Neil Young

For the first time his ongoing collaboration with scriptwriter Paul Laverty, Loach's studiously safe-hands approach -- typified by regular collaborator George Fenton's near-incessant score -- can't counterbalance fundamental screenplay flaws.

It all barrels along with a certain good-natured brio, even if ultimately falling short of bringing much that's new to what's already an overstocked table.

Director Macdonald, in his sixth outing of the decade including documentaries, likewise handles proceedings with a self-effacing, uninspired competence.

Indeed, the picture works best when it eschews dialogue and plot altogether and the lush musical elements combine with the intense hues of Manu Dacosse's 16mm-shot visuals to stimulatingly trippy effect.

It takes a little while to adjust to the film’s strong and deliberately oppressive stylistic approach, but Hinterland successfully avoids being swallowed up by its own aesthetic via the narrative’s propulsive momentum and the magnetic central performance by Muslu.

Most effective in its quiet dialogue-heavy scenes, the picture stumbles when anything more dramatic is required.

The enigmatic proceedings soon find an oneiric, hypnotic rhythm that some viewers may indeed find entrancing.

A professionally mounted but bluntly misanthropic character-study, the director's second solo outing wallows in the worst of human nature with little reward at the end of a mechanically inexorable downward spiral.

While the casting of Thompson, just two years Carlyle's senior is a gamble that could easily have seemed gimmicky, the half-Scottish Oscar-winner is a riot as the grotesque Cemolina, a raucously broad-accented, chain-smoking schemer resplendent in faux-ocelot

Belly-laughs are duly reaped courtesy of the game ensemble, who throw themselves into proceedings with suitable brio — egged on by Shunsuke Kida's infectious, percussively jaunty-jazzy score — while Shiota's screenplay is good for intermittent belly-laughs before dribbling away somewhat post-climax.

The film is most effective in simply conveying the agonising practical realities of Galvez’s quest, an operation involving endless telephone calls and long down-time periods of waiting punctuated by brief flurries of frenzied activity.

This a film which has all the superficial contours of a profound and intelligent enterprise, but little of the actual content.

The sour-tinged comedy of excruciatingly English embarrassment deploys some talented performers on both sides of the camera but its promising parts never quite cohere into a properly satisfying whole.

Thierry is utterly convincing and compelling from first to last, in a deglamorized but sensual performance of tautly controlled severity and uncompromising rigor.

This is a demanding and fitfully rewarding film which focuses minutely on the shifting relationships between its three protagonists.

When in doubt, the director cranks up the assaultively reverberant score from po-faced '80s rockers The The (aka Matt Johnson, the director's brother), which at least provides intermittent pep to this increasingly torpid wallow in the moral mud.

A confident and quietly promising feature debut from director/co-writer Fellipe Barbosa.

The foursome (most of whom will be in their 30s by the middle of 2015) have long since settled comfortably into their roles, and there's pleasure to be gleaned from the simple physical and verbal rough-housing of their interactions.

The impression is that De Palma is indulging himself with homages to his own Hitchcockian greatest hits, with results that veer close to self-parody on occasion and emphasize just how far this once-outstanding director's creative star has plummeted.

Even after 90-odd minutes, Mansfield remains something of an enigma. There's the nagging sense that Ebersole and Hughes are tossing myriad darts at a skittish moving target, trying out numerous techniques (including a couple of fifties-style animations) without ever settling into a proper rhythm.

Mainly of interest for the latest impressive turn from British national treasure Timothy Spall — snorting and blustering his way through the plum role of Protestant uber-firebrand Ian Paisley — deficiencies in script and direction render the vehicle less than road-worthy.

A textbook example of how not to turn real-life headlines into big-screen drama, Jeppe Ronde's Bridgend is a toxic combination of the laughable and the reprehensible.

Strong performances and outstanding cinematography aren't enough to rescue an unfocused and episodic screenplay, which will leave many stranded in a purgatorial cinematic-halfway house between bliss and despair.

There's no mistaking the earnest anger which motivates her assault on the sexist "dark ages" values still to be found in many Macedonian provincial areas, but expressing it in such clunky terms does no service to the cause.

Paradise is predictably problematic for the protagonists of Jet Trash, a flashily seductive and darkly comic crime-thriller that sidewinds between grimy London and the sun-kissed coasts of Goa.

Paying slavish homage to culty genre predecessors from the sixties, seventies and eighties, this steamy tale of a hunky screenwriter, his ethereal blood-sucking paramour and her bad-girl sister can't quite decide whether to be seductively stylish or knowingly cheesy.

Pairing another Firth (no relation) with crackerjack newcomer Taron Edgerton, Kingsman's fizzingly droll chutzpah can't help but make Spooks: The Greater Good, for all Peter Firth's ballast, seem dowdily old-school in comparison.