Though the sketchy narrative could do with a bit of filling out, and the settings could be less gloomy, this is a memorable interpretation that benefits enormously from sound casting decisions.

In the hands of bolder storytellers this could have been a witty take on "E. T."

Tight as a drum, glamorous and exquisitely funny, this one should earn them (Coens) enough cash to make five more offbeat minor masterpieces like "The Man Who Wasn't There" -- and the Coens deserve that as much as we do.

There is much to admire in Vol. 1, not least a performance from Uma Thurman as steely as the plate in her character’s head and a knowing soundtrack that effortlessly smears the boundaries between east and west.

Stealing the show is Suzanne Flon's immaculate display as the matriarch whose good-natured indulgence of her ghastly relations belies a guilty secret. Mercilessly acute and quietly devastating.

Two things make Eastwood's task easier for him: a superb cast and a cracking source novel. Dennis Lehane's book is one of the very best thrillers of recent years, richer in Boston detail and closer in character study than anything Eastwood manages to bring to the screen.

This powerful film offers no excuses for Sandro’s actions, but his situation demands our empathy.

Another thriller absent of any real thrills.

The feel-good hit of the year thus far. Be warned, though: if you think a little Jack Black goes a long way, then this isn’t for you.

Ultimately this is a film about feelings, moments and things not said. Like "Lost In Translation," it’s about what happens when people living in their own little worlds collide.

Another of the film's positive aspects is its narrative style, reminiscent of Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon.

Diehards might be disappointed at the lack of chainsaw wielding, but this is Campbell’s finest hour since you-know-what.

Director DeVito doesn't make his characters' cold-blooded decisions anywhere near as credible as he did in territorial black comedy "The War Of The Roses." Someone's losing their touch, it seems.

Packed with more clichés than a pizza has pepperoni slices, this is truly disappointing, especially after Lane’s stunning performance in "Unfaithful."

Many will love this because it forces them to cry; others may resent it for the same reason.

There's a Cronenbergian coldness to Olivier Assayas' corporate thriller.

Allen’s films have always had a feeling of melancholy to them, but this -- the first film Allen has written after the fall of the Twin Towers -- harbours a sense of dark unsettlement amid the neurotic romantic comedy.

The romance between Knowles and her leading man doesn't quite spark, and cutting 30 minutes wouldn't have hurt, but Saturday night disposable fluff is rarely as warm-hearted or exuberant as this.

Caine and Duvall paired on screen would be worth the price of admission even if they were just reading the Yellow Pages.

Lacks sparkle, and finally tips its gallery of colourful protagonists into the realm of caricature.

With cinemas dominated by underwhelming blockbusters and formulaic rom-coms, it’s easy to become disillusioned with the state of the movies. Thank the almighty, then, for Lost In Translation, which in 102 wondrous minutes will restore your faith in the power of the medium.

Powerful, personal, but bombastic.

The exuberance of the package, coupled with a sexual frankness seldom seen in English language cinema, makes this the most fun foreign film since "Y Tu Mamá También."

The action meanders occasionally, but the performances are consistently disarming and Luciano Zito and Diego del Piano’s black-and-white photography complements the mood of ironic melancholy.

Perhaps it was not intended to serve as a sequel to the fabulous "Dogtown And Z-Boys," but Helen Stickler's documentary does pick up where Stacey Peralta left off, following skateboarding into the '80s boom.

Hunter is superb as the alcoholic mom trying to keep her life from falling apart, and Wood and Reed are scarily convincing as delinquents.

Slap a restriction order on yourself and don't come within ten paces of this hideous concoction.

It's an hilarious, touching reminder that, sometimes, ordinary folk have the world's most interesting lives.

A return to the Western in its pure, cinematic form.

Formula is now the name of the game, although a steady diet of stunts and shootouts ensures that the audience is never bored.

Happily, Jamie Lee Curtis gurning through a guitar solo (she is Lady Spinal Tap, after all) while her floundering ‘mother’ mimes on stage is amusing.

The cast are terrific, but byt he end, the film is struggling to stay together as much as the family it depicts.

William H. Macy is a scream as the composite radio announcer whose hyperbolic racetrack reports are not only hilarious, but illustrate the impact of radio in creating a mass culture and how it was instrumental in making sporting events a nationwide obsession.

Lushly photographed by Andrei Zhegalov and impeccably played, it’s a long-overdue corrective to the kind of wildly patriotic war film produced in the Soviet era.

Every tiny aspect of the universe here comes from the filmmakers' imagination, and while this occasionally leaves us bemused, the film as a whole is a magical, otherworldly trip into undiscovered areas of cinema.

Delivers an effective double-sting ending.

Ultimately, this potentially intriguing character thriller loses its direction when it turns into a mean-spirited stalk-and-bash actioner.

Jarecki's film brilliantly illustrates the fallibility of memory, the slippery nature of 'facts' and even people's invention of events that may never have taken place.

This arty approach may dismay hard-core horror fans, but it captures the dark grace of the original with wit and style.

Ultimately make no more than a cosmetic effort to disguise its stage origins.

Considering the ignominy of its path to British cinemas, it’s hard not to approach the film with caution, but after a few minutes in the company of an unusually low-key but typically world-weary Al Pacino, it begins to win you over, dragging you deeper into the sleazy political underworld it describes.

Louis Sachar's compelling children's classic is about as Disney as Freddy Krueger. It's got murder, racism, facial disfigurement and killer lizards.

Improv comedy at its best: subtle, hilarious, excruciating and affecting in equal measure.

The dialogue is intelligent, but the humourlessness -- and the fact that most of the cast could use a good slap -- results less in involving drama and more in the viewer being held hostage in a 90-minute therapy session for the well-dressed and narcissistic.

Has something for everyone.

Yes, it’s offensive, stupid and loud, but its cartoonish, macabre wit should be evident to anyone with a brain in the first ten minutes. Whether it’s funny or not, though, is another matter entirely. Approach with extreme caution -- and/or rubber gloves.

Like a late ’60s satire played embarrassingly seriously.

If your anti-Apartheid musical knowledge only goes as far as The Specials’ Free Nelson Mandela, this is a toe-tapping, thought-provoking education.

25th Hour proves that big ideas and an indie sensibility can still flourish inside the studio system. One of the more entertaining and thought-provoking Spike Lee Joints in a long while.

The fact that Miyazaki and his team hand-draw the images before they're digitally coloured and animated gives them an artistry that has been woefully lacking from so many recent American features.

Sadly, though, all this arthouse exploitation fails to reveal as much about contemporary Korea as, say, "Texas Chainsaw" did about the States.

Not dire, but you can’t escape the feeling that there’s a good movie in here trying to get out.

Writer-director Jill Sprecher doesn't have the deftness or sad humour that P. T. Anderson uses in his similarly contrived group portraits, but the cast are, at least, individually fine.

A fable that leaves us unenlightened at the end, it is a curious, worthy failure.

Curiously uninvolving. It never comes to life -- even after someone is found dead. Nevertheless, there are pleasures to be found in the performances, particularly in Eddie Izzard's lovelorn Chaplin and Edward Herrmann's paranoid Hearst.

It may lack the fine-tuned inventiveness of Toy Story or the knowingness of Shrek, but it still delivers solid laughs and thrills wrapped up in an infectious sense of character.

It may not scale the heights of Heat or The Insider, but this is riveting stuff and reconfirms Mann's status as a master of the medium.

A neo-realist fairy tale that charms without losing sight of its key themes of exploitation and truth to one’s self.

Building slowly from a stately start, Del Toro manages to unite all his disparate elements - ghosts and gold, infidelity and politics - for a devastating final reel. The command of sound and colour is breathtaking.

A bone fide masterpiece. An erotic, deeply unsettling, darkly comic journey through the subconscious city of night.

Director Yang Joon-hyun works scrupulously from the Hollywood serial murder playbook, and delivers something which does its job, even as its last reel flounders with several too many plot twists, but has no particular reason to exist.

Now, it's a slower film, with a little more intellect and sentiment, but perhaps the added time to think will make you feel less overwhelmed.

In seamlessly interweaving top-notch CGI and incredible stuntwork, Cohen has delivered some of the finest auto-action ever put on screen.

Most unforgivably, the period detail is all over the place and the punk/disco soundtrack a real hotch potch, leaving this a story with no real sense of time or place.

Director Bong’s on song for his dark debut. A little rough around the edges, Barking Dogs Never Bite still delivers the blackest comedy lightened by some thrilling filmmaking, a clear calling card for Parasite. Caninophiles beware.

After Ned Kelly, Jagger needed a hit and Performance was it. Although playing a rock star probably wasn't the greatest challenge, he more than holds his own against Fox in a psychedelic classic.

A welcome antidote to anodyne Hollywood cartooning.

Though Spike Lee would clearly like this movie to remind you of ills-of-TV satires like A Face In The Crowd and Network (there's a spin on the well-remembered "mad as hell" speech), it comes out as a weird, unsatisfying hybrid of Robert Downey Sr.'s Putney Swope and Mel Brooks's The Producers.

Complemented by its black-and-white photography and a moody DJ Shadow score, this is a gritty yet often tender look at society's margins.

Even while laughing at lines like, “Black people don’t do bungee-jumping, it’s too much like lynching,” you’re still left thinking that the funniest man in the building was not actually in front of the camera.

Great cinematography captures the spectacular scenery and the directing is as assured as the stimulating array of characters.

While it's all grand opera, and driven by sweeping gestures and pompous, overwritten dialogue, it is prone to plain silliness - especially in granting us the big showdown at the close. But the sheer dynamism of the action, coupled with Hans Zimmer's lavish score and the forcefield of Crowe, still makes this a fiercesome competitor in the summer movie stakes.

An ambitious and sloppy, yet occasionally likeable, cross-European fable.

This imaginative and intriguing Anime deserves all the plaudits heaped upon it.

Strange, stylish and intelligent, this is a rare anime film that delivers on its Eastern promise.

As absorbed as he is with his characters, McTiernan is still able to provide a couple of dazzling set pieces - the sustained opening heist (involving a pun-intended Trojan horse) is a doozy, while the Magritte-inspired, music-fuelled denouement is, well, inspired.

However you dress it up, laughs where there should be frights is patently piss poor.

A straightforward camping-holiday nightmare, or a sly, ironic take on the same. It works deliciously as both.

The best Muppet movie for some time, adding film references a-plenty, dark, edgy comedy and even a touch of post-modernism to the usual all-singing, all-dancing ridiculousness.

Assayas' attempt to present a multi-perspective Polaroid view of Adrien and his circle fall back on the tired technique of abruptly punctuating grainy, handheld sequence with jump cuts. A disappointingly sterotypical French film.

Mike Figgis raised enough cash to make this with a pretty good cast and a lot of technical skill, but it's still hard to endure at feature length.

Zeffirelli's mawkish tendencies are checked by Mortimer's funny, richly observant screenplay; it's rose-tinted but plays up character and everyday detail rather than wallowing in war-movie villainy.

Despite the gritty subject matter, combined with some clichéd set pieces, interest is retained right through to the bleak end, largely due to the direction and Refn's handling of the excellent cast.

Entrapment ambles lazily through its set-up and features only one (admittedly impressive) stretch of white-knuckle daredevilry as our heroes dangle off the tallest building in the world (which is in Kuala Lumpur, incidentally).

The romantic plotting is so cliched that the denouement may as well have been e-mailed, and the director has fooled himself into believing that a rousing soundtrack is adequate shorthand for the mood of the flower power generation.

Okay, it may not be Shakespeare, but it's a welcome bonus, for neither Chow or Wahlberg looks out of place in crossfire that would likely leave trained military personnel shell-shocked.

Ritchie's colour-desaturated style, use of unusual background music, scattershot slang (some subtitled) and mostly tasteful black comedy give the whole film the feel of an altered state of perception.

The most worrying thing about She's All That is its message. The "ugly duckling" (specs, dungarees, art-lover) must conform (she gets a makeover and the boys notice her "bobos" for the first time) to fit in.

The sum of the parts is a cautiously optimistic view of love's power to re-shape lives, propounded with considerable appeal.

That this is a patchwork quilt of a screenplay (written by five credited writers) is apparent in its use of little bits of this and little bits of that. Did none of them notice, looking at the big picture, that it's unbelievable?

So the prognosis is generally positive, though there may be a touch too much sugar in this motion picture panacea, which is, in places, shamelessly sentimental to an extraordinarily manipulative degree.

Prince Of Egypt is epic storytelling on the grandest scale. Big imagery, big themes, big emotions - all met head-on and accomplished triumphantly within a film that is in essence a live action movie - more precisely a Steven Spielberg live action movie - writ cartoon.

A fulsome, fascinating piece of 20th century Irish folklore.

The thrill of the original is seeing a black-and-white, one-foot-on-the-floor, no-sex-please Hays Code world suddenly explode into a slasher movie. Our loss of innocence has, simply, changed all the rules.

The film has a real sense of a situation slipping out of control, with marvellous displays of hysteria matched by movie trickery that spreads the edginess to the audience.

Fun for kids, but, despite some adult references, appeal for the over 10s is limited.

Never quite as witty as it should be.

On paper, fine; on celluloid, a Rocky Horror Show of nightmarish proportions.