Peter Bradshaw

It’s creative and experimental in just the right spirit, though with an asymmetric flaw. The film is a kind of diptych in which one of the panels is more fully achieved than the other.

It is a tense, claustrophobic nightmare, played with sincerity and force, particularly by Adam Driver. But a strident orchestral score keeps intruding, dark chords telling us how scared we ought to be, and it is as if Costanzo is not content with an ultra-real relationship drama, and wants his film to be some kind of heavy-handed horror-thriller too.

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’s a big, ambitious, continent-spanning piece of work, concerned to show the Armenian horror was absorbed into the bloodstream of immigrant-descended population in the United States, but it is a little simplistic emotionally.

With playful touches of Spielberg, Shyamalan and even Hitchcock, veteran director Joe Dante has confected a neat little scary movie, not explicitly violent, but pretty scary nonetheless.

It is soulless, like something that has been generated by a computer programme.

Bogdanovich is a formidable figure, but with this movie he’s just coasting. He surely needs to find a screenplay more attuned to his brilliance, rather than a derivative, low-octane comedy.

This is a tough, muscular, idealistic drama that packs a mighty punch, and Shannon and Garfield are excellent.

There are some interestingly contrived moments of claustrophobia and surreal lunacy, but this cliched and slightly hand-me-down script neither scares nor amuses very satisfyingly.

The Look of Silence — like The Act of Killing — is arresting and important film-making.

This debut feature from the Cambodian-born, London-based film-maker Hong Khaou is heartfelt, intelligent film-making on a shoestring budget.

This really doesn't have the fun or the zip of that earlier Miami adventure. The dialogue is even more tired and, crucially, the dance sequences themselves are looking less fresh this time around.

The Killer Inside Me is a particular distillation of male hate, as practised by repulsive and inadequate individuals who have been encouraged to see themselves as essentially decent by virtue of the trappings of authority in which they have wrapped themselves. And Winterbottom is tearing off the mask.

There are some rousing battle scenes, preceded by stirring addresses on the subject of going to Elysium – all cheekily borrowed from Ridley Scott's "Gladiator."

Salvo is a strange, involving, if flawed movie.

There is something exacting and audacious in it, something superbly controlled in its composition and technique. The clarity of her film-making diction is a marvel – even, or perhaps especially, when the nature of the story itself remains murkily unrevealed.

As if from nowhere, a first-time British film-maker has appeared with a tremendously accomplished, subtle and supremely confident feature, authorially distinctive and positively dripping with technique.

A slight but engaging two-hander.

The film's purpose is the reverent mystification of everything that avowedly makes YSL special.

The two adjectives in the title should be replaced with "annoying" and "unendurably tiresome".

Exhibition is challenging, sensual, brilliant film-making.

It certainly provides that rarest of things: relaxing enjoyment. In all its uncompromising goofiness, 22 Jump Street brings onstream a sugar-rush of entertainment.

It is basically deadly serious, and after some moderate knockaboutfun, settles into something pretty dull. Where's the edge?

White God works as an ambiguous satire of power relations generally: eventually the lower orders will rise up. The film has a flair and a bite which I have found lacking in Mundruczó's earlier films.

It is a film so awe-inspiringly wooden that it is basically a fire-risk. The cringe-factor is ionospherically high.

It is colossally indulgent, shapeless, often fantastically and unthinkingly offensive and at all times insufferably conceited. Yet it is frustrating precisely because it sometimes isn't so bad. There is something in there somewhere - striking images and moments, and the crazy energy of a folie de grandeur.

Abderrahmane Sissako's passionate and visually beautiful film Timbuktu is a cry from the heart.

Kawase's film is sometimes beautiful and moving but I couldn't help occasionally finding it a little contrived and self-conscious.

It could be that Hazanavicius wanted, once again, to channel some of that Old Hollywood big-hearted sincerity — just as he did with his silent-movie triumph The Artist. But the outcome here is naive and misjudged.

Tommy Lee Jones shows some true storytelling grit in this superbly watchable frontier western; he has a muscular and confident command of narrative, driving the plot onward with a real whip-crack, and easily handles the tonal swings between brutal shock, black comedy and sentimentality.

If Assayas's film finally falls just shy of being great art itself, it is at least handsomely staged and played with conviction.

Saint Laurent is a well made but bafflingly airless and claustrophobic film.

A tense dramatic situation and a subtly magnificent central performance from Marion Cotillard add up to an outstanding new movie from the Dardenne brothers.

As a straight procedural, this might have worked if Egoyan did not try the audience's patience and insult their intelligence with how utterly implausible his drama is. But line by line, scene by scene, it is offensively preposterous and crass.

The status-anxiety, fame-vertigo, sexual satiety and that all-encompassing fear of failure which poisons every triumph are displayed here with an icy new connoisseurship, a kind of extremism which faces down the traditional objection that films like this are secretly infatuated with their subject.

What a glorious film this is, richly and immediately enjoyable, hitting its satisfying stride straight away. It's funny and visually immaculate; it combines domestic intimacy with an epic sweep and has a lyrical, mysterious quality that perfumes every scene, whether tragic or comic.

Leviathan is acted and directed with unflinching ambition, moving with deliberative slowness and periodically accelerating at moments of high drama and suspense. It isn't afraid of massive symbolic moments and operatic gestures.

It is an uncompromising and exasperating 70-minute cine-collage placed before us on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, composed of fragments of ideas, shards of disillusionment.

Dolan's energy and attack is thrilling; his movie is often brilliant and very funny in ways which smash through the barriers marked Incorrect and Inappropriate.

Michôd creates a good deal of ambient menace in The Rover; Pearce has a simmering presence. But I felt there was a bit of muddle, and the clean lines of conflict and tension had been blurred: the dystopian future setting doesn't add much and hasn't been very rigorously imagined.

It is a gripping film: horrible, scary and desperately sad.

This movie has the same desolate quality as Philip Larkin's poem The Building, and yet it is tender and lovable, too.

Welcome to New York proves thoroughly engrossing. Here is a work of ragged glory; dirty and galvanic. [Unrated Version]

the film is often stately and sluggish with some very daytime-soapy moments of emotional revelation.

We get one or two outrageous sight gags and massive "getting progressively drunk" montages, and some neatly managed comedy on the laugh-with/laugh-at borderline.

Perhaps as a parable, simplicity is what is required, although sometimes the film does not rise to tragedy. Visually, Age of Uprising is classy and plausible, but delivers less than it promises.

François Ozon's new film is a luxurious fantasy of a young girl's flowering: a very French and very male fantasy, like the pilot episode of the world's classiest soap opera... But this is well-crafted and well-acted.

Every moment of Ida feels intensely personal. It is a small gem, tender and bleak, funny and sad, superbly photographed in luminous monochrome: a sort of neo-new wave movie with something of the classic Polish film school and something of Truffaut, but also deadpan flecks of Béla Tarr and Aki Kaurismäki.

Subtle it isn't. But the entertainment rev counter more or less keeps turning over.

It really is pretty dull, though, with the same moments of campy silliness: the same frowning gym bunnies with the same digitally enhanced abs.

This comedy never quite relaxes or convinces or comes together, despite a blue-chip pedigree and a great cast.

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.

It's a headspinningly wacky premise, and it takes a little while for the audience to get up to speed, but once this is achieved, there's an awful lot of unexpected fun to be had, boasting zany adventures with various historical figures.

A deafening, boring action pile-up that is more Call of Duty than Robocop.

In the main, it's the usual story – much more rom than com.

All the material about social media looks forced and behind the curve, and nothing about the movie is really convincing or entertaining on any level, making it valueless as drama or satire.

The tired old trope "erotic thriller" does no justice to how confrontationally and explicitly sexual this movie is — nor how thrilling, nor how menacing and complex.

A real Christmas miracle would cause every copy of this film to spontaneously burst into flames.

The story unfolds intriguingly within an intimate, almost claustrophobic environment. There is perhaps something ultimately undeveloped about it, but the film is a well acted, well presented piece of work.

Looks dated and clunky, like a drawn-out episode of Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected on TV, and the direction doesn't have Softley's usual drive.

The Desolation of Smaug is a cheerfully entertaining and exhilarating adventure tale, a supercharged Saturday morning picture: it's mysterious and strange and yet Jackson also effortlessly conjures up that genial quality that distinguishes The Hobbit from the more solemn Rings stories.

It is an intriguing confection of a movie, announcing its influences candidly, but exerting its originality too.

The movie has rather silly, Bourne-style thriller graphics, which are unnecessary: it has an important story to tell.

Enjoyable, with some funny lines.

Not an easy watch, and something in which you must make an investment of attention – but a fascinating piece of work.

At times it looks like a parade of celebs, but the film comes belatedly to the point when it discusses Corbijn's parents, particularly his late father, whose approval Anton sought but perhaps never quite got.

Lovering coolly sticks to a rule often disregarded by horror movies looking for an instant scare: the weird, tense build-up is just as disturbing as the reveal.

Everyone is trying way too hard and Dom's final speech is toe-curlingly misjudged and charmless.

The movie has some real archival value and the simple juxtaposition of Polanski and Stewart – the oddest couple in Cannes, surely – has a surreal impact. But I wonder if there isn't something a little bit placid and self-satisfied about the film, which is paced remarkably slowly, given the subject matter.

A valuable, meticulously observed and wonderfully acted social-realist feature about a family under pressure.

As activist Larry Kramer remarked, the movement had "its good cops and its bad cops", and there is a remarkable, angry, passionate funeral speech from campaigner Bob Rafsky that helped mobilise Act Up and awaken America's conscience.

Frankly, the performances and line-readings are uneven. The couple's journey through night-time London is interesting: both have a painful past that they are at first reluctant to discuss, especially Maya, but these disclosures are not dramatically developed in any really satisfying way.

This film certainly chops up a few sacred cows. Could it be that the anti-wind brigade will have to make common cause with climate change scientists?

The love story – and it can be called that – between the doctor and Melanie is presented with candour and tenderness. There is a new humanity to Seidl's work; it could be his best film so far.

This is a bitter, jagged, disaffected drama, pessimistic about China, pessimistic about the whole world. One characters asks another if he ever feels like travelling abroad. "Why would I?" he replies. "Everywhere is broke. Foreigners come here now." Jia Zhang-ke's movie gives us a brutal unwelcome.

It's an intriguing and distinctive story, soberly told.

Gloria is a sad, painful romantic story.

Calin Peter Netzer's Child's Pose is a gripping new drama from Romania and another demonstration of how that country's new wave is developing a distinctive kind of real-time slice-of-life cinema with characterisation in extreme, pitiless closeup.

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 Faust is part bad dream, part music-less opera: sometimes muted and numb, though with hallucinatory flashes of fear.

It is a strange slo-mo farce, well directed, highly sexualised – shallow, but sleek.

The movie's apocalyptic finale indicates that it's bitten off considerably more than it can chew in terms of ideas, but it looks good, and the story rattles along.

Saving Mr Banks is an indulgent, overlong picture which is always on the verge of becoming a mess. Thankfully, reliable old Tom Hanks snaps his fingers and – spit, spot – everything more or less gets cleared away.

It's a guilty-pleasure romp of a documentary, filmed at last year's Cannes film festival, all about the gorgeous, deadly and heartbreaking business of cinema itself.

It's a road movie that runs out of road – and out of ideas.

Romcom fans deserve something with more heart.

There are some dull stretches here, but also some grisly instant hits: nasty, deplorable, vulgar and sometimes brilliant.

It has a sort of soapy reliability, but compare it to the blazing passion of Baz Luhrmann's modern-day version with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danesin gangland LA and it looks pretty feeble. Plus, the liberties taken with the text mean that it might not even be all that suitable for school parties.

This a quasi-war movie set in peacetime; these men are fighting to the death, but not for nation or principle or ideology — or at least, not a conscious ideology: they are caught in larger economic currents.

For the first half-hour it's got a full-on horrible energy, but there isn't enough humour for it to qualify as comedy, and not enough reality or plausible characterisation to justify calling it any sort of procedural noir.

A few laughs.

This is a formal and pedagogic production, but worthwhile nonetheless.

We call our House of Commons proceedings Punch and Judy: but the climate-change deniers on Fox News are Punch on steroids. It's a chilling and depressing picture.

An enormous pleasure. The performances are so fresh and natural – yet so subtle and delicately judged. The direction is superb in its control and the cinematography creates a gripping docu-realist vision.

After all those false dawns, non-comebacks and semi-successful Euro jeux d'esprit, Allen has produced an outstanding movie, immensely satisfying and absorbing, and set squarely on American turf: that is, partly in San Francisco and partly in New York.

A watchable and accessible revival, though not groundbreaking, and not quite matching the story's passionate fear and rapture.

The mystery and beauty of bees emerge strongly enough. But should we be seriously concerned, or not?

Poor Princess Diana. I hesitate to use the term "car crash cinema". But the awful truth is that, 16 years after that terrible day in 1997, she has died another awful death.

The results are by turns boring and bizarre, although Diesel still has some presence.

It is invigoratingly freaky and strange, with a Death-Valley-dry sense of humour somewhere underneath — though a little derivative sometimes. More than once, Carruth gives us a close-up on a hand ruminatively stroking a surface: very Malick. And the shots of creepy creatures swarming under the skin are very Cronenberg.

The movie needed some more detachment – and brevity – but Wahlberg shows once again he has the comedy chops.

I suspect a previous, wackier idea for the film was ditched in favour of a slick promotional video about their jaw-dropping global tour, but I also have to admit that this is a rather watchable record of a phenomenon.

You'll need to have a very sweet tooth for this, and it makes light of those difficult sexual politics that Mad Men attacked with such fierce satire.

There is a fair amount of not sufficiently witty or lovable banter, and Paula Patton gets to play Katharine Ross to their Butch and Sundance. She really has nothing to do except pose fetchingly in her underwear. Not much firepower.

It's rammed with cliches and silliness and conforms to a lot of stereotypes, the most suspect being the obligatory scene in Ibiza whose only purpose is to show loads of young women with no tops on.

Hang on for the outtake bloopers over the credits and you'll see Aniston momentarily unsure how to take a joke at her expense.

Nothing in the movie matches the fascination of its premise and its opening 10 minutes: the undisturbed status quo is mesmeric. Once the narrative grinds into gear, however, the film's distinctive quality is lost.

It's quite a sweet idea, with a liberal attempt at balance, though Palestinian audiences may query the idea of making their half of this equation a child, and Fahed's motivation for defying his elders in quite so disloyal and dangerous a way, is never convincingly explained.

There are plenty of Seidl's signature grotesques, extended uncomfortable scenes and hardcore imagery owing something to Lucian Freud and Diane Arbus. But perhaps for the first time there is also a hint of ordinary human heartbreak.

Nicolas Cage, Vanessa Hudgens and John Cusack give solid performances in this Prime Suspect-like thriller.

Émilie Dequenne is the young actor who made a powerful debut in the Dardenne brothers' prize-winning film "Rosetta" in 1999, and what a superb performance she gives now in this inexpressibly painful drama.

There are some good ideas, strong moments and a blue-chip cast in Broken, the feature-film debut from award-winning theatre and opera director Rufus Norris. But they somehow don't come together successfully.

It is extremely pleasurable to watch, and shows every sign of having been extremely pleasurable to make.

This beautiful and hypnotic documentary shows the agony and the ecstasy of herding sheep up into Montana's Beartooth mountains for the summer pasture.

Meadows is clearly not interested in lifting the biographical lid on anyone, just getting alongside the band, and picking up on their energy, vulnerability and excitement. He has no agenda; he just loves the Stone Roses, and it's a great, heartfelt tribute.

This documentary by Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin argues that Pussy Riot suffered an old-fashioned Soviet show trial, and what emerges is the effrontery and hypocrisy of Putin's attempt to associate these three young women with the Bolsheviks' suppression of religion.

There is a creepy, undead feel to this lumbering comedy set in the offices of Google, and Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn have a distinct Baron Samedi look in their eyes.

Overcooked, overcomplicated and underinteresting, this heist caper turns into a mess.

Wheatley's new film is grisly and visceral, an occult, monochrome-psychedelic breakdown taking place somewhere in the West Country during the civil war.

Some funny stuff, but a rental/download only.

A syrupy drizzle of tasteful prettiness covers this cloying movie about the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir (Michel Bouquet) and his film-maker son Jean Renoir (Vincent Rottiers).

Some nice touches, though it needs to be indulged.

Nothing here to challenge anything from the Pixar golden age, but Despicable Me 2 is a sweet-natured family film.

Good intentions are all but submerged in nonsense.

Before Midnight is intimate and intelligent, and also undemanding in the best possible way,

This is a shallow but watchable movie, and it nicely conveys the world of semi-respectable Soho porn, sadder and tattier than its sleazier end, with its desperate champagne lunches and dreary afternoon hangovers.

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

The sharp edges of the story are sentimentally sanded down; there's a fair bit of slush, and it's a pretty quaint view of what writers and a writer's life are actually like.

It is fantastically silly, often funny, with some unshowy but very serviceable digital effects.

He's done it again. M Night Shyamalan has done it again. Again. Done it. Again. He has given us another film for which the only appropriate expression is stammering, gibbering wonder that anyone can keep making such uncompromisingly terrible movies with such stamina and dedication.

It's competently made, but pointless.

Despite its moments of charm and caprice, the film is prolix, inert, indulgent and often just plain dull.

It certainly doesn't bore.

Temple's film is refreshingly free of cliché. A very heady experience.

It's made with gusto, but there's little dramatic interest for non-enthusiasts.

This is a great-looking movie with a sure sense of time and place; it is obviously a personal, and in fact, autobiographical work about Assayas's own youth. But for all its flair, I came away dissatisfied at its colossal self-indulgence and creamy complacency, and the way historical perspective and meaning are permitted to dissolve in its sunlit nostalgia.

Blue Is the Warmest Colour really is an outstanding film and the performances from Exarchopoulos and Séydoux make other people's acting look very weak.

Venus In Fur is a playful if occasionally heavy-handed jeu d'ésprit on the subject of sexual role-play, the games we all play, illusion and reality, and directing as a sexual act.

This is a fine film, which cements Barnard's growing reputation as one of Britain's best film-makers.

It is an intricate and often brilliant drama, with restrained and intelligent performances; there is an elegantly patterned mosaic of detail, unexpected plot turns, suspenseful twists and revelations.

If it is an exercise in style … well, what style. With its retro-chic connoisseurship and analogue era rock, this is a brilliant haute-hippy homage.

The Immigrant is certainly different: but Gray seems to run out of ideas and the film is shapeless and unsatisfying.

It is a typically calm, lucid drama, presented in the director's unforced, cinematic vernacular and attractively and sympathetically acted.

This movie looks and feels superb, it is pure couture cinema. But there is also a excess of richness and bombast and for all its sleekness I felt that the spark of emotion was being hidden, and there is a kind of frustration in the operatic sadness.

A strained jeu d'ésprit which is smug, precious, carelessly constructed, emotionally negligible, and above all fantastically annoying. It's a terrible waste of real acting talent.

Denis's drama intrigues more than it actually delivers...Sleight of hand is all well and good. But sooner or later a film must pay up.

Franco's As I Lay Dying is a worthwhile movie, approached in an intelligent and creative spirit. The ensemble work from the actors is generally very strong, with a star turn from Nelson as the prematurely aged patriarch, and the story is presented lucidly and confidently.

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

Nebraska may not be startlingly new, and sometimes we can see the epiphanies looming up over the distant horizon; the tone is, moreover, lighter and more lenient than in earlier pictures like Sideways. But it is always funny and smart.

It is put together with technical competence, but is entirely cliched and preposterous, and it implodes into its own fundamental narrative implausibility.

This is a sweet-natured, but essentially undemanding film from Kore-eda.

Only God Forgives will, understandably, have people running for the exits, and running for the hills. It is very violent, but Winding Refn's bizarre infernal creation, an entire created world of fear, really is gripping. Every scene, every frame, is executed with pure formal brilliance.

Director Hugh Hartford does not patronise his stars, although perhaps there is something too gently celebratory and obviously feelgood about the film. These dynamic table-tennis stars put the rest of us to shame.

In the Fog is an intense, slow-burning and haunting drama.

Brilliantly written, terrifically acted, superbly designed and shot; it's a sweet, sad, funny picture about the lost world of folk music which effortlessly immerses us in the period.

There are some nice images of the teeming penguin population, and great fun to be had witnessing the love life, and indeed sex life, of penguins. It does have to be said, though, there is a fair bit of Disneyfication going on.

The final notes of irony and repudiation may be laboured and obvious, but this is an intriguingly intuitive and atmospheric movie.

The result is funny and plausible, with a fair bit of newly modish Bridesmaidsy bad taste, though I kept getting the sense that the romcom template meant Mazer couldn't really let rip with pure comedy pessimism and cynicism in the way he might have liked.

Utterly distinctive and all but unclassifiable, a musique concrète nightmare, a psycho-metaphysical implosion of anxiety, with strange-tasting traces of black comedy and movie-buff riffs. It is seriously weird and seriously good.

It's all a bit absurd, but Legrand handles the absurdity with some style, and there is something clever in making an apparently minor character responsible for a major narrative flourish. An enjoyable spectacle.

It's all watchable and pretty funny, and the big setpiece is the three wildly queeny stewards Joserra, Fajas (Carlos Areces) and Ulloa (Arévalo) going into a drug-fuelled song-and-dance routine: a rendering of the Pointer Sisters' I'm So Excited.

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.

Director Niels Arden Orpev was in charge of the original "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," starring Rapace, but fails to create a revenge thriller with anything like the same focus.

As a demonstration of the banality of evil, The Iceman is certainly effective and Shannon's performance gives the film its power.

What Richard Did is an engrossing and intelligent drama that throbs in the mind for hours after the final credits.

Does the film tell us anything we didn't know already? And could anyone expect anything but the most straightforward irony in the title? The answer to both questions is no – but there is undoubted technique, and an authorial address to the audience.

Iron Man 3 is smart, funny and spectacular.

Part of the weirdness of this film lies in the fact that the tense North Korean situation in the real world gives it no realism or satirical edge, or prophetic authority of any kind.

It looks weirdly like a romcom pastiche, not cynical, but not properly inhabited; it doesn't taste of romance or comedy any more than Andy Warhol's Campbell Soup cans taste of soup.

It is nowhere near as creepy as the recent indie horror "V/H/S," but it is a full-bloodedly grisly and macabre film that zaps over a few scares.

It goes on for ever without getting properly started: an epic of depthless self-indulgence.

It is forthright, powerful, composed and directed with clarity and overwhelming force, yet capable of great subtlety and nuance.

A black-comic psychological drama with poise and self-possession. Featuring Fabrice Luchini and Kristin Scott Thomas, how could it have anything else?

An irritating, baffling, fascinating film.

Marsh's movie is calm, level, downbeat. The tension is subtle – perhaps subtler than it really should be.

Oblivion goes on for a long time, moving slowly and self-consciously, and it looks like a very expensive movie project that has been written and rewritten many times over. It is a shame: Cruise, Riseborough and Kurylenko as the last love triangle left on Planet Earth should have been quite interesting.

Sightseers is funny and well made, but Wheatley could be suffering from difficult third album syndrome: this is not as mysterious and interesting as Kill List.

It's all a bit tame, predictable and muted; the inevitable revelation of German decency seems contrived and there's an outrageous plot cop-out towards the end. It's a reminder of how David Lean exploited this kind of drama with more potency in "The Bridge on the River Kwai."

Brandon Cronenberg's movie is made with some technical skill and focus, but it is agonisingly self-regarding and tiresome.

The movie's pace flags a good deal once Bangladesh has been born in 1971, and the adult characters are much less interesting than their child counterparts, but there's enough here to entertain – and to send audiences back to the book.

It's always a pleasure to see Collette, a performer who always cranks up the energy, and yet here, as so often, she gives the impression of a ferocious screen intelligence somehow not being used to the full.

It's amiable enough, but it makes "The Flintstones" look like it was scripted by Karl Popper.

Trance is a disappointment: a strident, chaotic, frantically overcooked film with an almost deafeningly intrusive ambient soundtrack. There is some embarrassing, eyeball-swivelling acting from the male leads, and the elegance of the film's premise is quite obliterated by its crude and misjudged violence.

For all the competence and strength of Trapero's direction, the film is not as powerful as it might have been.

It's an athletic, loose-limbed piece of movie-making, not perfect, but bursting with energy and adrenaline.

It is a gut-churning film: and a radical dive into history, grabbing the past in a way a conventional documentary would not.

This has to be the year's most pointless remake: a boring and badly acted reboot of John Milius's gung-ho red-scare actioner from 1984.

It runs out of steam, with plot revelations visible from a mile away and a bit of a plausibility gap.

As ever with comedies like this, all the really funny stuff is in the opening 20 minutes. But it's entertaining stuff, with a scene-stealer from Alan Arkin.

There are some gruesomely ingenious moments in this gleefully yucky horror-comedy from director Conor McMahon, starring the standup comic Ross Noble. But I have to say it somehow wasn't funny or scary enough – though I do have to admit it is always more than revolting enough.

Almost all the charm of the real story is lost through the contrivances and overacting.

Marc Evans's Hunky Dory is sentimental, sweet-natured and daft as a brush.

It's a likable film played with gusto and heart — though fundamentally a little sentimental and predictable.

Whether you like this movie may depend very materially on how you respond to Franco himself, but I found his casting very astute.

Polley tackles painful issues with candour and tact. She has a gripping tale to tell. It's a film that raises questions about the ownership of memory and ownership of narrative.

It is not a story of great depth or passion, but there are intriguing and unsettling moments on its well-crafted surface.

Some of the acting isn't bad, but the story is messy and unsatisfying with a plot-hole you could drive a dozen combine harvesters through, the ending is an outrageous fudge and the lead performance from Dennis Quaid is strange to say the least.

It's an amiable film with some great musical moments and the classic "growing success" montage showing them on the road in south-east Asia. On music, identity and race, the film has a big beating heart in the right place.

At its best, Malick's cinematic rhapsody is glorious; during his uncertain moments, he appears to be repeating himself. But what delight there is in this film.

Ken Loach's latest collaboration with screenwriter Paul Laverty is warm, funny and good-natured. It's a freewheeling social-realist caper – unworldly and at times almost childlike.

This movie is a case in point. It's a film which is so demeaningly bad, so utterly without merit, that there is a kind of purity in its awfulness. There is a Zen mastery in producing a film which nullifies the concept of pleasure.

The most powerful thing about the film is the "audition" scene at the beginning in which the prisoners have to introduce themselves in two ways: sorrowingly, and then angrily. It is a brilliant sequence, and the rest of the film doesn't quite match it.

As ever with a Sparks story, the action takes place in a sugary vision of small-town America that does not correspond with the real world at any point.

Mud is an engaging and good-looking picture with two bright leading performances from Sheridan and Lofland.

This is a teenage movie that could in other hands have been precious; instead it has delicacy and intelligence.

Enthralling, mysterious and intimately upsetting – a terrible demonstration of how poverty creates a space which irrational fear must fill.

Quite a spectacle, and a nice family outing.

[Room 237] raises very interesting ideas about how we view a film, about what happens if we take the act of viewing down to a deeper, molecular level, and about how a movie's significance and effect need not be those intentionally willed by the director.

Zombie-ism in the movies is traditionally inspected for metaphorical qualities. Here it could simply be that we males are emotionally dead … until love revives us.

For me, it never came to life.

The film's depiction of the ugliness and strangeness of his self-hating LA celeb lifestyle is disturbing. Not just for Python fans.

A disappointing excursion into movie history.

A fascinating case study in basic-level democracy.

Movie 43 is sketchy, in every sense. It's a collection of short comedy films in the manner of the 70s cult classic "Kentucky Fried Movie," each with a separate director, in which many very famous actors have been persuaded to take part.

The Sessions can be sugary, but it's likable.

It is a beautifully shot, and very nicely acted beginning to something: but finally frustrating.

Devotees of Dumont's earlier films – particularly his 1999 film "Humanity" – will instantly recognise the style, the locale, the narrative, the bizarre quasi-realism, in which events take place in a world infinitesimally different from the one we inhabit. As ever, the visionary, radioactive glow is compelling.

For all the guns and gore, it's as breezy and uncritical as a tale from the True Detective magazine that the cops can't help reading.

A gripping documentary.

Outrageous but entertaining pulp-melodrama thriller.

The weird oppression and seediness of the times is elegantly captured, and Hoss coolly conveys Barbara's highly strung desperation.

It's a gem: gentle, eccentric, possessed of a distinctive sort of innocence – and also charming and funny.

Django Unchained also has the pure, almost meaningless excitement which I found sorely lacking in Tarantino's previous film, Inglourious Basterds, with its misfiring spaghetti-Nazi trope and boring plot. I can only say Django delivers, wholesale, that particular narcotic and delirious pleasure that Tarantino still knows how to confect in the cinema, something to do with the manipulation of surfaces. It's as unwholesome, deplorable and delicious as a forbidden cigarette.

It's leaden, boorish and dull.

After 170 minutes I felt that I had had enough of a pretty good thing. The trilogy will test the stamina of the non-believers, and many might feel, in their secret heart of hearts, that the traditional filmic look of Lord of the Rings was better.

Janney steals the movie in the scene in which she discovers the awful truth.

This film is justifiably celebratory and respectful, and it reaches out beyond the rock fanbase.

On the Road does, ultimately, have a touching kind of sadness in showing how poor Dean is becoming just raw material for fiction, destined to be left behind as Sal becomes a New York big-shot. But this real sadness can't pierce or dissipate this movie's tiresome glow of self-congratulation.

Stephen Frears is a supremely accomplished director, but perhaps there was little he could do with this garbled and unsatisfying story about gambling.

Among Jarecki's interviewees is David Simon (author of The Wire) who is incandescent with contempt for the system.

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."

The icy message may be that love is not a consolation as we face death. Rather the reverse. Love will give your death meaning, but make it no less unbearable.

Despite all those fierce confrontations and tribal divisions, exhaustively rehearsed and mythologised, nobody's really a bad guy and nothing's really at stake.

It's a straightforward, heartfelt drama, well acted and well produced.

In Another Country looks very much like something written on a napkin and shot in the one afternoon that Huppert could come to South Korea. Slight, diverting, forgettable.

The Holocaust material was not entirely successful, though certainly transmitted with absolute certainty and sincerity. This Must Be the Place is not my favourite of Sorrentino's films, but it certainly deserved inclusion at Cannes, and deserves to be watched for the glorious Byrne moments alone.

The Pusher remake may not have the full flavour of the original, but it makes brutally clear how the economics of drugs make paranoia and violence a fact of life.

Beasts of the Southern Wild is a vividly poetic and maybe even therapeutic response to one of the most painful and mortifying episodes in modern American history, second only to 9/11.

Weird and wonderful, rich and strange – barking mad, in fact. It is wayward, kaleidoscopic, black comic and bizarre; there is in it a batsqueak of genius, dishevelment and derangement; it is captivating and compelling.

It's a likable film, though not a sensational development in Tim Burton's career.

Comedy gothic isn't exactly novel, and frankly there is a sense here of a movie coasting along on Halloween hype-marketing, without providing as many laughs and ideas as it really could have done.

Kazan brings to the role a sweet and dignified vulnerability, keeping rigorously to plausible human behaviour.

The direction from Eric Lartigau keeps things moving along fast and furious: preposterous it may be, the movie is carried off with some style.

What a strange and intriguing film.

The snuff-porn aesthetic might suggest a realist drama, but a supernatural dimension is brought into play, making the plot directionless. There isn't an ounce of ingenuity in the way the movie is concluded, but some generic expertise in the way it is put together.

The premise is looking pretty tired.

Nicole Kidman gives her best performance since "To Die For."

Perhaps above everything else, Arnold returns us to the most potent fact about the Cathy and Heathcliff love affair: it is a love affair between equals, not between a woman with coquettish "erotic capital" and a man with property and status.

Sadly, Savages plays up to Stone's worst tendencies: machismo, bombast and self-indulgence, and the factor that could conceivably have made this movie tolerable – humour – is off the menu.

The comedy is at odds, perhaps even at war, with the gravitational downward pull of bittersweet seriousness, and the sucrose content is pretty high by the end. But it's an entertaining film.

As the couple try to rekindle the bedroom flame the note of cutesy comedy kicks in and the movie gets phonier and phonier.

It's a likable scary story – with hints of Tim Burton and Steven Spielberg.

Baldwin has some brilliant moments as he icily dismisses Monica's posturing: his final closeup – heavy-lidded, undeceived – is fascinating and rather chilling.

What could have been simply bizarre, sentimental or contrived here becomes an utterly absorbing love story.

Despite the violence and procedural detail, this is about as gritty as Dixon of Dock Green.

The Wright/Stoppard Anna Karenina is not a total success, but it's a bold and creative response to the novel.

Exhilarating and moving. This is a very satisfying love story.

This is an unrepentantly cynical take on the hope-and-change promised to the US in 2008; this year's election race makes it look even bleaker, an icily confident black comedy of continued disillusion.

It's a bit of a flavourless CGI-fest, without the character and comedy of the Arnie version, and it never really gets to grips with the idea of "reality" as a slippery, malleable concept.

The "breathing" of the title becomes a cleverly recurrent motif, and Markovics's script circles around the themes of death and life in thoughtful and elegant ways: it is a well-carpentered screenplay which bears every sign of having been a labour of love, worked on fruitfully over many years.

There's some comedy in there, too, intentional – mostly. As a poignant study of the ageing process, it's on a rough par with "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel." For The Expendables 3, they might want to consider enlisting Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson and Judi Dench.

It has plenty of energy and drive, and Jeremy Renner is really good, better as a Bourne-y agent than Matt Damon, tougher and more grizzled-looking, more convincing as the professional soldier who has grown careworn and disillusioned in the public service.

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.

The movie is at its lightest, most charming and most persuasive in the 60s; as it approaches the present, something inescapably preposterous weighs it down, though Honoré carries it off with some flair.

It's perfectly workable popcorn entertainment for the school holidays.

Dreams of a Life is a painful film, a Christmas film with no feelgood message, but one which I think would in fact have interested Charles Dickens. Watching it is an almost claustrophobic experience, but a very powerful and moving one.