Kudos to Anderson and Gilroy for making a low-action, dialogue-heavy geopolitical thriller in this day and age. But aside from finally giving its star some strong material to work with, it doesn’t live up to its promise.

Lyne's efforts to be both passionate and artistic are generally successful, although a few sex scenes are disturbing and arguably close to salacious.

Shot in grainy, high contrast black-and-white with a lot of simple but effective optical and aural tricks to suggest the workings of his unusual mind, this is one of the most intimate movies in recent memory.

Part 4, to its credit, is the noisiest. Disappointingly, it's also the worst: not bad, just not as good.

While never scaling any great heights, there's lots of little points - and some bigger ones, like the pairing of the leads - to enjoy.

Mulan serves up the sort of classic entertainment the Magic Kingdom was built on: stunning animation, sharply defined characters, a smattering of catchy tunes all seamlessly woven into a simple, powerfully told yarn.

The X-Files can stand proud as a genuine movie with a beginning, a middle and an end, two charismatic leads and a franchise ahead of it.

[Hartley] has turned out a film that is the same as his impressive back catalogue - quirky talk-driven curiosities about people living on the fringes of society - yet somehow different, managing to imbue his usual obsessions with the freshness and vitality of a first-time director.

Bright, breezy, thoroughly enjoyable while you're sitting through it yet not likely to stick around in your head for long.

Hope may float, but this bore flounders beyond salvaging.

Casting aside the forgettable ragbag of a cast, tiptoeing round the leaden script, and avoiding the story's many pot-holes (how come he only breathes fire twice?), Godzilla does provide plenty to look at. But that, for fear of sounding ungrateful, is all.

The movie as a whole - an undeserved flop in the US - is energetic, pacey and funny with tons of great fights. What more could any six-year-old want?

Apart from a sprinkling of Wilde's legendary bons mots and a few fleeting visits to theatres where audiences cheer Lady Windemere's Fan, there is disappointingly little here to suggest the complexity of his mind, the range of his writing or, crucially, the importance of being Oscar.

Sound tricky? It is, and all a little too cutely so, the switches back and forth between realities ever more contrived and eventually tiresome, prompting giggles of relief as the storylines painfully draw towards a soap operatic convergence.

This movie intrigues and disappoints in equal measure.

A stand-out romantic fantasy and surefire hit of Ghost-ly proportions. But all you cynical and smart-arsed brethren, beware: this is definitely not for you.

Though Species II is far from serious and aimed squarely at the hairy-palmed, it really didn't need to be quite this rotten.

Beautiful and resonant, this provokes deeper thoughts on the nature of living with violence than most gangster films.

Though there's an obvious, admirable effort to supply character development and plot twists, the set-work and special effects - both stylish and stunning - tend to dominate.

An anemic time-waster you've seen before that fails to create tension or generate the suspense this genre cries out for.

As double-cross becomes triple-cross becomes quadruple cross, it all gets awfully trying.

It's a film you might argue with, but its sparing use of on-screen violence, some extraordinarily protracted scenes and sensitive handling of thorny subject matter make it also a film you ought to see.

Generic, uninspired and devoid of suspense.

For those who delight in the Coens' divinely abstract take on reality, this is pure nirvana (cross Blood Simple with Raising Arizona if you must), yet beyond the hysterical black comedy, scattered violence and groovy dialogue, there sounds the same song to human goodness which enriched Fargo.

The Real Blonde has lost that certain something that earmarked DiCillo's earlier, more offbeat outings, resulting in a film which is pleasant rather than innovative.

There is nothing reprehensible about Palmetto; it simply falls short of conviction because you're too aware you've seen it all a hundred times before.

A script with a streak of clever cynicism and poignancy, a soundtrack of tunes you thought had long since departed to the vinyl graveyard and one of the most adorable screen pairings in ages in Sandler and Barrymore and the result is a film which, while hardly high art, is simply irresistible.

It's just like a spectacularly excessive and melodramatically daft Cantonese crime opus, but in English, with a thumpingly trendy soundtrack.