Rohmer doesn't attempt to create any skepticism about Grace's perspective on her experiences; we are shown them as she saw them, and seeing is the real pleasure of The Lady and the Duke.

So you figure, what the hell, go with it and enjoy it for what it is, which is C-plus, but A-minus for effort and B-plus for honesty, and since you gave the book a D-minus, you decide you're going to tell your friends to skip the book and see the movie. Then you're left with only one nagging question as you walk out of the theatre into the bright lights of whatever big city you happen to be in: how is Pepsi going to feel about Michael J. Fox doing so much coke? [1 Apr 1988]

The film is poetically structured and Lear is a spry, emotionally involved participant in a lively bio-doc that succeeds eulogistically and contextually.

Aquarela’s soundtrack shifts from ambient post-rock to gnarly speed-metal to widescreen strings. The effect is a serenely apocalyptic warning: Climate change is a killer, with water as its indiscriminately lethal weapon.

Breakdown is a taut little thriller, the kind of well-crafted yarn that sets itself attainable goals and then meets them.

Comes as a pleasure. It's a comic drama set in a Chicago hair salon where the characters are engaging and the story has a bustling richness.

The man likes a scrap. But he's never had quite as ludicrous, and ludicrously entertaining, a fight as in The Commuter, which is essentially Liam Neeson versus a train.

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.

Ballet 422 is narrative without the heavy structural imposition of much plot, and the small, captivating tensions that are framed by the film seem to parallel current innovations in contemporary ballet.

May be well-trod territory, but worth a walk down the movie aisle.

Fans will probably spend little time debating Star Trek's intellectual depths; there are none. But the human element triumphs over the technological in a resolution that is sentimental and highly satisfying. Star Trek is a visually boggling 23rd-Century fantasy. But peel away the budget and it's as comforting as an old-fashioned fable. [8 Dec. 1979]

Adults should get a kick out of Phantom Boy’s sly humour but the story and the action is for the kids.

At times, these singers’ versatility has kept them both regularly employed and deliberately anonymous.

If Blaze is not historically or psychologically reliable, it is a reliable good time. This is a meaningless movie, but there's no arguing with Ron Shelton's skills as a frothy screwball romantic: in Blaze, nobody gets burned. [14 Dec 1989]

Hall creates a fierce, uncompromising portrait of a woman who was prescient enough to see the dark places her culture was headed – the logical end game of our “if it bleeds, it leads” obsessions – but also damaged enough to succumb to them.

I don’t know how many subscribers actually interested in its mature story and top-level craft will be able to unearth it from their Holidate-choked queues, but here’s hoping some are willing to embark on the excavation.

All that's deliberate, but the lingering question is not: Is Melancholia a sly depiction of the end we deserve, or simply a lovely load of bombast? Be prepared to choose one or the other; unless there's an extra moon in tonight's sky, it can't be both.

It's a decidedly odd, down-beat story and yet, if the sexes were reversed, we would think nothing of a young woman swapping the role of lover for that of nurse when her much-older partner fell ill.

The movie doesn't have the heart of the book, but it does have a solid mechanical pump, strong enough at least to keep a robust story on two-hour life support.

The direction is dynamic, the cutting has verve. To confess, Rambo: First Blood Part II is unexpectedly taut and exciting, despite its sermonizing and predictable conclusion, assuming Stallone is accepted as that impossible creation, the one-man army. [23 May 1985]

An intense story about an all-powerful Chinese crime lord and his extended family. [26 Jan 1996]

For the conquering Sacha, no pack ice can prove too crushing nor hardened sailor too obdurate: It’s only the unusual setting and subtle animation that raise this adventure above the formulaic.

A painful documentary film, partly because of its subject, partly because of the troubling questions raised by the filmmaker's approach.

What's fun about Benson Lee's documentary Planet B-Boy isn't just the amazingly athletic displays of B-boys he puts on screen, but the film's sense of cultural discovery.

The film is a savage but funny, unsparing but oddly kindly, examination of a hell-bent-for-a-bigger-bank-account brand of behavior that was celebrated in the fifties, tolerated in the early sixties, rejected in the late sixties, tolerated again in the seventies, and is once again being celebrated in the eighties. [06 Mar 1987]

An innovative romantic comedy that is a mixture of British spice and American sugar.

Kureishi's sensibility is very much his own - he's more compassionate than Fassbinder (the portrayal of the white mistress is heart- wrenching) and far funnier. The zingers fly by so fast in My Beautiful Laundrette they almost go unnoticed. [28 Mar 1986, p.D1]

In the end, it’s the songs that provide the most eloquent and lasting testimony.