Oliver Lyttelton

The tale of Choi and Shin is a true stranger-than-fiction one, as good a piece of material as a filmmaker could help for. It’s just a shame that, for the most part, The Lovers And The Despot feels like it’s giving you the Cliff Notes version of the story.

The 90-minute film feels shallow and, while Rosi has a good eye, not especially cinematic.

It's an ambitious attempt to meld the kind of social realism that made the names of Andrea Arnold and Clio Barnard with a stripped-down genre thriller, an attempt that's only moderately successful, though it suggests Wolfe is a filmmaker of real promise.

Quartet is a hard film to dislike entirely, thanks principally to the charms of its cast.

Both fascinatingly theatrical and thrillingly cinematic, a picture that's lingered on our minds more than we expected.

Midnight movie programmers of the future will undoubtedly give it a long life years after it’s gone from first-run theaters.

The film can be engaging, well-made, and even a touch more interesting than it has much right to be. But it's also far from a satisfying work as a whole.

For all the film's flaws, Black brings enough to the table that it's far from a chore, and if this level of ingenuity and surprise can be maintained, there'll be no need for Tony to hang up his Iron Man helmet any time soon.

It'll pass a couple of hours on a rainy afternoon without too much trouble. But whether as an adventure tale, a thriller, or a morality play, Black Sea never quite makes a compelling enough case for its existence when better examples of the submarine genre are already out there.

The tension really is beautifully ramped up in these early scenes and gets an audience well prepped to watch carnage unfold around people you've truly come to care about. Then, when the thing goes off, it's not with a bang but with something more like a a whimper.

As a portrait of a legitimately fascinating unlikely superstar, the film really works.

For all its abrasiveness, the film is also capable of real tenderness.

While there's a lot of fun to be had, Furious 6 doesn't quite hit the insane heights of "Fast Five," but we're sure it'll delight franchise fans who mostly want to see bald people butt heads, and moving vehicles crash into other moving vehicles.

Powerful, engaging and, by the finale, moving. And in the end, At Any Price is certainly one of the most impressive reactions to the recent economic crisis (because that’s exactly what it is) that cinema has produced so far.

In general, this feels like a film patched together out of endless hastily-drafted script rewrites rather than a cohesive vision.

Unfortunately, it proves to be as disposable as the snack it revolves around.

It’s an engaging film in many respects, but one that exemplifies a lot of the problems that have trailed Zemeckis across his career.

The humor is there on paper, but it ends up emptily quippy and gag-filled rather deriving the jokes from situations and character, and only one in three end up landing, mostly thanks to Robbins.

It’s never a painful watch, more of a faintly dull, seen-it-all-before one. If nothing else, it’s evidence that these days, being based on a true story isn’t enough to elevate a film in a well-worn genre ahead of the pack.

Bercot's setting out to make both a character study of a troubled young man wasting his potential, and an examination of a system trying desperately to do right by its charges, despite the immense difficulties and occasional bureaucratic red tape that tie their hands. It's more successful at the latter than at the former.

Those looking for a substantial meal or an Oscar contender are probably going to be left lacking. But so long as you’re prepared for some rousing medieval action and not all that much more, Mackenzie proves here he can work on a significant canvas with a film that must rank as one of Netflix’s more satisfying bigger-budget ventures to date.

A film as mercurial as this can be an impressive thing, but the back half is so filled with half-baked metaphysics, pseudo-Lynchian maybe-dreams, and a sour, cheap conclusion that feels nihilistically cruel to at least one of its characters, that even the pleasures of watching the actors on screen start to fade away.

A beautiful, hearfelt and raw piece of work.

At its best, the film becomes something winningly subversive.

It’s a reminder of what a tremendously talented writer and director Kiyoshi Kurosawa is, and hopefully we’ll see him venturing back to the big screen sooner rather than later.

The meat of the film is sadly, a tedious misstep for a director who, even when he's experimented in the past, has generally come up with something more interesting than this. It is, however, still better than "9 Songs"

It is very much a first film, albeit one of rare ambition, and there's every reason to think that Benson will nail it next time around. The film's absolutely worth watching for the performances alone... But in and of itself, the "Them" version of The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby doesn't quite add up to the sum of its parts.

The bad news, for anyone over the age of eight, is that it’s at its best disposable, and at its worst really, really annoying.

Kiefer Sutherland feels somewhat miscast as the mentor, but nowhere near as badly as Hudson is as the love interest. In all fairness, it’s a nightmare of a part, an artist (whose art is, as it turns out, is terrible) haunted by the recent death of her boyfriend, and seemingly unable to read basic human feelings and emotion. But Hudson doesn’t really help things, coming across more often than not as unintentionally funny.

It is overlong, and familiar, and never quite hits top gear -- it's never especially bad, but neither is it especially excellent, beyond the visual wow factor. But there's still a lot to admire in the film, not least that it's engaging from the first moment to the last.

Jeunet occasionally reminds you why he was once considered one of the most exciting names in world cinema. But for the most part, it’s another visually interesting, somewhat hollow misfire.

Unfortunately, while Husson clearly has talent to burn, her film is something of a case of all talk and no trousers.

The film, like the original, feels very haphazardly structured, a hotchpotch collection of scenes rather than a unified whole. There's also no tonal consistency, with Webb lurching awkwardly from quippy comedy to brooding drama to high tragedy in short spaces of time, undercutting all three modes as a result.

It won't linger in the mind longer than it takes for the credits to roll, but it's a lot of fun while it lasts, and we're genuinely looking forward to part 2 at this point.

As well-handled as the set pieces are, the connective tissue doesn’t pull you along, and then collapses completely in a messy, unsatisfying final act.

There are enough rough edges and interesting kinks across the two-hour running time that you come out forgiving it for the more generic elements, though we'll acknowledge that the flaws might stick out more on a second viewing, when you're not just pleasantly surprised that the whole thing isn't a stinking mess.

There’s much to like, from Waltz’s performance to the typically rich production and costume design.

The whole thing feels sort of tossed off, like it was made by film students over a couple of weekends.

For most of the run-time, Welcome To The Punch is thrillingly cinematic, beautifully made, smarter and funnier than you'd expect, and a phenomenal showcase for Creevy and his team.

Avery can't commit to whether he's making a gritty "Animal Kingdom"-style crime picture, or a light caper film, and the final result is wonky in the extreme, particularly in the conclusion, which feels particularly muddled.

There is genuine warmth and heart to the central relationship, and the script is occasionally funny, though it draws smiles more than laughs. But it's hard to see, beyond the gender swap, what LaBruce is saying here that Hal Ashby didn't cover more definitively four decades ago.

A smart, well-acted and well-directed picture that adds up to a little more than the sum of its parts.

A sour, tedious and derivative film that doesn't just prove disappointing in its own right, it actively makes us resent the first film retroactively for inspiring it.

Given the talent assembled, the emptiness at its center only makes it feel like more of a waste. But it does look great, it does sound great (the score, by "Drive" soundtrack contributor Johnny Jewel, is one of the film's best elements), and can be fitfully interesting.

Perhaps hardcore Jet Li fans will be able to get some joy out of it, but we'd suspect that even they will struggle with this one.

One can’t fault Hazanavicius’ motivations too much, especially given the lack of attention given to the events in Chechnya over the past fifteen years... It’s just a shame that he does it such a banal and trite way.

The film isn't bad enough to be some kind of potential cult classic: it's tedious, with even the stranger moments and plot developments failing to raise the pulse.

Leconte’s never been the edgiest of filmmakers, but A Promise is so free of anything close to an edge that it’s like watching a beige sphere for ninety-odd minutes—and it feels much longer.

There’s very little in The Huntsman: Winter's War itself that is actively bad. Compared to some of its blockbuster rivals, it’s reasonably watchable, never offensive, and mostly coherent.

From the cloying, ever-present score to the complete lack of narrative momentum, it all adds up to a film that's easily Van Sant's worst, and is a sad black mark on McConaughey's mostly excellent recent run. Ultimately, Sea Of Trees feels like an entirely appropriate title: it makes you feel like you're drowning, and it's full of sap.