Having managed Berlin rather gracefully, Race often plods along the home front.

There is a Hitchcockian creepiness in Finley's mad-as-hell teen drama.

The problem with Flash of Genius is that a windshield wiper is an awfully thin mechanism on which to hang a feature movie.

Apart from Mychael Danna’s portentous orchestral and electronic score, Transcendence simply lacks oomph: Shots don’t overwhelm, scenes don’t pop and nothing on the screen gets under your skin.

Just as John Carpenter seems to generate box-office smashes incidentally to his search for intriguing shades of blue, Miller is so enthused with his camera angles that the movie has ended before he's aware there's only 20 lines of dialogue in it and not a single character better defined than Max's mutt. [22 May 1982]

This solid intellectual biography painstakingly follows the development of Arendt’s thought as she was forced to flee her privileged surroundings in German academia, where she was Martin Heidegger’s student and lover, to France and then the United States.

The action half of the action-comedy tends to lean more towards slapstick than shoot-’em-up, even when heads are exploding, and while it’s capably handled, the movie is at its best when its two leads are bickering in the car. Stuber is probably the only ride share where talking should be strongly encouraged.

That there are no surprises (jumps, yes, surprises, no) should surprise no one – Will Smith movies must uplift the human spirit and reaffirm our best instincts while reassuring us that our ticket money has been well invested.

There's a quaintness about the film, from the animation style to the wholesome jokes – there's not much in the way of asides for the adults in the audience – that is refreshing for this pop-culture-obsessed animation era.

We feel the death on the platform so acutely not because it’s a stupid act of randomness, but hardly untypical racist violence, but because we’ve come to love this man.

What benefits the picture early on, giving it a casual air, becomes cloying in the later going, making it feel like a smug exercise in mutual admiration.

A drama with honourable intentions that feels like a bit of a fib.

Dalio’s script doesn’t always flow as smoothly as the camera work, but an air of calm authenticity should leave audiences touched, in a good way.

As a story about a war that is unresolved, it seems better suited to a provisional “To be continued” than the certainty of “The end.”

Some of the most striking moments in Bears are during the film’s closing credits, when we see how alarmingly close the camera crew was to the animals. We’re reminded us that while the movie Bears is both sweet and humane, the real bears are neither.

As Jamie, an American drug tourist desperately seeking a hallucinogenic cactus, Michael Cera pours kerosene on his wet blanket slacker persona.

In a film where two leads are alone on screen for almost the full running time, that is the true catastrophe. When at last Alex and Ben lock eyes, we should not be looking around them to see what the dog is up to.

Nevertheless, in mid-reverie, there's no denying the pleasure in falling under its little spell -- till human voices wake us, and we frown.

Colombian filmmaker Ciro Guerra’s reimagining of the lives of lost peoples is compelling, but, despite many languorous images of river and jungle, this remains a bookish examination of the themes.

A typically hypnotic, slow-coiling drama from 80-year-old French filmmaker, Jacques Rivette.

It’s frequently funny and entertaining enough, but its insights are far from revolutionary.

At its most interesting when it shows the lives of women and children prisoners, the film has the feel of a movie-of-the-week cliché when it returns to Julia's improbable crime.

Since there's no evidence in the film that Green teaches his students how to compose, improvise or experiment with the music, presumably the next wave will come from somewhere else.

It’s all fun enough to watch for the sheer over-the-topness of the performances, and Horovitz does his level best at working around some heavy spatial limitations, but there’s no getting around the fact that, ultimately, My Old Lady feels as stubbornly stuck in that expansive and underlit apartment as Madame Girard herself, and you may find yourself bolting for a lungful of relief.

Sumptuous and schmaltzy, Steven Spielberg's First World War drama, War Horse, is a strange beast of a film.

By the head-scratching dénouement, the "perfect" in the title seems particularly misplaced. How about Dial M for Muddle.

Part revisionist history and part deeply grim fairy tale, writer-director Mirrah Foulkes’s feature debut wants to be as clever as it is fiendish, as funny as it is dark, and as progressive as it is exploitative – but such goals collide instead of coalesce.

Johnny Dangerously belongs to the comic genre known as the Dumb Movie, but it's a pretty smart example of how to be stupid. [22 Dec 1984]