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]

While formally quite different from his more universally-respected early work, Chi-Raq has the exuberance and wit you’ll find in Do The Right Thing and Crooklyn. It’s the best film he’s made in a very long time.

Much of that war is waged with a combination of fists, feet, blades and assorted ironmongery; people are routinely hurled through walls, thrown off rooftops and otherwise beaten to a pulp, and the athleticism and fight choreography is impressive, even if the action is edited so frenetically that it’s almost impossible to follow.

Its quiet drama is extremely effective, often because its young actors are so good. [05 Jul 1990]

Squibb is however really good: no other casting is conceivable, and it is good to see her get the lead turn she deserves.

In its unexpected way, this film speaks to the new agony of banishment now being felt by millions of Ukrainians, and to the profound unease and concern and impotence spreading westward across Europe.

Without the garish excess, the script is rote and rickety, a ride to the wild side that’s all out of gas.

The film’s chief enjoyment is seeing how motivations transform, and character is forged, through the sliding doors of new people, victories and losses, and the sharpening of the young women’s disparate judgments on the genuinely disappointing differences between boys and girls state.

Calvary boasts a sharp sense of place and a deep love of language. It's puckish and playful, mercurial and clever, rattling with gallows laughter as it paints a portrait of an Irish community that is at once intimate and alienated.

Among Jarecki's interviewees is David Simon (author of The Wire) who is incandescent with contempt for the system.

The movie still looks very good, and you'd need a heart of stone not to love the cat. [Review of re-release]

It is an absorbing, intriguing, bewildering work: often spectacular and beautiful, like a sci-fi supernatural disaster movie or an essay on nature and politics, but shot through with distinctive elements of fey and whimsical comedy.

Apples is intriguingly deadpan and sometimes funny, though I couldn’t help feeling that it is also contrived, and even a bit flippant in a middleweight-arthouse mode, not quite as profound as it thinks but certainly displaying some impressively choreographed mannerisms of dysfunction.

Backrooms progressively raises its game towards the big finish with jump scares, squirm scares and tiny shiver scares. There is real fascination in exploring this vast, invisible city state of fear.

It is forthright, powerful, composed and directed with clarity and overwhelming force, yet capable of great subtlety and nuance.

Zimny’s film-making style is certainly less adventurous, but his weaving of archive footage is deftly done – it’s fun to see the terrible sleeping arrangements on early E Street Band outings – and you’re left with the sense that this is a unit of people for whom rocking out and blowing minds is an irresistible lifetime pursuit.

This is a bitter, jagged, disaffected drama, pessimistic about China, pessimistic about the whole world. One characters asks another if he ever feels like travelling abroad. "Why would I?" he replies. "Everywhere is broke. Foreigners come here now." Jia Zhang-ke's movie gives us a brutal unwelcome.

Coppola tells the story with terrific gusto and insouciant wit, tying together images from the first scene and the last, so that the narrative satisfyingly snaps shut.

There is a gentle and very happy sense of freedom and possibility aboard the Adamant, and there is enormous warmth, sympathy and human curiosity in this film.

Martinessi shrewdly combines subtlety, melancholy, satirical observation and candour about sex.

Brilliantly, Schoenaerts almost underplays Roman’s anger, lumbering slowly like a wounded animal, the downward slope of his eyes conveying a howl of rage. It’s an electrifying performance.

What a strange and intriguing film.

Most people will find Thru You Princess inspirational. A few will find it infuriating. But that’s frequently the case with a good documentary.

You will no doubt bail out at some point – but that’s part of the deal. Llinás has done enough to make sure we come back.

Clara Sola is superbly filmed and composed with a very humid sense of atmosphere, and Araya’s performance is a miracle of sympathy and candour.

Its main focus is the sparky, shifting relationship between its two protagonists and its trump card the startling chemistry between its two main stars.

As ever with Miike, the sheer profusion of material, the torrent of wacky creativity, means that there is always something to hold the attention. It’s bizarre and very unwholesome. But weirdly inspired.

The Immigrant is certainly different: but Gray seems to run out of ideas and the film is shapeless and unsatisfying.

The important thing is to be disturbed.

This is a sombre, grieving movie which appears to gesture to the ghost-town ruin that is still in Detroit’s future.

The heart of the movie is the unexpectedly poignant relationship between Xavier and Logan: I’d be tempted to call them the Steptoe and Son of the mutant world, although in fact Logan goes into Basil Fawlty mode at one stage with his own pickup truck, attempting to trash it – perhaps to teach it a lesson. Logan is a forthright, muscular movie which preserves the X-Men’s strange, exotic idealism.

Now we have 28 Years Later, an interesting, tonally uncertain development which takes a generational, even evolutionary leap into the future from the initial catastrophe, creating something that mixes folk horror, little-England satire and even a grieving process for all that has happened. And there are some colossal cameo appearances.

Eventually, the drama closes in on itself and attains the logic of a dream, though a dream that dissipates quickly on waking.

It is a smart, supremely watchable and entertaining film, and Close gives a wonderful star turn.

The tale drifts and falters when I wished it would have hit home with more conviction, but that may be partly the point. The struggle is endless, unwinnable. Everybody is compromised.

This may not be the director’s most immediately electrifying film, but in its understated way, it’s an immensely powerful work.

The dazzle of the cast and the targeted in-jokes never take away from the film’s core messaging about the importance of believing in one’s own ability as an artist.

He lived until recently in bohemian chaos in one of the "artist apartments" in Carnegie Hall, and cares nothing for money or vanity. That's real class.

For those looking for a ride through our modern technological world, or indeed a preview of what is to come, this is it.

While the effort put into research for this documentary is commendable, ultimately the aestheticisation of the information dampens its impact.

The film really comes to life in the actual hip-hop scenes; the musical sequences have originality, comedy and freedom. The rest of the time, the film looks worryingly like a late 90s-early 00s cool Britannia geezer-gangster romp.

A friend who watched this with me said that it’s the kind of film she’d like to see again when she’s dying. That pretty much nails its meditative, melancholy tone and suits the kind of work Goldsworthy does, which is all about the ephemeral and the enduring; time and the tactile qualities of the instant.

It is a sharp, smart picture, with English eccentricity, sly quirk and political subversion, that represents a brilliant and almost unique engagement with contemporary history in 80s British cinema.

Basically, there is a contentment and calm here, an acceptance and a Zen simplicity that is a cleansing of the moviegoing palate, or perhaps the fiction-consuming palate in general. It is a film to savour.

It’s unpredictable and a bit of a mess. And that’s what makes Maggie’s Plan such a delight.

It is a beautifully shot, and very nicely acted beginning to something: but finally frustrating.

Pamela B Green’s hectic, garrulous, fascinating documentary recovers the story of French film-maker Alice Guy-Blaché.

Tremendously acted by Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb with exactly the right absence of sympathy, although Cox arguably loses his nerve on this score in the film’s dying moments.

Cleverly, it gives us enigmatic backstory hints that may or may not help explain the sudden direction change the film takes in its third act, leading to a denouement of toxic ingenuity. And of all it driven by the sensuality and rage of Pugh’s performance.

I can think of few documentaries that are more honest, self-scrutinising and revelatory about ageing, familial love and its limits, and the whole tragicomic process of dying.

In its engaging and eccentric way, Hong’s film-making is diverting and intriguing and then it capriciously concludes, leaving things up in the air, yet without making you feel shortchanged. Perhaps this one is slighter than his recent work, but it has a comic charm.

This is a great-looking movie with a sure sense of time and place; it is obviously a personal, and in fact, autobiographical work about Assayas's own youth. But for all its flair, I came away dissatisfied at its colossal self-indulgence and creamy complacency, and the way historical perspective and meaning are permitted to dissolve in its sunlit nostalgia.

It’s a heartfelt, funny, satisfying film.

The movie practically satirises itself as it goes along, glossing over its own absurdity in the process.

Australian director Cate Shortland's drama is overflowing with such poetic visual touches, conjuring up a fairytale landscape of long shadows, wafting curtains and waving fronds.

No one would accuse it of breaking new ground, or finding fascinating new paths across its well-worn prison yard. But Sauvaire’s drama is lean and trim and unwavering in its task.

Revolving around a tender true love story, this first narrative feature from seasoned documentary director Heidi Ewing (which won a couple of awards at Sundance) is a fascinating – though at times uneven – blend of film styles.

In many ways this is a study in anger, and it is an austere and angular picture. Krieps gives an exhilaratingly fierce, uningratiating performance.

The endlessly prolific Takashi Miike returns with this superbly acted revenger's tragedy.

Dirty Harry director Don Siegel reunited with Clint Eastwood for this taut 1979 thriller about real-life bank robber Frank Morris, who led the one possibly successful (bodies were never found) escape attempt from the notorious maximum-security prison on San Francisco's Alcatraz Island.

The movie has rather silly, Bourne-style thriller graphics, which are unnecessary: it has an important story to tell.

With Red Rocket, Sean Baker has given us an adult American pastoral, essentially a comedy, and another study of tough lives at the margin, close in spirit to his lo-fi breakthrough Tangerine.

Telling the story through the eyes of the harried, bereaved but indomitable mother gives this calm, funny, only occasionally schmaltzy family film a maturity Twilight never reached.

Ultimately, it tries a little too hard to wring those tears.

A sombre, relevant piece of work.

At its core, it’s really just a workplace love story that grows increasingly uninterested in its plucky heroine’s journey in favour of hitting familiar rom-com notes – and to give audiences another reason to love Bill Nighy.

An absorbing tale of feline ambition.

The film would have been more effective if its relentlessly uplifting score didn’t keep figuratively prodding the viewer in the chest, telling us to feel moved, dammit. Likewise, the editing is annoyingly frenetic at times, and you long for a more measured approach that would allow you to appreciate the athletes’ skills, instead of seeing their prowess chopped up into tiny snippets of footage.

Perhaps that final meeting in Lasker-Wallfisch’s front room does not offer closure. Nothing could. An amazing and dramatic historical tableau nonetheless.

The resulting adventure – bizarre, mysterious and moving – is about lost youth and the recovery of innocence through writing and memory. It is also one of those vanishingly rare films where child actors have to carry almost the entire drama.

An engrossing, beautifully filmed and remarkably balanced portrait of a fascinating moment in history, cleverly enhanced by the intercutting of real-life documentary interviews. Reds is everything a historian could want in a movie.

It’s refreshing for a film-maker to opt for subtlety, and there are good performances from Riley, Martin and Farthing.

While showing Totsuko’s religious beliefs respectfully, The Colors Within takes care to highlight how community can be meaningfully formed outside religion, in the embrace of creative arts.

It seems almost frivolous to note this, but the hyper high-definition cinematography is both beautiful in a savage way and adds immediacy to the viewing experience.

[A] remarkably unguarded documentary.

There’s no denying Zappa’s personal charisma and devotion to his cause, nor his articulacy in its service. Winter has created a fascinating watch.

All Quiet on the Western Front is a substantial, serious work, acted with urgency and focus and with battlefield scenes whose digital fabrications are expertly melded into the action. It never fails to do justice to its subject matter, though is perhaps conscious of its own classic status.

Next to Gump, the film has the moral force of a George Steiner essay, but what lends it that force are not the carefully calibrated moral ambiguities of the script, but the bruised, defiant soul that appears to us in the form of Denzel Washington.

This is a tough, muscular, idealistic drama that packs a mighty punch, and Shannon and Garfield are excellent.

Though the interviews with the Reeve children are poignant and insightful, directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui show no signs of trusting their material.

He [Sorkin] can also become fantastically ponderous, bloated with finger-waggingly self-important liberal patriotism. Sadly, that is the tone with this exasperatingly dull, dramatically inert and faintly misjudged re-creation of the “Chicago Seven” trial in the US, which Sorkin has written and directed.

The final half-hour seems to be a neo-western style melee which seems to go on for ever. Odd … and unrewarding.

It’s a movie bristling with ideas and ingenuity.

An immensely charming Hewson makes it all seem effortless, though, even as Carney’s manipulative string-pulling threatens to get a bit too forceful, an instinctive and quick-witted actor who drags the film’s sillier, flightier moments back to earth.

The Lunchbox is perfectly handled and beautifully acted; a quiet storm of banked emotions.

[Gibney's] film does present Khodorkovsky in context in a way that I haven’t seen before. He was the oligarch smart enough – and ruthless enough – to do as well or better than anyone in the Yeltsin/Putin free-for-all years, and then his smartness and ruthlessness perhaps gave him a perspective on it all.

This quietly amazing film is conceived in terms of pure minimalist intimacy.