Tim Robey

It’s addictive fantasy, satisfyingly snappy even in its absurdity, and something no Chastain fan can afford to miss.

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

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.

It’s jocular, never feels like a screed, and it’s refreshingly outward-looking.

Watching it is like settling into a reupholstered armchair which still creaks in the same old places.

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?

Cedar might have built up a broader satirical thesis from all this wheeling and dealing, but he’s happy to let the film rest gently on Gere’s shoulders – these days, a pretty safe foundation.

For all the emptiness of Nobody, it’s sleekly watchable.

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 History of Sound has fashioned a deliberate non-epic from wispy material, keeping such a tight lid on sentiment, it’s like an obstinate clamshell with its secrets. Expectations need recalibrating beforehand so as not to feel lightly underwhelmed.

While Gyllenhaal thrusts himself into the role with energy, you can sense his awareness that his acting has to carry the whole shebang, like a chef in the kitchen doing every last job. He’s entertaining, but guilty, like The Guilty, of throwing nuance in the bin.

Shot entirely in Welsh, this pristine debut from Lee Haven Jones has a methodical chill to it, laying steady groundwork for a buffet of grotesqueries. It’s horror-satire, with its eye on environmental plundering, and a demonic revenge to exact.

The story’s insistent ambiguities ought to make it seductively complex, but it never quite shakes off a stuck-in-the-mud vibe.

Nyad’s theme of women pulling together just about lands – thanks chiefly to Foster. But following the recipe of human interest this slavishly is a fast track to not being very interesting at all.

It’s a film that feels emotionally half-fulfilled, never quite grabbing or devastating in the way you’d hope.

The distinctive charms of Wain’s aesthetic certainly come over, especially daubed across the lovely end credits, by which time this jumpy curio, with almost palpable relief, has laid itself to rest.

Denial certainly isn’t great cinema – it gets stuffy and repetitive, and Lipstadt’s frustration at not being allowed to testify herself isn’t the burning issue it ought to be. Still, it’s textbook advocacy, and a teaching tool of genuine value.

It’s well-acted, especially by Healy (The Innkeepers), who makes you feel the pain of every wound, the ratcheting torture of every dilemma. But the film’s also a gimmicky exercise whose hollowness and credibility are constant problems.

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

The crazy surfeit of style can only go so far to compensate for the story, which is well-nigh impossible to care about.

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]

From a premise of purest hokum, the Sixth Sense director wrings out an impressive amount of sweat – it's a real return to form.

Puig’s story is trivialised by slickness, and the tragic ending barely registers.

[Folman's] film is an alluring curio, a protest against the digital frontier which gets stuck with a knotty internal paradox – it starts out as thoroughly its own experiment, and ends up like a counterfeit of too many others.

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.

Well-played and divertingly handsome, it’s one of those pedigreed visions of love and war which backs away from specifics, reassuring us almost to death with its lavish craft. It’s thoroughly easy to sit through, when it should probably have been harder.

Smartly cast and gluing that career ever-more-diligently back together, LaBeouf gets under the McEnroe skin with twitchy gusto.

It’s rough, to say the least, and that’s not just a matter of hasty visuals: the whole thing feels provisional and half-hearted, like a scrunched-up charcoal sketch.