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.

A picture whose tone wanders between arid academic exercise and something close to parody of the more pretentious trends in current auteur cinema.

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.

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.

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

Mark Gill's feature debut England Is Mine struggles to evoke the atmosphere of its setting — Manchester, 1976-1982 — and to bring its tantalizingly enigmatic subject into satisfying focus.

Properly analyzing what made "Boro" tick, and explaining how one of most acclaimed directors of his generation ended up fizzling out so messily in the 1980s, ultimately proves beyond Mikurda and collaborators.

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.

The Golden Cage (La Jaula de oro) is a lukewarm examination of a hot-potato political issue.

There's little in the way of genuine depth, complexity or nuance here, Diaz instead seeks to convey the illusion of profundity by having various characters throw around weighty social and philosophical verbiage in thuddingly sophomoric fashion.

It's clear that Weerasethakul is even less concerned with conventional narrative considerations here than he was in the free-rangingly imaginative Uncle Boonmee.

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.

Awkwardly condensing more than 20 years into a running-time well under two hours, director/co-writer Cao Hamburger needs a bigger canvas for his well-intentioned but underpowered saga.

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.

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.

A very loose and extremely limp adaptation of Don DeLillo's 2001 novella The Body Artist, it palpably aspires to be a classily highbrow kind of romantic ghost story with psychological thriller undertones, but falls laughably short of its goals.

Pretty pictures alone do not in themselves great cinema make - not for the first time, Reygadas' waywardly wilful approach to screenwriting and structure severely outweighs whatever fleeting pleasures his movies may impart.

The general air of slipshod incompetence thus torpedoes the intriguing concepts underlying Lewis's screenplay.