Maitland McDonagh

The film satisfies on both visceral and emotional levels.

Despite its length, the film only starts feeling as long at the end -- or, more correctly, ends. Serious fans of the novels will be prepared for the serial codicils, but the uninitiated are likely to think the film is over several times before it actually is.

Ambitious, deeply flawed and studded with sequences that achieve pure, majestic greatness.

It's a hugely entertaining slice of sunbaked Gothic.

It's a mixed blessing, in some ways even richer and more atmospheric than the original version, in others attenuated and logy.

Above all, Jackson evokes an almost palpable sense of the will to power trapped within the ring. Without this evocation of the ring's insidious ability to sniff out the potential for corruption and capitalize on it, the entire enterprise would be precious drivel.

It's dramatically unsatisfying.

Piercing, sweetly melancholy and acted with a breathtaking eye for nuance.

The movie's greatest strength lies in phenomenal performances that reach from the leads right down to the smallest supporting roles.

Mirren, who's played her share of queens in the past, is hypnotic.

A loving, gently funny and slightly claustrophobic tribute to theatrical life.

Bizarre, utterly original and truly indescribable comedy...You just have to see it for yourself.

The result is truly a family film, not a kiddie time-waster that throws the occasional sop to adults; whether you like or love it is a function of how vividly the material reflects your own childhood fantasies.

A cool indictment of television's near-irresistible pandering to the inner peeping tom.

This film pivots on a romantic triangle as overwrought as it is stylized. It's like a Douglas Sirk melodrama ratcheted up with fists of fury and wrapped in apparently endless yards of shimmering silk.

For what could easily have been a slickly vulgar variation on "American Pie" or "Porky's", this libidinous comedy explores some unusually complicated territory, and benefits greatly from Verdú's unpredictable performance as Luisa.

It's a fearless performance and yields some squirm-inducingly funny moments.

Lee occasionally stumbles as a documentarian... But the material is so profoundly moving that it hardly matters.

But the real marvel is that beneath the ghoulish in-jokes and horror-geek allusions, there's a core of the same bittersweet truth that makes the best fairy tales resonate from one generation to the next.

A painfully slow psychological thriller.

The film's tone is set by a bravura opening sequence that follows a single bullet from a factory conveyer belt to its resting place in a child's skull, and by Cage's flawlessly sardonic voice-over.

Sentimental, formulaic, predictable and shamelessly manipulative, Marcos Carnevale’s tale of late-life love is also genuinely heartbreaking and heartening.

A rapt fascination with transcendent lunacy runs through Herzog's work, both fiction and documentary; while disdaining Treadwell's rhapsodically anthropomorphized vision of nature.

Eminently worth seeing, even if it leaves you wishing it were as consistently inventive as Aardman's first feature, "Chicken Run" (2000).

Moreno's subtly calibrated mix of intelligence, naivete, rebelliousness, charisma and practicality produces an unforgettable protagonist; even Maria's recklessness seems reasonable because it's so clearly rooted in desperation.

Anyone looking for the comfort in a tense thriller ending in a satisfying restoration of order and psychological security will be bitterly disappointed, but Haneke isn't in the business of encouraging comforting illusions.

Classic melodrama given a thoroughly modern, utterly Almodovarian face-lift.

Eastwood's slow-building story of loss and deliverance is a fine, understated piece of storytelling that earns every emotional body blow it lands.