Buffy The Vampire Slayer should be a mess, but it's not. It's a mini-comic triumph, and although it's technically a teen movie, it's in the tiny genre of sophisticated, darkly funny teen films such as Heathers and Pump Up the Volume. [4 Aug 1992, p.C1]

The result is hallucinatory and puzzling, but never anything less than captivating.

Sure, the film’s a bit of a hit job. But hey, as Bannon himself tells us, “There’s no bad media.” Sadly, he’s probably right.

Though there are moments when the drama turns into intellectual debate, the film is also emotional, moving with a fluid, mounting tension and moments of anguish and strange, startling humour.

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

The laughs and the wisdom creep up on you in this small and subtle comedy about male relationships.

In the end, then, just Vanessa Redgrave and Terence Stamp and those voices – their solos contain this picture like carved book-ends, vintage and lovely and still so profoundly of use.

An unusually smartly written and performed American independent film.

The best of The Desolation of Smaug is saved for the last, when Bilbo goes to steal from the massive fire-breathing dragon, Smaug. The orange-eyed beast is voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch, who, through a sludge of voice-altering electronics, seethes and preens between fiery exhalations; this scene is one of the few occasions in the film where anyone actually takes time to talk.

The lads from Edinburgh thrive in chaos and, for all their new-found maturity, they are still at their best when in full flight from both responsibility and time.

A satisfying thriller interestingly complicated by its study of character and compromise.

Filmed in Nova Scotia and featuring both English and Mi’kmaw, Wildhood beautifully captures the beauty of the landscape and its community as well as moments of humour, even as it treads some bleak spaces.

Its true subject is the thrill of the chase and the means by which the movies express it, which is to say it’s one hell of a ride in the same direction taken by the characters: deep into a desert of vast and horizonless emptiness.

As it turns out, making money selling drugs is pretty win-win as far as it goes, but keeping it is another matter. So the title isn’t so much a joke as a bleak comment on a desperately cynical economy: In the drug trade, as well as the dubious “war” declared against it, everybody ultimately loses.

Like its namesake prophet, Zobel’s film is about exile and return, but it’s also more simply about who we lust after. This simplicity is the film’s virtue rather than its sin, and a layered picture of right and wrong, faith and reason, emerges as the story unfolds.

It is emphatically not for people who like either Twain or the more sophisticated manifestations of the Arthurian legend (the Camelot musical or Thomas Berger's Arthur Rex) but it is a well-directed, nicely acted bit of slapstick that has young audiences squealing with delight. [13 Aug 1979]

A delightful family movie that packs an emotional punch.

An immersive, compact and unpolished documentary from the Kurdish-born, Oslo-based filmmaker Zaradasht Ahmed.

The combined talents of Apted, Stoppard and the stellar cast make Enigma a puzzle worth solving.

Yet, about as often as Marvin's Room strikes a chord of emotional authenticity, it hits a fistful of false notes as well.

Muylaert’s is attuned to matters of social stratification and economic mobility, and the manner in which Brazil’s leisure class is propped up by the undervalued exertions of domestic labourers.

The film is a fun and unsettling showcase for Kravitz, who proves herself to be an intentional and provocative filmmaker, putting jarring edits, precise framing and a sensational ensemble cast led by Naomi Ackie, Channing Tatum, Adria Arjona and Geena Davis to great use.

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 portrait of the artist might be a bit uncritically rosy; still, this is a compelling dance film that captures the drive and passion of a key figure in contemporary choreography.

It’s a shame the Morrises don’t include more of Nureyev’s performance footage and opt, instead, to use long segments of contemporary dance reconstructions choreographed by Russell Maliphant. The segments look a bit garish and out of place, not necessarily because of their poor choreographic content, but as they have little aesthetic or conceptual continuity with the rest of the film.

The kind of movie that kids used to flock to on Saturday afternoons in the forties and fifties.

A good film prevented from being a great film by an act of well-intentioned but misguided casting.

Timoner offers a resonant, often painfully funny, drama about two good friends who become enemies against the backdrop of the pop-music business.