Good news – it’s incredible. It sets the standard for blockbuster action movies, and manages to be even better than its predecessor.

De Palma's visual acuity tends to blur into mere gimmickry without the benefit of a resonant script. He got one in Carrie and another in Blow Out. Here, Mamet makes do with a text that is always shrewd but never intelligent. Still, when shwrewdness meets style, smoothing the curves and polishing the twists, the ride becomes a bonafide crowd-pleaser. The Untouchables is the cheering people's happy choice. [4 June 1987]

Beneath the polished surface, Dead Poets Society is moribund at the core - too pat, too safe and too hypocritical, as conformist as the conformity it so easily decries.

A tormented and tormenting man uses violence to break the historic chain of violence, then bequeaths to his loved ones the most precious gift he can give -- his total silence and perpetual absence.

It’s a blockbuster movie with a shiny veneer for sure, but it also gives its story the benefit of the doubt with care in its development that seems to be missing from several recently released women-led movies looking to cash in on vague overtures to female solidarity.

If it weren’t for Binoche’s warmth, the film might easily sink beneath the stereotype of French culture as overly talky and sex obsessed.

Every once in a long while, the right director comes across the right project at just the right moment, and things so often discordant fall into perfect harmony.

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.

In Fences, every time a character opens their mouth is an opportunity to savour the playwright’s impeccable ear for language – for capturing the joys and frustrations that come when someone simply tries to say something – anything – about the daily struggle that is life. It’s as much workaday poetry as it is dialogue and Washington knows better than to dilute it or make it his own.

Soderbergh, once again acting as his own cinematographer and editor, pulls out nearly every cinematic trick he has to elevate Koepp’s material, but the film too often tip-toes when it should run: Every narrative and character beat feels muted, as if the tech-thriller is being apologetic for its own place within the genre.

Billed by the director as his tribute to cinema, One Second is affectionate and sweet – perhaps a bit too sweet, considering this premiere was much delayed after the film was held back by the Chinese government for supposed technical reasons in 2019.

Equally enrapturing are the birders themselves, including the writers Jonathan Franzen and Jonathan Rosen – contemplatively articulate in all their geeky birding glory – and especially Starr Saphir, who leads birding tours through Central Park.

Berger’s film is a sometimes zippy, frequently ridiculous drama.

Free Willy (for some strange reason, that tiny imperative just gives me the giggles) is a family picture that stays safely within the haven of a cozy formula, yet does a whole lot of inventive work in the process.

Mother symbolically doubles as Mother Korea, devoted to her land. But is she blindly and uncritically devoted, too quick to forgive and forget sins that should be redressed, to treat any flaws in the national character as simply intrinsic to the country's nature?

Vinterberg is a master of storytelling and character here, bringing forth equal parts tragicomedy and suspense in a way that is refreshingly eager to be grounded in the ordinary realities of life.

The concept and the laughs hold strong amid all the craziness because Seligman has such affectionate sympathy for her mendacious protagonist.

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

As he did with "Once," Carney with the somewhat autobiographical Sing Street mixes hardscrabble realism with highly charged romanticism, filmed on a low budget with mostly unknown talent.

This Spanish-language satire of the film industry, from the Argentinian duo Mariano Cohn and Gaston Duprat, is one big and delightful inside joke for the art-house aficionado.

The most provocative aspect of this compulsive riddle is how it resists closure. The end comes not when we have the answer, but when the movie reaches its irresolute end.

Priscilla the movie is as complicated and beguiling as Priscilla the woman.

Fun, fun, fun. Take the title at its word, because this movie is nothing less than a flat-out, lung-pumping, 76-minute sprint.

Audaciously whacked-out and never less than entertaining, Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan mixes a backstage dance drama with a Freudian psychological thriller that's indebted to Roman Polanski's studies of shattered feminine psyches and David Cronenberg's movies about repressed bodies in rebellion.

The Painter and the Thief might be the best documentary of the year, if it could be fairly called a documentary. Instead, director Benjamin Ree’s film is more a mesmerizing, and potentially transgressive, investigation into just how far the documentary form can be torn apart and put back together – and whether the audience should accept such a wild reconfiguration.

Lawrence Michael Levine’s film, though, is only sporadically clever enough to pull off its central trick. Mostly, we’re stuck with a group of rather unpleasant people doing rather unpleasant things. To what desired end, it is never quite clear.

The wildly ambitious but flawed biographical film about the English cellist Jacqueline du Pré.

It is beautiful, delirious, frustrating and so wedded to that film-critic notion of the unimpeachable “Kaufman-esque” sensibility that there is little point in arguing with its power, with its immeasurable impact. It works, even (especially?) when it’s not supposed to.