Here is a psychological twister with an implausible and hard-to-follow plot. All of this is more than compensated for by terrific performances, a seductive colour palette that is greenish and glassy, and a minimalist style reminiscent of Michael Mann.

Propelled by a perfectly cast trio of stars whose eccentricities shine in singular character roles, Bernie is a charmer.

The impact should be visceral and gut-wrenching; instead, it's cool and cerebral – after all, we're being lectured in a lecture hall.

Like Apatow's best work, this is about friendships – only this group of loveable misfits wear matching purple gowns.

While Benedetta the woman may have been touched by Heaven or cursed from Hell or neither, Benedetta the film is undoubtedly a miracle.

The exiled Tibetans who are interviewed display a lack of bitterness, a sympathy for their enemies and hope for the future that is inspiring.

The Invisible Woman is, fair warning, leisurely in its pace.

Cody’s third-act twist threatens to unravel Theron’s hard work; yet, somehow, the power of Tully remains firmly in Theron’s skilled and capable hands.

Bad history it may be, but Elizabeth is a movie that makes you want more, as it plays to the myth of history's great actress-monarch, a character who puts today's tinselly political heros and heroines (royal and not), to shame.

As a conversation-starter, though, Pleasure hits all the spots – and sometimes soars far beyond thanks to the work of Kappel, whose performance is absolutely committed, fearless and entrancing.

The Muppet charm, always more at home within the intimate frame of a TV set, is gone here.

Wright's Darkest Hour is filled with many lush examples of the pathetic fallacy, which doesn't totally disguise the awkward truth that this is a film mainly about meetings.

Even a politically naive film critic can see that An Inconvenient Truth isn't only about science or economics; it's also about ideology.

For all his daring, the brazen creator maintains control - there's aesthetic order in the disorder, and calculated reason in the madness. Seldom has it felt so good to seem so lost.

Gimmickry is death to this sort of artsy endeavour -- it turns a movie with a small budget into a small movie.

The Shrek franchise is alive and well -- Model 2 is zippier, sleeker, with ever-improving graphics, vast commercial potential and the same sly ability to reach out and hook the whole family.

It feels like one long non-sequitur -- like closing a Charles Bronson film with a disco medley -- but there's an emotional consistency to Kitano's boisterous celebration of movement.

Lady Vengeance is more than half over before we discover the object of Geum-Ja's hatred: a kindergarten teacher named Mr. Baek. He's played by Choi Min-sik, the prisoner in "Old Boy," and here he's as tepid as he was heated in that film.

The movie's big kick – what makes Enchanted live up to its title – is that the further Giselle progresses in New York, the more we feel like we've tumbled into a timeless Disney Neverland.

An uneven but intriguing piece of whimsy that veers from powerfully symbolic cinematography into self parody.

Detective Dee is the action flick of the year, a two-hour epic that blows the "Pirates of the Caribbean" to the Bermuda Triangle.

It’s subdued, at times even too leisurely, but the film and its characters are luminous, especially lead Ayase Haruka.

What we learn from the enjoyable punditry of siblings, art-world associates and former lovers is that the gorgeous provocateur was consumed with fame, and that everything and everybody was a means to that end.

“I’m selective about my audience,” says the singer. “I don’t need everybody to like me.” With a dour, sophisticated film that won’t be to everyone’s taste, writer-director Nicchiarelli seems to have taken those words to heart.

The Absent-Minded Professor, from 1961, starred the late Fred MacMurray in one of his best-remembered comic roles, as a scientist named Brainerd who discovers a substance he dubs "flubber" (for "flying rubber," since it enables people and objects to fly). [08 Jan 1993]

Tuned in to the anarchic wisecracks and slapstick humour of traditional Warner Bros. cartoons. In contrast to the computer-generated characters and slick script of a movie like "Shrek," Lilo and Stitch still feels like a cartoon aimed at kids, not their parents.

A searing tale effectively told. And superbly acted. [18 Aug 1989]

What makes Crude worthy of the overused term “epic” is the way the case symbolizes a host of contemporary issues: the iron-fistedness of multinational corporations; environmental despoliation; the disappearance of indigenous cultures; and the power of celebrity and the media to influence justice.

The film’s delightful collision of the poetic and the profane is illustrated perfectly about midway through Chapter 2.

The film is not a masterpiece, but a memory box. Comforting, inviting, and one you won’t mind keeping close.

It’s a corny, old fashioned boy-dog love story, as adorable as anything Walt Disney ever signed off on.

To his credit, Beatty has designed Bulworth along the classic lines of Shakespeare's Fool -- the antic truth-speaker who has the ear of the court.

Raw and electrically presented, Civil War is an ugly odyssey and an audacious premonition.

But it’s Rooney who commands the most attention. As she already proved in David Fincher’s "The Social Network" and "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," she has an oddly fascinating screen presence, suggesting both vulnerability and inscrutable levels of calculation. Few actors or actresses can make inexpressiveness look so smart.

The Stunt Man, which is scary and sorrowful and stirring and sexy - in other words, everything a big Hollywood popcorn-cruncher of a movie should be - is the best movie about making a movie ever made. [11 Oct 1980]

Titanic is awesome even when it's awful -- you can't take your eyes off the extraordinary thing.

Dive into a masterpiece.

It is only when Diggs and Casal near the end of the film − including a too-convenient-by-half encounter with a cop − that the effort’s ambition in creating a treatise on all of Western society’s ills begins to crack. But until then, Blindspotting possesses enough flair, passion and sweat to put up one hell of a fight.

May not have the most sophisticated narrative, but it is one of the most spectacular and masterly demonstrations of animation in screen history.

Captures some of the spirit of the real Che.

Based on a Vanity Fair article by Marie Brenner, the film doesn’t flinch from Colvin’s driven, destructive side. But it’s best when she’s on the ground in a war zone, bearing witness.

To these disappointed eyes, Little Children seems a frustrating mess.

A great movie... A pop epiphany, marking that commercially creative point where the power of Hollywood meets the purity of myth.

With lesser performers, too, maybe Hammer would have felt more like a gag. Yet O’Brien, fresh off a tremendous and under-seen performance in last year’s "Goalie," radiates nervy energy like it was the most natural thing in the world, while longtime character actor Patton gives his wary patriarch an urgent, unshakable sense of disappointment and unease. It’s almost worth eating your own tail over.

There is little chance for the movie's talented stars, Day Lewis and Emily Watson (Breaking the Waves) to establish and develop their characters, beyond their set-piece declarations of love.

Together is such a sharp blend of the hilarious and the terrifying that it busts your gut at the same time it has you gritting your teeth.

The confluence of poverty, dysfunctional parenting and poor educational prospects makes the oft-idealized small-town life look like an incubator for failure, no matter how high and spectacular the Fourth of July fireworks fly.

Like the stationary figures it portrays, Kicking And Screaming is alive at the edges; it comes with a vibrant border of trenchant asides, tossed-off remarks that blend the solace of protective irony with the sterner stuff of hard truth.

In nearly every way Civil War represents the dizzying heights of the genre.

The film’s bizarre, gore-soaked premise actually manages to ease viewers into the far more uncomfortable topic of grief – after all, dying is easy, but living with death is much more complicated.

Some may find Finding Vivian Maier invasive, since Maloof and co-director Charlie Siskel delved into its namesake’s past after her death, but their curiosity is genuine rather than prurient; this is the rare example of a documentary about an enigmatic subject that doesn’t pretend to know all the answers.

Sometimes, the quiet lyricism of DuVernay’s direction seems at odds with the grittiness of the subject matter, like poetry force-fed into prose.

A laugh and a half, a genial crowd-pleaser.

An unusually smartly written and performed American independent film.

The best thing the film does is to show us not only what that mind looks like, but how the creative process itself operates: messily, erratically, outside of most people's morality, but with a force and purposiveness that makes the machinations of the rest of us look irresolute by comparison.

Serves to champion human irrepressibility and unpredictability. It's the flip side to the defeatism of "Distant," but with parallels, both in the very deliberate pacing and moments of visual wit.

Never the most subtle of directors Oliver Stone brings a jackhammer brutality to Born on the Fourth that the material no longer needs. [22 Dec 1989, p.C1]

To watch German documentarian Thomas Heise’s marathon family memoir Heimat is a Space in Time, the viewer has to continually analyze the relationship between text and image.

The overwhelming sense of physical and moral decay could be taken for social commentary, and if Graceland has a flaw, it’s that Morales gradually starts to overstate his case as the movie goes on.

The film is a sad calamity of conflicting narratives as those closest to Houston work through varying stages of honesty and denial.

The movie could have used a further dose of the resonance Walken gives it, and a more intellectually adventurous director might have brought the theme close to home.

It doesn’t take a lot of wit or imagination to use Richard Nixon as a bad guy, but it’s still satisfying to watch a climatic showdown between two supervillains – one brought back from out of the past and the other from off the comic-book page – and wait to see who blinks first. Seems like we’ll always have Nixon to kick around, after all.

Writer-director Zandvliet has crafted a handsome, affecting and questioning film about post-war revenge and forgiveness. On a tough field to navigate, he makes it to the other side, commendably.

There is a Hitchcockian creepiness in Finley's mad-as-hell teen drama.

It is a small story told with slightly greater ambition than the small-screen affords. The animation is slicker, the original-songs budget more generous (the movie is, like the series, half-comedy and half-musical), and the guest stars are plentiful. It is ideal lazy summer Saturday matinee viewing.

Peggy Sue is by no means a masterpiece of movie art, but it is an example of the sort of thoroughly enjoyable middle-brow Hollywood picture - clever, thoughtful, literate - that went missing about the time Peggy Sue got married. [10 Oct 1986]

Bring Her Back feels less like a movie than a finely tuned instrument of doom. In the devilish hands of Australian filmmaking brothers Danny and Michael Philippou, evil has been concentrated into an exceptionally and impressively nasty 104 minutes.

It all makes for an entertaining, occasionally delirious ride – especially the opening sequence.

A meditation on death that has you humming to the melody and laughing at the joke -- it's an elegiac picture that refuses to eulogize.

Everything about Mid-August Lunch is simple and unpretentious, from the black-out scene transitions to the folk-dance score, as the four isolated, elderly women, over a couple of days and meals, become a circle of companions.

For a filmmaker who was frequently drawn back to the subject of suffering, and especially the anguish of the individual cast against the collective will of cruel, foolish authority, it’s a perfectly fitting farewell.

Both an homage to his dad and a backstage story rich in Hollywood lore.

The couple are the movie’s saving grace – especially Lillian, now 87, who regales in every story.

The love that blooms is essentially between the boys. They both have some considerable growing up to do, but theirs is a true romance and it's awfully sweet. Funny, too.

The artistry of the storytelling, the visual approach and Gosling's performance in The Believer make us believe that Danny's path was the only choice for him, a truly disturbing and fascinating revelation.

Always well-meaning, not always well-executed, In This World ends by suffocating us in its good intentions.

A beguiling, slow-moving parable.

Gets under your skin as another thought-provoking wake-up call about the power of studios and the corporations that back them.

While Ellis-Taylor is, as always, magnetic onscreen, Origin fails her talents, as well as both its characters and story, by reproducing the flaws of Wilkerson’s book with a stoic conviction.

The screen, always Bergman’s supreme medium, is proof of the power of her magnetic and energetic presence. It shines through in even the grainiest, jumpy, out-of-focus home-movie footage.

A House of Dynamite doesn’t so much self-destruct as fail to even ignite a spark.

If this is the film that is destined to divide the movie business, it’s as weird and imperfect a choice as could possibly be.

Whether Omar will ultimately serve to change or harden hearts remains ambiguous, though it’s a movie that’s entertaining enough to appeal to the kinds of ordinary kids we see in the movie.

Thanks largely to Petersen, Manhunter does occasionally evoke the peculiar pleasures of Harris's novel, and it does get under the skin, but only because the picture amounts to an aural mugging: the soundtrack, credited to The Reds & Michael Rubini, is Tangerine-Dream-styled electronic offal cranked up to rock concert decibels. [15 Aug 1986, p.D11]

Like her first film, 2016′s fine-young cannibals tale Raw, Ducournau is tracing taboos to sketch a messy but compelling treatise on life’s endless growing pains. Ride or die.

Physically ripped, constantly engaged and possessing a quite possibly insane desire to do each and every one of his own stunts, Cruise is the platonic ideal of an action star. And thank god for that.

A testament to the insidiousness of systemic abuse, Kidnapped illuminates the tragedy of unchecked power exploited by men. It upholds the importance of separating church and state, serving as a painful reminder that authoritarianism is a dangerous road soaked with the tears of its countless victims.

It's hard to generate a sense of warmth when the plot points all feel so coldly calculated, and it doesn't help that the musical numbers are so pedestrian.

Part political satire, part fantasy, part I-don’t-even-know-what, Diamantino is exactly the type of surreal concoction that begs to be discovered by unsuspecting audiences.

It manages to be heartwarming and heartbreaking all at once.

Waitress is sweet, uneven and, ultimately, a heartbreaker.

Kimberly Reed’s debut documentary, Prodigal Sons, would make a terribly contrived novel, but is a compelling and sensational real-life story.

Abramovic is a sensationally attractive narcissist and the filmmakers are clearly smitten with her, but the film goes a long way to establish the intellectual seriousness and dedication involved in her ambitious series of art stunts.

A maniacal, hallucinogenic dip into the bloodbath drawn by a pair of mass murderers, it's the quintessential Stone opus - topical, testy, and wildly controversial, as brilliant or egregious as you wish it to be. [26 Aug 1994, p.C1]

This film doesn’t flinch from violence, but it finds hope in a people’s patient refusal to surrender who they are.

Douglas Tirola’s doc does the era and National Lampoon justice. The tone is sharp and freewheeling, the craziness is infectious and the pace is cocaine-quick.

Films about single film scenes, however, represent unexplored territory. Which is why 78/52 is such an enticing prospect – a deep dive into one of the most influential moments in cinema history: the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.