Patrick Peters

Brimful of glorious sounds, this affectionate fan letter says as much about Pops Staples's artistic and political evolution as it does about his devoted daughter, one of the all-time greats.

Refocused on the hoof after the catastrophic 2014 earthquakes, Jennifer Peedom's film pulls no punches in exploring the culture and work of this unheralded group, as well as their frequent exploitation by Westerners.

Has its moments of spectacle and danger, but offers too few genuine insights or rite-of-passage epiphanies.

The tone is pseudo-Sopranos at times, but the oppressive ambience is grippingly sustained.

A gripping and unheralded story that doesn't quite get the telling it deserves.

While the Norman vistas are glorious, the storytelling lacks wit and charm.

This reflection on isolation, technology, creativity and desire brilliantly blurs the lines between perception and voyeurism, the objective and the subjective.

A decent cast gives it more credibility than it deserves.

May be contrived and overlong, but it is also technically distinctive and utterly compelling in its analysis of Swedish attitudes towards race.

As passionate and wide-ranging as you'd hope, but disappointingly mistrusting of its audience's interest in the finer points of the case.

Beautiful to look at but lacking a strong point.

Intimate, delicate and delightful.

Paced with steady assurance, this gentle bildungsroman is a impressive debut from director Daniel Patrick Carbone.

Touching and funny. Waters fans should sign up now.

Hogg stages some scenes with a sure sense of composition and dramatic tension but too often the film feels self-conscious and ponderous.

A satisfaction conclusion to the trilogy.

The premise is slightly bizarre but there's enough wink-and-a-nod charm in the performances to earn it a pass.

A frustratingly ungraspable movie collage compiled with real visual flair.

Indigestible Christmas stodge.

Like Spinal Tap's more seriously older brother, Jay Bulger's fond but unsparingly honest film is a treat for fans and music lovers. A juicy slice of rock history.

It features more weed than a pot-warming party at Bill & Ben's but offers little more than spliff-glazed promotion for Snoop's reggae reincarnation.

A hit in Berlin, the Taviani siblings' documentary has plenty of wit and punch, although compared to the best of the medium - "Man On Wire," for instance - it sometimes comes off as guileless and clunky.

This barely conceivable story of neglect and loneliness is given heartbreaking new life by Morley, with Zawe Ashton standing in effectively for the tragic young singer.

Unsparing in its portrayal of the seedier side of French society, only Polisse's loose focus keeps it from matching The Class for emotional punch. It's still a worthy companion piece to TV police procedurals like Spiral.

An Oscar nominee at this year's Academy Awards and for good reason, Falardeau's film is moving, smart and sensitive. Terrific stuff, in short.

A fascinating insight into the disparity between rich and poor, and powerful nations and their less muscle-flexing neighbours. And, unless you're a fish, it's also pretty darn scary.

A compelling story told with Morris's usually flair. Still, hard not to think of it as a disappointment by the director's exalted standards and a missed opportunity to explore society's dysfunctional relationship with its media.

An eerie and unsettling adaptation of Judy Pascoe's novel that impresses more for its atmospherics than its narrative.

Josh Fox puts a fresh spin on a well-drilled - if continually relevant - story.

Claire Denis' drama is an overly fastidious but insight-filled look at post-colonial Africa.

A beautifully designed but overly formal biopic that can't match the greatness of the artists it depicts.

Both women are impeccably played by Maria Bonnevie.

It may lack subtlety, but everything is beautifully designed and photographed, Watling and Tosar are superb and it's undeniably great fun.

A decent snapshot of pre-Beatle Britain, this is much more a fact-based gay melodrama than a trenchant portrait of Joe Orton's life, loves and art.

Subtle and unflinching, this is genuine and charming.

The structure similarly misses the flashbacking subtlety of the original. Even the characterisation lacks depth.

This plays very much like a standard biopic, lacking the dangerous spirit of the movie that inspired it.

This is a gentle, camp but nonetheless revealing satire on how a nation circumvented the social strictures imposed upon it by Franco's fading fascist regime.

The action meanders occasionally, but the performances are consistently disarming and Luciano Zito and Diego del Piano’s black-and-white photography complements the mood of ironic melancholy.

Shot over three years, this is one of the more considered and insightful Iraqi documentaries - although some may find its stylistic contrasts a little self-conscious and distracting.

Rip Torn and Darren Burrows respectively over- and underplay their hands in this archly restrained Memphis melodrama.

Slow-paced and self-indulgent in places but a bravely intense use of camera work to explore the internal psychology of the characters.

A brilliant musical that still looks fresh today.

Every bit as enchanting as you remember. Molto, molto bene.

Shifting between bourgeois soap, tabloid parable and tale of the unexpected, this three-storied study of salvation in extremis makes for unsettling but compelling viewing.

Make a date to catch this on the big screen and be rewarded with pure magic.

Abrasive but affecting.

Disappointing third act to this brave drama about love and sex in our later years.

The breakneck pace, the seething sense of menace and the unflinching attitude to sex, drugs and violence coagulate into a nastily authentic take on the seediness and venality of modern villainy.

A slyly subversive insight into the role of women in the Israeli military, this is a surprisingly compassionate satire that makes its political points without resorting to caricature.

Sadly, though, all this arthouse exploitation fails to reveal as much about contemporary Korea as, say, "Texas Chainsaw" did about the States.

Making masterly use of sound and image, this is a desperately sad study of the difficulty people have to communicate and commit in an increasingly insular world.

A fond and always accessible portrait, but the lack of objectivity and drooling images of Gehry's work deprives this documentary of any objectivity.

Lovingly photographed in a monochrome that recalls Woody Allen’s Manhattan, this is a slickly scripted rom-com.

Castellitto deserves great credit for toning down the melodrama in wife Margaret Mazzantini's novel and producing a very human story about chance, choice and consequence.

Despite the odd moment of visual bravura, this mockumentary is too aware of its own satirical daring. Consequently, it's never as dark, dangerous or amusing as it thinks - and the soundtrack is diabolical.

The fact that Miyazaki and his team hand-draw the images before they're digitally coloured and animated gives them an artistry that has been woefully lacking from so many recent American features.

Keeping it surreal has never been so nauseating and, at times, hilarious.

A splendid performance by Naomi Watts holds together this smart and astutely restrained lampoon of life in the Hollywood basement.

A welcome antidote to anodyne Hollywood cartooning.

Strong performances and meticulous direction make this consistently disconcerting, but the subplot distracts from the moving human drama.

The cast are terrific, but byt he end, the film is struggling to stay together as much as the family it depicts.

Stealing the show is Suzanne Flon's immaculate display as the matriarch whose good-natured indulgence of her ghastly relations belies a guilty secret. Mercilessly acute and quietly devastating.

Ultimately, this potentially intriguing character thriller loses its direction when it turns into a mean-spirited stalk-and-bash actioner.