It is about grief and about the shock of grief and the stabbing fear which, in its terrifying way, gives you a clarified view of your own existence. A film to wonder at.

Obsession is satisfyingly slick proof that [Barker] knows just what to do when levelling up to a different platform, and while his debut might have been a film designed around a very modern form of horror, this time he’s looking back, his set-up using elements of a classic fable and the kind of grabby schlock you’d see in a video store back in the 1980s.

Poekel’s style is far too authentic-indie and unaffected to get slushy or sentimental about Christmas; through his lens Christmas tree lights blink like police lights. But in its own low-key way, he pitches his film just right for a little squeeze of festive warmth.

This is a candid, sober, well-acted debut by the first-time director Ruthy Pribar.

Poetic License is far from mere pastiche. It has a distinct, youthful sensibility and sources its comedy more from recognisably human behaviour than from profane, one-liner riffing.

Zero Days is an intriguing, disturbing watch.

There is something clotted and heavy about this film, with sadly not enough of the humour for which Peele justly became celebrated in his double-act days with Keegan-Michael Key. It’s not the positive response I wanted to have.

For me, the film is itself a bit of misfit, full of big stagey speeches, contrived moments and some overemphatic performances, but opened out with muscular style by Huston. The faces of Gable, Clift and Monroe together in closeup have a Mount Rushmore look to them.

This tricksy, exasperating and strangely unenlightening film, with its pointless fictional narrator played by Alan Cumming, purports to tell the story of Orson Welles’s mysterious “lost” masterpiece, The Other Side of the Wind. But in jokily trying to imitate the jabbering chaos of this film’s production history, it fails to give a clear, informative account.

The problem with Finding Dory is it doesn’t know when enough is enough. Its believe-in-yourself message is pounded with the subtlety of a hammerhead shark and the final action sequence is really too far-fetched to fathom.

Flawed or not, it is a compelling thought experiment.

This is an urgent, deep soak in the current refugee crisis.

This isn’t Perkins’ first shot but it’s his biggest swing and ultimately his clumsiest miss, a grab bag of ideas and tricks that can’t be coerced into anything resembling a whole.

The script could have done without the odd bout of heavy-handed chess symbolism (“a king for a king”) but it’s a solidly entertaining drama with an intriguingly unconventional lead.

It's a guilty-pleasure romp of a documentary, filmed at last year's Cannes film festival, all about the gorgeous, deadly and heartbreaking business of cinema itself.

Films about film-making are usually deeply self-conscious, and sometimes deceiving. But there is one at least that succeeds in surpassing the movie whose making it describes.

The debutant director applies himself with the same quiet assurance and attention to detail he’s displayed in his acting projects.

This is a sympathetic and very contemporary study.

Despite the strong performances, it’s Schipper’s single-shot conceit - and the fact that he and his team pulled it off with aplomb - that makes Victoria such a bracing triumph. While the entire enterprise is inarguably a stunt, Victoria manages to overwhelm in ways that few films do.

The film is a parable about the dangers of blind faith in religion and authority, but it’s also warmly compassionate and accepting of human nature.

The movie is fundamentally silly, with tiringly shallow characterisation and broad streaks of crime-drama intrigue, which only underline the fact that not a single word of it is really believable.

It’s a one-note drama of simmering resentment. That note is sustained with impressive conviction.

Full credit to the film-makers, who manage to map their digital bear against his human co-stars and marry Bond’s antique conceit to a high-concept story.

The film’s rather abstract conversation doesn’t convey much in the way of urgency or specificity. But there is a sustained moral seriousness in Polley’s work, a willingness to confront pain.

Writer-director team Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (It’s Kind of A Funny Story, Half Nelson) must be applauded for refusing to let their shaggy dog tale line up with any predictable storyline.

Exhilarating and moving. This is a very satisfying love story.

Often moving but also disquieting and even intermittently funny, this drama unfurls a spiritual parable that is uniquely Polish but accessible to all.

There’s a lot to admire in the performances from Garner, Henwick, Yovich and Weaving.

What is invigorating about The Story of Film is that each new clip, each new comment, is an exercise in back to basics, an exercise in looking, and looking again and looking harder – something that’s even more difficult when it feels like we’re drowning in content.

But what a triumph this film was for Chapman, who gave a convincing, touching performance as the bewildered everyman who decides to make a stand, and in his battle with the evil empire makes a Luke Skywalker-style discovery about his lineage. Life of Brian is an unexpectedly earnest, sweet-natured hymn to the idea of tolerance.

Yes, 24 Frames is rigorously experimental; it demands patience and engagement. But this haunted ghost-film had me completely entranced.

As Sokol’s style matures, Glob’s direction also becomes visibly more assured. The meandering beginning in which the film-maker’s narration does a lot of the heavy lifting soon becomes more stylistically coherent.

What gives the film its distinct flavour is a slightly feverish tone and dream-like logic. In places, it’s hard to see what the magic realism adds, and the script’s ideas about gender and gaze feel underexplored. Perhaps in the end, this sense of unreality opens the door to its characters finding love in this harsh and hopeless place. A touching and moving film.

It is actually Assayas’s best film for a long time, and Stewart’s best performance to date.

What emerges is Ailey’s lifelong seriousness and his vocational purpose in dance.

Much of the film’s pleasure lies in the glimpses of Soho over the decades: a wealth of photographs, sound clips and archive footage bring the club and the neighbourhood to life. Free of obtrusive talking heads, contributors feature as voices only, and none overstays their welcome.

This debut feature from Australian film-maker Shannon Murphy, adapted by Rita Kalnejais from her stage play, is well acted, heartfelt, beautifully filmed.

A terrifically enjoyable piece of old-fashioned storytelling and a beautiful-looking film: spectacular, exciting, funny and fun.

Zulu is a brilliantly made dramatisation of Rorke's Drift, and it does a fine job of capturing the spirit for which the battle is remembered.

The film is at its most intriguing in its earlier half, when it simply takes you through the growing excitement within the scientific community as the reality of Crispr emerges.

The movie finishes on an unresolved chord, as if we have left the story months or years before the actual scandalous denouement. But it is arguably faithful to the mood of messy bewilderment and frustration that governs the ongoing situation.

The face-off between two of the biggest legends in American pop culture, Sinatra and Brando, is something to be relished, although the roles are perhaps a little too atypical for each for the pairing itself to be legendary as the individuals. But still, what a joy it always is.

An almost perfect 90-minute hit of confident and inspired comedic commentary.

Retrofitting medieval Noh as a world of guitar gods and cavorting dancers, Inu-oh has its two disabled lead characters make a psychedelic plea in favour of slipping loose from dominant narratives, told in a fecund patchwork of styles by Yuasa that asserts its own outsider credentials.

It is engaging and sympathetically acted and layered with genuinely funny moments, mysterious and hallucinatory setpiece sequences, and is challengingly incorrect thoughts about the haves who fear the contagious risk of coming into contact with the have-nots.

On the face of it, the film contains a soap-opera’s worth of secret feelings and tumultuous events, including the teenage lovers’ sensational escape from the town during a heavy storm. And yet Fukada maintains a cool distance.

If a movie as rich and understanding as Mediterranea suddenly appeared every time we read about a difficult issue in the paper, maybe all of the world’s problems could be solved.

[McConaughey] delivers a twitchy, hostile performance on par with anything he's done since he escaped the rom com cul-de-sac.

The film is interestingly candid about the toxic, driving force of envy behind a musical career – something many music biopics omit – but in the end, however initially startling and amusing, Robbie-as-chimp feels like a distraction from his all-too-human unhappiness and talent.

It’s an endlessly charming film focused on a woman whose view of life is one to be envied.

It is perhaps too much the acquired taste (and smell) to appeal to everyone, but it’s distinctive, never dull and – much like its most noxious niffs – difficult to shake.

Tsou and Baker’s script sharply examines what it really means to lose face: which shames are noble, which are indulgent, and what should be passed from one generation to the next?

Temple's film is refreshingly free of cliché. A very heady experience.

It’s a delicate, thoughtful film, moving and real.

Samani’s film-making language has consistency and urgency, and there is an interesting streak of atheism that goes alongside this movie’s spiritual aura.

It’s a watchable though slightly sentimentalised story and Mikkelsen gives it seriousness and force.

The film itself is a kind of free spirit, and one that has made an indelible print on Australian cinema.

The reggae soundtrack throbs and crunches and shudders in concert with the raw energy of Henzell’s storytelling and Cliff’s performance, but this doesn’t preclude a shrewdly self-aware debate about representation.

Introduction, like so many of Hong’s films, occupies a delicate middle ground between whimsy and poetry, between inconsequentiality and epiphany, between lightweight and light. My feeling is that Introduction is closer to the former in each case, and I wanted to hear more about and more from Young-ho’s troubled father. But there is an unmistakable and mature film-making language on display: a simplicity and charm.

This is a pellucid and gentle film, made with the simplicity and grace of a children's tale and yet its humour, emotional clarity and directness speak directly to adults and children alike - and the pre-teen principals shoulder an adult burden of performance.

Weaving themes of colonialism and class into the broad strokes of a won’t-stop-can’t-stop revenge potboiler, the film marks a step forward for the Australian director in terms of ambition and scope. In execution, however, the songbird hits a few false notes.

Calin Peter Netzer's Child's Pose is a gripping new drama from Romania and another demonstration of how that country's new wave is developing a distinctive kind of real-time slice-of-life cinema with characterisation in extreme, pitiless closeup.

Grandma is fun and brisk, though sometimes the encounters seem a little pat, and Elle’s grief about the death of her partner a year earlier is way overdone.

It is well-acted, disciplined and intimate as a play. But for me it is marred by an early, unsubtle moment of overt supernatural creepiness, which signals a retreat from ingenuity and restraint.

This is a broad, frequently cartoonish romp that plays like a less effective mishmash of To Die For and Fargo. The blunt, unashamed crudeness does provide some laughs but the tonal shifts are often uncomfortably handled.

It’s a quiet, deliberately paced film, but exquisitely shot, with nuanced performances and visual invention.

There’s no missing the polemical points being made or doubting the film is meant to inspire further action, but even hardened whale-eating oil oligarchs are likely to be charmed by the idealism and smarts of these audacious activists.

The most powerful thing about the film is the "audition" scene at the beginning in which the prisoners have to introduce themselves in two ways: sorrowingly, and then angrily. It is a brilliant sequence, and the rest of the film doesn't quite match it.

The film dissolves in silliness and whimsy, but not before it’s given us some surreal spectacle.

In the end, Cooper’s Maestro succeeds because it is candid about the sacrifices which art demands of its practitioners, and the sacrifices these practitioners demand of their families and partners

It is such a beguiling performance from Richard, natural, unaffected, unselfconscious, you find herself rooting for Ana, although what form success might take for her is a mystery. Very impressive work from Lang.

This is a Hail Mary pass that Gosling just about manages to catch.

It isn’t nearly as deep as it thinks it is, but it is marvellously entertaining.

Fundamental to Relic’s psychological oomph are three excellent performances, perfectly complementing that sticky-icky ambience.

Davis’s parents have called for stricter gun control laws in the wake of their son’s death. Silver has provided them with a powerful tool for their cause in this shocking, moving and relatively unbiased account of the tragedy.

Of all the American independent movies this year, Ruby In Paradise is one of the strongest because, for all its meandering style, it seems to know exactly what such a life as Ruby's is about. [25 Nov 1993, p.4]