Climate of the Hunter is less concerned with story than mood. A sensuous, trippy mood that successfully seduces – at least for those who can easily settle into these kinds of campy experiments. (Guilty!)

For all its aches and pains, the heart of You Can Live Forever doesn’t so much beat as skip, haltingly and disconcertingly, as it tries to keep its own lifeblood pumping.

Director Robbins is a natural - he has managed to make a movie that is entertaining despite the handicap of having a main character who is at best a black hole. [30 June 1981]

It's rare for a documentary style to match its subject so ideally.

Civilization has the wealth and the technology to start dealing with the threat, but does it have the wisdom?

Has a provocative, ticklish premise – five North England Muslims become suicide bombers, but can't decide who or what to take with them.

In a performance that should earn him the Oscar nomination he has long deserved, Penn uncovers every slimy instinct that motivated Lee, but he never loses the audience's sympathy. Despite Hutton and Schlesinger, The Falcon and the Snowman does tell a terrific story, and the tale is sufficient to hold interest right up to the mishandled ending. [25 Jan 1985]

It's a nifty caper flick that also ponders the aesthetic nature of deception -- in other words, a solid work of craft that doubles as a little meditation on art.

The upside? Visually polished, credibly acted and competently directed courtesy of Ridley Scott, the film is always likable. The downside? Well, it's never anything more than likable.

The Divine Order plays up the fun of feminist empowerment with its anthems (You Don't Own Me, Respect), and lightens the tension with a modern-woman makeover for Nora.

Watching Moon is kind of like seeing a booster rocket thrust seventies' sci-fi films deeper into orbit.

Dull moments, so much the rule in most genre comedies, are the exception in Forgetting Sarah Marshall -- it does run long, but it mainly rollicks.

As much a deeply affectionate love letter to eighties-era horror-comedies as it is a synapse-stretching exercise in defiant maximalism, Joseph Kahn’s new film, Ick, is a true ride designed to hold, thrill, kiss and kill you.

Akilla’s Escape recasts the monolithic narrative of gang involvement as one that rejects a trope of Black peril in order to tell a multi-dimensional story of resilience – one where keen strategists are developed through unsolvable situations, where the enduring love of Black mothers demonstrates what it means to walk into the line of fire and where, amidst abject tumult, moments of tenderness and triumph persist against all odds.

The film shifts its tone like an evasive minnow, at once circling the familiar visual grammar of true crime media and the slapstick fancies of a buddy comedy.

A compelling, if ultimately predictable, coming-of-age drama.

The Way of Water is the kind of tremendously entertaining, spectacularly ambitious, not-a-little-bit-silly epic that only James Cameron can, and should, make.

It's a kaleidoscope of ideas that range from exciting to silly and gaudy.

Thoughtfully crafted but ultimately lugubrious, Green's latest only really connects when the director sticks to the small stuff.

Even if its cultural and artistic stakes remain relatively low in the grand scheme of things, The Blackening – whose enjoyment absolutely lies in the fact that it both knows exactly the confines it’s working within and doesn’t take itself too seriously – is still a hell of a good time.

"The Road" meets "Leave No Trace" with a sprinkling of another half-dozen sharper films, Light of My Life is Casey Affleck’s ode to the power of storytelling. Namely, Casey Affleck’s brand of storytelling: glacial, meandering, but not entirely ineffective.

Paradoxically cerebral and primal, reasonable and anti-rational, life- affirming and nihilistic, Naked Lunch is a sensual and intellectual feast. It will not be a meal to everyone's taste, but in its bizarre class, there is nothing classier. [10 Jan 1992]

Not just a 3-D novelty to amuse school groups, but also a memorial.

There just isn't the same zingy rapport. Seth Rogen's praying mantis and Jackie Chan's monkey have no more than a dozen lines between them. Even Jack Black's Po is more subdued.

Very charming but very slight.

This is well-crafted retro horror, too familiar to be really scary but smart enough to be fun. And funny too, with the kind of pure laughs that grow organically from the script, untainted by the chemical spray of irony.

Corbet’s work is a big, sloppy wet kiss to all manner of rise-and-fall clichés. Yet it mostly works, with Corbet as eager to display his influences...as he is to prove he can handle his own gonzo-spectacle set-pieces.

The setting is unique, the cast is terrific, the dialogue crackles and, if only there were a plot worth believing, In Bruges might have been a fine film.