Tim Robey

From its unshowy script on down, Mississippi Grind is content to rumble along as a character piece, keeping its storytelling loose and unpredictable, like a repeat flick of the dice.

Other directors might have escalated this into the zone of outright horror, with gory payback awaiting. Not Green, who has the level intent of keeping it chillingly real.

Baumbach packs his film with the wit and vigour of a polished one-act play, right down to a climax which wants us to notice how much juggling he’s doing with his ideas.

The scenario is so familiar it could have been the same old story, but the texture of all this street life gives it rather a special shine.

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.

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

Compellingly stumped by its own heroine, the film simply can’t make its mind up about Tonya Harding. If it did, it wouldn’t get away with being such a blast.

For all the film’s merits, the suspicion persists that McDonagh’s a little too pleased with his own fulminating thesis. Time and again the writing is showing off for effect, delivering a fire-and-brimstone sermon with cocky swagger.

Suzume is perhaps Shinkai’s most spookily beautiful work to date, while remaining treasurably odd.

While occasionally too muted for its own good, Apples does benefit from not pushing its quirk factor too hard – that would only have set up a barrier between us and Servetalis’s hollow detachment. It’s a braver choice for Nikou to invite our empathy.

The film has a sheepish, hair-shirt quality, as if it wants credit for intersectional largesse. What it does do quite well is challenge the temptations of unquestioning nostalgia.

As an empathetic snapshot of the current immigrant experience in France, the film is compelling right through, but it’s the central relationship that really digs its way into your soul.

It’s Herzog’s uncertainty as a tourist in the field that gives the film its enticing charge, as surely as his wanderings in the Antarctic, or gropings in the dark to find the world’s oldest cave paintings.

As a film, Testament of Youth glimmers with sadness, but also the apprehension of sadness: we know not all of these boys are coming back.

Pugh is mesmerising.

Admirers of Baker’s earlier work will have a journey to go on here, first in missing the rowdy companionship of protagonists who weren’t wholly out for themselves. As spectacle, this study of a dirtbag running out of extra lives falls into the category of crowd-baiting, not crowd-pleasing. Mikey, repeatedly, is just the worst.

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

There’s a Spielbergian showmanship to Bayona’s films, wedded to an unabashed emotionalism, and this one reaches for you down in the gut.

The film scores highly as a Highsmithian three-hander, and particularly excels at illuminating all the ways this trio have failed to grow up. It shimmers, convinces and thoroughly absorbs.

An assortment of myths are exploded in Zappa, the baggily engaging docu-portrait directed by Bill & Ted star Alex Winter.

Astutely judged for the most part, and reflective on what Reeve meant to people in all phases of his life, the British documentary Super/Man is an emotional rollercoaster with some undeniably walloping moments. The relationships that quite literally saved Reeve come to the fore.

It’s the kind of filmmaking with rich confidence in its own professionalism, like a hired assassin purring with his own satisfaction after a devious, trace-free job.

This is a film of piercingly perceptive moments, even if, as some say of Haneke's own work, it is cold to the core. [28 Dec 2001]

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.

The film grabs your attention with verve, but also has a vision: it’s not mortal danger it finds freaky, but what’s waiting on the other side.

The most haunting part of this riskily earnest film isn’t the unmentionable effects coup of its grand finale, but the quieter beats, all in close-up, that comprise its coda: atomised, spent, and sad.

Wingard has the technique to pull this homage off, and the sense to build unease from somewhere in the core of America’s psyche.

With its single, ultimately blood-soaked day to cover, this wants to be a pressure-cooker thriller, but something’s a little off with the settings.