Tim Robey

This modest ladcom scores rather higher on the sincerity scale, much like a best man’s speech that fluffs the jokes but semi-accidentally gets a deep sense of friendship across.

It’s a series of pointless, boorish skits about two unrepentant lotharios.

This cast of national institutions make fools of themselves with a lack of vanity that’s theoretically fun, but there’s playing to the gallery, and then there’s clambering up there to wiggle your bits at them.

Marc Webb, returning after the last instalment, again shows a better feel for the relationships than he does for juggling all the overlapping story elements.

The more you scrutinise the society Roth and these screenwriters have created, the more it seems a chintzily self-designed dystopia whose rules and entire infrastructure are pure cardboard.

What you see in Dom Hemingway is exactly what you end up getting. It’s filthy, it’s shouty, it’s embarrassing, and you mainly want it to go away.

It's halfway-strong, just under-dramatised; goodness, though, if it doesn't show what O'Connell is capable of.

The racing scenes are its one hope of reclaiming your attention, but there aren’t nearly enough of them to justify such a killing duration.

It’s a stunningly confident piece of filmmaking, which holds on to vital clues about how much time has elapsed, and what’s happened, then springs them on us. The performances slay you.

The macho showmanship of director Fyodor Bondarchuk, wedded to such a facile script, turns this undeniably impressive megaproduction into a behemoth you mainly want to cower from.

The point is that you could watch these films for four hours, then spend 14 arguing about them – about whether sex, for vor Trier, is an eternal human mystery, or a cosmic joke at our expense.

Nymphomaniac, which mainly plays out in the banal home-and-office settings you might expect from a 1970s porn shoot, is less drop-dead gorgeous than Antichrist but significantly more human.

The problem isn't a lack of weight, but of lightness. It's stuck with lead feet for a historical caper and serves no other worthwhile purpose.

It’s an elegantly pleasurable period thriller, a film of tidy precision and class.

Jack Thorne's screenplay has all the emotional nuance of a Sudoku puzzle; directed by French romcom veteran Pascal Chaumeil (Heartbreaker), it's bouncy and vacuous enough to feel like a light comedy from the planet Neptune.

It’s wonderful.

The film is not only unchallenging, it seems actively scared of challenging us. You emerge feeling pacified and only semi-entertained.

Oscillates between the jolting and the absurd, bottoming out with a nonsensical coda.

It seethes with frustration on its subjects’ behalf – that for all the impact their stand has had, they still face a many-headed hydra on the road to real democracy.

It’s really a radical experiment in non-fiction cinema – not seeking to enlighten or inform, but to disorientate us, practically to drown us, in a nightmare vision of the ocean’s power.

It’s a misguided enterprise all round, and while it’s perfectly possible to applaud everything the film wants to say, you find yourself cringing at the ways it’s saying it.

Other than sniggering about what an outré stereotype they’ve served up, it’s hard to see how Lee and Copley can justify this performance, which is quite the worst of the year, and sends the whole final act of their movie straight to oblivion.

This meat-and-potatoes B-thriller stays modest and grounded: compared with the noisy excesses of higher-budgeted action flicks, it has a kind of crude integrity.

Writer-director Jeremy Lovering, in his feature debut, keeps a skilful handle on technique — his film is a calling card that could give you paper cuts.

The movie doesn’t have a funny bone in its body, clomping from one unoriginal set piece to the next with a head-scratching lack of urgency.

[A] mildly engaging print-the-legend documentary.

This starfighter-recruit blockbuster is refreshingly idea-driven.

Rather than bionically enhancing all its characters, a better movie might have found ways to celebrate their sloth and slime.

For all its properly surreal mayhem, this flick isn’t quite as nimble or emotionally rounded as its predecessor.

The movie is hauntingly romantic at heart, in the best spirit of a Gothic fairytale, but without the harsh shadows or hard edges.

With a tighter plot and slightly more knowing craftsmanship, this might have worked, but Swedish director Mikael Hafström (1408, The Rite) isn’t really the man to poke fun with any sophistication at his stars’ well-established personas.

For all the solid efforts of the cast, it’s still one of those biopics with a totally canned story arc and as many head-slapping moments as intentional laughs.

A tough, vital, electrifying film.

Let’s blame Fellowes before Shakespeare – one of them built this house, the other has just walked right through it in his filthiest garden clogs.

Perhaps because the joke’s already spent, this sequel has a pretty low bar to clear, and manages to be both utterly meritless and weirdly bearable.

For a while, the film gets by on silliness alone. But in the end, it all amounts to no more than a sniggery guilty pleasure.

Allen’s ambitions with this taut, tart character study might not be stratospheric, but they’re at least moderate-to-high, and his degree of success is exciting.

Runner Runner starts off with a solid draw, then folds on the flop.

Though pristinely faithful to Maynard's book, it blurs inexorably into Nicholas Sparks.

Abi Morgan's script – better, for my money, than her work on either Shameor The Iron Lady – elegantly straddles two timelines to illuminate a deliberately obscured life

Benedict Cumberbatch is inspiredly cast, serving up a technically ingenious performance which may be his juiciest ever.

It's a bureaucratic noir nightmare that may put you more readily in mind of Kafka, albeit with a tone of tongue-in-cheek bleakness that's bracing and funny – at least at first.

At just under two hours, it's a little long, but the blend of biting character study and campaigning pharmaceutical docudrama is zesty and memorable.

Elicits from McQueen a directing job that's compellingly humble but also majestic, because his radical showmanship is turned to such precise, human purposes.

A vastly enjoyable theatrical banquet, if perhaps not a profound one, is served up in a bit of a rush here, as if they can't wait to get the next sitting in. But you certainly don't come away feeling hungry.

The result is a film that does perfectly respectable justice to Lomax's ordeal, without ever making a strong case for itself as independently stirring art.

Flexing some of that Jean Valjean resolve, but with a payload of untrammelled, Wolverine-like rage behind it, Jackman comes closest to shouldering the movie, without ever seriously threatening to make it work.

Every turn Karl Golden’s cheeky-chappie comedy-drama about the early-Nineties rave scene takes is a little less original or convincing.

There’s nothing soft and romcom-cuddly here, but a brutal dissection of competitive friendship dynamics, eating disorders and selfish misery.

If films were gestures, this one would be a perfectly timed shrug, with the smile to match.

Dean Parisot, who made the delightful Galaxy Quest, has a funnier sensibility than the first movie’s director, Robert Schwentke, but he’s still defeated by a script that’s over-complicated and under-sophisticated.

A good cop/bad cop action comedy with the funniest two-women-above-the-title pairing in memory.

It’s just a big blue blur – too anodyne to elicit more than heavy sighs, too full of Smurfs not to recommend solely to the under-eights.

Fans of Cage and Cusack, previously paired as unlikely allies in Con Air (1997), may be looking forward to a bit of deranged actorly combat once Hansen is cornered in the interrogation room, but it’s here that this hopeless flick comes up especially short.

There are no shattering revelations here – if Gibney’s canny gathering of various narratives, shimmering score and cool graphics give his film the goose-pimply intrigue of a spy thriller, it just happens to be one you’ve already seen. It’s also one in which the subplot, if anything, takes over from the main plot.

A story stretched thinly between two many characters, without the dynamism or momentum to keep itself charging onwards.

The film’s family-saga pretensions and bombastically overdone characterisation keep hobbling its better elements.

Call it a landlocked variant on Robinson Crusoe, but it’s a hypnotic one, with a sense of mystery and interior life that are all its own.

Come the final act, the best political thrillers don't play nice, after all – they twist the knife. This one’s so concerned with making the world a better place, it retracts the blade and wipes it clean

You’ve never seen a documentary like The Act of Killing. If you saw too many like it, your hold on sanity might fray, which is not so much the film’s fault as that of its bloodcurdling subject. This movie is essential.

That the film ends up floundering is not really their fault. These two belong on screen together: when they’re not completing each other’s sentences, they’re completing them wrongly, which is even better.

The one inspired idea here is what happens to the minions when they’re injected with serum by the film’s mystery baddie, and this is enough to give us at least a reel’s worth of anarchic pleasure.

Where we might have expected a gentle or rueful coda, we get a battle of the sexes as blistering as the best of Tracy/Hepburn, and infinitely more frank.

The movie subverts expectations, and not in a good way, by seeming in a dither about its own identity. The romance is by the by, the comedy as sparse as can be. We’re left with a curious non-film about the pitfalls of higher education assessment. Odd.

It’s a thoroughly warm diversion, whose lapses into cliché only make it cosier.

It has heft, it looks amazing, and it's businesslike to a fault.

There are cameos from James Franco, Stephen Dorff, a comically moustachioed David Schwimmer and an unrecognisably hirsute Chris Evans as various lowlifes. A pity, then, that nothing else in Ariel Vromen’s movie is remotely on Shannon’s level, from the plodding, Scorsese-clone script to the needlessly lifeless editing and cinematography.

The actual exorcism sequence, involving three well-meaning cult members and a chicken, is strangely uneventful – and if there’s one thing a movie exorcism should never, ever be, it’s that.

Despite the Smith family’s association with Scientology, which unmistakably informs this tale’s belief system (“Fear is a Choice”), as well as its shaky attempts at mythic patterning, it is in no way the laughable shambles that John Travolta’s infamous "Battlefield Earth" was.

This movie starts from a premise so sociologically batty it’s hard to take any of its subsequent terrors seriously, which means tension doesn’t so much fly out the window as fail to even get up the driveway.

A dizzying collage of all the changes in London’s social and architectural fabric since light was first trained through celluloid.

This would-be-frothy date flick is a sub-"Meet the Fockers" dog’s dinner.

Bad scripting, bad plotting, terrible joke formulation, and not a single character actually having a hangover until part-way through the end credits. What kind of a Hangover movie is this?

Before, after, and between these (action) sequences, even by the paltry standard of previous scripts, it’s slow-witted and won’t shut up.

On his broadest canvas yet, Trapero mounts a saga about the role of conscience, which might seem old-fashioned if it weren’t so urgently imagined. An added fillip is Michael Nyman’s stirring score, his best in years.

An acutely compassionate account of unshakeable guilt.

Brian De Palma's flamboyant directing might seem callous were it not balanced by Sissy Spacek's heart-rending performance as the mousy adolescent who wreaks telekinetic vengeance when she's humiliated by bitchy classmates. [10 Dec 2011, p.39]

It takes a special kind of biopic to reduce its subject to the least imaginably interesting version of itself.

This is a grand success – perhaps a new populist benchmark in what to do with a flagging franchise, and a witty, light-on-its-feet prequel.

This Ireland-set fantasy adventure, starring Albert Sharpe and Janet Munro as a father and daughter vying with a local clan of leprechauns is benign and deeply genial stuff. [25 Mar 2020]

One of the rawest, toughest, most emotionally scalding portraits of a marriage ever put on screen.

Jerome Robbins’s legendary choreography needs the biggest screen it can get; when the movie’s firing on all cylinders of music, lyrics and motion (twice: “America” and “Gee, Officer Krupke”) there’s little to touch it.

Cinematogapher Dean Semler gets amazing colours as the sun sets, and there’s a bravely avant-garde debut score from Kiwi composer Graeme Revell, pumping up the pulse with sinister breathing sounds. The plot even thrives on a tacit cultural tension between the Australian stars and the arrogant interloper.

It’s an interesting achievement in many ways.

Grand, propulsive.

This slice of class-baiting British ordeal horror from writer-director James Watkins is potently made. It's also exploitative trash, serving up silly levels of alarmist editorialising about kids today.

The Big Sleep is the best scripted, best directed, best acted, and least comprehensible film noir ever made. [27 Aug 2004]

Plays entertainingly like an Asian version of a Michael Mann film, albeit with the plot of Mean Streets. It's not quite essential, but the deeply felt ending looks like a jumping-off point for all that Wong has made since. [22 Jan 2005]

Stanwyck, in her absolute prime, is hard to touch - even Katharine Hepburn, or Claudette Colbert, who was originally supposed to play Jean, might have struggled to make her quite such sly and mesmerising company. Sturges feeds her subtle innuendos by the cartload. [19 Mar 2013]

What a multiple swansong and beautiful accident The Misfits is.

There's hardly a shot in Polanski's debut that isn't laced with purpose. [12 Jan 2013, p.10]

Not a hugely comfortable fit for the silent treatment, Noël Coward's play might have transferred better in the stagey confines of the early sound era. [14 Jul 2012]

The construction has a mocking fatalism that might have felt oppressive, but Malle and his actors keep you constantly on the edge of your seat, wondering what curse will befall the desperate lovebirds next.

Fifty Shades of Grey can only dream of being as erotic a work as Powell and Pressburger's tale of repressed desire and simmering passions among a community of nuns at a convent in the Himalayas. Jack Cardiff's cinematography, with its rich, dark interiors and mountains painted on glass, is among the most beautiful in film. [09 Mar 2020]

It has the desperate vitality of something barely made-up.

There are no good guys in this quietly gripping adaptation of Ted Lewis's 1969 novel Jack's Return Home, but cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky brings out the stark beauty of the North-East while capturing their attempts to kill each other. [09 Mar 2020]

Skilful photography boosts a standard-issue love triangle into one of Hitch's own favourite films from the period. [14 Jul 2012]

Everything we're meant to feel here is bluntly dictated by the script and delivered with unambiguous, button-pushing direction - it's impossible to miss. [06 Aug 2016]

Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman won Oscars, but the work of Eileen Brennan and Timothy Bottoms is even more cherishable.

It holds up as terrifically fresh and constantly enjoyable, thanks to the collision of two social milieus that American cinema rarely puts side by side.

Wholly useless, entirely harmless, Stratton would be good clean fun, if it was good or fun.

Scriptwise, it's as stilted as any other 1950s studio horror flick, but De Toth does a great job at making the melting waxworks look genuinely creepy, and, yes, that really is Charles Bronson (credited with his original surnme, "Buchinsky") loping about the museum as Price's deaf-mute assistant Igor. [28 May 2005]

Elliot is a talent eccentric enough to make Nick Park look like an office drone, and the serious sadness underpinning his vision only makes the humour work better.

What kept me smiling right through this overturned odyssey is that the men in it aren’t brave pioneers or scary outlaws or any such thing – they’re incorrigible nerds, a century before the word was coined.

Everett overdoes the lachrymosity right at the end, the one part of the film where a more subdued rigour would have served him better. At the very least, though, it’s a command performance he puts in front of us, an uncompromising feat of empathy in the role he’s made his own more than any other.

Ozu may have made subtler films, but the clarity of his social critique here is wrenching and unassailable.

Another play Hitchcock was resistant to adapting, this time by John Galsworthy, made for a static but honourable picture. [14 Jul 2012]

André De Toth's film noir benefits from lovely LA location work and a strong supporting cast, including a scenery-chewing cameo from Timothy Carey. [10 Dec 2011, p.38]

Tornatore may have hit a sticky wicket with his subsequent work, but he knew what he was doing here: warning us about the irrational lure of the filmed past, which is to say cinema itself, then ushering us grandly to our seats.

A masterly reconstruction of a Brooklyn bank siege on August 22, 1972, built around arguably Al Pacino's finest screen performance.

Quantum of Solace offers next to no solace, if we mean respite, but in plunging its hero into a revenge-displacement grudge mission, it has the compensation of a rock-solid dramatic idea, and the intelligence to run and run with it.

It's too cruel to be all that much fun, and lacks the antagonistic zip of the earlier Dunne/Grant divorce romp The Awful Truth. [08 Nov 2003]

Glorious.

The whole climax is a delight

Profound, penetrating and unfathomable rather than (quite) perfectly formed art. Vertigo pioneered that camera effect, known as the dolly zoom, whereby the viewer (the point of view is always Stewart’s) appears to fall into an infinite abyss while remaining quite still...The film itself is that abyss, and we’re still falling into it and for it.

Heavenly Creatures, which remains Jackson's best movie, his most serious and his most daring, is 99 minutes long and doesn't waste a single one. It manages to be both shocking and intoxicating, a portrait of giddy teenage escapism which yanks itself free from reality in disturbing, and finally deadly, ways. Jackson has an obvious flair for fantasy - an obsession with it, one might say - but this is a film about its dangers, not just its temptations. [17 Nov 2012]

Hawaiian waves crash over a high-calibre Hollywood prestige drama, sharp and sobering, with top-drawer work from Lancaster, Clift and Sinatra.

Werner Herzog's classic vampire movie Nosferatu will scare the living daylights out of you.

It’s the very open-endedness of the film’s subtext that gives it power. When a sleepy California town is overrun, first by the outbreak of a strange delusion that people have been replaced by doppelgangers, but then gradually by the doppelgangers themselves, the film is brilliantly placed, however unwittingly, to illustrate America’s political paranoia from both ends.