The best thing about the movie is the performance of Stephen Fry, who makes you hope that the real Wilde was like him. [05 Jun 1998, p.C5]

It is as much a gusty dissection of colonialism as it is a gut-spilling splatter-thon.

The film surrounding the performance is not always as strong, but the centre holds, and magnificently so.

Fortunately, there's always the fascination of watching actor Toni Servillo, who does a brilliant job of playing Andreotti (known as Beelzebub) as a kind of devil with a clown's exterior.

With strong performances in a scheme of both sensible updates and clever revivals, Mary Poppins Returns is as impressive as the 1964 version it joyfully recalls – except in one key area.

This time out, with a few exceptions, the inspiration feels solid and earned, not saccharine and contrived.

Johannes Vermeer is still a genius at documentary’s end but a fathomable genius, as much scientist as artist, a driven, resourceful creator whose conceptual and compositional brilliance remains undiminished by whatever techniques Jenison, Hockney and crew ascribe to him.

Still, credit Gondry, like Tocqueville before him, with at least re-examining tired clichés and scraping the rust off stereotypes.

Though the threat of exposure and incarceration lurk behind every story, the characters' ingenuity and humour serve as impudent alternatives to authoritarian stupidity and brutality.

The film is rich in such positive messaging, and its subjects quickly endear themselves to the camera.

It's a screwball comedy, with a possible debt to Preston Sturges's 1942 film, "The Miracle of Morgan Creek," a movie inspired by the Dionne quintuplets, and similarly set in a small town turned upside down by media and political showboating.

The beautifully photographed film is quite stylized at times...But it manages to steer clear of the stereotypes one might expect of a movie set in this time and place, thanks in part to the underlying and, mostly, underplayed themes of spirituality and the search for identity.

Jam-packed but never disorienting, Cool It will definitely get your head spinning.

Today’s YA generation is unlikely to appreciate the monosyllabic performances and stately pace, but Pilote delivers a beautiful film in the tradition of the Quebec canon.

Although there are definite lags here, those "glittering" set-pieces are funny enough (at least one is hilarious) to stave off any prolonged yawns.

You may find yourself having more kinky fun in The Wanderers than you have had in any American movie for a long time, but when you try to grasp the meaning of what you've seen, you find yourself clutching at moonbeams. [31 Aug 1979]

A horror movie based on history, offering some of the most spectacularly brutal, viscerally intense battle scenes ever brought to a Hollywood movie.

In many areas, Food Inc. could be accused of being a fast-food version of a documentary – it's everywhere at once, skipping across the surface of a vast subject, and adding nuggets of sweetness to the scary filler.

The film is an attack on religious hypocrisy, mixing melodrama and black humour in a volatile blend.

The results are generally refreshing. Much of the film takes place inside a theatre, as if to suggest the shenanigans of the Saint Petersburg aristocracy were a form of public entertainment.

A very funny, very unusual ensemble comedy that falls somewhere between slapdash and brilliant, an improvised comedy with more hits than misses. It's also an oddly touching tribute to the joys of show biz.

This is a war film with an anti-epic feel, best when it forgoes the forced march of plot to hunker down in the trenches of our flawed humanity.

The film manages to make surprisingly convincing gestures toward the power of communion, and indeed pantomime, that make the world shine a bit more hopeful.

Even though the subject of this British documentary is a traveller who got lost in a more terrestrial sort of void, the spirit of the stranded astronaut haunts Deep Water.

While the situation is played for dark laughs, Odenkirk’s commitment to the role is dead serious. He makes its ridiculousness believable. By the end of Nobody, I wanted desperately for the producers of the next Fast & Furious film to cast Odenkirk as the muscle-car-driving villain. In your heart of hearts, you know it would work, too.

Natasha is, in fact, a deceptive and delicate coming-of-age piece – deceptive because it exposes a troubling underside, delicate because it does so with a measured and quiet intelligence.

While Neptune Frost is at no loss for multi-faceted thinking, its development of these concepts too often remains at the surface of meaning. The Black futures envisioned here are largely concerned with aesthetics and, while sonically and visually lush, seem hollow in comparison to the range of their full potential.

It's got thrills and chills and one of the most elegantly conceived monsters in the history of movies.

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.

Disney’s live-action revival of the Beauty and the Beast franchise is nothing if not lively, albeit occasionally overwrought: The dinnerware’s number, Be Our Guest, turns into a hallucinogenic sequence worthy of Busby Berkeley.

Filmmaker Anthony Maras has made a chilling thriller, using extreme violence and high-wire tension to impressive effect, but it lacks deeper characterization.

Educating young audiences as it entertains just about anyone, Penguins features the droll narration of Ed Helms and some great Antarctic cinematography.

In every way but one, A Knight's Tale is a bouncy pop song of a movie, the snappy/happy kind that puts a grin on your face and a tap to your toe, shifting the heart into high and the mind into neutral. [11 May 2001]

With his elegant bio-doc Oscar Peterson: Black + White, director Barry Avrich discreetly (perhaps too discreetly) sniffs around the question of Peterson’s legacy and whether he truly received the respect he deserved in his lifetime.

So yes, Mud is messy, but it’s also rich and earthy in a way that suggests a filmmaker who is deeply immersed in his story, his characters and his surroundings.

Zathura involves a lot of yelling, a lot of explosions and a lot of flying objects -- but what else would you expect from a movie that is, honestly for a change, intended for 10-year-old boys?

In Fabric is a beautiful, unpredictable nightmare for those drawn to giggle in the dark.

A Touch of Sin is a distinct departure, dipping into the pulpy martial arts tradition in a scathing portrait of post-Maoist China, where money is the new religion and horrific violence is its by-product.

There is something of the charming first novel to Victoria Day: It's a small film focused on a teenage passage. It is intensely well observed, but somewhat lacking in drama. It is lightly nostalgic about its moment in history. It's probably autobiographical. And it doesn't have much of an ending.

The film is a vertiginous experience of hanging 350 kilometres above the Earth.

Chef is compelling, somewhat convincing and, according to many who know better than I, it’s largely on trend.

Batra has drawn delicate performances from his ensemble in this adaptation of what was always an elliptical novel, but as a film, The Sense of an Ending leaves you hungry for something more than just the sense of an ending.

Surprisingly entertaining.

Pitt and Damon deliver the best lines (wisecracks about the food chain, predators and evolution, etc.) but their characters also represent most of us.

Undoubtedly the rudest and possibly the most inspired comedy of the summer.

It's a pretty fine film, thanks largely to the performances (and look) of its crackerjack cast, as well as Jonathan Freeman's restless, gritty cinematography and a lickety-split script.

Here's a truly novel sports film: It actually has a script, decent acting, sympathetic characters. And it's fun.

Writers Cecilia Frugiuele (who also produced) and Desiree Akhavan (who also directed), working from Emily Danforth’s source novel, capture the fugue state that is teenagehood, then refract it through the extra-weirdness of the camp.

The title leaves no doubt about the ending but, thanks to Santos's unflinching performance and Rodrigues's continued audaciousness, the climax still takes us aback.

In the end, the family drama rolls on as the political metaphor wears thin so that the second half of the film is less striking and less interesting than the first.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer should be a mess, but it's not. It's a mini-comic triumph, and although it's technically a teen movie, it's in the tiny genre of sophisticated, darkly funny teen films such as Heathers and Pump Up the Volume. [4 Aug 1992, p.C1]

The result is hallucinatory and puzzling, but never anything less than captivating.

Sure, the film’s a bit of a hit job. But hey, as Bannon himself tells us, “There’s no bad media.” Sadly, he’s probably right.

Though there are moments when the drama turns into intellectual debate, the film is also emotional, moving with a fluid, mounting tension and moments of anguish and strange, startling humour.

Mainly, though, it's the exquisite restraint - both of Cornish's performance and Campion's direction - that gives the film its power.

The laughs and the wisdom creep up on you in this small and subtle comedy about male relationships.

In the end, then, just Vanessa Redgrave and Terence Stamp and those voices – their solos contain this picture like carved book-ends, vintage and lovely and still so profoundly of use.

An unusually smartly written and performed American independent film.

The best of The Desolation of Smaug is saved for the last, when Bilbo goes to steal from the massive fire-breathing dragon, Smaug. The orange-eyed beast is voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch, who, through a sludge of voice-altering electronics, seethes and preens between fiery exhalations; this scene is one of the few occasions in the film where anyone actually takes time to talk.

The lads from Edinburgh thrive in chaos and, for all their new-found maturity, they are still at their best when in full flight from both responsibility and time.

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

Filmed in Nova Scotia and featuring both English and Mi’kmaw, Wildhood beautifully captures the beauty of the landscape and its community as well as moments of humour, even as it treads some bleak spaces.

Its true subject is the thrill of the chase and the means by which the movies express it, which is to say it’s one hell of a ride in the same direction taken by the characters: deep into a desert of vast and horizonless emptiness.

As it turns out, making money selling drugs is pretty win-win as far as it goes, but keeping it is another matter. So the title isn’t so much a joke as a bleak comment on a desperately cynical economy: In the drug trade, as well as the dubious “war” declared against it, everybody ultimately loses.

Like its namesake prophet, Zobel’s film is about exile and return, but it’s also more simply about who we lust after. This simplicity is the film’s virtue rather than its sin, and a layered picture of right and wrong, faith and reason, emerges as the story unfolds.

It is emphatically not for people who like either Twain or the more sophisticated manifestations of the Arthurian legend (the Camelot musical or Thomas Berger's Arthur Rex) but it is a well-directed, nicely acted bit of slapstick that has young audiences squealing with delight. [13 Aug 1979]

A delightful family movie that packs an emotional punch.

An immersive, compact and unpolished documentary from the Kurdish-born, Oslo-based filmmaker Zaradasht Ahmed.

The combined talents of Apted, Stoppard and the stellar cast make Enigma a puzzle worth solving.

Yet, about as often as Marvin's Room strikes a chord of emotional authenticity, it hits a fistful of false notes as well.

Muylaert’s is attuned to matters of social stratification and economic mobility, and the manner in which Brazil’s leisure class is propped up by the undervalued exertions of domestic labourers.

The film is a fun and unsettling showcase for Kravitz, who proves herself to be an intentional and provocative filmmaker, putting jarring edits, precise framing and a sensational ensemble cast led by Naomi Ackie, Channing Tatum, Adria Arjona and Geena Davis to great use.

As Miguel unravels the secret behind his family's ban on music and its relationship with de la Cruz, a story emerges that is both newly inventive in the way it deploys the skeletons and absolutely classic in the way it connects remembrance with immortality. Turns out these talking skeletons have a lot to say.

The portrait of the artist might be a bit uncritically rosy; still, this is a compelling dance film that captures the drive and passion of a key figure in contemporary choreography.

It’s a shame the Morrises don’t include more of Nureyev’s performance footage and opt, instead, to use long segments of contemporary dance reconstructions choreographed by Russell Maliphant. The segments look a bit garish and out of place, not necessarily because of their poor choreographic content, but as they have little aesthetic or conceptual continuity with the rest of the film.

The kind of movie that kids used to flock to on Saturday afternoons in the forties and fifties.

A good film prevented from being a great film by an act of well-intentioned but misguided casting.

Timoner offers a resonant, often painfully funny, drama about two good friends who become enemies against the backdrop of the pop-music business.

Fear is the anticipation of horror, and it’s this movie’s prime evil: not what happens inside the tent, but what might be making that noise outside.

The film is much more subversive for treading back and forth between the political and the personal, the Arab and the Israeli points of view.

Love it, hate it, but be sure to watch it, because this odd and disturbing picture is as different as the war it reflects, and that difference is vast enough to seem profound.

Greed’s antihero is known as “Rich" to his intimates and his surname earns him the moniker “greedy McCreadie.” It’s not subtle stuff but then, investigative journalism, censure, documentary exposés, and empathy haven’t worked so far to cure our rapacious fast-fashion appetite – so why not a movie?

The hook of The Crash Reel is that it’s about the rivalry between two famous American snowboarders, but in reality, Lucy Walker’s slickly produced documentary is about one man’s ongoing battle with himself – on and off the slopes.

The most remarkable element is surely the way Egoyan has seamlessly integrated footage from previous COC productions, that he shot himself at the time, into his new film to give it the breadth of a genuine stage performance.

After 107 well-packed minutes, Dotan’s film (which curiously fails to mention current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) arrives at a pessimistic outlook. A settlement on the settlements is nowhere in sight.

It is a rare song that deserves its own book, but Hallelujah is one of them. The story is a doozy.

The easy back-and-forth chemistry between Affleck and Bernthal as they paint the town blood-red provides certain dividends.

It’s hard to imagine another filmmaker who could invest the lives of straight, middle-class, norm-y, aggressively bro-y, immaculately groomed college sports jocks with a sense of vital anarchy and resounding humanity.

From the film's bravura opening scene to its cute but bloody conclusion, The Negotiator plays out as tautly as any crowd-pleasing action flick since Die Hard,which it emulates with shameless glee.

What always feels genuine, movingly so, are the faces of the school children caught up in their account of the unforgotten past.

The film’s bleakness is almost satirical. It’s "Brazil" drained of the daydreams.

The strength of this documentary lies in its balance, or at least the careful appearance of balance.

The freestyle approach is an apt fit with the freestyle, spontaneous comedy, as both the playful director and affable star capture moments on the fly.

[A] soulful, fluently told, low-key comedy.

The Return of the Living Dead, a parody of George A. Romero's unforgettably frightening Night of the Living Dead, is not for everybody, but it's one of the funniest films of its kind ever made. [16 Aug 1985]

The pitch on Dear White People is that it’s “Do the Right Thing for the Obama generation,” which is both an oversell and a disservice to Justin Simien’s witty satire about race relations on a fictional Ivy League campus.

Mostly, it's a Coen brothers movie so slick, so careful in rationing its darkly perverse and personal elements, that it seems suspiciously sweet. Intolerable Cruelty feels like the Coens' peculiar new way of being cynical, by pretending they're not.

Although the most dramatic events in the film tend to happen off screen, both men endure jail time, devastation of their property and familial heartbreak for participating in such a high-risk, high-reward career.