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.