This isn’t a movie of easy cynicism or a snide middle finger to horror-movie tradition – it is a finely calibrated shock to a system that Barker obviously grew up worshipping.

While the tone and feel of Nope is wonderfully atmospheric and expansive, it also feels as if it comes at the expense of characters possessing deep interior lives or a story world that is well and evenly plotted.

DeGeneres goes much further, though, maintaining a delicate balance between Dory’s optimistic personality and the hovering anxieties created by her imperfect memory.

The strangely hybrid result, half Herzog and half Hollywood, plays like its own battleground. Sometimes, the tension is fascinatingly productive; other times, all we get is the worst of both worlds.

Timeliness aside, it's an electrifying and erotic film-noir thriller in the Hitchcock tradition - James Stewart could have been cast as Tom Farrell - right up to the final five minutes, which feature a surprise ending that is a shock primarily because it makes little logical sense; surprise endings should click satisfyingly into place once the shock has worn off, but this one stirs up questions that refuse to settle. [14 Aug 1987]

Human Flow ventures further into pure documentary than Ai's previous work in that field but it's still an art film, with a circular rhythm to its scenes, lingering imagery and a prolonged running time of 140 minutes.

Stands as an important film, perhaps even a timely one as once again the United States finds itself enmeshed in fending off a guerrilla war in a faraway land.

As with his previous film, director Chang nurses a compelling drama from a multilayered cultural reality, at once intimate and unfathomably large in implications.

As a young man he dreamed of racing cars. Now he rides a bicycle to the market each day, to negotiate with an elite fraternity of top fish dealers, who save their best for Jiri's restaurant. Like the fish that are disappearing from the oceans, they're probably the last of a breed.

This is an imaginatively conceived, impressively scaled, and surprisingly funny ride. Just pay as little attention to the promotional scare tactics as possible.

The cinematography is evocative – rainy, rich, gritty and raw, for this inspiring but not always pretty story – and Curtis is 100-per-cent watchable as a puffy, mumbling shuffler whose chess lessons double as life strategies.

There are great things to be found in little packages, and Islands offers tremendous evidence that, if Edralin might ever be given more than the bare minimum of resources, the director will create something gigantic.

The film ends with a delicious question, an uncertainty that will linger long after the credits roll – no ribbon is tied on The Gift.

What better casting than Al Pacino, whose own career, of course, has reflected all the seasonal changes in the gangster saga. Pacino takes the part and runs with it so boldly that he ends up in Arthur Miller land.

Love sometimes hurts, but love/hate is always pure anguish. That's the two-stroke engine powering I Killed My Mother ( J'ai tué ma mère), a coming-of-age tale as ferociously raw as its teller - the very young Xavier Dolan.

With no cutaways, the film’s story and the momentum of the unlikely robbers seems as unstoppable as the camera. The characters are confused, adrenalinized and breathless, as are you. Because the deal feels real.

At the end of Courage Under Fire, you feel torn between admiration and annoyance with the filmmakers.

Broker too frequently goes broad and wide, resulting in a story that doesn’t earn the happiness that its flawed characters desire, and eventually achieve.

This is not only a dandy, playful movie about a talking bear, but one that gives pause for thought, too.

It is a constraint of cinematic vision that flattens the potential of the figures, the speech, and the movements of Women Talking. It is less about what is being said here – flawed yet fierce as it is – and more that, in order to realize the full impact of its meaning, what is being said needs to fight through the film’s own lacklustre veneer to be able to convey itself with any sense of spirit.

Yes, the movie gets off the ground when it gets off the ground, and who better to provide the lift than director Carroll Ballard. [13 Sep 1996, p.C1]

Flagrantly flawed but never less than fascinating film that does indeed blend the funny Woody and the serious Woody.

Needless to say, what's refreshing about A Christmas Story is subversive to the sepia-toned and loving references to the forties which director Bob Clark has provided for the film. The fictional Parker family that Shepherd has written about for 20 years is not as gentle or gauzy as they first appear. It's possible to imagine them so preoccupied with their own problems, whether dealing with the neighbor's dogs or winning a mail- order contest, that they could forget Christmas altogether. [25 Nov 1983, p.E5]

Not often does a film double as a literary critic, but this is the Northrop Frye of docs. Essentially, it revises and sharpens the blunted reputation of a great writer.

A thought-provoking film that examines women’s limited choices in a patriarchal country reeling from the contradictions of rapid modernization.

The interactions between these adventurers, with their varied imperatives and world-views, are compelling and funny – all the more so for being set against such a dramatically blanked-out backdrop.

What really distinguishes it from the art-film crowd is that it’s also food-spittingly funny.

The finale is a gut-punch, but it arrives too long after Komasa has already exhausted most of his story's, and leading man's, energy.