Xan Brooks

On screen, the man play-acted the qualities of courage and resilience. Off it, he came to embody them too.

Time is of the essence; Eastwood’s 94 years old. He’s not prepared to be cross-examined or sidetracked by pesky minor details.

Salles’s imperfect, hobbled film tells us that hope springs eternal and that joy is a given and that most happy families will find a way to survive.

The film itself never amounts to much more than a silly, self-satisfied crime caper, but the headline stars look as though they are enjoying themselves and their sense of fun, by and large, is infectious.

Babygirl rolls off the track looking almost as neat and anonymous as a box from Tensile’s upstate delivery warehouse.

It’s too skimpy and self-conscious, more a series of gestures than an organic whole. But Ortega frames his action with a delicious high style, interspersing tense standoffs with formal dance sequences. He gives the impression that all his characters are locked in a bizarre hothouse romance, even when they are chasing or attempting to kill one another.

It’s a likable exercise in nostalgia; a joyride through old haunts. Burton’s underworld caper contains plenty of second-hand spirit; what it craves is fresh blood. What it needs is some substance.

The film is fun, broad and exuberant, like a primetime Marxist sitcom, although it does feel indebted to a number of recent, better films around the same theme.

It’s not The Exorcist, Sorcerer or The French Connection. But it makes for a worthy late addition to the great director’s armada.

The strong, credible performances oil the wheels during these clattering shifts of gear and serve to distract from its occasional moments of implausibility.

Anderson’s short, sweet, neatly managed production follows the original tale pretty much to the letter.

May December also comes coloured by the lurid downlight of tabloid culture. It could be a pastiche of a psychological thriller, or a playfully misdirected daytime afternoon soap.

It’s a thorough, measured, often illuminating portrait, aided by readings from Highsmith’s unpublished diaries and interviews with her ex-lovers.

Shinkai casts a spell in the moment, but the magic fades away.

Your standard vampire film would have put Cage centre stage. Renfield, God help it, elects to bury the lede and drive a stake through his heart.

This one almost makes it, but a boggy script slows it down.

Clooney and Roberts try their best but they’re finally not much more than decoration themselves, the filmic equivalent of plastic figurines on a cake.

Three Thousand Years of Longing is guileless, open-hearted, like an antiquarian bookseller’s dream of The Thief of Baghdad. It’s so defiantly out of step with fashion that there’s finally something faintly glorious about it.

A quality cast tackle the script’s various twists and turns with aplomb. But the tale itself feels cumbersome and over-furnished, listing under the weight of its bolt-on subplots and endless reams of dialogue.

The respective charms of Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum receive a rigorous workout during the course of this caffeinated, overeager adventure romp – to the point where significant signs of wear and tear begin to appear.

At the risk of insulting Benedetta, it’s mostly good, clean, wholesome fun.

True Things is not a bad film, exactly. The actors play it like they mean it, while the drama itself carries a natural dry charge. But it’s unambitious, sometimes clunky and doesn’t wrong-foot us once.

Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon offers street-food for the senses, served with lashings of hot sauce. It’s hardly nutritious but it tastes fine in the moment, wolfed down on the run.

Old Henry is a determinedly low-aiming affair.

Vigas’s direction is efficient, pedestrian, entirely built for purpose. But he manages to keep the audience on-board throughout the tale’s twists and turns.

Hallelujah is one for the fans, thorough and informative, like a set of cinematic liner notes, largely content to marvel at the majesty of its subject and the vibrant afterlife of his work.

The Hand of God, no surprise, is Sorrentino’s most nakedly personal film to date, almost to a fault in the way it jettisons the cool distance of The Great Beauty or Il Divo in favour of a sweaty, close-up evocation of youth. It’s a picture only Sorrentino could make. But that doesn’t necessarily make him the safest pair of hands.

Dumont’s secular crisis-of-faith drama has much to say about the corrosive effect of our 24-hour news culture. But it is also indecisive and compromised and plays out as a prolonged admission of defeat.

The disparate ingredients do not always gel. But in fits and starts Bombay Rose casts quite a spell.

Mandibules is a rollicking, rambunctious tequila-dream of a movie.

The restored footage is an intriguing relic – an offcut, raw copy. There’s something pleasingly voyeuristic about the experience of being allowed behind the velvet rope to watch these blusterers hold forth, although I expect their charms may be limited to die-hard devotees.

What can’t be faulted is Noce’s sheer boldness and ambition. If Padrenostro winds up as a bit of a mess, it’s a beautiful mess, a glorious mess.

I wish that I enjoyed The Disciple as much as I admired it. The film is a labour of love insofar as it feels overthought and overburdened, with all the rough edges planed down.

Viewed as an acting masterclass, the film is bruisingly impressive in its way. The principal actors raise the roof; each gets to do their big turn for the camera. But it feels a little schooled, a little staged, like a workshop at the Actors’ Studio.

I’m not convinced it amounts to any more than the sum of its parts, but the parts are intriguing – and some are possessed of real power.

One watches Chalamet’s performance here with a simmering unease, willing him on but wondering if he is entirely fit for the task.

The film is glossy, illuminating and frequently exciting. What it lacks is an emotional charge and a fine-grained texture. We need to invest in these people in order to understand their decisions – and care about the consequences of these.

No one in real life speaks the way they do in this film. No genuine drama is this crudely ordered drama, with its telegraphed turnabouts and conveniently-placed confessions, all building to a stage-managed plea for tolerance and unity.

It tells us that Seberg was wronged and that she looked really great in a bra – and not necessarily in that order.

It’s handsome, it’s amusing, it knows exactly where it’s going. All that is missing is that crucial fifth gear.

West of Sunshine’s rough, down-at-heel Aussie vibe prompts one to set it alongside other recent bawlers and brawlers, such as Kriv Stenders’ Boxing Day or David Michod’s Animal Kingdom. But Raftopoulos is altogether more protective of his characters, shielding them from full-blown horror, clearly wishing them well even as they stumble and fall, and his film works best in tenderly framing a burgeoning father-son friendship.

Filho’s film is never less than heartfelt and strident, like a tale torn from life, or an episode of Jeremy Kyle played as stentorian opera. And this, I suspect, may be part of the problem. Crucially, Angel Face lacks shading, pacing and nuance.

Oh Lucy!’s plot feels overthought. The tone see-saws wildly. What prevents it collapsing are the warm, heartfelt performances, together with Hirayanagi’s obvious affection for her chief protagonist.

Watching it is akin to be being waylaid by an expert raconteur. There is the curious sense that it has told this tale before; that every joke has been honed and rehearsed; every anecdote lovingly polished in advance.

What a peculiarly dodgy, conservative film this is – a lazy salute to a good queen and her faithful Indian servant. It’s a film about the Raj era that looks as if it was made back then, too.

Suburbicon is too lightweight and mannered; it lacks proper fury. Watching it is like having your trouser-leg savaged by an energetic small dog.

What an extravagantly muddled, borderline incontinent film this is. You might call it genre-hopping, except that this would imply some degree of intent and control.

Satrapi's disreputable little creepshow finally doesn't amount to a hill of beans. Maybe that's fine. The Voices provides an enjoyably trashy antidote to the traditional Sundance fare of soulful drama and crusading documentary.

The film is listing, overladen with cheap trinkets. Dogged, heartfelt acting works hard to prop it up.

[Clint Eastwood's] gripping, incurious film gives the impression of having not so much been directed as dictated. It stares so fixedly down the rifle sight that it is finally guilty of tunnel vision.

Full credit to the film-makers, who manage to map their digital bear against his human co-stars and marry Bond’s antique conceit to a high-concept story.

There’s no doubt it makes for a jubilant ride, a galvanic first blast. But it remains a film which feels deeply thought rather than deeply felt; a brilliant technical exercise as opposed to a flesh-and-blood story.

While Benson treats his characters with care and respect, his depiction of grief can feel studied and not felt.

Amalric's handling is cool, studied and perhaps a little self-conscious. But he does a good job of showing how adultery is a noose that tightens at the throat even before an actual crime is committed - at which point the film grows altogether less interesting.

A sweet yet suspect romantic drama.

The pungent, ponderous final chapter of Sono's "Hate" trilogy (following Love Exposure and Cold Fish) bows out with lots of bangs and plenty of whimper.

How ironic to realise that the greatest Mitt Romney campaign ad should arrive too late to save him.

Sattler's film leans on its actors too heavily. It heaps too many implausibilities upon their trembling shoulders. After an hour in Camp X-Ray, the strain starts to show.

God Help the Girl comes loose and easy, verging on the slipshod. It's warm and generous, verging on the sentimental; a film that crystallises the best and worst of Belle and Sebastian's songwriting skills.

It's a professional old-school espionage outing, intricate as clockwork and acted with relish by the ever-watchable Hoffman. But it remains an oddly anonymous enterprise from this talented and distinctive director.

Even Cranston looks to be on auto-pilot here: he comes stomping through the action with a perma-scowl that suggests that his break from playing Walter White is little more than a busman's holiday.

It plays as cut-price Le Carré; a recording of a recording of superior films. The picture is fuzzy, and the plot becomes garbled.

This is a lazy, trashy film that barely goes through the motions.

Full credit to Hardy and Knight for making a film such as Locke. Low-budget film-makers could learn a lot from their method. And yet – having stripped away all but the bare necessities, having reduced the components to a car and a man – they make a classic error of overcompensation.

The film has a ragged charm, a Tiggerish bounce, and a certain sweet melancholy that bubbles up near the end.

If the film finally doesn't tell us anything we did not already know, the approach makes a worn-out old tragedy feel supple and urgent.

A gorgeous yet ultimately frustrating tribute to the Japanese airplane designer Jiro Horikoshi.

The kids are charmless, the adults bemused.

The spirits fly in and out of The Lone Ranger at random. It's nice to see them come and go. I just wish they'd stay for longer.

Director, Eric Valette, is an exuberant market-stall trader, hawking knock-off ingredients.

This hoary, hackneyed old cop-opera...is served with such relish that the fun proves infectious.

The Congress contains tricks aplenty and ideas in abundance. The problem comes in herding these scattered, floating elements towards a satisfying whole.

Mandy Lane feels bogus and compromised: an unreconstructed horror romp in the guise of a nerdish intellectual.

Perhaps this tells us nothing new about life on the inside in the US (there are rapes, riots and suicides), but it at least handles its brief with pace and precision.

It has been converted into a proficient, machine-tooled horror flick, stuffed full of shocks and buttressed with back-story. Mama got so flabby the second time around.

The plot is wildly silly and shot full of holes, maundering endlessly on its slow trawl towards the climax. But the cast at least play it like they mean it, and keep it honest for a spell.

I don't think it knows where it's going. I'm not even sure it cares.

Even Stallone's rumbling voiceover possesses the drooping tone of a lullaby – like 45rpm vinyl played at 33. And if you think that reference is retro, you should see the actual movie.

If Rise of the Guardians is finally never more than the sum of its parts, the parts themselves have real appeal.

All of which works terrifically well up to a point.

Little White Lies unspools as glossy, high-grade tosh, a sun-dappled Big Chill, without the rigour or insight required to make you care about these people and wonder which bed they will eventually wind up in.

Sit in the front – and don't peer too hard – and Chicken With Plums casts an undeniable spell. It is bold, exotic and distinctive, particularly during the animated angel of death sequence.

There is little in the film's pitch-black interior that wasn't tackled better – with more bite, wit and abandon – in "Happiness," "Welcome to the Dollhouse," or "Storytelling."

In keeping with the spirit of Sebald's writing, Gee's film is teasing, elegant and perhaps inevitably unresolved: an invitation as opposed to a destination.

One could class The Walker as a thriller, in that it features a murder, a political scandal and a fraught chase that ends with a car crash. But these elements all seem a little rote and rudimentary. Instead, the film's real focus is on the character of Page and his perilous relationship with the world he inhabits.

No one would accuse it of breaking new ground, or finding fascinating new paths across its well-worn prison yard. But Sauvaire’s drama is lean and trim and unwavering in its task.

Midway through, the plot blows a gasket and the camerawork turns altogether crazed, joggling us about in the semi-darkness while the soundtrack rings to distorted screams. Expect pitch and yaw and lots of gore.

It's not that Paperback Hero is a duff film, exactly. Just a little flimsy, a trifle slight, a mite schematic. The story turns dog-eared midway through. [03 Sep 1999, p.19]

First Reformed is a deeply felt, deeply thought picture; impressive in its seriousness and often gripping in the way it frames itself as a debate and a sermon.