[Nolan is] back in the fine engineering business, crafting a story as intricately designed as a magician's lock, tightly packed with tumblers of deception and issuing a fun challenge to any volunteers in the audience: Just try to pick it.

The problem is that the film, despite an attempt to examine the intellectual pollution of pervasive marketing, can't help coming off as one big smirk.

This is one of those solo turns where the star performance matters more than the story, and Renee Zellweger, playing the legendary singer Judy Garland in her sad last months – broke, anxious, drunk, rueful, but still in it – gives it everything she’s got.

Although the screenplay by Andy Breckman and Michael Leeson is wittier than most, it overshoots its screwball target by a wide margin, and what was initially blithe and charming ends up as merely silly. [24 Dec 1994]

An ambitious but ultimately sloppy time-travel epic, Good Luck wants to deliver an incendiary critique of artificial intelligence and our reliance on big tech. Yet it ends up being so exhausting and weirdly dull that it will force audiences to pull out their phones out of sheer restlessness.

Restoration is a middling thing, indifferent good, albeit much enlivened by Robert Downey Jr., who did act Merivel with the full vigour of his profession. [31 Jan 1996]

Chalamet seems to be a Gene Wilder fan / But he can’t live up to the original candyman / He’s flat, and he’s grating, and he can’t sing a tune / The heartthrob is best off on the sands of Dune.

The documentary is an inspiration to women – not just in the Middle East – who are determined to rise to the top of their professions, despite the odds being stacked against them.

Condescending, self-righteous and sloppy, Truth is simply a bad film for which there are no excuses.

Beautifully shot, the film is at its best when it’s unclear whether Vincent is intensely paranoid or highly perceptive.

PARENTS defies all categories but one - it is a virtuoso display of movie-making, a multi-textured and pyschologically intense work unimaginable in any medium except film, a tale fantastic in style yet deadly serious in its intent and absolutely horrifying in its implications. [27 Jan 1989]

The result, Elegy, isn't a great film but it is a good one, and better for Coixet's perspective, her ability to interpret Roth's world from the other side of the gender fence.

Leaves us with is sporadic showers of laughs for kids under 10. That's a shame, because the film could have been a delight for everyone, if only it hadn't learned to behave.

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

An almost really good movie...risks leaving the viewer feeling like one of the bewildered automatons that move through the plots.

Dad’s suspected infidelity is the tension in a film that hammers its nineties setting so relentlessly it could be called Sex, Lies and Videotape (and Floppy Disks and Payphones).

For audiences tired of summer sequels that grind through the familiar motions, Stardust provides a dizzying antidote.

May be anticorporate, it's by no means hype-free.

Mainly, though, it's the performers who are having the last laugh.

Even when their material is not much more substantial than a punchline overheard in a playground, Cheech and Chong, in their routines together, make being funny look as effortless as Ella Fitzgerald makes singing sound.[23 July 1980]

The effect of watching these viral videos as a "movie" feels genuinely singular – suspending the viewer somewhere between reality and documentary, between the dash-mounted long takes of Abbas Kiarostami's "10" and the combustible vehicular carnage of Michael Bay's "The Island," between cinema and something else.

This low-low-budget movie tells its little Romeo and Juliet story without pretension or condescension. In scratching at the surface of youth trends, Valley Girl manages to reveal the perennial innocence of teenage romance. And that, in the wake of such sexist teenage fare as Porky's and Spring Break, is a fresh and sweet achievement. [24 May 1983]

Apart from the ideology of the film, Pretty Baby is exquisitely executed. Shields, Sarandon and Carradine all give substantial but generally low key performances. [11 Apr 1978]

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]

What you're smelling is Ang Lee's "The Ice Storm" without the pathos and the punch, or John Updike's "Rabbit Redux" minus the insight and the style.

There are performances that shock you, that ground you, and that break you apart before building you back up. It is not often when an actor is able to deliver all of those reactions and more in the span of two hours, yet here is Vanessa Kirby proving herself as one of the most capable and ferociously talented stars of the moment.

Strange Days, then, isn't nearly strange enough. Once the premise has lost its promise, and Fiennes's brave attempts at characterization are sacrificed to pseudo-dazzle, everything appears awfully humdrum and, yes, distinctly dated. So dated that in the crowded and pat climax, as the ball drops on the year 2000, all that's missing is Dick Clark himself - damn, it's out with the old and in with the older. [13 Oct 1995]

So is the result just a case of life imitating pop art, or has the director shaped the footage to enhance the imitation?