Kranz can’t quite figure out a way to make his characters’ collective misery cinematically interesting. This is a serious movie, but not a searing one.

In dramatizing the rigours of the ghetto, Yakin stoops to hyperbolic plot devices that tend to erode the very empathy he's striving to create. Things are surely bad, but not that bad - unwittingly, he's demonizing people who deserve better, who are better. [02 Sep 1994]

A twisty, cerebral drama that just happens to involve aliens, Denis Villeneuve’s film is a truly beguiling take on both the sci-fi canon and what, exactly, a grown-up Hollywood film is supposed to be.

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.

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

Hackman is unexpectedly hilarious. With protruding top teeth and a professorial beard, he's a motormouth, badgering and abusing one minute, wheedling and fawning the next.

Quickly and efficiently, Cregger sets up his world and its impossibly high stakes with style to burn. Finally, we have a horror movie director who knows how to properly light a nighttime scene. But once Cregger’s narrative threads are laid out, the writer-director has a helluva time stitching them together.

The Fly is a mass-market, horror- film masterpiece that is also a work of art; it is the very movie the timorous feared "Aliens" would be - a gruesome, disturbing, fundamentally uncompromising shocker that accesses the subconscious. [15 Aug 1986]

It is a film that asks audiences to take the plunge into chaos and confusion, so that we’re able to fully see the innate humanity of what remains when the dust of it all settles.

Two superb actors etch an unflinching portrait of a young marriage doomed never to grow old.

Fans of stunning cinematography, thoughtful writing and pure, unadulterated emotional torture will find Close to be worthy of the Oscar nod.

The film’s real triumph is in how accurately it captures the intricacies of human relationships, especially when tested.

Labelling his film as a response to the impoverishment of ordinary people caused by the government-imposed austerity of 2013-14, Gomes explains his dilemma brilliantly at the start of Volume 1. How is a well-meaning filmmaker to effectively render the pain of the Portuguese with a documentary set in a town where the shipyard has closed just as alien wasps are attacking local beehives?

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.

Top Five finds Rock in an elevated form, at 49. Things change, sometimes for the better.

But the stuff looks like what it is -- trite imagery grafted over the narrative barrens, like a bad weave on a balding pate.

Dunn’s work is a far more fantastical feat, one that mixes slow-burn drama with a welcome Cronenbergian sensibility. Oh, and Isabella Rossellini plays a talking hamster. Just try to top that.

There's no redemption here. Indeed, if anything is redemptive about Katyn , it's the fact of the film itself.

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.

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 ever-reliable Hanks sympathetically personifies all in America that is worth fighting for, while his British colleague’s surprisingly comic version of Rudolf Abel portrays the Russian spy as a man quietly steadfast in his loyalty to a different cause.

This delightful stop-motion animated romp features no dialogue, which is as it should be – the beauty of animals is in their actions, not words, after all.

Through a richly layered lens of myth-building and melodrama, Ainouz manages to capture the heartbreak, solitude and resilience of women on the verge.

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.

The triumph of Foxcatcher is not in the subject but in its art. The clear-eyed compassion and moral intelligence of Miller’s film brings sense to the senseless, and finds the human pulse behind the tabloid shock. It’s not a movie to make you feel good, but, at moments, it reminds you what goodness is.

Ultimately, the result is identical to Mills's debut effort in "Thumbsucker." Once again, clever insight vies with misty-eyed sentimentality, honesty with artifice, real humour with bogus gravity, the genuinely affecting with the merely quirky. But "Thumbsucker" was at least a promising start; Beginners is just a frustrating continuation.

Gomes believes we should all take responsibility for one another and sees austerity as a government abrogation of social duty that ultimately turns citizen against citizen.

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

White Lie is a wildly entertaining ride.

To watch Portman’s every move is to not only watch history being recreated, but to also witness history being made. No one will ever be able to touch this role again. Or, at least, no one should.

It's not the subject matter itself that's offensive -- pedophilia is as worthy a topic of investigation as any other. Instead, it's the subject's non-treatment -- we don't learn a thing that rings true.

A deceptively simple and concise narrative structure allows Ford to parse her subject and characters with a graceful internal complexity that shows rather than tells.

It’s shocking and troubling, but it doesn’t add much to the reality we already know cruelly exists.

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.

From beginning to brutal end, this is Fargeat’s uncompromising creation, but Lutz is at the centre of the terror, and acquits herself well as a person never to be dismissed, or crossed, again.

Despite strong performances across the board – most notably Wright, who has never before been able to flex such leading-man magnetism – there is an overriding flatness to Monk’s personal life.

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.

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.

In its bold aesthetic courage and rigid thematic spine, Khatami’s movie is a full-body experience that leaves you fully alive.

Take the backroom political machinations of "Lincoln," add in the showbiz sleight of hand of "Argo," and you’ll get something like No, a cunning and richly enjoyable combination of high-stakes drama and media satire.

This dandy foreign feature from Anders Thomas Jensen is only posing as a revenge film – clickbait for the violence junkies and the popcorn crowd. Yes, leading man Mads Mikkelsen plays a brooding killing machine out to avenge the loss of a loved one. But Riders of Justice, in Danish with English subtitles, is actually a pitch-black comedy about questions, coincidences and ideas that pile up faster than the body count.

Evil isn't a matter of banality in The China Syndrome; it's a barracuda in a three-piece suit. The film is thus weakened both politically and esthetically. The weakness does not stand in the way of the movie's cumulative effect, which is to weaken the knees, but as you make your way out of the theatre, knee-caps clicking like castanets, you may stop to wonder what kind of shape you'd be in if the one-eyed king's vision had been bifold.[24 March 1979]

A twofold story of heroic achievements and personal failings.

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

With Hot Fuzz, you'll just have to settle for semi-hilarity.

British humour at its eclectic best, a deliciously heady mix of dry wit and ribald farce.

A simultaneously realistic and absurdist examination of police work.

Tarantino's approach is so enamoured of the exploitation cinema he emulates, there is a serious risk that noble intentions get smothered in juvenile comedy and cinematic grandstanding.

Lumet uses every claustrophobic camera angle in the book to make the viewer feel as trapped as the characters. [04 Nov 2000, p.12]

A refreshing take on vampire lore.

Us is the work of a gifted director who seems to be compensating for having less to say by overstating how he says it.

The Big Short has a reckless, off-balance energy, with an ending that doesn’t really end the uncertainty: The collapse could happen again, no joke.

The obvious subtext of Moana is rich and pointedly relevant, but never overpowering.

If "The Great Wall" felt like Yimou was turning his greatest hits into something dispassionately bland, then Shadow takes the familiar and makes it feel startlingly new.

Perhaps Jia is trying to prove the point that the future has already arrived. Or perhaps he is suggesting that the truth is stranger than science fiction. This is today's China: Anything is possible.

Reservoir Dogs sizzles - it's dynamite on a short fuse, and you watch it with mesmerized fascination, simultaneously attracted and repelled by the explosion you know will come.

Skyfall is one of the best Bonds in the 50-year history of moviedom's most successful franchise.

In the script Lelio co-wrote with Gonzalo Maza, the lover's family may be conveniently ghastly and the authorities who investigate the death puzzlingly erratic (as the film flirts unsuccessfully with mystery), but a quietly honest centre never wavers.

Shinkai unleashes a twist early on so clever and cerebral that J.J. Abrams and Christopher Nolan will kick themselves for not thinking of it first. That twist turns things from a teen film to an adult film.

All that's deliberate, but the lingering question is not: Is Melancholia a sly depiction of the end we deserve, or simply a lovely load of bombast? Be prepared to choose one or the other; unless there's an extra moon in tonight's sky, it can't be both.

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.

Waititi (who’s also responsible for the best comedy of 2015, "What We Do in the Shadows," and will next tackle the third "Thor" film) executes a series of deft narrative U-turns, twisting the tale into 101 minutes of pure comic joy.

Ballets Russes should find a wider audience beyond dance aficionados. Like all good documentaries, the human element is the glory of Ballets Russes.

Death, torture, humour and even budding eroticism -- now this is more like it.

Paprika is a creatively dizzying and visually dazzling allegory about alternative realities.

Shaping the rhetoric of black activism and black liberation into accessible and demographic-spanning prose is no easy task. It is work which must be undertaken with intelligence, care and, above all, experience. It is no surprise then that the adaptation of Angie Thomas’s debut young-adult novel, The Hate U Give, into a big-budget studio picture loses much of its import in translation.

What completely undermines that appearance is Shankman's chronic inability to shoot the damn scene. His camerawork is so stiff it should be interred in a pine box.

The verdict? King Kong may be a great movie event in a "Jaws/Titanic" sense of blockbuster impact and cultural talking point, but it is not a great movie.

Daughters of the Dust is hypnotic, flowing with the trance-like rhythms of a poem that is beautifully written yet deliberately arcane. It's the cinematic equivalent of the voices you hear in the fiction of Toni Morrison or Alice Walker, but without the connecting narrative thread that most novels possess and most movies imitate. The result is a difficult work, yet a haunting one. [29 May 1992]

Just when you think that you have figured out which rug will next be pulled out from under you, Johnson reveals that there are rugs woven inside rugs woven inside even tinier rugs – and that the floor beneath those many carpets isn’t actually a floor at all, but a ceiling.

Certainly, his (Allen) work here feels effortless, and that feather-light touch gives the picture its charm – modest but real.

At nearly every turn, Dead Reckoning aims for something more than the sum of its Evel Knievel parts. In an already strong year for breakneck, throat-kick, punch-out cinema, this adrenaline-pumped fever dream from Cruise and his regular enabler-slash-director Christopher McQuarrie represents a brutally thrilling action-film apotheosis.

It is a slight, charming, filmic oddity, well acted and intelligently written

The dialogue is quietly scathing, and the production values are sumptuous. But Davies seems most interested in Sassoon as a symbol of hemmed-in Englishness. As a character, he remains poetically opaque.

In its cautious rhythm, its economical storytelling and its deliberately over-the-top colour scheme – each character’s “infection,” so to speak, is back-lit by deeply saturated red and blues – She Dies Tomorrow unsettles without using any of cinema’s typical tools.

Living just doesn’t quite vault over its self-imposed challenges. Except, that is, when it comes to Nighy.

Plays like a sophisticated children's story.

The World’s End isn’t perfect – – but its best moments leave the bulk of recent American “event movies” gasping in the dust.

Even if you’d rather die than be trapped in a broken elevator with endless Kenny G music, Lane’s excellent accomplishment is making 97 minutes about the musician so much smart fun.

The news behind the understated drama Menashe is that it’s a rare thing, a film performed in Yiddish, covertly shot in Brooklyn’s guarded Hasidic community.

Yes, the premise is delightful; no, the delight doesn't last.

Yet the most startling scene in the film is when he returns home after confinement. He politely tells the journalists waiting outside his home studio that he is on bail and can not talk. He smiles and repeatedly declines to comment. It is utterly contrary to his true character.

Featuring standout performances from Landry Jones and Davis, Nitram is uncomfortable, demanding viewing. It is the kind of work that presses on a nerve, begging you to stand up or tune out, but compelling you forward nonetheless – with its haunting portrayal of our all too boring capacity for inflicting pain.

Filmmaker Erlingsson has an eye for detail, a flair for the absurd – a sousaphone-based trio pops up here and there – and a deft touch with social commentary and political satire.

An intense new film that pivots on a tremendous, teeth-gnashing performance from Law as a 1980s father whose aspirations of upward mobility threaten to destroy his life.

To Live and Die in L.A., for all its amorality and downright immorality, is a cracker-jack thriller, tense and exciting and unpredictable, and more grimy fun than any moralist will want it to be. It has big hit written all over it: the premise, Miami Vice Meets The French Connection, may be perverse, but it's also inspired. [1 Nov 1985]

Ford v Ferrari’s narrative and emotional beats feel assembled in a factory-floor kind of way. The characters are stock, the story’s ups and downs are easily telegraphed, and the inoffensive but not particularly inventive dialogue is spat up as if the actors were eager to move onto the next thing.

Even when the plots of sexual confusions, transgression and tragedy became absurdly complicated and arbitrary, there was always the mise-en-scène to die for.

The jokes arrive fast and plentifully, knowing just what will tickle both younger viewers and adults.

Lawrence and Cooper have electric chemistry, and the director pulls off one of the most satisfying romantic Hollywood endings seen in years.

It is tempting to call A Thousand and One a love letter of sorts, but a more accurate read might be one of heartbreak. There is love here, certainly, but more than that there is frustration, anger and sadness at the way the world refuses to help those trying hardest to endure within it.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple doesn’t quite live up to the earlier film’s promise. At best, it’s an ambitious and compelling enough staging ground biding time, with cruel violence more stomach-turning than ever, as it sets up the already-in-the-works final chapter in a planned trilogy

All this is as fascinating as it is humbling, even when Herzog ventures a little too far down eccentricity's back alley.

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

Waves is unmistakably and defiantly its own thing – and when its ideas and aesthetics coalesce, it is a wonder to behold.

The Martian is nearly all things to all audiences: a ticking-clock drama, an intimate character study, a sci-fi comedy, a rollicking space adventure. It’s almost impossible to dislike, which is perhaps its only flaw. When a huge film reveals its eager-to-please intentions from the get-go, the stakes evaporate awfully quick.

Scorsese and Schrader have made a courageous film that people of all religions or no religion should be able to watch with identical fascination. [10 Aug 1988. pg. C.4]

The film is filthy with nuanced moments of fierce, sweaty intimacy, all shot with a precise eye for detail. At the very least, it will make you rethink your next rodeo.