The agreeable Gloria - despite the TV advertising, it is neither violent nor frightening - has three built-in audiences, none of which should be disappointed in the slightest: students of acting, children and suckers for fairy tales. [11 Oct 1980]

The star of Sound of My Voice is co-screenwriter, female lead Brit Marling, who plays Maggie with melancholy, amusement and scorn. Compulsively watchable, she can change who we think she is by simply turning her face. In profile, she's Vanessa Redgrave. Laughing, she becomes Debbie Reynolds. Marling might become a great character actress. Let's hope the movies use her well.

Too loud, too long and too busy but – here’s the good part – also wonderfully silly.

Most of this is bald, and very funny; some of it is witty, and even funnier. [14 Dec 1988, p.C9]

The only country in the Western world without a universal system – is indeed Sicko. But if that social wound is gapingly obvious, so is this documentary.

Despite a formidable effort and occasional grace, there's something cowardly about Braveheart -- it's an aspiring giant with a diminutive soul.

Rarely does a fine movie like this have so awkward a title, or so off-putting an opening scene. But there is method in both these madnesses, and a searchingly intelligent and moving story to be told.

Framing John DeLorean is a film that delights in stretching the truth, so maybe its constant ignorance of Hamm’s work is just part of its whole meta-narrative shtick.

Along with its allegorical elements, The King is also impressively specific in naturalistic detail.

Enough Said confirms filmmaker Nicole Holofcener’s status as one of America’s best stealth satirists.

Yet for a number of reasons, The Favourite is the first Yorgos Lanthimos film that puts the director’s bitter instincts to good use. It’s not only his most tolerable film, it’s his most insightful, too. It even approaches, well, fun.

This witty, star-packed and visually splendid kids' movie provides a small-is-beautiful message served on a parodoxically epic scale.

You may well watch this film and not buy into a single frame. Me, I couldn't help myself.

Gere delightfully soft-shoes his way through Norman, surfacing the character’s loneliness without unduly exploiting it.

The ultimate question in An Honest Liar is whether it’s possible to know so much about the method behind the magic without being fooled into believing your own act.

The Informant! may be a gadfly of a movie, but it's not without bite.

Sometimes, the animators find an expressive style to match difficult content – a suicide, a mercy killing and several sex scenes – and sometimes they just make the images of Salomon and the refugee with whom she falls in love seem leaden in comparison to the artist’s sprightly line.

Jacob's Ladder is a cheat - but a talented, disturbing, beguiling cheat. We don't know we've been truly had until it's finally over, when the screen fades and the lights rise and we wake up with a start, deliciously unnerved. [2 Nov 1990, p.D3]

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.

Like the writings of William Burroughs or Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction," Watchmen falls into the category of what might be called meta-pulp, a multilayered fiction that serves as a parody and commentary on our collective bottom-feeding fantasies.

There are a thousand ways you can imagine My Life Without Me going gruesomely wrong but, somehow, it doesn't.

Shows how our family fictions sustain us, and how some truths are better left unspoken.

It’s a genuinely fun affair – let’s not write it off as a cult classic just yet – with the smirking air of a confidant and mischievous filmmaker.

The value of Amandla! is that the film helps the rest of the world understand, both with our ears and minds, where South Africans have come from.

As the frequency of this particular nightmare ratchets up in volume, The Antenna proves a worthy successor to the work of David Cronenberg, Ben Wheatley and the many other filmmakers who delight in the meaty material of rancid subjects.

It's adapted with charming dispatch from the Dick King-Smith story, and served up by the same CGI wizards who animated the critters in "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Narnia Chronicles."

The dialogue is an occasionally witty cut above the norm, partly because director Greg Berlanti goes easy on those cute baby reaction shots, but mainly because of something rather more valuable: screen chemistry.

In the end, Ahmed claims a kind of victory, noting that open dissent and public protest has become embedded in the culture, even if Egyptians have not yet found a leader to unite them all. Something has begun, he says. Its real meaning is not yet clear.