked to nerve ends, and everything that matters depends on the twitch of a muscle or a finger on a button.

Not everything about Zero Dark Thirty zips by. The middle hour of the film feels overstuffed with agency chiefs and national security advisors gazing on the feisty Maya with avuncular admiration.

Granted a rare degree of access to reporters, and later to the Minister of Health, Collective is a tribute to people who work together to uncover the truth, even if the immediate benefits are not obvious.

Mixing Chaplinesque delicacy with the architectural grandeur of a Stanley Kubrick film, director Andrew Stanton recycles film history and makes something fresh and accessible from it without pandering to a young audience.

No doubt, it’s pretty great to watch and listen to Franklin, 29 at the time and at the height of her powers, demonstrating her mastery in the genre of music she grew up on.

Performances are still the heart of Leigh’s work, and at the heart of this film is an extraordinary performance by Leigh’s frequent collaborator, the British actor Timothy Spall.

This is some of De Niro’s most moving work in years. His performance full of anxious misfit energy, where his often-parodied grimaces, tics and haunted gaze feel entirely correct.

The film is immersive, in the sense of the frog in gradually heating water, where you reach boiling point before you realize it.

The [final] battle is vast, and undoubtedly required thousands of hours of matching puppetry, robotics and computer code, but it is not without tedium.

A preening terrorist for the Me generation, his primary drive was vanity and his main professional asset an absence of empathy.

Though I am sure there will be many more family memory films, Blue Heron sets the bar at a new level.

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.

The focus of [Germina's] story is rebellion and liberation and treating his story as a sombre fable of a soul’s journey through time, he turns the luridly familiar to something poetic and tragic.

With Sir David as our guide, it’s a theme well worth plunging into.

At times, No Bears can come across as frustratingly convoluted, but Panahi is an artful filmmaker, who surprises us by breaking the rhythms of the film with disruptions, confrontations, and plot twists.

In set design, choreography, performances and music, The Wizard of Oz is a brilliant bauble of collective filmmaking, in what may have been Hollywood's greatest single year. [06 Nov 1998]

Weeraskathul also explores how identities emerge, dissolve, and connect but he steps onto that shifting ground of memory and experience through a poetic, reverent portal.

The adjective “inspirational” doesn't do justice to the quality of Schnabel's film.