Rohmer doesn't attempt to create any skepticism about Grace's perspective on her experiences; we are shown them as she saw them, and seeing is the real pleasure of The Lady and the Duke.

Fiennes really shines here, with an electric-cocaine vigour and lust for life.

Early in the film, Morgan is careful to highlight Abe’s talent in predicting a movie’s twist (“She poisoned his drink!”). It is extremely doubtful, though, that anyone could guess what happens at the end of The Kid Detective.

Anthropologists, former missionaries and Chau’s friends offer valuable perspectives – and prompt viewers to examine their own roles in perpetuating ages-old saviour complexes. The Mission’s message is as timely as it is timeless, tragically.

For those who have read the book, this contemporary adaptation of a once avant-garde story feels exactly right.

Well conceived, deftly comic and finely acted (particularly Evelin Hagoel as the gutsy wives’ ringleader), The Women’s Balcony overlooks nothing when it comes to addressing faith, segregation and sexism in a peppery, entertaining way.

Comparisons of Janis: Little Girl Blue have been made to Asif Kapadia’s touching 2015 documentary on singer Amy Winehouse, but in Amy we don’t see a subject as remorseful as the Joplin presented by Berg.

You have to feel pleased just for the existence of a film like Tim Burton's Frankenweenie. A 3-D, black-and-white, stop-motion animated film, it's a one-man blow for cinematic biodiversity.

Radio Days, is an occasionally charming trifle, a cinematic bauble that - held up to just the right light, soft and undemanding - sparkles quite prettily. But add just a hint of the glare cast by a raised expectation, and this lightweight thing fades right out of view. [30 Jan 1987]

When Beans works, it resonates deeply. And when it doesn’t, it’s not a tragedy – just evidence of a filmmaker finding what works for her voice and vision, and what might work better for an anticipated follow-up.

A simple film only designed to charm.

The Clowns and the Krumpers have a rivalry that parallels the Bloods and the Crips battle for the neighbourhood, but fought out in moves, not bullets.

It’s a movie in which you can feel the spirit of the material infusing the filmmaker both as an artist and as a human being, and what results is that thing that occurs when even the simplest of songs sends sparks to the soul.

Any excuse to tune out the real world and escape into a fantasy land is welcome – especially through a film that’s about trust and the loving bond between family and friends, and also manages to deliver a couple of solid laughs in between.

Humpday is mostly foreplay. But isn't that usually the most fun anyway? It certainly is in this film.

An energetic coming-of-age film that pairs the tonalities of a rugged sports flick with the depth of a well-scripted drama, Backspot is a promising debut from Waterson that will leave audiences cheering.

This movie might make you cry, but it is not explicitly designed to do so.

I doubt that Jean-Michel Basquiat would have endorsed the subtitle. Indeed, The Radiant Child seems to inflate the very cliché that the rest of this film is keen to refute.

This is a sewer blessedly free of actual sewage, which makes Flushed Away more kid-friendly than, say, the average "South Park" episode.

Marshall elicits performances from Williams and De Niro that are exceptional. Awakenings is a small, simple movie about a large, complex issue, the waste of human opportunity. [19 Dec 1990, p.C1]

There is a sincerity here that is unafraid of itself and – in what is most certainly a love letter to the beguiling and tumultuous affair that is girlhood – Catherine Called Birdy feels unique and special in a way that speaks directly to Birdy and other uncontainable girls like her.

The Measure of a Man is about one of those everyday people who lose their livelihood and are at risk of losing everything else, and on this small scale and rather ordinary canvas the human drama is keenly felt.

Smart, serious and deftly composed, New York director Jill Sprecher's jigsaw anthology film, Thirteen Conversations About One Thing, is the kind of work you want to applaud just for its ambitions.

Though not as instantly charming as The Little Mermaid, nor as cheerfully revisionist as Beauty and the Beast, Hunchback rates as one of the best animated Disney features of the past rich decade. [21 June 1996, p.C1]

I can sympathize with the skeptics who take one look at Jackass’s cultural durability and shake their heads in disgust over the state of the world. But, as ever, there is a subversive method to Knoxville’s madness: an obsessive, and impressive, drive to tease the forever-blurry lines between comedy and pain.

You can’t feel for anyone when nothing feels real. Memo to Christopher Nolan for future outings: Kill the dream, tell a story.

After witnessing the wearying parliamentary debates among good and bad senators in recent Star Wars episodes, it's a pleasure to watch a sci-fi movie where more than just the spaceships move quickly.

Côté has a reputation of being something of a punk filmmaker. But if there is anything transgressive about Ghost Town Anthology it is its optimistic vision, where instead of having characters remain alienated and separated, they come together, find themselves and form a community.

Shot on a vintage Portapak video camera that actually predates the movie’s early-eighties setting and painstakingly crafted to resemble an analog artifact from a bygone era, Computer Chess is, ironically, a comedy about technological innovation.

Unfortunately, despite a committed and lively performance, McAvoy's Scottish doctor is fictional, an amalgam of Amin's "white monkeys."

All four characters are rendered as layered, believable humans, and I especially love how each resulting relationship – Cami and Rachel, Rachel and Aster, Cami and Tallulah – has its own arc and rhythm.

It may be a slim story, but its gentle humour, natural rhythm and above all authentic performances make Tomboy beautiful, intimate cinema.

Frightening and romantic, dreamy and dreary, the film laces the gore of a zombie movie with the magic-hour sunsets of a Terrence Malick film, plus a healthy amount of 1980s needle-drops. It is, in so many ways, one of the most unusually beautiful and violently sensual films in recent memory.

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is, at its best moments, pure and gigantic cinematic madness.

It makes for a compelling story and some thrilling music.

Before it turns into a thriller, and goes badly awry, Red Lights paints a devastating little portrait of a marriage on the rocks.

Delicate, intelligent and honest.

Unlike Todd Solondz's "Happiness," Mysterious Skin is not an abuse movie that seeks to offend or upset.

The problem with car-racing movies, though, is that they are car-racing movies. Has any director found a way to spare audiences the eventual tedium of watching automobiles go around and around a track and instead capture the thrill of the sport?

Living in a part of the world where politics, and the pursuit of politics by warring means, are the rule, director Elia Suleiman is the exception.

After a solid start and a strong buildup through two acts, the movie fumbles the resolution. Ethical lines that were convincingly wavy suddenly straighten out, too quickly and too neatly.

Indeed, like all bureaucracies, the educational version is a bit of a bully itself. In Sioux City at least, the official response to bullying is to recognize its existence but to deny it's an "overwhelming issue," and retreat behind the comforting bromide that "kids will be kids."

The film is also weighed down with a hokey record-scratch moment, a triumphant big-game sequence and a church-set finale that seems to be aping "The Graduate" but doesn’t quite have the courage to fully embrace the comedy of the moment.

As an epic action movie, Mongol is satisfying enough. Think "Braveheart." Think "300." Just don't think too much.

A great film about a good man.

The narrative, cobbled together from various Pooh stories by an army of writers, is held together reasonably well by John Cleese's soothing narration.

Every detail and narrative swerve are stacked on top of the other to build a monumental story of compromises and consequences. This is a brave film, bracing and thoughtful. It is also, at times, painfully funny.

Bouncing about from one flawed movie to another, Steven Spielberg has lost his way of late, and Munich finds him more disoriented than ever.

Exploring themes such as control, connection, isolation, becoming and the effects of environment on a person's sense of self, Thelma poses more questions than it answers – suggesting Trier isn't in search of what can be known. Instead, Thelma, similar to the director's other films, portrays uncertainty as the ultimate suspense.

Colette is a satisfyingly conventional biopic about a highly unconventional woman.

Mutant Mayhem is a giddily fun and relentlessly eye-pleasing rebranding for the Turtles, which, like the Spider-Verse movies, mixes up daring and inventive animation styles while embracing visual imperfections as part of its soulful artistry.

The film is small-scale, cleverly crafted and feels like a more expensive version of the sort of "dramedy" they produce by the truckload at the BBC.

It is a love story, as beautiful as it is devastating.

No matter how many times the script instructs us that Valmont is "conspicuously charming," Malkovich is not charming, conspicuously or otherwise.

A fascinating and compelling dive into an artist’s uniquely ticking parts, gives voice to a complex dude and broadens the picture.

[Kendrick] delivers a taut thriller that’s also a sharp critique of the casual misogyny women face.

This is a movie that works well when it works, and lazes around the rest of the time.

Love, Gilda reveals this but does not probe it. With various soft and admiring interviews, it relies mainly on Radner’s own words to hint at how dark things got.

For all that it tells a highly unusual story, Hidden Figures is a classic Hollywood feel-good movie. This has been a year of notable achievement for African-American performers and stories, from the surprising observations about masculinity in Moonlight to the gently told civil-rights saga of Loving. In that sober-sided company, Hidden Figures is a face-licking puppy dog of a film.

As a portrait of a deliciously eccentric individual, Gods and Monsters features a vivid performance from Ian McKellen that makes you think not of James Whale but of Ian McKellen.

The film's quiet realism demands from us our own act of faith: We're asked to watch closely and to listen intently in the promise of a greater reward to come. Well, the promise is partly kept.

As lovely to look at as it is dramatically inert.

Mostly I love how Pankiw drops important pieces of information in almost casual ways, because she knows that’s how people, especially funny people, talk.

Like Martin Scorsese's "The Departed" or James Gray's "We Own the Night," The Town is a deliberately old-fashioned melodrama that echoes the pulpy mix of violence and romanticism of gangster films of the Thirties and Forties.

The film is as much about Hokusai as it is about the titular protagonist, and so she defers to her father here as she apparently did in real life.

Though the conclusion is foregone, Canadian screenwriter David F. Shamoon's script manages to extract suspense out of Poldek's ruthless, calculating nature.

The emotional geometry is familiar enough to be credible yet odd enough to be creepy.

The film, like its subject, is more adroit with pictures than with words.

Ballet 422 is narrative without the heavy structural imposition of much plot, and the small, captivating tensions that are framed by the film seem to parallel current innovations in contemporary ballet.

It’s humanizing and heartbreaking.

A satisfying thriller interestingly complicated by its study of character and compromise.

Thrilling when we’re on and around the plane (seeing that giant CGI bird splash down, especially on an Imax screen, makes you realize how improbable the whole enterprise was) and too often thudding when we’re not.

Like circus acrobats who bounce up smiling, the characters end up on their feet, and you realize in retrospect that they survived because somebody, finally, stopped to think. A final thought on Go: Go.

The technical packaging of his picture is terrific - with its high-tech Manhattan and its split screens and slow motion, Dressed to Kill is - but the goods it opens to reveal are shoddily second-hand. [26 July 1980]

By Herzog's lofty standards, the result is mildly disappointing. The film lacks the sociological depth of "The Executioner's Song" or the emotional wallop of "In Cold Blood." But it sure is a surpassingly, and compellingly, strange tale.

While it’s technically eye-popping and intricately structured, Interstellar is at its most fascinating when it struggles hard to communicate those things we human beings call “emotions”. Instead, we get something like a freeze-dried approximation of Steven Spielberg at his most sentimental.

When the filmmakers fix the lens on his face and laud his work, Benson looks genuinely embarrassed, mumbling that he’s “shit.” As any seasoned charmer knows, this will only endear you further.

Unlike "Microcosmos" (all insects) and the acclaimed nature doc "Winged Migration" (all birds), Genesis is bogged down by its intentions and too vast a "cast."

Both a cathartic and a creative family entertainment.

Despite its explosive subject matter, the movie has been carefully calibrated not to offend anybody.

The pat inspirational formula is followed to a sweaty T, although it comes here with an inadvertent side effect -- more than a few nagging questions never get answered.

A delightfully satiric comedy. [29 May 1987]

Joy Ride is as fantastically filthy as they come, providing enough glorious gags about gagging to carry audiences through the cold, hard winter to come.

The film lacks the comic ingenuity of the best in CGI critter movies. It's not fun-for-the-whole-family, like "Shrek." Still, it's a howl and amazement for anyone under 12.

There is a certain charm to Shaw’s deadpan comedy – and I genuinely appreciated what I can only assume was an intentional callback to Michael Cera’s fate in 2013′s This Is the End – but one visit to the Cryptozoo was enough for me.

40 Acres is a top-tier genre film that Trojan-horses a flood of knotty, provocative conversations into multiplexes via the best kind of speculative fiction.

As the obscenities of wealth accumulate while a large cast of Asian and Eurasian actors render their many silly characters, the source of the laughter becomes troubling.

A cheeky black comedy and worthy Norwegian successor to "Kill Bill."

Touch, adapted from Olafur Johann Olafsson’s novel, is handsome, sentimental and restrained (admirably, in parts). But it also leaves a lot to be desired – yes, a movie about yearning left me yearning – chiefly when it comes to the central romance, which is presented as more ornamental than passionate.

The 1949 film version was definitively a tear-jerker. But Holland, too, has opted for a faithful adaptation, which starts out tart and winds up treacly. [14 Aug 1993]

This is a piece engineered to run on the high octane of clever dialogue. It's chatty, it's wordy, but a passion for the well-written word lies at the thematic heart of the thing, and cinematic flourishes would only clog the arteries. Purists can rest assured -- there's no clogging.

Hercules is a lot of fun -- not a masterpiece, but engaging, clever and bright. [27 June 1997, p.C1]

The film takes its cue from the widow, neither sermonizing or even villainizing, content to serve quietly as an admirable exercise in restraint and a moving example of the grace under pressure that is the essence of courage.

Breakdown is a taut little thriller, the kind of well-crafted yarn that sets itself attainable goals and then meets them.

Informative and swiftly paced documentary.

This is the chef’s-kiss premise of the new dark comedy Dream Scenario, a thoroughly imaginative and mostly brilliant movie from Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli that is easily the best thing – real or otherwise – that Cage has starred in for ages.

Shannon, who has a great face and a criminally underused talent, gives it all she’s got. You’ll be Googling the Dickinson canon and rethinking all your literature courses the minute it ends.

The focus of Invictus is less on Mandela's psychology than his willpower and political astuteness.