Though only 85 minutes, the film captures an entire, bewilderingly extended family and way of life inside a sturdy frame.

Based on the 2015 book of the same title, The Hidden Life of Trees is a documentary both simple and startling.

It’s a by-the-numbers profile, complete with the requisite visit to his childhood home, but, partway through, it becomes a rather piercing portrait of a man constantly doubting himself – while he studied under Carl Sagan, he lacks a PhD and is therefore, in the eyes of his detractors, not a real scientist – and struggling with his celebrity.

There's much to observe – for example, the thoroughly credible performances of the cast, most of them non-professionals.

Video-game developers: Geeks, nerds, socially adrift obsessives. Indie Game thankfully gets past such base introductions in a flash and graduates to far more engrossing levels – levels which open up into the real worlds of the best independent game developers working their craft.

Trapero reveals the ways in which truth can be much stranger, more tragic and confused, than fiction.

As far as movies-as-line-items go, Homecoming is better than it has any right to be. The story is slight but spry, thanks partly to the jettisoning of origin story but also due to its blessedly small stakes.

A charming oddity starring Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch, often feels like an al fresco stage play. It’s an intimate two-hander with lots of dialogue, humour and poignant revelations, set against a backdrop of rugged woodland beauty.

For those entering grade school, there is likely no better and more concise primer on the scandal. For everyone else, well, you know the story.

There are sequences in Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai’s new film, The Grandmaster, that are as gorgeous as anything you’ll see on a screen this year, or perhaps this decade.

Gran Torino skids into the narrative ditch. By the time it jolts to an ending, followed by Clint rasping a tune to the closing credits, you're more likely to be rolling your eyes than dabbing them.

LaBeouf’s script crackles with penetrating dialogue. His acting – LaBeouf portrays a version of his own father – might be the finest of his career.

This is David Fincher’s version of a sitcom: as violently funny as it is hilariously violent.

Guts will be busted, and sides will be split. Heck, moviegoers might even learn to kiss and make up with comedies for good.

Warning: Cars comes unequipped with two essential options -- charm and a good muffler.

A fascinating, frequently angry and occasionally darkly funny documentary.

Modestly clever, this is definitely a little thing. Enjoy.

Part of the charm of Satin Rouge is that it avoids the obvious with humour and lightness.

In revealing Cassandra’s interior life, Rozema lays bare the modern female condition in an epic battle that is by turns lacerating, soothing and heartbreaking.

It is a busy narrative machine that raises expectations of a tidy ending; instead Almodóvar offers an artfully mysterious conclusion that seems unearned by the movie that preceded it – except, of course, for that lonely stag.

Mourning her only child, her marriage, and very likely her fortune as the betrayed and sidelined Laura, Cruz goes scorched-earth, incinerating any performer sharing her space.

This witty, star-packed and visually splendid kids' movie provides a small-is-beautiful message served on a parodoxically epic scale.

A sensitive coping drama after all, while still serving up that noirish heist flick with comic flourishes. That's some range, and in 99 succinct minutes too: Most pictures would be lucky to do half as much in twice the time.

Hanks is sturdy as ever, grounding the proceedings in a warm sense of familiar, fatherly comfort. But the rest of the film feels weightless, and at parts unbelievably dumb. One mid-film shoot-out in particular is executed with such listlessness that it’s a wonder Greengrass was able to stay awake while filming it.

Sure, the premise is identical age-reversal comedies, but this one uses a much higher octane, animating a tired idea with a timeless script, and the result is pop humor at its most appealing - wit and charm spiced with a measured pinch of farce and just the right hint of melancholy. [3 Jun 1988, p.E1]

Rude, lewd and occasionally in the nude, The Hangover brings a collection of fresh faces to the familiar raucous male-bonding comedy.

The Square turns from a sharp art-world satire into something egregiously bonkers, a collision of blunt comic beats and heavy-handed social commentary that's more messy than profound.

Even with Pablo Larrain’s signature insights hidden in quiet and seemingly simple dialogue, and even with hints of his trademark dark humour, The Club may be one of the Chilean director’s most disturbing films.

Slam is a film about rap poetry, romance and gangster culture that blends melodrama, visceral excitement -- and a lot of preaching. [23 Oct 1998, p.D3]

The actors are superb at impressing some humanity onto this ugliness. Their civility is in the details: a morning shave, a cheerio and “one small pipe” before jumping the trench and heading into the German line of fire.

Riklis, working from an adaptation of a popular novel by the Arab-Israeli writer Sayed Kashua, is wryly perceptive of the ways each side exoticizes and demonizes the other.

The film is surprisingly timely: Today's fierce, revitalized misogyny makes the 1970s male chauvinism droll and quaint in comparison.

One of the blackest, funniest, most disturbing and annoyingly lingering American films of this or any other year; the annoyance occasioned by the film's tendency to linger is not because River's Edge is not good, it's because it's too good.[05 June 1987]

The movie rolls on, with more clever but increasingly repetitive action sequences that entertain, but drain the film of any credible sense of jeopardy.

A love letter to performers who put their egos and bodies on the line.

Ray rambles on for two hours and 40 minutes, mining repetitive episodes like a TV miniseries.

One of those crime flicks besotted with its own plot.

[A] fascinating documentary.

The time Bogdanovich spends with Rusty and Rocky, and the time Rocky spends at a summer camp for the blind with a gorgeous blonde (Laura Dern) who falls in love with him, is time that is priceless. The time Bogdanovich spends with the cuddly bikers, especially the time he spends with Sam Elliott in a dismally ingratiating, cockeyed performance as Rusty's boy friend, is time that exacts a terrible toll: credibility. [08 Mar 1985]

A sweet if predictable tale about teaching and learning and parents and kids, it's all made easier on the eyes by Grant, whose trademark suaveness never allows him to quite slip into the role of bedraggled father of five. [19 Nov 2005, p.9]

The movie takes its time to get going, which can be frustrating given how thin the material feels along the way. But that patience also works in its favour during a lovely final act that doesn’t come off as maudlin and forced as this sort of melodrama usually tends to.

The labour the filmmaker undertakes here is similarly personal and intimate; it is clearly an act of healing as well as an offering for others who see their lives echoed.

An amused and affectionate look at the writer who formed a crucial link between the New Journalism of the 1960s and today's blogosphere.

The movie is pretty damned funny in its insubstantial, gratuitously violent, gratuitously everything way.

Cerebral without being dry, delicate without being dull, Mr. And Mrs. Bridge is a rarity: a drama of manners that breathes esthetic life into airless parlours, without either sentimentalizing the occupants or hyping the atmosphere. [21 Dec 1980]

Though Three Monkeys feels conventional compared with Ceylan's other work, it maintains its auteurist imprint, especially the rich colour palette and suggestive HD camerawork that helped Ceylan take the best-director honours at Cannes this year.

Funny, heartbreaking and, yes, uplifting, The Long Walk Home takes the audience into a past that is always threatening to become the present; that it was made makes the future seem a little less threatening. [09 Feb 1991]

It preserves the believe-in-yourself mythos of its predecessor, but smoothly addresses the problems baked into Zootopia’s overly sunny portrayal of local government. It doesn’t regurgitate old jokes, but builds on them, and even makes them funnier.

Yes, a Terence Malick film remains an event, but he appears awfully disoriented in The New World -- less a seasoned traveller than a perplexed tourist, content to mask his confusion by reaching for a camera and snapping relentless pretty pictures.

While "Wedding Crashers" ultimately succumbs to endorsing the mushy romantic clichés that it spends the rest of the time ridiculing, The 40-Year-Old Virgin offers a wiser take on the anxieties, negotiations and expectations that surround love and sex, particularly for people who've been burned before.

The elegant, condensed saga covers a dozen years, starting in 1933. You don't need to be an Einstein to guess where the story is heading. An evocative, slow-blooming feature is a study on the flash horrors of war and the gradual death of dreams.

For all its incident, A Royal Affair is slow and picturesquely framed – more of a languorously animated coffee-table book than a gripping drama.

Ma’s film isn’t solely set on establishing The Peg’s winter bona fides, but rather exposing the city’s throbbing romantic heart, which might be able to melt the coldest of days.

A loopy, loving nine innings full of comic curve balls, emotional home-runs and euphoric, summertime music.

Herman's House is conventionally produced, but it does right by its two uncommon subjects.

With too much salutation and not enough action, this is a (fine) companion to the album but not a freestanding film.

It will make you mad as hell. So angry, even, that you might wonder why no one has given this opportunity to Todd Haynes before.

It's a slacker flick, it's a relationship pic, it's a road movie all under the same hood.

What a strange, moving, puzzling, funny, frustrating and ultimately absorbing film this is.

The laughter does build. But there's precious little risk in the comedy -- even the rough edges seem calculated. These guys are preaching to the converted, and their careful sermons keep the faith. Skilled they are, but original or kingly they definitely are not -- just solid knights working the round table.

The makers of Shattered Glass ignore this obvious give-and-take reality, and substitute the hoary myth that, save for the odd lying devil, the free press is a bastion of the gospel truth. Even here, then, the facts get shaped to fit the theme. Ironically, had they not, it would have made for a helluva better story.

My mood kept fluctuating, as did my reaction when the end credits rolled: This is seriously lovely; this is fluff; this is seriously lovely fluff.

This is B-movie material all the way, yet it's not only watchable, it's engrossing. That's because the material is in the hands of an A-talent director, who knows, as few of his contemporaries do, how to manipulate the plastic qualities of a film: the lighting, editing, composition, camera movement and production values.

The summer's most lip-smacking movie treat.

We're left with the weakest part of the novel -- the lurching and often melodramatic plot -- plus the chance to see two splendid actors, Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett, do the best they can with what they're given (sadly, in Blanchett's case, not much). Okay, no one would call that trade-off a scandal, but it sure ain't much of a bargain.

I don’t know how many subscribers actually interested in its mature story and top-level craft will be able to unearth it from their Holidate-choked queues, but here’s hoping some are willing to embark on the excavation.

It is at times brash and thick-headed in its characters and politics, but it is engineered with such an electric ferocity – a beautiful marriage of high-performance technical expertise and gonzo aesthetic imagination – that it cannot help but knock you out.

Carter himself ties a bow on the film, noting that music is a galvanizing force and that what will unite mankind is a shared respect for truth, God, freedom and democracy. That and a righteous Allman Brothers jam.

As the two women clash in the film’s final moments, Tjahjanto executes a truly glorious extravaganza of choreographed carnage, as impressive as it is overwhelming.

A kind of stealth political film that confronts issues of ethnic tension and American xenophobia.

There isn’t enough raw drama, deep-felt emotion, or genuine artistry on display here to keep CODA from staring down its own obligatory end: a half-smile and a shrug.

Waters uses the tawdry in satirical celebration of itself - he's the red satin tassled plush pillow of filmmaking. [17 Sep 1981]

Bros is a genuinely hilarious, wonderful movie: heartfelt, slick and crafted with such careful comedic care that a good deal of jokes will inevitably be drowned out by audiences still laughing over the punchlines that came just before.

This is a remarkably good-looking near-corpse of a film, with a pulse that fades in and out.

A painful documentary film, partly because of its subject, partly because of the troubling questions raised by the filmmaker's approach.

It takes more than a fan to analyze the legacy of a period. But a fan is just what it takes to indulge in that legacy, which is exactly what Broadway: The Golden Age is all about.

Which is why when Mary and Charlotte’s first big sex scene arrives – a moment destined to become a meme unto itself – its explosive energy feels undercut by a lack of genuine connection between the two women. Both performers are throwing the entirety of themselves into Lee’s world, but only one is offered much of anything to grab hold of.

Moselle believes in the power of girls. The friendships through which Camille learns how to be loved become the anguish that breaks her heart and the forgiveness that humbly heals her. And resiliently they soar through the city, a harmony of wheels on pavement.

Very few movies end so much better than they begin. For that reason, and only that reason, this is an exceptional picture.

By the time The Insult's verdict seems near, you may find yourself as wrapped up in the inherent tensions and entertainment of a traditional legal thriller as Doueiri is. Give the man his Oscar already. He's earned it.

What remains is an interesting, if too often overly protracted, portrait of creative frustration, artistic ego and the ethics of storytelling in an overly saturated landscape. It’s Shackleton’s most personal film to date, even though it’s about something that doesn’t exist. Or maybe that’s why it feels personal – here he is finally interrogating not just formal convention, but his own desire to fit into it.

Two things do redeem the film somewhat. One is the near-uniform excellence of the cast, led by Tatum, who has a compelling, eminently watchable aw-shucks charisma, and newcomer Horn as the cute, concerned sister. The other is the easy, naturalistic flow and ebb of Reid Carolin's dialogue, which gives none of his characters a vocabulary or insights above his or her station.

Besides the movie’s weight in our contemporary, post-Ferguson historical moment, Straight Outta Compton may also be the funniest, most exhilarating and flat-out best Hollywood movie of the summer.

Clint Eastwood is still making movies at 94. That’s amazing. What’s more shocking is that Juror #2 is not just pretty good but arguably the Unforgiven director’s most satisfying work in well over a decade.

We’re primed to expect that the culture clash, when it comes, will be powerful and dangerous. Instead, the film suddenly backs down, and the resulting learning and growing feels like chickening out.

Luckily, none of the inconsistencies in tone and atmosphere can overwhelm Matilda's charm. The power of its narrative and the self-composed presence of Wilson in the title role -- DeVito has persuaded the child to underact the part so that Matilda is precocious, not obnoxious -- carry the movie resolutely to its happy conclusion. [02 Aug 1996, p.D2]

Without Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World would be an absolute bore.

Still Mine is a measured but considerably moving celebration of things hand-crafted, traditional and built to last.

At its best moments, Our Nixon captures the split-personality of the times, and the apparently innocent face of corruption.

Cabin is a meta-horror-comedy mash-up that, at least for two-thirds of its running time, holds together smartly.

MIAMI BLUES gleefully presides over the happy marriage of two solid but usually separate traditions in U.S. movies: film noir, with its emphasis on the sleazy and the powerless, and screwball comedy, with its celebration of the romantically eccentric. As darkly unpredictable as The Third Man and as bouncingly comic as Pretty Woman, Miami Blues deserves all the rave reviews it's going to get and all the tons of money it's going to make. [20 Apr 1990]

The more queasy the film becomes – in both story and style, with the director preferring unusually moody natural light and nerve-rattling zooms – the funnier it gets.

Burton's movie is not only more faithful, complex and better cast, it has an essential ingredient: squirrels.

Touching, if by-the-books, documentary.

Headhunters is slick and spritely, a mixture of corporate skullduggery and low-life slapstick that plays like "The Firm" meets "Blood Simple."

It's all such a throwback, and yet there's something rather sweet about the way this pot boils.

Moore continues another one infinitely more valuable -- the proud line that extends right back to Mark Twain, embracing all those satirists so enamoured with America at its best that they won't stand silent for America at its worst.