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.