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

What’s missing in Get Him to the Greek are the supporting characters that made "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" so engaging.

Actress Helen Buday is coolly persuasive in the seesaw role of an unbalanced housewife who jerks from despair to anger.

No, this isn't the Care Bears. But it is a compelling yarn, in a Grimm sort of way, a throwback to a time when storytellers felt freer to tap the emotional currents that run deep and often dark in all children, and when the stories themselves formed a moral maze that trusted the kids to find their own way home.

One of the more ingenious and fresh surprises of the summer.

Unfortunately, as the phone battery wears down, the plot's theatrics heat up to pot-boiling degrees of incredulity – a senile mother, a vicious personnel director, even a coiled serpent, all vie to raise the ante. Talk about your bad day.

If you long for the bleak intelligence of an Ingmar Bergman film, where humankind is deeply flawed and God is indifferently silent and the landscape is cloaked in perpetual winter, then Beyond the Hills promises to be your cup of despair.

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.

Beijing Bicycle is a good film that owes a huge debt to a better film. And that, of course, is Vittorio De Sica's "The Bicycle Thief."

Less satisfying are the moments when the film concedes to American horror conventions, especially the scuttling vampire effects, which pull us out of the haunted world of these lovely damaged creatures into a place that, while not of this world, feels entirely too familiar.

It’s a solid notch in Statham’s career, but nothing that will change anyone’s mind about the actor.

The filmmaker’s narrative and visual approach isn’t especially novel in style, but it is compassionate, detailed and persuasive in its assembly.

What saves it, however, is Gerwig. The love story ain’t credible, but her performance is, perfectly capturing a young woman who doesn’t lack confidence so much as a sense of self.

Ultimately, This Changes Everything is a mainline to the first-hand experience of those who work and exist outside the white male umbrella. And because of that, it’s an exercise in storytelling that evolves quickly into a valuable lesson for anyone who purports to be a feminist, an ally or a film and television lover. You’ll never watch either the same way again.

Of all this year’s loud, over-long summer action movies that, in various ways, simulate the experience of having a tin bucket placed over your head and being struck repeatedly with a stick, it must be said that Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim is by far the most entertaining.

Landon is not aiming to break new ground here – only to use well-trod territory for his own gag- and gross-out-happy ends. This is candy-coloured mayhem, bright and snappy and enjoyably wince-inducing in its desire to disgust. And just as Vaughn can easily play both male murderer and winsome teen girl, so, too, can the charming Newton ace her required flips.

A trifle compared to Robert Altman's great films -- But it's a very assured trifle, and an unusually good-natured Altman film.

This is a grown-up film that puts liberalism under the microscope and finds it tired -- not a dirty word, as neo-cons believe, and not a panacea, as sentimentalists wish, but just tired and longing for rejuvenation.

Director Bharat Nalluri sets a pace as punishing as the title character's – the film is mainly a quick romp – even if he does indulge in some unnecessarily Dickensian melodrama along the way.

The movie blows through the Brat Pack smoke screen - it is superior to Colors in that regard - to reveal the troubled, lonely and sometimes crazy males behind the macho, misogynist posturing of men in groups. You couldn't find a nicer bunch of killers. [12 Aug 1988, p.C3]

The film feels as finely tailored to J. Lo as the booty-enhancing pencil skirts she wears throughout the movie: Second Act’s Maya from Queens is our Jenny from the Block.

The comic spirit in this type of picture is wonderfully democratic, and so is the result.

The meta-fiction concept of characters interacting with their creator is hardly original, but it's neatly packaged here by Kazan herself, who wrote the script for this clever little charmer.

A former mental patient and her family spend a summer on an isolated island, in a classic Bergman portrait where family dysfunction and existential terror meet. [31 Jul 2007, p.R1]

An adolescent-oriented farce so finely tuned it projects beyond its narrow intended audience - it's not only for adolescents, it's for anyone who remembers what adolescence was like. [05 Aug 1983]

It is, in short, a compendium of clichés, yet with a presentation that makes the familiar seem remarkably warm and fresh.

An unusually charming dark comedy about an actor teetering on the edges of reality, fantasy and career. The subject of dementia is explored and mined, not made fun of.

Best of all, it’s tight at 81 minutes, which means a 7 p.m. screening gets you out of the theatre while it’s still light out, thank God.

The apocalyptic vision of the heartland created by Sutton and his cast (based on the novel by Frank Bill) is impressively convincing, even if the themes are often overstated and the film itself is very hard to watch.

Compliance develops an intriguing premise intelligently, inquisitively and uncomfortably.

Burger and Tateisi don’t quite deliver a film as energetic and unpredictable as their subject.

A one-two punch that marks a step forward in Taylor’s brand of stylish and heightened thriller films.

Hal Hartley's latest film, an odd and mentally stimulating black comedy that may or may not have a point. In any case, the ride is delectably weird and entertaining. [17 Jul 1998]

It's an undemanding yet bright delight. [16 Mar 1991]

Barnaby puts a mythic frame around a grim history, shaping it in a way that feels always like a creative adventure, not a duty.

So this is a light/bright movie that actually illuminates our dull grey lives, reminding us that intrigue can be, well, intriguing. And damn sexy too.

An absorbing and not-too-uncomfortable experience, so long as you remember there's a camera lens and a big distance between you and the film's violent subject.

It manages to be heartwarming and heartbreaking all at once.

The film is a level-headed look at artists who promoted joy but lost their own.

It’s tempting to say that Aram Rappaport’s Syrup sticks, but it’s also true.

A pleasing fix, Searching for Sugar Man is a lost-and-found film about pursuits – one of them abandoned, and one not.

Apart from the ideology of the film, Pretty Baby is exquisitely executed. Shields, Sarandon and Carradine all give substantial but generally low key performances. [11 Apr 1978]

The movie's main attraction isn't hard to find. It's essentially a character study, but one where the nature of the study is as unique as the stature of the character.

Pleasant because, instead of the usual hero-and-mayhem jive, Snitch is an honest exercise in workmanlike craft. This is to film what ceramic is to floors or Billy is to bookcase or what a third-line centre is to a winning hockey team – hardly great but good and solid and functional.

Hackle-raising in its intensity.

Finding deep meaning and satisfaction from this story will be difficult, but if it’s style over substance you’re after, then you’ll revel in the comedic chic.

An engaging and surprisingly sharp allegory about high-school hierarchies and adolescent growing pains.

City of God crossed with A Prophet by way of One Thousand and One Nights, Philippe Lacôte’s Night of the Kings is an ambitious thriller that constantly surprises.

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

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]

The film's forced quirkiness constantly threatens to derail the entire enterprise, making this another minor American indie exercise in family eccentricity. But it keeps being put back on track by the apparently effortless performance of a great young actress.

Jeunet manages a terrific pass in an extended underwater sequence, but, beyond that, he runs out of ideas as we run out of patience.

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

Thanks to some skillful, nuanced editing – and the forgiveness of time that comes with three decades – Coppola’s experiment is an offer you (sorry) can’t refuse. Mostly.

Paradoxically cerebral and primal, reasonable and anti-rational, life- affirming and nihilistic, Naked Lunch is a sensual and intellectual feast. It will not be a meal to everyone's taste, but in its bizarre class, there is nothing classier. [10 Jan 1992]

A drama that's often insightful and occasionally powerful but is still, at heart, a piece of television and not a work of film.

Perfect betrays itself in the end, but until it does, it's an unexpectedly thoughtful consideration of "lifestyle" journalism, which by nature allots to the unknown a sudden but ephemeral celebrity, and which too frequently takes advantage of naive subjects eager to lower their defences. [7 June 1985]

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

Strange and beautiful and transfixing and confusing, it's quite the sight - martial-arts fans may find themselves disappointed, but Wong Kar-wai addicts will be delighted.

There is both a sense of disappointment and relief when House of Sand and Fog crosses over into improbability, when the viewer can sit back, breathe easy again. All this trouble over the failure to open an envelope.

When Spitzer resigned, they broke out champagne on the stock exchange trading floor. Shame on them.

In Hollywood terms, Beverly Hills Cop harks back to the semi- good old days, to the studio era when stars were not always relied on to fix everything - this is unquestionably a star vehicle, but the star, an employee of his own production company, has been smart enough to surround himself with other, by no means lesser lights. [4 Dec. 1984]

All right, there are bits and pieces of new material in Chapter 3, but they come in the form of gobbledygook world-building. What’s worse is that all this blather about the underground assassin economy arrives gussied up with characters uttering needlessly intimidating Latin phrases.

The night scenes are particularly resonant, mixing humour, suspense and textured visuals. This is the kind of film dream from which you feel reluctant to wake.

It’s a pleasant surprise, therefore, to see what Whedon has done with the Bard’s timeless comedy Much Ado About Nothing.

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.

From the cult Oklahoma director Mickey Reece, the horror film Agnes is funny – both funny ha-ha (in sly ways) and funny-peculiar all around.

Both a triumph of design and cinematic engineering and, at the same time, long, repetitious and naive.

The return to an Errol Flynn-style hero, who can swing from chandeliers, fight with two swords at once and ride a horse backward, recalls a movie era both sexier and more innocent.

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]

Very light-hearted and glamorous. [09 Nov 2002, p.R24]

From its intense beginnings to its what-really-c’mon-no-reallllllly-c’mon mid-film twist to its defiantly and successfully sentimental finale, the new Matthew McConaughey vehicle is playing by its own demented rules. When it deigns to care about rules.

The Motown musicians today are in their 60s and 70s but they remain inspiringly colourful, funny in their stories and assured in their musicianship.

Heartbreaking, compelling and terrifying, The Cured is a quick way to re-examine our capacity for forgiveness, tolerance and above all, fear.

A fascinating, frequently angry and occasionally darkly funny documentary.

No doubt, there is an uncomfortable number of logos being marketed to kids in the The Lego Movie, along with the obvious one that’s in the title, but the film as a whole is very much in the spirit of Cloud Cuckooland: It’s a place where the use of X-Acto blades and Krazy Glue breaks the rules but almost everything else goes.

Employing the unapologetic pomp of rap videos and enough heart to transition stereotypical characters into complex, dynamic subjects, Superfly is a visual treat that embellishes Director X’s signature kaleidoscopic visuals with an uncanny knack for storytelling.

The synthesis is a revealing and extremely funny portrait of urban schizophrenia in the waning years of the twentieth century. [21 May 1982]

Once the euphoria passes, director Tim Wardle takes his audience on an engrossing, heartbreaking journey into the lives of three innocents whose lives became experiments for scientists on a quest to unravel how identity is shaped. Sadly, in their zeal to figure out if nurture or nature wins, they forgot the human beings in the middle of the mix.

Buoyed by its urgent yet playful references to the real-life history of the Black West, Netflix’s newest genre outing The Harder They Fall is an energetic and poppy crowd-pleaser of a film made even better by its punky indifference toward staid conventions of period filmmaking.

The Italian belongs in group of excellent recent Russian films -- most notably Andrei Zvyagintsev's "The Return" and Boris Khlebnikov and Aleksei Popogrebsky's "Roads to Koktebel" -- that have examined the effects of the country's woes on its youngest and most vulnerable citizens, as well as the problems faced by any child unfortunate enough to have faulty or absent parents. At its best, The Italian conveys this grave issue with admirable clarity and power.

When this brisk, disquieting doc debuted at Sundance, these censorship farms were largely secret, but Facebook has started to bow to public pressure and open up some of the process. The troubling questions remain.

In making the first DC superhero film in a long time to aspire to anything like levity, Wan finds a way to catalyze what might have been yet another dust-dry origin story. The secret? Just add water.

Todd Solondz isn't for everyone, maybe not even most people...he's a comic filmmaker whose idea of entertainment is shredding chum into a shark tank.

The Babadook is too deliberately calibrated to prove truly terrifying.

Much to an audience's discomfort, Ingrid's desperation to bond with the phony Taylor soon breaks the bounds of sanity – until the film rebukes her warped world view with a highly moral ending. The critique is clever but the limit is the one so common in satire: it's hard to care about the fate of a character this exaggerated.

It’s lovely film to look at, Springsteen confronting his past and demons in the prettiest, gently tuneful barn-and-big-sky way imaginable.

A creepy, smartly written and very entertaining low-budget chiller.

The ethical fallout, the lingering fog of the so-called war on terror, is not that people don't know what's wrong or who's guilty - it's precisely that they do, and count it as the cost of doing business.

The result is a whodunit so nicely crafted that you're tempted to forgive the Byzantine plot -- hell, you're even tempted to pretend you actually understand its twisting obscurities.

Gotham gives way to Gaudi and the Met to Miro, but the sensibility is the same, the city as a precious treasure, and so is the message: Life may be hard and short, love may be flawed or doomed, but, my, aren't we blessed with lovely distractions.

Nothing much happens in this pleasantly casual 80-minute conversation of a documentary. It doesn’t come to you; you must come to it – like a Jim Jarmusch film, particularly his "Coffee and Cigarettes" from 2003.

What really distinguishes it from the art-film crowd is that it’s also food-spittingly funny.

Ex Machina is a clever film with one indelible performance from Isaac.

Bold, intelligent and provocative.

Edgerton, who also plays the tightly wound chief of the conversion-therapy organization here, wrings devastating performances from his cast, including Lucas Hedges as Garrard, and Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman as his parents.

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]

A celebration of Hong Kong action cinema that mocks gravity, both emotional and physical.