There is something undeniably charming about the film in spite of itself, its familiar but pleasant narrative momentum and tense on-court action wrapped around a lovably scruffy lead performance from a man who knows how to turn it on when he wants to.

Often more ingenious in appearance than fact. The hunter-gets-captured-by-the-game scenario is predictable and the sequence of shell games does not, when reconsidered, actually add up.

The film is simply unlike anything else to play theatres this year – a feat it will likely keep for the foreseeable future.

French Postcards is a minor, mechanical remembrance of insignificant times past - specifically, of days spent by (young) Americans in Paris. But it is also quite funny and the performers more than make up for the script's creaking joints: there is a freshness and vitality in the work of the largely unknown actors that is invigorating. [27 Oct 1979]

Michelle Monaghan's clowning response to her boyfriend's sudden histrionics lends the drama a giddy fizz.

Politicians are craven and driven by all the wrong reasons, and though the pair uncover a handful of hopeful voices – especially Ben Feinstein, a compassionate and committed idealist – you will likely exit the world of Boys State as cynical as you entered it.

The One and Only Ivan elevates its babbling baboons and erudite elephants to a level of graceful storytelling and emotional catharsis. The film might only be available to stream in the emptiness of your own home, but it has enough big-screen ambition that you can easily imagine it holding an entire theatre’s audience rapt.

Holofcener's work is character and dialogue-driven, with a keen sense of prickly female competitiveness and intimacy that a man couldn't, and probably wouldn't, dare portray.

Hartley manages to spin grim-sounding material into an uplifting - and funny - story dealing with love, responsibility, the dynamics of family life and, yes, trust. [09 Aug 1991]

The trouble is that absolutely nothing about the movie feels like news.

Ultimately, your nautical mileage may vary as to whether Chandor and Redford achieve the philosophical and emotional impact they intend, but in a movie that is a demonstration of the importance of trying, they definitely try.

The violent but impressive Bad Boys doesn't waste much time getting down to business. Bad Boys is about a generation of teen-agers who have learned from television to want the biggest and the best, and it's about a generation in the process of angrily learning that it's going to be forced to settle for the littlest and the least. [22 Apr 1983]

Two Lovers is two movies – the complex, alluring one we want, and the simple, pedestrian one we'll settle for.

The rare biopic of a visual artist that considers the dilemma of the art more seriously than it considers the drama of the life.

The result is a stylish, watchable film, but one with a slow pulse. Game, set and almost a great movie.

Plays like a sophisticated children's story.

Bloody fun is here to be had.

Good Hair is also about how African-Americans spend $9-billion annually chemically treating and straightening their hair, buying 80 per cent of America's hair products. It's such a fascinating, complex tale that you hope one day some probing filmmaker will make a conclusive documentary on the subject.

A half-century ago, "kitchen sink realism" began its harsh existence on the British stage and then migrated to the screen where, over the years, the genre has taken up permanent residence, maturing into a gritty art...Now add Andrea Arnold to the directors' list and Fish Tank to the kitchen. It's classic low-rent realism – you can almost smell the grease on the unwashed dishes.

The journey here, over all, is still worth it, full of Asians making jokes, talking dirty and getting it on – like any good rom-com.

Based on a book by his widow, it's an entertaining film that shows a few warts in portraying Lee's complexity but is, overall, reverential (in the best biopic tradition). [7 May 1993]

The Mumbai-set Photograph is a gentle romance cleverly told, and not without humour.

Instead of a message movie, Gabrielle is a romance and an unusual kind of musical that seamlessly integrates special needs actors with the other cast members.

So the interrogative title is left to hover over the ending, as it does over all those tension-filled places near and far. Speaking as a foolish man, I had high hopes for these wise women – given the historic alternative, I still do.

Baker proves himself a talented director; he manages the rolling rhythms of his waves and his story with skill – especially a montage around Pikelet’s sexual awakening, which is at once funny, steamy and poignant.

For all its loud signalling of raunch ahead, Blockers is funnier that you might expect: It’s a reliable laugh machine that features enough jabs at contemporary mores, alongside a discreet social conscience and some successfully female-centric comedy, that it rises above the inevitable chug-and-vomit jokes.

Girotti is especially evocative, his face an alternating current that switches from emptiness to alarm and back again.

There is nothing dry about Last Call at the Oasis, Jessica Yu's engaging, informative and fast-flowing documentary exploring the global water crisis.

Hard Candy not only trips along a tightrope line between exploitation and art; in some ways, that line is its subject.

Stand and Deliver honors its title; it's a good news movie in a bad news world. [15 Apr 1988]

Never brilliant but always solid and often wry, Marley & Me is what it celebrates -- an amiable overachiever.

Watching Morgan Spurlock commit slow suicide in Super Size Me is rather like watching Nic Cage do the same in "Leaving Las Vegas," except here the "preferred" instruments of destruction are hamburgers and vanilla milkshakes instead of booze and cigarettes.

It's Adrien Brody's turn to find himself the lone and immobilized star of an emerging new genre: Call it the anti-action flick.

As much as The Shape of Water's disparate parts shouldn't work – and as much as its "originality" is sourced from the thousands of other fables del Toro has consumed over his lifetime – it does, in the end.

The film is like an Ingmar Bergman movie as realized by Monty Python: It's seriously gloomy about the loss of spirituality in the world, but at the same time rudely, sometimes hilariously, absurd.

It feels like one long non-sequitur -- like closing a Charles Bronson film with a disco medley -- but there's an emotional consistency to Kitano's boisterous celebration of movement.

The tale may be Dahl's, but there's a whole new wag to it – this is decidedly, weirdly and, at best, wonderfully a Wes Anderson movie.

A beguiling, slow-moving parable.

In the film's finest moments, as a generous Iranian host explains traditional Farsi poetry, the animation and the themes mingle and explode in a riot of cross-cultural colour as the stringy Canadian cartoon meets gorgeously rendered illustrations – and personifications – of Persian traditions.

As sincere and entertaining as it is, The New Romantic makes the classic university mistake of trying to ace the exam by cramming the night before.

Director Morgen is a bit messy with his timeline and his relentless insect photography really bugged me. But the biggest nit to pick is with Philip Glass's intrusive, crazily grandiose score.

Audacious and bursting with ideas, the paranoid little sci-fi independent film Pi marks an auspicious debut for New York writer Darren Aronofsky.

So this is a first-level, unironic fright film, the sort whose tongue is removed from its cheek, coated in gore, and pointed right at the audience.

Unless you are made of stone – to say nothing of being actually stoned – it is pretty damn funny. For at least 100 of its 137 minutes.

Charming, ingenious and absurd tale of friendship.

Stewart believed people would rally to the shark cause if only they knew the gravity of the situation. The film is now made, the word is out and Stewart more than did his part.

Each character in David Webb Peoples' dense, unexpectedly stately, non- violent script (the inevitable gore is employed sparingly) is treated with that same, somewhat distanced clarity.

Director Barbosa's love letter to his late friend is emotionally satisfying and cinematically splendid, with social commentary shoe-horned in for better or worse.

It's an imperfect movie that serves as a perfect reminder of what the movies do best.

Ruben’s story may be as oddly illogical as any of his nightmares, but the animation here is a dreamy delight.

In this journey, [Crowe] wears the uniform, the accent and the derring-do with consummate panache. Have him strike a muscular pose on the ship's prow, which Weir does more than once, and the manly sight puts that wussy DiCaprio to titanic shame.

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

Already being decried as either self-parody or half-assed nonsense, the drama is in fact just as challenging and rewarding as Malick’s previous work, though with a more modern and caustic edge than one-time acolytes might be used to.

Crucially, Ask Dr. Ruth shows us a renegade ahead of her time.

Plot, characterization and dialogue are merely the frame here for the real goods, an immersion into the Indonesian martial arts form known as silat.

The first 20 minutes owe too much - much too much - to Animal House & Co., and the last 20 to The Graduate, but in between there is an uproariously crude and vigorously funny effort to squish the teen genre into the confines of classic French sex farce.[14 June 1985]

The Indian in the Cupboard unfolds with absorbing logic to tell a tale in the best of children's story tradition. [17 July 1995]

Home Again is a tight, witty script from a first-time director with a long list of hits ahead of her – and, of course, the golden age of Hollywood dynasties lighting her way.

It's a my-brother's-keeper drama, except when it's a violent comedy. It's a tale of There Will Be Blood-levels of greed, except when it's a high-ho adventure.

Cynical, stylish and witty. [21 Feb 1997]

It's also mysterious in fresh ways. Like Hillary, Yates and Simpson climbed the mountain because it was there -- but what strange deity sent down a Boney M song to help Joe Simpson get home?

Lumpy title, lively movie. Dead Man Down proves to be a frisky gangster flick cum elaborate thriller cum off-beat romance. Yep, there’s a whole lot going on here, but this is one of those plot-heavy scripts that carries its weight with confidence – the intricate twists don’t cheat.

The plot depends on an improbably interdependent set of acquaintances and events, but the cinematography, the dialogue and the performances, especially Adrian Titieni’s as an earnest and anxious Mr. Fix-It, are impressively naturalistic.

Captures some of the spirit of the real Che.

Well, the movie suffers slightly from that tendency -- the portrait shows definite signs of airbrushing. But it's rendered with enough intelligence, and performed with sufficient grace, to offer us an occasionally compelling, curiously upbeat look behind the lacquered image and into the complicated self.

The Eyes of My Mother is not for the easily queasy. It is a stark, dreadful vision – but one that is fascinatingly executed, with a compelling central performance from Kika Magalhaes as a matter-of-fact monster.

That it all works is a tribute to Stu Silver's gaggy but never vulgar script and to DeVito's imaginative direction, but the movie would be unthinkable without its trio of funny folk. [11 Dec 1987]

This film is many things at once: It is didactic but ambitious, affecting but satirical, absurd but also poignant.

The enlightening and necessary film, narrated by an adoring Denny, is very much in the vein of 2002’s "Standing in the Shadows of Motown," a documentary that celebrated the Funk Brothers, the criminally unheralded house band at Berry Gordy Jr.’s hit-making studio in Detroit. But where "Standing in the Shadows" of Motown used re-enactments and new live performances, The Wrecking Crew is composed mostly of archival footage and newish interviews.

Played adroitly by Patrick Sabongui, this guy wouldn’t hurt a fly. Or would he? A couple of nice plot twists overshadow the predictable sound-of-sorrow ethnic wail that closes the film.

Like every classic toy, the franchise has been remodelled in hopes of customer satisfaction. Luckily, this smarter, funnier Child’s Play actually works.

Come Play’s themes, characters and story are too strong to lump the film in with the wave of sub-tier horror flooding the market this month.

Though Abrams doesn't possess a fraction of the visual pizzazz of the two previous MI directors, Brian De Palma or John Woo, his incarnation is, from a narrative perspective, better made.

This is a movie about children that isn't just a children's movie - thoughtful adult accompaniment is strongly advised. [13 Aug 1993]

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.

The main attraction here are the characters: well-observed animals of the zoo or the barnyard.

In the midst of this emotional train wreck in motion, with angry outbursts and accusations, there are moments of levity, jokes and even a song or two. Strangely, it does not seem irreverent or bizarre but, rather, an expression of affection, as if love is tearing them apart.

Sington's smartest decision was to let 10 of the astronauts speak for themselves. The film juxtaposes their personal stories, both their doubts and machismo, with the titanic achievement of the lunar landings.

Think of this stylish, quirky and quite grisly feature from Marjane Satrapi as a meeting of "Psycho," "Dexter" and "Dr. Doolittle."

As the title more than hints, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is all about a leap of faith, and faith is exactly what this picture requires of us. Make the leap, and you'll be delighted by a movie that's sugary goodness, a guilty pleasure.

Rosaline ultimately sparkles in this cheeky telling of the greatest love story never told.

The film’s director, who would make an excellent character witness for the defence, raises the questions but frustratingly doesn’t answer them in an otherwise compelling documentary.

In resisting the urge to roll over into the sappy-dog genre, Buddy instead elevates the stories it tells: It’s ultimately about love, resilience and lessons we can all take in.

As director Michael Noer struggles to tease a theme out of a string of exploits, Papillon remains as entertaining as ever.

An excellent cast (including Michael Shannon and Hillary Swank) hit the right notes in an evenly wrought family drama that rings true.

If hell is other people, then high school is a four-year journey through all nine levels of Dante-ish misery. But while most teen-centric films skip over this harsh reality, The Edge of Seventeen embraces it with a refreshing zeal.

As director Maren Ade builds one extended set piece after another, you will gradually spy her brilliant fusion of form and function: the languid pacing reproduces in the audience the feeling of Ines’s excruciating discomfort and desire to see her father shuffle out of the scene.

The Bronze often feels like an extended skit, but Hope is so refreshingly unladylike and the movie is so refreshingly cynical about gymnastics that the results are surprisingly amusing.

Simple but engrossing.

Baby Driver is fast and furious and fun as hell, but its cinema of cool may melt down in the coming years, another artifact of reckless, headstrong youth.

Though nothing much happens in the plot, the interplay between characters is always sharply observed, with funny, off-kilter dialogue: Whether it's a clumsy pickup attempt at a bar, a couple fighting about which of them cares more about the other, or the attempt by relatives to console each other at a funeral -- while sharing lines of cocaine -- the scenes feel both spontaneous and deftly constructed. [1 Nov 1996, p.D3]

The soundtrack is effective and overt – from the badass rock blare of Billy Squire, Bad Company and AC/DC to the atmosphere compositions of the indie musician Julia Holter to the riveting nu-blues of Willis Earl Beal. The camera work is slick, too; tricky sound-editing notions are pulled off with aplomb.

Josue’s film is not consistently effective in bridging her personal story with Shepard’s well-known legacy, but there are striking moments that explore the limits of forgiveness.

In a better entertainment world, Owe would have won a special Buster Keaton Great Stoneface award at last year's Academy Awards.

Bullock, easing into her mid-40s with box-office mojo intact, remains the star attraction as the annoyingly endearing Mary. You simply can't imagine another actor of her stature pulling it off.

WAG the Dog is a cozy political satire, the warm-and-fuzzy kind that is always entertaining yet never disturbing.

Overall, it's a satisfying example of the classic thriller, with a nifty digital update for these times.

It doesn’t all hang together, but its furious, ramshackle energy does the job, and maybe that’s all that matters: Outrage, after all, aims to spur action, not land four-star movie reviews.