Maybe it’s the last great mainstream exploitation picture, a film which owns and flaunts its crassness; a bi-curious catfight version of All About Eve or Pretty Woman.

A cast-iron, self-evident hit, but also just a tiny bit boring, perhaps?

It really is very very long; watching it like going to an all-night movie show where the only film is Fight Club. Yet it’s tremendously directed and performed with brio.

From the current vantage point, this film, not yet entirely dominated by digital effects, looks like a 1960s-vintage second world war film.

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

A period piece, still reasonably funny.

The Killer Inside Me is a particular distillation of male hate, as practised by repulsive and inadequate individuals who have been encouraged to see themselves as essentially decent by virtue of the trappings of authority in which they have wrapped themselves. And Winterbottom is tearing off the mask.

It looks and feels like an exceptional student film...Choppy editing and erratic time-shifts tend to undercut rather than enhance the character Ryan has magicked up. [5 May 2006, p.8]

For all its absurdity and the family friendly bloodlessness (despite the copious violence), it spins along very smoothly and efficiently.

Over the past decade, director Takashi Miike has churned out gleefully extreme films Audition, Ichi the Killer and Visitor Q, but it's difficult to detect much subversion in this sober, classical effort

The movie cleverly spins a meta-fictional "origin" myth for Captain America: explaining that he was in fact a propagandist comic-book superhero before becoming a real one. The final scene of the film, and Captain America's very last line, are rather brilliant – though admittedly less brilliant if their sole purpose is to set up sequels.

It's solid entertainment.

It's a bit sucrose, especially at the beginning, but this traditional, sweet-natured family film will tug on the heartstrings.

Vin, great ridiculous beefcake lunk that he is, does provide us with some fun.

The film is entirely ridiculous, often quite boring, with a script showing worrying signs of being cobbled together. But even as a longtime Von Trier doubter, I now have to admit it grows on you; there's a mawkish fascination and some flashes of real visual brilliance.

However smart and sophisticated this film is, it may disappoint those who, in their hearts, would still like to be genuinely scared.

It runs out of steam in the final 10 minutes, but there's some gruesome drama and Cusack is on decent form.

There's something about this film's churn of goo and grit that lingers ambivalently, difficult to digest.

Brutal, bloody and presided over by a portrait of Her Majesty the Queen, the Canadian ice hockey in this movie is a cross between Rollerball and a prison riot: harking back to the robust certainties of Paul Newman's 1977 bonecruncher "Slap Shot."

The film is watchable and often funny, but still seems encumbered with a kind of Sundance-indie self-consciousness, and I wondered if, in the end, it was doing anything more than the far more unassuming and gag-packed Harold & Kumar movies.

It's an intriguing movie, in some ways, but its contrived and even bizarre final revelation depends on coincidences of almost Hardyesque proportions. It is not really believable, and yet if it is not taken literally, but as a cinematic prose-poem, it has undoubted force.

It has plenty of energy and drive, and Jeremy Renner is really good, better as a Bourne-y agent than Matt Damon, tougher and more grizzled-looking, more convincing as the professional soldier who has grown careworn and disillusioned in the public service.

All of which works terrifically well up to a point.

A fun, disposable watch.

If Rise of the Guardians is finally never more than the sum of its parts, the parts themselves have real appeal.

It's fun to watch Whedon pitch his heroes against each other. Child's play, maybe, but entertaining all the same.

It's by no means a triumph, but one of the enjoyable things about Men in Black has always been the malleable nature of its reality.

Ridley Scott has counter-evolved his 1979 classic Alien into something more grandiose, more elaborate – but less interesting. In place of scariness there is wonderment; in place of tension there is hugely ambitious design; in place of unforgettable shocks there are reminders of the original's unforgettable shocks.

Bekmambetov directs with gusto, and the forthright absurdity of the story, combined with its weirdly heartfelt self-belief is winning.

It's a likable scary story – with hints of Tim Burton and Steven Spielberg.

Enjoyable, with some funny lines.

It’s a shame Kenan can’t muster his own bit of gothic shorthand for post-credit crunch America, but the film still has a fluid, 3D-orientated immediacy.

This really is a reasonably, moderately, whelmingly good film.

For me, it tends to be a recipe in which you can't taste either of the constituent ingredients. The big man-to-wolf transformation scene is still a marvel.

Nothing in the movie matches the fascination of its premise and its opening 10 minutes: the undisturbed status quo is mesmeric. Once the narrative grinds into gear, however, the film's distinctive quality is lost.

Whether you like this movie may depend very materially on how you respond to Franco himself, but I found his casting very astute.

After 170 minutes I felt that I had had enough of a pretty good thing. The trilogy will test the stamina of the non-believers, and many might feel, in their secret heart of hearts, that the traditional filmic look of Lord of the Rings was better.

The whole film ends up feeling weighed down: though Man of Steel bounds from one epic setpiece to another, you're left with the nagging feeling that you just can't work out what the central twosome see in each other. And for Superman and Lois Lane, that's hardly ideal.

Nothing here to challenge anything from the Pixar golden age, but Despicable Me 2 is a sweet-natured family film.

Pacific Rim's wafer-thin psychodrama and plot-generator dialogue provides little for the human component to get their teeth into.

No amount of tool-wielding heroism can save The Dark World from being a startlingly unbalanced movie.

It's a headspinningly wacky premise, and it takes a little while for the audience to get up to speed, but once this is achieved, there's an awful lot of unexpected fun to be had, boasting zany adventures with various historical figures.

What stands out is the animation. The microcosmic woodland world is luminous and detailed, and there's a nice disconnect of scale whereby humans appear as lumbering, slow-motion giants.

What lets the movie down is its heart, or lack thereof. The reprise of the Games introduces new adversaries (and some allies) but has exactly the same dynamic as in the first movie.

While some of World War Z is rotten, the whole stands as a punchy, if conventional action thriller.

It is not a story of great depth or passion, but there are intriguing and unsettling moments on its well-crafted surface.

It's perfectly workable popcorn entertainment for the school holidays.

Deeply strange and politically incorrect, ­baffling, and often funny.

Like Kaja (Agnes Kittelsen), the wide-eyed Madame Bovary at its heart, Happy, Happy starts out cartoonish and ends up oddly endearing.

By the end, you feel like a piñata: in pieces, the victim of prolonged assault by killer pipes.

The Wright/Stoppard Anna Karenina is not a total success, but it's a bold and creative response to the novel.

This film has to be indulged a little, and you'll have to negotiate the stumbling block that is Hawke's stodgy, dodgy French accent.

For all the guns and gore, it's as breezy and uncritical as a tale from the True Detective magazine that the cops can't help reading.

There's a degree of puffery in the writing, however, that makes this drama untrustworthy.

It is a sombre, thoughtful, restrained and often powerful piece of work.

Zombie-ism in the movies is traditionally inspected for metaphorical qualities. Here it could simply be that we males are emotionally dead … until love revives us.

Oddly, Magic Mike somehow looks like a much darker and more challenging movie than is actually the case.

As ever with comedies like this, all the really funny stuff is in the opening 20 minutes. But it's entertaining stuff, with a scene-stealer from Alan Arkin.

The movie's apocalyptic finale indicates that it's bitten off considerably more than it can chew in terms of ideas, but it looks good, and the story rattles along.

She's entertaining enough, and like most fashion documentaries, it's a mine of pop-cultural history, but the unswervingly generous assessment of her achievements and permanently arch vocal style become a little wearying.

Likable, watchable and has a nice supporting turn from Robert De Niro; I'm not sure I wouldn't rather watch this again than the macho acting in Russell's boxing drama "The Fighter."

It is nowhere near as creepy as the recent indie horror "V/H/S," but it is a full-bloodedly grisly and macabre film that zaps over a few scares.

Sometimes a film takes your breath away by dint of its brilliance. Sometimes it's on account of its ineptitude. And just occasionally, it's for its shamelessness. Hyde Park on Hudson, for all its captivating shots of cornfields and estimable performances, is the latter.

It's a likable film, though not a sensational development in Tim Burton's career.

It's still atmospheric enough, and like the original, has a quasi-theatrical event status. But it feels like a copy.

It's indulgent, but Macdonald's performance is attractive and relaxed.

The dialogue, penned by Miller with Katie Anne Naylon, is subversively salty: surpassing even those Judd Apatow comedies to which it's indebted, this is almost certainly the filthiest movie ever to bear the Universal logo.

Outrageous but entertaining pulp-melodrama thriller.

The interplay between animated and live-action elements remains a selling point: Hank Azaria again gives exemplary pantomime as Gargamel.

Fortunately, the animators get stuck in: the foodscape Flint's party passes through is again wittily realised, each frame sprinkled with colourful hybrid creations, from "flamangos" to "shrimpanzees".

The slightly slushy tone of celebration rather obtusely fails to engage with the nihilist, pessimist nature of Tatsumi's work. Anyway, an intriguing event.

A Simple Life is a tear-jerker, but thoughtful and intelligent, with an anti-sentimental dimension.

Impressive as much of his film is, however, Aronofsky never quite solves the main challenge of the semi-literal biblical adaptation: what is so economical, and beautifully expressed, on the page can become a heavy, lumbering beast when translated into conventional narrative.

The weakness is in the material: these are second-string Miller yarns... But the vision remains uncompromising and it dazzles far more than any sequel should.

Boseman hits his key scenes out of the park, making a swell couple with Shame's Nicole Beharie, while Helgeland stages Robinson's signature base-stealing with undeniable aplomb.

Some funny stuff, but a rental/download only.

In keeping with the spirit of Sebald's writing, Gee's film is teasing, elegant and perhaps inevitably unresolved: an invitation as opposed to a destination.

The movie is at its lightest, most charming and most persuasive in the 60s; as it approaches the present, something inescapably preposterous weighs it down, though Honoré carries it off with some flair.

This bona-fide big-budget Hollywood flop at least has the good grace to laugh at itself as it rolls out the dingbat-daft action-movie cliches.

Jiménez's drama is crisply imprinted; another fine recent Chilean effort.

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.

The Sessions can be sugary, but it's likable.

It's a slight, attractive tale: a childlike fable of a little girl and her preternaturally intelligent cat that swiftly devolves into a very old-school cops and robbers yarn.

It's too airless, too perfect, a dream of connection with humanity that flees contact with actual people.

Non-devotees might well give up, but director Bryan Singer always has a neat special effect, a well-timed gag or an action set piece around the corner, whipping up the action towards a symphonic climax.

An accomplished debut.

All in all, this is a carefully modulated plea for tolerance and mutual understanding.

The comedy is at odds, perhaps even at war, with the gravitational downward pull of bittersweet seriousness, and the sucrose content is pretty high by the end. But it's an entertaining film.

They could have called it British Pie, but this TV sitcom spin-off updates the teen summer holiday formula surprisingly entertainingly, considering it doesn't subvert it one iota.

This movie might itself make a modest contribution to rewriting the history of white South Africa.

Hepburn is in the boho-gamine mode, and this has a brittle charm, (arguably more than in Breakfast At Tiffany's four years later) but there is something unconvincing in the May-to-December pairing of 28-year-old Hepburn and 58-year-old Astaire and also something grumpy and not particularly classy about the way this film shrieks with laughter at silly modern women filling their empty heads with trendy Parisian intellectualism.

Subtle it isn't. But the entertainment rev counter more or less keeps turning over.

Director Francis Laurence ekes a paltry story out. The special effects are limp and the script a little creaky, although somehow it still manages to thrill.

There's plenty that's good here: a serious tone, steady ­pacing, muddy and bloody scenery and a convincing turn by Purefoy in his own west country accent. But Kane is an ill fit into the ­origins tale template; it's a story with few ­surprises.

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

It is up to McConaughey's crooked cop to carry the picture: a sleek, loungingly casual loner whose hunger for violence, like his hunger for fried chicken, is finally and horribly gratified.

Sit in the front – and don't peer too hard – and Chicken With Plums casts an undeniable spell. It is bold, exotic and distinctive, particularly during the animated angel of death sequence.

There are some nicely creepy moments, and director and co-writer Nick Murphy interestingly dramatises some of the neuroses feeding the appetite for ghostly phenomena – repressed sexuality, guilt and self-harm.