A maniacal, hallucinogenic dip into the bloodbath drawn by a pair of mass murderers, it's the quintessential Stone opus - topical, testy, and wildly controversial, as brilliant or egregious as you wish it to be. [26 Aug 1994, p.C1]

Very light-hearted and glamorous. [09 Nov 2002, p.R24]

From its intense beginnings to its what-really-c’mon-no-reallllllly-c’mon mid-film twist to its defiantly and successfully sentimental finale, the new Matthew McConaughey vehicle is playing by its own demented rules. When it deigns to care about rules.

The Motown musicians today are in their 60s and 70s but they remain inspiringly colourful, funny in their stories and assured in their musicianship.

Heartbreaking, compelling and terrifying, The Cured is a quick way to re-examine our capacity for forgiveness, tolerance and above all, fear.

A fascinating, frequently angry and occasionally darkly funny documentary.

No doubt, there is an uncomfortable number of logos being marketed to kids in the The Lego Movie, along with the obvious one that’s in the title, but the film as a whole is very much in the spirit of Cloud Cuckooland: It’s a place where the use of X-Acto blades and Krazy Glue breaks the rules but almost everything else goes.

Employing the unapologetic pomp of rap videos and enough heart to transition stereotypical characters into complex, dynamic subjects, Superfly is a visual treat that embellishes Director X’s signature kaleidoscopic visuals with an uncanny knack for storytelling.

The synthesis is a revealing and extremely funny portrait of urban schizophrenia in the waning years of the twentieth century. [21 May 1982]

Once the euphoria passes, director Tim Wardle takes his audience on an engrossing, heartbreaking journey into the lives of three innocents whose lives became experiments for scientists on a quest to unravel how identity is shaped. Sadly, in their zeal to figure out if nurture or nature wins, they forgot the human beings in the middle of the mix.

Buoyed by its urgent yet playful references to the real-life history of the Black West, Netflix’s newest genre outing The Harder They Fall is an energetic and poppy crowd-pleaser of a film made even better by its punky indifference toward staid conventions of period filmmaking.

The Italian belongs in group of excellent recent Russian films -- most notably Andrei Zvyagintsev's "The Return" and Boris Khlebnikov and Aleksei Popogrebsky's "Roads to Koktebel" -- that have examined the effects of the country's woes on its youngest and most vulnerable citizens, as well as the problems faced by any child unfortunate enough to have faulty or absent parents. At its best, The Italian conveys this grave issue with admirable clarity and power.

When this brisk, disquieting doc debuted at Sundance, these censorship farms were largely secret, but Facebook has started to bow to public pressure and open up some of the process. The troubling questions remain.

In making the first DC superhero film in a long time to aspire to anything like levity, Wan finds a way to catalyze what might have been yet another dust-dry origin story. The secret? Just add water.

Todd Solondz isn't for everyone, maybe not even most people...he's a comic filmmaker whose idea of entertainment is shredding chum into a shark tank.

The Babadook is too deliberately calibrated to prove truly terrifying.

Much to an audience's discomfort, Ingrid's desperation to bond with the phony Taylor soon breaks the bounds of sanity – until the film rebukes her warped world view with a highly moral ending. The critique is clever but the limit is the one so common in satire: it's hard to care about the fate of a character this exaggerated.

It’s lovely film to look at, Springsteen confronting his past and demons in the prettiest, gently tuneful barn-and-big-sky way imaginable.

A creepy, smartly written and very entertaining low-budget chiller.

The ethical fallout, the lingering fog of the so-called war on terror, is not that people don't know what's wrong or who's guilty - it's precisely that they do, and count it as the cost of doing business.

The result is a whodunit so nicely crafted that you're tempted to forgive the Byzantine plot -- hell, you're even tempted to pretend you actually understand its twisting obscurities.

Gotham gives way to Gaudi and the Met to Miro, but the sensibility is the same, the city as a precious treasure, and so is the message: Life may be hard and short, love may be flawed or doomed, but, my, aren't we blessed with lovely distractions.

Nothing much happens in this pleasantly casual 80-minute conversation of a documentary. It doesn’t come to you; you must come to it – like a Jim Jarmusch film, particularly his "Coffee and Cigarettes" from 2003.

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

Ex Machina is a clever film with one indelible performance from Isaac.

Bold, intelligent and provocative.

Edgerton, who also plays the tightly wound chief of the conversion-therapy organization here, wrings devastating performances from his cast, including Lucas Hedges as Garrard, and Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman as his parents.

Luckily, none of the inconsistencies in tone and atmosphere can overwhelm Matilda's charm. The power of its narrative and the self-composed presence of Wilson in the title role -- DeVito has persuaded the child to underact the part so that Matilda is precocious, not obnoxious -- carry the movie resolutely to its happy conclusion. [02 Aug 1996, p.D2]