Peter Bradshaw

Hit Man comes close to fantasy and approaches screwball but keeps the realism. A hit is what it deserves to be.

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

A shiver of disquiet runs right through it.

Rachel Weisz performs with enormous intelligence and restraint.

Labyrinth of Cinema is indeed labyrinthine, a maze of jokes, film references, quirky back projections, bargain-basement effects and melodramatic confrontations. But at its centre is something deeply serious: a belief that, as the sole country to have experienced a nuclear strike, Japan has a terrifying exceptionalism. This awful truth is marked by a tonal cymbal-clash, both acidly comic and desperately sad.

Vortex tells us something else about old age, something which a severe and high-minded movie like Michael Haneke’s Amour would not grasp: death is chaotic, like life. It ends with things undone and in messy disarray. This is a work of wintry maturity, and real compassion.

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

It’s an engrossing, forthright adventure.

It is elegant, eccentric and needs some time to be indulged. ... And yes, it is six parts beguiling to one part exasperating. But ... it leaves you with a gentle, bemused smile on your face.

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.

Our ­Beloved Month Of August is a real one-off: ­eccentric and singular and ­cerebral: an arthouse event, yes, but also witty and emotionally engaged. I found myself thinking about it for days afterwards – and smiling a very great deal. Try it.

A brilliant idea, brilliantly executed; hilarious, surreal and, yes, in its weird way, genuinely exciting.

Joyland is such a delicate, intelligent and emotionally rich film. What a debut from Sadiq.

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

Hitchcock's superbly insouciant crime caper from 1955 must surely be one of the last movies in which the American super-rich are indulged so extravagantly and adoringly – the kind of people who stub their cigarettes out in fried eggs.

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.

Forrest Gump is Hollywood film-making at its most corn-fed, sucrose-enriched and calorific; you’ll need a sweet tooth for it.

It’s another really bold and distinct statement from Jenkin.

It is shot with fluency and energy; the dreamy chapter-heading inserts are striking, the final image is powerful, and of course Watson herself is a triumph.

There’s no doubting the shiver of pure fear that runs through this movie from beginning to end.

This new Star Trek is fast-moving, funny, exciting warp-speed entertainment and, heaven help me, even quite moving - the kind of film that shows that, like it or not, commercial cinema can still deliver a sledgehammer punch.

In its simplicity and punch, this is a film that feels as if it could have been made decades ago, in the classic age of Planet of the Apes or The Omega Man.

Andres Veiel’s sombre documentary tells the gripping, incrementally nauseating story of Helene “Leni” Riefenstahl, the brilliant and pioneering German film-maker of the 20th century who isn’t getting her name on a Girls on Tops T-shirt any time soon.

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.

Itō is an amazing personality: an intelligent, courageous journalist who may have changed the course of Japanese history.

It is an absorbing, committed drama.