Neil Smith

A feel-good charmer with an important message, Pride will have you clutching your sides, wiping your eyes and punching the air in triumph.

Part war story, part endurance test, this harrowing portrait of a young boy’s loss of innocence is gripping, gruelling, grown-up fare. That said, some judicious trimming wouldn’t have hurt.

Denzel Washington and Viola Davis excel in a well-crafted drama that’s sure to bring the late August Wilson’s words to a much wider audience.

It’s heartening to find Fox so fearlessly unhumbled by his condition and the mobility problems that come with it. One of the star’s stipulations before consenting to this film was that it would have "no violins". By its end you’ll be happy to give him the whole flipping orchestra.

The performances keep us engaged.

Zootropolis is a witty, creative and entertaining romp with literally endless sequel potential and the biggest collection of four-legged critters this side of Noah.

Wildly inventive, unpredictable, and unhinged, Riley’s genre-bender stands out from the comedy pack.

For all its attempts to expand the original’s ensemble and embellish its themes, Dory is cod in batter beside Nemo’s smoked salmon. But still tasty.

The horrors, like Cage himself, are largely kept off-screen for much of the movie’s duration. Yet with its eerie soundscape and sepulchral visuals, Longlegs nevertheless succeeds as a deeply disconcerting experience, one that burrows into the brain as insidiously as the innocuous means its villain employs to disseminate his evil.

Breakfast At Tiffany's still exerts an enduring charm, not least because of the poise and waif-like beauty of the bewitching Hepburn. [Review of re-release]

In Suzume, though, Shinkai goes full Ghibli, peppering his story of a teenage girl (voiced by Nanoka Hara) on a mission with oddball elements that would feel off-puttingly bizarre were they not incorporated so seamlessly within its epic grand design.

As terrific as Colman is, however, the film around her has a schematic and engineered quality not too dissimilar from Jones’ prized projectors.

Clearly no stranger to John Hughes movies, writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig brings a spiky wit and a warm-hearted, nerd-friendly finale to a comedy that wants for nothing but a little substance.

Though stronger in its more straightforward first half than in its experimental and hallucinatory second, 28 Years… still provides enough terror, splatter and suspense to satisfy.

Overlords has its share of clunky moments yet nonetheless proves, like Monsters before it, what can be achieved when you’re short of cash but rich in imagination.

Madame Bovary meets Thérèse Raquin with a splash of Lady Chatterley in a pared-down drama that packs a real punch.

Marvel’s man with the mallet does all that’s required of him in a breakneck sequel that’s never dark for long. Next time, though, we’ll have more Loki and fewer elves.

Taken as speculative fantasy, however, Civil War is never less than vividly, chillingly authentic.

An entertaining, if frenetic, vehicle for Arnett’s Bale-inspired Bats that packs plenty of laughs.

Best of all...is the mini-animation fashioned out of Suskind’s Walt-inspired scribblings.

What could be better than watching Doris Day reprise her signature role, whip-cracking away in buckskin as the deadwood stage comes a-rolling in over the hills?

Triumph and tragedy form an inseparable tag team in writer/director Sean Durkin’s (Martha Marcy May Marlene) emotional chronicle of the Von Erich clan, a close-knit family of sibling wrestlers whose rise to prominence in 1980s Texas was accompanied by a remorseless, almost Shakespearean succession of setbacks.

Domont is too smart to go full Fatal Attraction, largely restricting the violence in the piece to the emotional and the verbal.

As much as Nicholas Jarecki’s debut feature simmers, it never quite boils.

Cooper’s performance grounds a solid, authentic drama – Eastwood’s best since Letters From Iwo Jima – that is less about one single field of combat than the price of war itself.

Though we'd love to see how Aardman handle Defoe's followup, An Adventure With Communists, this amiable but overstretched diversion is unlikely to spawn a Caribbean franchise.

It has an unpredictability that keeps you on your toes and a bitter pathos that gives every laugh (of which there are many) a note of tragic despair.

Green fashions a slow-burn charmer that’s a million miles from Pineapple Express in tone, pace and content. But just like that film, the odd couple interplay is beautifully judged.