Tara Brady

Watching anonymous child after anonymous child arrive for treatment makes for grim and frustrating viewing. We want to know who these kids are, but the film does not. It’s the very antithesis of how hospital drama – narrational or otherwise – are supposed to function.

Gibney is equally fascinated by Putin’s journey from anonymous civil servant to strongman, and the broader political scene’s increasing resemblance to performance art. It makes for an arresting chronicle and many follow-up questions.

A terrifying reminder that those with absolute power don’t make good retirees.

Each sequence of the film springs a fresh horror and a new intrigue.

Ignore the unassuming title: Ordinary Love is a love story that is extraordinary.

Forget the big brand space opera: here’s the season’s pre-eminent work of event cinema.

Shot in 96-frames-per-second, this is a stunning, thrilling chronicle of nature at its angriest.

The beats ought to form a more compelling narrative than they do.

Harrison Jr is frazzled and electric; Russell is wounded and circumspect. The audacious drama is matched by musical cues from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score and a wildly impressive collection of tunes, running from A$AP to SZA.

Just Mercy is commendably restrained in its courtroom scenes – there is none of the contempt-baiting wailing and gnashing of teeth that too often characterises legal procedurals.

For all that emotional content, Amanda is a pleasingly unsentimental film, never more so than in its understanding of children.

It’s a ravishing spectacle. The trouble is that the unremitting gorgeousness robs the material of all its grit, of its satire, of the sense of precariousness that one experiences on the characters’ behalf, of the fear of hunger, and of the dread that any chill or fever might be a death sentence.

The real issue is the distracting and disturbing “digital fur technology”. Every time Cats settles into an admittedly avant-garde shape, an ear twitches or a tail flicks and you’re back thinking about how ghastly the actual cats look.

No other film – not even by Georges Méliès at his most fantastic – trumpets early cinema's status as a magical science and scientific magic, quite so loudly or melodically.

Husbands longueurs and wobbly shots of improvised tangents never congeal into anything as satisfying as Cassavetes s The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Gloria or A Woman Under the Influence. But, in contrast with director s mean-spirited inheritors, the film does own that husbands even rubbish ones are people too. [28 Sep 2012, p.13]

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s movie has a strange, magical aura for cineastes.

Mandabi’s playful grammar and arresting camerawork are as exciting and politically charged as anything that emerged from the contemporaneous Nouvelle Vague.

It’s all very superficial, but carried off with impeccable style.