Some viewers will decide that Benny & Joon strays too far from the brink; they will find its sentimentality cloying. Other viewers will applaud the classic silent film humour and will emerge with a glow they'll want to show off to their friends. Both camps can agree, however, that Mary Stuart Masterson, Aidan Quinn and Johnny Depp are quite good. [16 Apr 1993]

Despite all these challenges, the performances that Mantello wrings make the 2020 effort worth everyone’s trouble.

The cheery result is enough to renew one's faith in Uncle Walt and the boys - a family picture that transcends the cliche, a light-bright romp where the sentiment isn't cheap and where the action isn't childish. Now there's a novelty item for you. [27 June 1989]

Bourne fans will find much to enjoy about The Bourne Legacy, even if they are forced to do without the title character.

Rarely, though, has cinema been so devoted to idealizing the importance of journalism than in Collective.

Calvary is an unsettling concoction, abstract and brutal, morally serious and too ghastly in its flippancy to be simply comedy. When you stop gasping at the shocks and jokes, there’s a profundity here, in the struggle to find the balance between outrage and forgiveness.

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.

It's a film of vigorous performances and provocative modern resonances, though it sometimes struggles to grapple with a grim, politically ambiguous, 400-year-old play.

Rodriguez, is a hack in the best sense of the term, often serving as producer, director, writer, shooter and composer – all of which come into play for Shorts .

The reason Diane (the film) exists is not to propose and then solve a mystery, but to engage with Diane (the person).

It is messy, it is incendiary, and it is frustrating. It may not be what you wanted or were promised by the slick and smooth marketing materials provided by Netflix, the streaming giant that is partnering with Lee here for the first time. But Da 5 Bloods is what you need.

The plot is threadbare, but cutely disarming in its own way.

We’re watching Buckley electrify the screen today. May her voice rattle in your head for the rest of the year.

Solitary Man makes too good on its title – it’s a fascinating character study isolated within a mediocre film.

As much as Occupied City’s observational eye is rooted in a humanistic and cumulative approach to history, it will, no doubt, leave those in search of a less austere approach wanting.

The impact of modern vice upon the Wayuu is a captivating tale never told before, and the final few minutes are brutal in the best possible way

The bulk of Fire and Ash feels distressingly derivative of what came before, down to ultra-specific plot beats

Though the progress of Atim's increasing empathy is predictable, the film understates its points effectively, without simplification.

Instead of the typical John Grisham-style connect-the-dots legal thriller, we get a film that's idiosyncratic, with a time-shifting structure, a surfeit of subplots and characters.

If CJ7 feels like the love child of Charles Dickens, Mao Zedong and Steven Spielberg, it's because that's exactly what this PG-rated, Chinese-made fantasy is.

The political buck-passing from all entertains and creates the film’s time-sensitive tension.

Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color is a deliberate exercise in swooning obscurity. You either go with its considerable sensory powers or you scratch a groove on your head.

If this doc is sometimes elegiac in tone, there is nothing mournful about it. Dorfman is too much the odd-ball optimist, telling funny anecdotes – a lifelong friendship with poet Allen Ginsberg began when she was a young publishing-house secretary and he asked for some mysterious thing called “the can” – and tossing off provocative insights into the nature of photography and life.

Just as it seems that Noé will tip over into the truly extreme, he backs off. If this is the dawn of a new, slightly restrained Noé, we might need five more stages to process the pivot.

The script is loose; the acting is natural and nuanced. Over the credits plays an acoustic song about lives in the how-did-we-get-here stage. If you do not leave this Netflix movie asking questions about your own paths, the failing is yours, not Duplass’s.

A skilfully executed thriller that is narrowly aimed at one demographic – audiences over 50 who like a little violence with their late-life dramas – but succeeds at entertaining just about anyone who comes across its dusty, blood-soaked path.

Elena is at once a portrait, an autobiography and a history of family trauma.

You can practically taste the grit and grime of the mean streets of this North of England setting. [17 Aug 1996, p.11]

Any kids’ cartoon that opens with narration by the mondo eccentric German filmmaker Werner Herzog is bound to bring comfort to hearts of certain parents in the house.

A delicate pearl of a movie, Like Someone in Love is thus a meditative dance along the ambiguous borders of truth and illusion. What, Kiarostami seems to be asking, can we actually see? What can we definitively know? Far less than we think.

But it is bright, smart, sometimes wickedly funny, and crisply performed to the point where the acting seems richer than the script.

As a film, The Handmaid's Tale, effectively compressed in Pinter's terse screenplay and heightened by Schldondorff's Teutonic thriller techniques, both subtracts from and adds to Atwood's novel, while scrupulously preserving its interior paradox. [09 Mar 1990]

Not everything about Zero Dark Thirty zips by. The middle hour of the film feels overstuffed with agency chiefs and national security advisors gazing on the feisty Maya with avuncular admiration.

You'll be rewarded with a terrific finale. The twists here are the rare sort that seem both narratively surprising and emotionally engaging.

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.

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.

There is no tragic hero here; there is no overarching explanation, but a movie that offered either of those would seem pretty pat. Take it or leave, Everest is just there.

As an epic, American Gangster doesn't cut it. The reputations of Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather," Brian De Palma's "Scarface," Martin Scorsese's "Goodfellas" or Michael Mann's "Heat" are safe. At best, American Gangster is no better than a workmanlike imitation of its betters.

Here, in orderly fiction, the reverberations bring about the alignment of cultures, the meeting of minds and the comforting assertion that "our lives aren't that different." Maybe so, and the film deserves full marks for trying, at times movingly, to convince us. In the end, the argument is a little too neat to accept, but far too poignant to ignore.

The principals are superb, with Mullan and Colman doing a masterful job of inhabiting their separate but equal prisons.

As angry, deluded, vulnerable and confused as Aileen is, the character remains an enigma. Apart from serving as an opportunity for Theron's emotionally deep-dredging performance, the movie doesn't know why it exists.

Those who lived through the Vietnam War era, and paid attention, will find this documentary short on revelation but long on poignant reminders.

Directed by Paul Greengrass, the unflinching eye behind "Bloody Sunday," The Bourne Supremacy not only lives up to the promises of the novel by Robert Ludlum, but in many ways manages to improve on the first film.

Leigh Whannell’s new film is exactly the kind of pure trash that feels suited to spaces that are dirty, neglected, a little bit worse for wear. But this is no insult.

A light, slight, wry look at the beautiful and besotted, which gets away with not having much to say, thanks to its charm and excessive good looks.

The naively amenable character is wonderfully observed by Fonte, and early scenes show delicious whimsy and black comedy...but as the film’s numbing brutality takes hold the character’s passivity makes the action drag in places.

EDtv is precisely the kind of brisk, straightforward, amiable and accessible material that shows Howard’s skills to advantage.

While Wojtowicz’s shape-shifting character is the major source of fascination here, the archival footage, including with is terrifically effective in evoking the tumultuous era and occasionally providing a reality check to the Dog’s boastful version of his life.

Against all odds and historical improbabilities, God Grew Tired of Us is a pleasant, uplifting documentary about genocide and ethnic cleansing.

If you had to be an alcoholic, you'd want to be like Kate, the young drunk played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead in the new movie Smashed.

Director Sean Durkin's precisely constructed psychological thriller Martha Marcy May Marlene is a movie of many m-words – memories, mirrors and madness.

Ultimately, Benigni's comic refinery merely transforms the banality of evil into a lesser sin -- the evil of banality.

Generally makes good on its promise. There are shivers to be felt, especially in the early stages, and there's fun to be had, including the post-movie pleasure of detecting the soft spots in the plot. The result is an always-watchable picture from a director capable of more.

While Mesrine: Killer Instinct certainly deserves a place among memorable French gangster films, Richet never delivers a clear theme here, let alone a plot.

One of Stephen Chow's extravagant and very funny martial-arts spoof movies.

The Ambassador may be an important, even necessary film; just don't expect to find it enjoyable.

The performances of Travis Fimmel, Toby Kebbell and Paula Patton as the warrior Lothar, the orc hero Durotan and the half-orc/half-woman Garona, all awakening to the evil forces around them, are meaty enough to hold attention.

Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid (whose debut Policeman was a critical hit) keeps us guessing. His message seems clear even if his characters’ motivations aren’t always.

Turning the stately game into something few can resist – a smart and lively comedy of manners.

With little dialogue to assist her -- just the strains of that wonderfully organic music -- she still manages to suggest the internal struggle, and to slowly reveal a fierce toughness that flies in the face of conventional morality.

The cinematic strategies are energetic without being vulgar, the words are plain-spoken, and moony Mel's melancholy is what matinee idols are made of. [18 Jan 1991]

This is a grimly thrilling movie that falls somewhere between clear-eyed realism and the improbabilities of an action flick.

If there’s a glaring oversight in Hail Satan?, it’s in the film’s singular devotion to the Temple of Satan. There’s little-to-no mention of other Satanic cults.

Fonda and Hepburn work gallantly against the mythic: Norman and Ethel are specific people, New Englanders, a middle-class pair without any special abilities or beliefs that might ease their slide into the oblivion at the end of life. They are Every Couple, delineated with a sharpness that only two consummate professionals working at the peak of their powers could provide. [18 Dec 1981]

Truth be told, Wrong isn’t as funny as "Rubber," which played kamikaze games with horror-movie tropes. The tone here is flatter and more meandering, and more than a few of Dupieux’s digressions feel like dead ends. At the same time, there’s a winning confidence to the filmmaking, which is deceptively stylish.

A supernatural winner.

Loving Vincent is gorgeous. It's a film of immersive beauty.

A subtext of the film is a focus on classical music, as if to ask how humans can be capable of both intense beauty and ruthless inhumanity.

The most provocative aspect of this compulsive riddle is how it resists closure. The end comes not when we have the answer, but when the movie reaches its irresolute end.

For all that The Sessions does well, it offers some telling deviations from the real story.

A butterfly metaphor is employed by the time-flipping Takahata, a filmmaker whose delightful Only Yesterday took 25 years to arrive right on time.

In My Bodyguard the warfare is entirely internecine, and the movie, for all its shortcomings, is an exceptionally perceptive (and funny) study of the terror that can be visited upon an innocent victim. [23 Aug 1980]

The dialogue is often mundane...and the actors' lurching delivery of these lines, often flattened, sometimes speechifying, sometimes rushed, but never naturalistic, forces the viewer to question the point of the action as Lanthimos crafts a dark satire about responsibility, justice and retribution.

Handsome, profoundly austere and vaguely traumatizing, Black Hollow Cage has no fun at all with the time-travel trope. But, then, one man's kitchen knife to the neck is another man's hot tub or Michael J. Fox.

If there’s a low-key disappointment to Vic and Flo, it’s that the film teases the mind and pleases the eye without requiring emotional commitment.

As usual, Levine rounds out his supporting cast with a suspiciously stacked roster of comic actors – Randall Park, June Diane Raphael, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Bob Odenkirk, and Andy Serkis, the latter taking his love of heavy makeup a bit too far this time – and keeps the story moving with a breezy briskness that should be studied by any aspiring rom-com director.

In lesser hands, this chaos might tumble into melodrama or farce. But Stolevski’s actors deliver such naturalistic performances, and he writes such specific dialogue . . . that you care deeply about what happens to these people.

Marshall treats everything, from the feminist themes to a soundtrack that features period chestnuts redone by contemporary singers, with a unique mix of the furiousand the subdued - a broad knee-slapper one moment, a delicate caress the next. No wonder we root for it. With the count full and our hopes wavering, A League Of Their Own smacks a stand-up triple and dares us not to cheer. Go ahead - give in and be a fan. [3 July 1992]

In keeping with that home-team tradition, The Promise lives up to the title --it really delivers the eye-popping goods.

Making his directorial debut is actor John Carroll Lynch (no relation to David Lynch). This first-timer quirks things up occasionally with surreal scenes of a nightmare and an on-the-nose allegory (Lucky walking toward an exit sign and standing at an abyss).

Adventure, romance and fabulous travel opportunities, all for a few bucks. [23 Dec 1994]

Surf's Up is that rarity in a children's movie, a comedy that's actually exciting.

Short Term 12 is a triumph of modesty.

Even its structurally weaker moments give Garfield an opportunity to expand on Jack's physical and mental dislocation. Given Boy A's final floating reel, it's an anchoring performance in every sense of the word.

The very name Orson Welles stands for genius wasted and betrayed, and the movie offers some foreshadowing of his triumphs and failures to come.

He’s a fox who’s used to being hounded by journalists, and as such he’s a very elusive subject for a documentary – even one by a filmmaker who’s renowned for getting his subjects to talk.

Even when their material is not much more substantial than a punchline overheard in a playground, Cheech and Chong, in their routines together, make being funny look as effortless as Ella Fitzgerald makes singing sound.[23 July 1980]

The Beautiful Game shines because of Nighy.

De Bont knows how to edit a pulse-pounding sequence, he knows how to keep the screen white-hot, and he sure knows how to blow things up real good. What he doesn't know is how to slow down - this premise is perfect for him.

It’s a felt, funny, bracingly sincere kids’ movie. And even more refreshing, it takes as a theme our social fixation with waste, salvage and repackaging.

There's plenty of humour in Comedian but not a lot of happiness -- apparently, the sad clown is a cliché for good reason.

Like the incompetent spy himself, this is a comedy that will sneak up on the skeptical and defy low expectations, producing something smart enough to neatly balance the thrills and the yuks.

As millions watching the eventual rescue understood, the strength of those miners and the unlikely hope of their families, was utterly captivating. Their survival moved me deeply then and, with The 33, it still does now.

Seabiscuit is a good enough movie, in the sense that it's a well-crafted assemblage of pathos and rousing moments, solidly acted and handsomely shot -- but it's far from champion material.

The film is a technical wonder, especially the sound design. There's also an excellent incongruity at work: Happy faces drawn in blood, viscous killers in playful masks and cheesy eighties music as the soundtrack to savagery.

Both Rudd and Segel have splendid comic timing and their improvised scenes leap out from the script.

In a Hollywood ecosystem obsessed with brands and inoffensive genericism, there is something admirable and fresh about a movie that has nothing on its mind other than delivering 87 minutes’ worth of gory gator-chomping thrills.

Jordan remains faithful to the looney sensibility of a hero, who is hard to take, but in his refusal to acquiesce to the social humdrum, is like a saint, or at least an artist.