Wilson and Stanley are both excellent performers and they are the mainstays of a valuable piece of work, but I felt the ending was contrived and a bit grandiloquent. However, the visual style and fluency of the film are obvious.

Lee wants to clear away the tabloid smoke and spite, and bring the focus back to Jackson's professionalism, his craftsmanship, his artistry and his pop genius; the movie defiantly insists that Jackson was and is superior to his detractors.

Zero Motivation is a shot of honesty, in which short-term goals are far more important than larger geo-political ones. Perhaps because they are the only ones over which we have any control.

Whodunnits require so many moving parts to be expertly placed and played with, and, ultimately, the script isn’t as sleek as it needs to be with a board as ambitious as this. The game is a fun one, but you might feel a little cheated once it’s over.

The ensemble cast work wonderfully and intuitively together; I loved the surges of emotion, and then the palate-cleansing moments of silence and calm. The song is a tremendous setpiece and the dialogue has a music of its own.

It’s an amusing and diverting film that, with a series of ellipses and jumps, finally takes us to an unexpected world of fear and grief – and then back again, to stylised unseriousness. An engaging debut, which Sendijarević will follow up with more substance to go with the style.

This dense but witty film is never caught short for a flourish.

Belli’s supple direction – reminiscent of Edgar Wright’s pop’n’snap – keeps its energy levels high as it roves around the living room that is its main location; it also exults in the occasional set-piece, such as the players’ Jazzercise routine. There aren’t quite enough of these zany segues, but with a larger budget, you can smell the franchise potential here.

Despite its moments of charm and caprice, the film is prolix, inert, indulgent and often just plain dull.

Onwubolu avoids the usual flash and posturing in favour of a careful, rooted storytelling, finding subtly different perspectives on gang life, and offering his characters as many ways out as there are ways in.

A droll account of the world’s whimpering end.

Various colourful characters including Freeway Rick Ross, the man who invented crack, and ex-cop Barry Cooper explain the tricks of the trade, but none of it will be news to anyone who's watched "Breaking Bad" or "The Wire."

Tim Roth is excellent as David: impassive and enigmatic, withholding the truth about himself, but radiating in repose a sadness and a swallowed pain.

Even granting the enormous difficulty of adapting such a long and complex book, I do not see how a worse job could have been done. Jack–rabbiting along in fits and starts, it gives one the feeling that the book has been arbitrarily chopped up into an irrelevant series of scenes, attempting an unsuccessful compromise between intimacy and the epic.

The script, inspired by Chomko’s grandparents’ marriage, throws up plenty of authentic-looking observations of life with Alzheimer’s.

Leto is a film with some wonderful moments and some slightly forgettable stretches – like an album with one or two wonderful tracks.

This is a really exhilarating, disturbing picture which foregrounds excellent writing and performances.

What the film shows – perhaps not entirely intentionally – is that maybe you need someone vain enough to think he is destined to make a difference, and cunning enough to see how the vanity-economy of movie celebrity can generate media attention and cash.

Even if Predestination is distinctive chiefly for Snook’s excellent performance, it’s still a tricksy story well-handled by its directors. It doesn’t offer any new twists on the genre, but it is clever enough to leave you satisfied that you don’t want the time back.

This is an amusing essay in amorous delusion.

This is a serious and worthwhile film, though one that tells you what you know already, and yet somehow perhaps doesn’t tell you enough.

It is the very preposterousness of Eyes Wide Shut which is the key to the achievement it represents: it has a singular excessiveness - at once gamey, florid and enigmatically deadpan - which underpins this picture's rich, sensuous style.

It is captivating and agonising all over again to see how dazzling Diana was, how simple and spontaneous she was compared with both the stuffy royals but also the secular celebrity class – how she instinctively knew to work with the press when it was still essentially sympathetic, but how panicky and dysfunctional she became when this same press became boorish and predatory.

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.

This brief, winsome feature is a typically stylish, if ephemeral piece of work in the classic New Wave manner – almost a time capsule.

A strong, muscular, heartfelt film.

There’s something grating about a film which insists on detailing its pseudo-science while also conceding you probably won’t have followed a thing. We’re clobbered with plot then comforted with tea-towel homilies about how what’s happened has happened.

Woody Allen said that he could watch a Bergman movie and feel himself gripped as if by a thriller; that's how I felt watching this restored version of John Cassavetes's 1977 picture Opening Night.

Having set out to shock and ultimately shatter his audience, a film-maker unwilling or incapable of hitting the tonal brakes succeeds in his mission, only to compromise a deeper dramatic power along the way.

When focused, this film truly sings, but it takes its time and tests your patience to land on the right notes.

It is as if Noé has somehow mulched up the quintessence of dance, coke and porn together and squooshed it into his camera. If that sounds horrible, then yes it is, but also, often, demonically inspired.

The more characters Selick has to work with, the more room there is for his deliciously strange and comic visual craft.

Denis's drama intrigues more than it actually delivers...Sleight of hand is all well and good. But sooner or later a film must pay up.

Shallow Grave is persistently cynical and uningratiating, a tale of nasty, greedy, stupid people who don’t realise that the finders-keepers rule doesn’t apply to a suitcase full of cash whose criminal owners will not merely want it back but want to create the specific circumstances in which Juliet, David and Alex will be unable to testify against them in a court of law.

Mostly, the film is heavy-handed, with subtlety nowhere to be found.

The film-makers never probe psyches very deeply, not even the parents’. It’s just one contemporary travelogue cliche after another, admittedly beautifully shot in super high definition.

This is a fan-servicing but not necessarily hagiographic documentary.

Holland is very good but he needs someone to play against, someone with Downey’s heft. That someone could well be Zendaya, as MJ, the great love of Peter Parker’s life. We shall have to see how the Marvel franchise plays this romance in forthcoming episodes.

There's romance and tragedy, but little depth and no nuance.

Wells’s coolly indirect way with dialogue prevents the movie becoming insufferable in the way that it might have done in other hands. It is like a short story that insouciantly signs off before you’ve quite decided what it means.

This is a teenage movie that could in other hands have been precious; instead it has delicacy and intelligence.

There’s little doubt who the hero of Peter Berg’s retelling of the 2013 Boston marathon bombings is: the city itself.

Slater didn’t need to get every last Canyon musician on camera, but to avoid mentioning many of them altogether is a total dereliction of duty. Mojo and Uncut magazines do this sort of nostalgic rock history with so much more specificity and impact – spend your money on some real storytellers.

Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon offers street-food for the senses, served with lashings of hot sauce. It’s hardly nutritious but it tastes fine in the moment, wolfed down on the run.

The film works on only one level, but so completely on that level that the rest doesn’t seem to matter: Woodley and Egort have terrific chemistry.

Thanks to inventive camerawork, mesmeric performances and incisive yet elliptical editing and storytelling, the claustrophobia becomes a feature instead of a liability.

Despite its flaws, See You Then is an interesting opportunity to see trans talents in front of and behind the camera.

In its outrageous way, 21 Jump Street has real laughs.

Bagaria’s personal journey has none of the gravitas on screen that the director wants it to have, especially when set against the backdrop of actual human rights crises in Damascus.

This is another film about a white European mixed up in a Middle Eastern war they barely seem to understand, but on its own terms it’s a story well told.

For all its fantastical vein, this movie has an interesting grasp of what high school is really like – not a Hollywood narrative, neither funny nor tragic, and certainly nothing like that most unreal of genres, the coming-of-age drama. Rather it’s messy, downbeat and inconclusive, without teachable moments – like everything else in real life.

With his reedy voice and fractionally mis-set eyes, Segan exploits his unsettling qualities in a deadpan performance that he lifts, as director, with pleasingly snappy, almost comic-book-like direction.

There’s an amazing lineup of collaborators and stars, and it’s good to see Candy’s uniquely likable and buoyant screen personality, but the tone borders on the stultifyingly reverential.

The Dead of Winter has an old-school barnstorming brashness, some edge-of-the-seat tension, a mile-wide streak of sentimentality, a dash of broad humour and a horrible flourish of the macabre.

Loach and Laverty fervently argue that through solidarity and a recognition of real interests, British people can naturally show empathy to immigrants and refugees.

It’s a melancholy, dreamy study.

Rounding out the pervasive sense of fear and ecstasy is a mesmerizing, sometimes mind-altering, depiction of the ocean’s depths. When one beholds Zecchini’s figure undulating to the sound of nothing, it’s all too clear that thrill-seeking is only part of the story.

The question of whether this is a ghost story or if Laura is experiencing a kind of psychological breakdown twists and turns in ways that lost me by the end. Still, it’s is a very accomplished debut from Gregg, and acted with subtlety and sensitivity by Riseborough.

A handful of jokes in this minipop Ragnarok, like the crack at Gene Hackman’s role in the 1978 Superman, land at the exact sweet spot where fond fanboy scholarship meets sublime goofiness.

Martha is, after all, the star – a fascinating narrator of her own life, sometimes direct, sometimes curiously opaque or self-contradictory, always evincing a glowing, undaunted ambition. As the OG influencer, she lived the rule: whatever happens, just keep pushing forward. The people will keep watching.

It’s in the scenes from the late 80s, which slowly start to take centre stage, that the film finds more original footing, exploring with nuance the realities of living with the weight of doing so much yet thinking of it as so little.

It’s a great piece of Hollywood confectionery, and you might well find yourself choking up a little at the end.

Moore never quite settles on a single, compelling riposte to Trump, never really hones his arguments to a piercing arrowhead of counterattack. Instead, he rambles over almost everything … entertainingly, but confusingly, ending on an image of Parkland School shooting survivor Emma González.

Happiest Season exists within well-worn framework but still feels fresh, a sprightly and substantial comedy that will be an immediate addition to the Christmas movie rotation for many, including myself.

Boyz in the Wood isn’t perfect (there isn’t really a wood in it as such and the title is a bit strained), but there’s likable wackiness and weirdness, one or two sizable laughs and a very bizarre deus ex machina moment.

Yoon executes all the classic double-agent set pieces with finesse, and those enamoured of the genre will appreciate a change of setting.

There's some great Pinteresque dialogue, and the murky gloom is illuminated with flashes of genius. [07 May 2004, p.15]

This is a film that doesn’t set out to push your emotional buttons all that hard, or even at all. But it covers a surprising amount of narrative ground and there is always something engaging and tender to it.

If Atkinson isn’t quite the Coen inheritor he aspires to be, this hectic flurry of schemers, snatchers and low-lifes puts him three-quarters of the way to inventing a new genre: Texan noir farce.

It’s an entertaining, fairly overwrought piece, a little tightly buttoned.

At a young age, Raiff still remains an exciting up-and-coming film-maker of note and even in his sophomoric slump, there’s enough, coupled with his standout debut, to suggest that better things will come. Hopefully better titles too.

An adrenaline-pumping action fest that is ironic in many respects, Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash swerves towards the mystical and the spiritual in the latter half, becoming a earnest and potent critique on the trappings of masculinity.

Our Souls at Night is your classic Hollywood weepie, so immaculately played that it confounds crass preconceptions.

Marianne Ihlen emerges as someone of enormous gentleness and dignity.