Peter Bradshaw

I wished I liked it more. It is engagingly self-aware and excruciatingly self-conscious, wearing its hipness on its sleeve; it's ingenious and yet remarkably contrived. The film seems very new, but the sentimental ending is as old as the hills. There are some great moments.

This is clearly a very personal project for Avilés, and the heartbreak feels very real.

It’s a bit hammy and TV-movie-ish, but you can’t help smiling at its feelgood directness and warmth.

This is a fluent, watchable piece of work, though not quite as lucid as it might have been. A poignant tribute, at any rate, to the lost innocence of skateboarding.

There is a kind of solidity and force to the film in its opening act, but its interest dwindles and we get little in the way of either ambition or moment-by-moment humour.

It is an ordeal of gruesomeness and tiresomeness that was every bit as exasperating as I had feared.

Foxtrot is a movie from Israeli writer-director Samuel Maoz that is structurally fascinating yet also structurally flawed: its accumulations of ambiguity and mystery are jettisoned by a whimsical final reveal.

Over two-and-a-half hours, you get a lot of deafening bangs for your buck, and the tourist location stunts are impressive - but there isn’t as much humour in the dialogue as before.

There is something, for me, unrevealing about the drama, and almost sentimental about the final moments. But Hovig and Skarsgård are both very good.

Redford delivers a tour de force performance: holding the screen effortlessly with no acting support whatsoever.

While it’s such an intriguing idea, an almost absurdist scrutiny of what avoidance looks like and how families choreograph their collective denial, there is something a little bit contrived in it and, though always engaged, I found myself longing for some outright passion or rage or confrontation.

The documentary vividness that Carol Reed brought to the streets of Vienna in The Third Man and London in The Fallen Idol, he here brings to Belfast in this fascinating but imperfect 1947 thriller.

This heartfelt movie-musical of The Color Purple sugars the pill and softens the blow, planing down the original’s barbed and knotty surfaces, taking away some of the shock of violence and tragedy and tilting the experience more towards female solidarity and triumph over adversity.

It’s dynamic and intriguing, though the detail and the emotion can get lost in the splurge.

Everything in Showing Up is certainly valid, but I confess I thought it lacked some perspective on Lizzie’s life, and it is sometimes a bit studied and passionless, especially compared with Reichardt’s previous film, First Cow. But there is sympathy and charm and food for thought.

Disappointingly, it is a borderline dopey, sentimental children’s adventure mostly without the wit and spark that converted grownups and kids to the Lego films.

It’s a movie straining for more than it’s achieving, moment by moment, but Goth’s toxic energy always holds the attention.

It’s a baggy comedy, sentimental in ways that are not entirely intentional, but there is value, too.

The Salesman is a well-crafted, valuable drama.

There is charm and delicacy here and Magimel and Binoche perform impeccably, though I wasn’t entirely sure they go together as the ingredients of a love story.

Steven Soderbergh’s downbeat, affectless tongue-in-cheek spy comedy (“caper” isn’t quite right) is in this new mode, though taking itself to the edge of self-satire, with a few 007 refugees in the cast, efficiently scripted by David Koepp.

At 37 minutes long, its brevity perhaps exposes or even creates a flimsiness in his signature style that in a longer film would have more space to breathe and parade itself.

The subtlety and dignity of Fernanda Torres’s Oscar-nominated performance in Walter Salles’s new film have been rightly praised.

I’m not sure this is my favourite Skolimowski film, but it is engaging in many ways: beautifully photographed, sentimental and surreal in equal measure; and also stubborn – as stubborn as its hero – in its symbolism and stark pessimism.

A sweet, eminently sensible film.

For many, the movie could as well do without the supernatural element, and I admit I’m one of them; I’d prefer to see a real story with real jeopardy work itself out. But there is energy and comic-book brashness

The story has a moderate charm, but is less baroque and ambitious than many Japanese animations.

Sirāt is a path to nowhere, an improvised spectacle in the Sahara; it is very impressive in the opening 10 minutes but valueless as it proceeds, and a pointless mirage of unearned emotion.

An interesting and worthwhile drama.

It may only be a repeat of earlier ideas and plotlines, but compare it to the fourth films in other franchises and Pixar’s latest is an amusing and charming gem.

It’s impossible to object to In the Heights with its almost childlike innocence. Ramos is very good and it is great to see Stephanie Beatriz (from TV’s Brooklyn Nine-Nine) and Dascha Polanco (from Orange Is the New Black) round out the supporting cast. But this is a pretty quaint image of street life, whose unrealities probably worked better on stage.

A Simple Life is a tear-jerker, but thoughtful and intelligent, with an anti-sentimental dimension.

The Children Act is concerned with love, intimacy and moral responsibility and it is refreshing to see a movie which sets itself standards of this sort. But there is also something a little too neat in the way all these things are wrapped up. Emma Thompson’s performance, so elegant and vulnerable, carries the picture.

A disappointing excursion into movie history.

It’s an intriguing filmic tribute to the rehabilitation programme: effective altruism in action.

This film does not offer any actual conclusions, but it is an atmospheric immersion in the old, smoky and very male world of American TV journalism.

The sheer laborious silliness of Avatar feels like harder work the second time around and its essential problem is more prominent. [2022 re-release]

It’s an engaging and spirited piece of work.

It is an intriguing story, although I have to admit to feeling a bit bemused at the arbitrary way the Beast story is inserted into the already tense and interesting situation of Suzu/Belle and her relationships with people at home and school.

Not a knockout, by any means, but a win on points.

It’s an entertaining spectacle but the brilliant tonal balance in something like Jordan Peele’s satire Get Out leaves this looking a little exposed. Yet it responds fiercely, contemptuously to the crassness at the heart of the Trump regime and gleefully pays it back in its own coin.

The film has sympathy and charm, although I can’t exactly share all the praise that’s been lavished on it. It unfolds in an indulgent, dreamy summer haze, halfway between rapture and torpor; a murmuring indie-stonewash of good taste.

It’s a fascinating story but the resulting film insists on a kooky relatability that isn’t really there. A misfire.

Perhaps it is inevitably going to be of limited interest, and as intelligent as the two performances are, neither Whishaw nor Hall is tested very much. But it is an intriguing experiment in recovering the moment-by-moment reality of a lost time and place.

The Animal Kingdom seems squeamish about going for the jugular in the way a proper genre movie would.

In the end I felt that the film fully achieves neither the ostensible comedy of the opening, nor the supposed sadness of its denouement.

At all events, it pays due homage to Edwards as a courageous pioneer.

There's a too-cute-to-be-true ending to this US indie movie by the much-acclaimed young director Destin Cretton; I couldn't buy it, and found myself wondering if I had kept the receipt for the rest of the film too.

This is a film that tries your patience a fair bit, and yet there is something attractive in its kind of innocence.

Unsubtle and on-the-nose though it undoubtedly is, there is also an amiable, upbeat energy.

It’s an adventure which begins by being bizarre and hilarious but appears to run out of ideas at its mid-way point, and run out of interest in what had at first seemed to be its central comic image: humans turning into animals.

Running at just 71 minutes, Socrates left me wondering if it was slightly underdeveloped as a feature project. But plenty of glossier and more finished films don’t have its beating compassionate heart.

It’s an impressively contrived film, almost a machine for winning awards, a monochrome reverie of midlife yearning.

What we have is a straightforward murder mystery, but it is told with gusto and humour.

It is up to McConaughey's crooked cop to carry the picture: a sleek, loungingly casual loner whose hunger for violence, like his hunger for fried chicken, is finally and horribly gratified.

You might need a sweet tooth for this gentle, Hornbyesque drama from writer-director Brett Haley. But it’s a likable heartwarmer and very decently acted.

What seems to be most therapeutic is their contact with the dogs. As one teacher puts it: “You are more than good enough for that dog just the way you are.”

Ahmed’s performance clarifies the drama and delivers the meaning of Ruben’s final epiphany. He gives the film energy and point.

The proceedings are claustrophobic, intense and alienated – often brilliant, sometimes slightly redundant.

It is every bit as beautifully made and intelligently acted as you might expect, with some wonderful visual imagery at the very beginning. Yet I was disappointed.

It’s an engaging portrait - film-making which works from the ground up.

The visuals are not exactly cutting edge but the storytelling has bounce and there’s gusto in the vocal talents.

A Hero is an engaging and even intriguing film, but I wonder if its realist mannerisms are concealing a slightly unfocused story.

Good intentions are all but submerged in nonsense.

It is the intelligence and delicacy of the acting which keeps this wobbly contrivance steady.

This mad succession of consequence-free events, trains of activity which get cancelled by a switch to another parallel world, means that nothing is actually at stake, and the film becomes a formless splurge of Nothing Nowhere Over a Long Period of Time.

The comic material really isn't there, and the plot transitions feel forced and uncomfortable.

The movie is its own show of force in some ways, surely accurate in showing what the soldiers did, moment by moment, though blandly unaware of a point or a meaning beyond the horror.

[A] startling but sometimes frustratingly reticent and guarded documentary.

Kulumbegashvili’s style is confident, if derivative. Her technique now has to evolve away from these self-conscious influences.

RMN is a sombre downbeat movie, whose sudden flurry of dreamlike visions at the very end is a little disconcerting. But it is seriously engaged with the dysfunction and unhappiness in Europe that goes unreported and unacknowledged.

A well made film, which slithers confidently in its slick of blood.

Hanks carries the film with his personality and his easy address to the camera, but this oddity of a film never quite comes to life.

Chalamet gives it his all as the pudding-bowl-hairstyled young king. But so much of the poetry and the sense of loss has gone from this decaffeinated version of the story.

Some of the movie doesn't exactly convince, and some of the scenes have an actors-improv feel to them, but there's always plenty of humour and energy.

The film is entirely ridiculous, often quite boring, with a script showing worrying signs of being cobbled together. But even as a longtime Von Trier doubter, I now have to admit it grows on you; there's a mawkish fascination and some flashes of real visual brilliance.

There are some nicely creepy moments, and director and co-writer Nick Murphy interestingly dramatises some of the neuroses feeding the appetite for ghostly phenomena – repressed sexuality, guilt and self-harm.

When the wisps of khat smoke clear away, it is perhaps not easy to decide exactly what is left behind, or to decide if khat is a cultural practice to be celebrated or rejected: but there are some marvellous images and moods in this misty, impressionistic study.

Perhaps a more unassuming genre director would have tightened this movie’s cables a little, so that it had more tension and less revulsion. At all events, it delivers some nasty shocks.

It is an attractive and sympathetic performance from Geirharðsdóttir as Halla.

It is crammed with unearned emotional moments and factory-built male characters whose dedication to their sport we are expected to find adorable and heroic by turns.

Likable, watchable and has a nice supporting turn from Robert De Niro; I'm not sure I wouldn't rather watch this again than the macho acting in Russell's boxing drama "The Fighter."

Perhaps this movie is a little anticlimactic, but there is often an atmosphere of real fear, especially when Natalia is driven to the edge by her newborn’s incessant crying: a horrible moment which is not supernatural in the slightest.

The whole film is like an incomplete fragment, intriguing if frustrating.

There is no law that says a movie like this has to be funny exactly, and it needn’t be something in the style of Booksmart – but there is something rather solemn about it.

Some entertaining moments can’t hide the fact that this latest product of the DC Comics universe doesn’t exactly fly past.

It has a seriousness, an unsentimental readiness to look reality in the face.

This is a genuinely strange film, elusive in both tone and meaning, one which deploys the obvious effects and rhetorical forms of irony, while at the same time distancing itself from these effects and asking its audience to sympathise and even admire Lee, because she is not supposed to be the villain.

It’s an intriguing, startlingly restrained and even cerebral piece of work from Ferrara, an unimpeachably serious homage, with an assured lead performance from Willem Dafoe.

The film has its own kind of mad, migrainey energy and individuality, and Robert Pattinson gives a strong, charismatic performance.

I found something a little too subdued in this film, though the evocation of Tokyo itself is very uncliched, despite the emphasis on something that is the subject of so many touristy jokes: the loos. Not perfect, but engaging enough.

There is real emotional warmth and human sympathy in this otherwise somewhat flawed film, a docudrama experiment in getting actors to play some of the real people in a tragic news story from Tunisia.

It's an intriguing movie, in some ways, but its contrived and even bizarre final revelation depends on coincidences of almost Hardyesque proportions. It is not really believable, and yet if it is not taken literally, but as a cinematic prose-poem, it has undoubted force.

You Hurt My Feelings is a movie about emotional pain, and there is something very astringent in it, a salty tang which isn’t really effaced by the later plot transitions whose emollient message is that we all fib a bit to our loved ones and it doesn’t mean we love them any the less.

Malick does succeed, to some degree, on his own terms; he attempts to give some (stylised) sense of this man’s inner life: his emotional and spiritual architecture. It is admirably serious but static.

This is a well-intentioned film with some forthright performances, although there’s a fair bit of actorly shouting going on and the smiley spaciness of Bruni-Tedeschi can sometimes feel a bit affected.

It balances what is with what might have been and what could still be, and, although the result is maybe a bit less substantial than Castro intended, there is a certain literary elegance in the way he sketches it out.

Last and First Men is an interesting if minor work, perhaps comparable to Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Homo Sapiens or Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity.