An illuminating, affecting piece of work.

[A] televisual but still touching documentary tribute.

It may be a bit corny, but Hammer keeps the funny lines coming and it has some pep that George Clooney and Julia Roberts’ recent romcom effort Ticket to Ride didn’t.

Now Guardians of the Galaxy has reached the threequel stage: overlong, yes, and finally reaching for an importance and emotional closure (perhaps inspired by Gunn’s own emotional corporate redemption) that it doesn’t quite encompass, while leaving the GOTG brand open for a next-gen reboot. But it’s still spectacular, spirited and often funny.

Tran adroitly layers the fight sequences, filmed with fluidity and at least substantially performed by the main actors themselves, between frothy layers of blokey banter.

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.

The graphic novel-inspired world of Gunpowder Milkshake isn’t unique, but it’s admirably committed and Papushado edges his film away from the danger of pastiche thanks to an equally committed cast.

It’s the sort of old-fashioned string-puller that when done well is hard to resist even if we know the strings are being pulled, like we’re aware of the bait but powerless to resist.

A Hero is an engaging and even intriguing film, but I wonder if its realist mannerisms are concealing a slightly unfocused story.

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

Like Beckett trying to escape his pursuers, it’s a scrappy little film but one worth keeping up with.

It gives you a good idea of what a nightmare he must have been to work for, and the 24/7 tumult that drove his work. Fassbinder was the nearest an auteur came to punk rock.

The history that emerges here is of a band yo-yoing between attempts to be taken seriously as artists, then coming back for more boyband fame and adulation. An air of collective self-loathing and regret hangs over them.

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

The film is a reminder of just what a brilliant writer Bourdain was.

It takes proper acting talent, boosted by strong direction from Wladyka, to pull the film along the way Reis does. She’s vulnerable, frightening and relentlessly physical.

It’s hard to deny Fuhrman’s pinch-faced vehemence and the film’s hallucinatory verve.

The impossibility of ever really knowing our parents is a familiar storyline, but it’s told here with real generosity and warmth. Malik slyly pokes fun, but never meanly. This is satire with the thermostat turned up to 22 degrees.

In the end, Collins emerges as an opaque figure, as resistant to interpretation as her famously 2D fictional heroine Lucky Santangelo.

It succeeds in walking the tonal high beam without falling into soul-destroying bleakness on one side or a saccharinely fake happy ending on the other. That’s no mean feat.

It’s a valuable portrait of a great risk-taker.

This new animated origin story for the chelonian adventurers is unexpectedly funny, with a rather stylish crepuscular design.

The final endgame is a little unsatisfying, but this is a very interesting debut for McCarthy.

It is a lovely-looking, lovely-sounding movie, handsomely designed, meticulously shot and impeccably performed — and it also has interesting things to say about the emotional toughness and the Greeneian splinter of ice in the heart, that is needed by a writer. But I have to admit that, despite my liking for slow cinema, I found something a bit indulgent and classy about the unvarying andante pace.

A valuable if slightly passionless and reticent movie.

Whatever its flaws, this movie provides fans of French star Léa Seydoux with a treat.

It can be overwrought and even absurd but lively and heartfelt.

As it begins to explain more and more about what drives its leading character, the film becomes less and less interesting and the stridently melodramatic finale, as well as being highly unlikely in ordinary plot terms, feels a little bit self-exculpatory.

It is all presented earnestly and engagingly, though self consciously, and if the political debates are unsolved, well, that could be because they are unsolved in real life. It’s certainly a heartening demonstration that new ideas can flourish in a religious society.

It is an intriguing story, although I have to admit to feeling a bit bemused at the arbitrary way the Beast story is inserted into the already tense and interesting situation of Suzu/Belle and her relationships with people at home and school.

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

A to-the-point two-hour slab of pulp that slickly glides above a very low bar.

This is a film raised a fair few notches by the wonder of geekery, the absolute joy of seeing scientists living and breathing their work.

In the end this is a fundamentally genre-subservient film, staying within the safe lines that absolves it from getting close to the true horrors it hints at.

Not just a valuable crash course in digital-age hermeneutics, this is a gauntlet thrown down to film-makers with an old-fashioned belief in the truth.

This is a documentary about Australian motor sports legend Jack Brabham that aims to finesse the usual greatest-hits highlights by including some darker material: family strife, on-track bad behaviour, behind-the-scenes fallouts.

Director-producer team David Bickerstaff and Phil Grabsky are past masters at putting this kind of film together, and Sunflowers has the usual mix of smoothly impressive visuals and authoritatively informed comment.

The deft camerawork showcases a dynamic Ethiopia – from tiny villages to the gritty underbelly of bustling Addis Ababa – and, let’s face it, everyone loves a good training montage.

This is engaging, intelligent film-making and Navas’s performers relax into the space that she creates for them.

Cage is remarkably restrained (bar one unnecessary scream), delicately deconstructing what we’ve come to expect from him. His trademark tics are gone, his voice that much softer, his swagger replaced by an unsureness, an aggressive blare that’s faded into calm.

Settlers isn’t perfect: some of the storytelling beats aren’t hit as clearly as they could have been. But it’s a quietly impressive piece of work.

Altogether, this is flyweight fun.

Despite Fine’s conversational interviewing, Wilson is still not enormously articulate or forthcoming, though it’s nice to see him reminisce, however simply, and there are plenty of powerful, telling moments.

There’s now a well-trodden route for such musical travelogues, laid down by the likes of Buena Vista Social Club and Searching for Sugar Man, and while this lacks the polish or drama of either of those, it’s an engaging and uplifting journey.

Every shot, every scene, every exchange from The Harder They Fall is combat-ready and garishly tensed for violence – and Samuel certainly brings the freaky mayhem, with gruesome relish and high energy. My feeling, though, is that there is a diminishing return on it, and the big reveal at the end is slightly silly and somehow retrospectively discloses that we haven’t really found out enough about Rufus Buck’s backstory.

Once the bloodletting starts, Calahan interleaves it with witty asides and the pacing picks up a lot, all combining to make this impish if flyweight entertainment.

Director Théo Court does a fine job of capturing the barren beauty of this landscape and using it to suggest the broader moral vacuum.

It’s pure hagiography and taken as that, it’s skillfully assembled, even stylishly so at times, and Kilmer’s insights into his art skirt just the right side of Inside the Actors Studio indulgence but as a portrait of a star known for his rough edges, it’s all far too smooth.

It’s a bit indulgent but, still, a gentle watch.

The closing stretch – including an exorcism in an imam’s incantation-lined apartment (interior design goals!) – is brutally effective. By this time, Aisha Kandisha is a towering succubus; postcolonial theory stomping in on a pair of terrifying goat’s hooves.

The journey is slick and diverting, and at times incisive, but Turning Red is yet another Pixar film that coasts rather than glides. Hopefully its next offering can turn into something more.

Boarders is baggily structured, and feels overlong as a result. But it’s still an absorbing look at day-to-day involvement in a sport that’s a combination of dynamism and hyper-precision as an activity, but paradoxically nebulous and uncertain as a long-term career.

It’s tender and poignant, but might be a bit cloying were it not for Norton, who underplays it beautifully with a performance of tremendous depth and empathy.

In narrative terms it never really develops any of its characters or relationships, yet its two utterly heartfelt lead performances make this a grimly authentic spectacle.

It’s an engaging piece of work from Merlant who has a real sense of directing an ensemble of actors.

Schizophrenic performance from the estimable Walter Matthau, playing the central characters of three Neil Simon stories set in New York's Plaza Hotel. His barely contained rage as the dad who finds his daughter refusing to come out of the bathroom on her wedding day is particularly good, but the jokes are thinly rationed. [19 Nov 2005, p.53]

This is a decent, intelligent, well-acted film if a little uninspired until that third act, which packs an almighty punch.

Like the junk food that the central characters sell in their convenience store, it’s a strangely moreish brew that you enjoy but feel faintly guilty about consuming, like nachos with cheese-flavoured sauce or a blue slushy ice drink.

Here is a film that accomplishes the difficult task of capturing the heroic trials of its subject without overly valorising and mythologising the real person.

This is an enjoyable rollercoaster of absurdities and poignancy, and a marvellous showcase for Stafiej’s talent.

The tech may be on the blink, but this striking debut makes humanity seem like a beautiful malfunction.

There’s nothing markedly necessary about universe expander Army of Thieves, niche fan service that gives backstory to a character who we know dies later on, but Schweighöfer, also acting as director, keeps his frothy caper afloat with a light knockabout tone, never insisting the film as anything that it isn’t.

This film (and Liggett) is likable and charming enough.

This extraordinary story of an extraordinary person is told via bland film-making reminiscent of a public service announcement.

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.

This an enjoyably strange spectacle, perhaps best appreciated by taking it less seriously than its creators intended.

The Hand of God, no surprise, is Sorrentino’s most nakedly personal film to date, almost to a fault in the way it jettisons the cool distance of The Great Beauty or Il Divo in favour of a sweaty, close-up evocation of youth. It’s a picture only Sorrentino could make. But that doesn’t necessarily make him the safest pair of hands.

Vigas’s direction is efficient, pedestrian, entirely built for purpose. But he manages to keep the audience on-board throughout the tale’s twists and turns.

It’s a shame that Durall doesn’t find his torrid and sophisticated story the visual register it deserves, leaving The Offering with a humdrum televisual ambience that’s a bit unsatisfying.

The film-makers’ enthusiasm for his clarity of purpose is all well and good, but it does leave the film prone to hyperbole, and perhaps a more measured, sideways look at the weird dropout culture around climbing would have been more interesting.

With Civetta ably dashing off a couple of desperate kidnap attempts, The Gateway manages to scrabble over the line.

Birds of Paradise, then, settles into a weird, slightly unsettling middle-ground – beautiful yet hollow, intriguing yet distanced, skillfully performed without much of a beating heart. Like its principal dancers, its a portrait of contrasts, though the friction here doesn’t generate much heat.

It’s been compiled with enthusiasm, flashes of skill, and a certain devil-may-care cheek – an infusion of newish blood for a Brazilian film industry that’s been badly drained in recent years.

Moses’ story circumnavigates a relationship between two women, one that is charged with an intensity that’s more than platonic but less than erotic, and inflected by an unequal power distribution.

There’s an admirable sense of pluck to the film, as if those involved know very well they’re making something that doesn’t need to exist but they’re making the most of it anyway.

This film may stretch your patience to the limit and beyond. It’s minor work – but there is always something there, some restless wounded intelligence, a pugnacious worrying-away at something.

What really redeems the film are the brilliantly observed characters: these are archetypes of modern Britain that nobody really nailed before. Created by the principal actors themselves, they are generally portrayed with affection rather than condescension, and performed so convincingly that a newcomer might well believe they were real people.

The trouble with the film is that beneath the surface lurks … well, perhaps not quite enough to keep the momentum going.

Although made on a tiny budget, this highly original exercise in folk horror punches well above its weight with snappy dialogue, trippy visual effects and impressive camerawork.

BellBottom always feels more movie than propaganda – a mission undertaken to offer audiences a good time after the longest and worst time.

This film is a capable, wholesome tribute to a project that is about as warm and fuzzy as space travel gets.

The streak of perversity at Intrusion’s centre nudges it above the norm, briefly waking us up before we sleepily click on something else.

Perhaps to overcompensate for the lack of conventionally opened-out dramatic action, there is some big closeup acting from Gyllenhaal, but it’s a well-made and watchable picture of a man in the secular confessional box, a sinner forced to occupy the place of a priest.

An inoffensive time-filler that’s hard to love but easy to like.

There are imperfections here, especially near the end, but it’s the work of someone striving to stand out, to do something that will linger in the memory rather than fade into the over-populated homepage background.

The goofier it all gets, the more one starts to warm to it, leaning further away from its initial A-trappings and nestling into a far more likable B-movie mode.

It feels kid-gloves at times: big-hearted and entertaining, but possibly lacking a little fun or oomph. A lovely warming film, though.

Jones skilfully cranks up the creepiness a notch at a time with an ominous soundtrack and stylish lighting, until the dial is way past 11 and into grand guignol territory by the end.

The film coheres quietly, thanks in no small part to the two excellent child performances.

Not only is the story compelling, but thanks to how much the event captured the interest of the world’s media, there is a lot of archive footage to splice in among the generous wodges of talking-heads narration from the main participants.

The explosively potent Graham does deliver a colossal, intimate ending, acted with complete and affecting sincerity. He has presence, potency and force.

Overall, this is a likable and well-researched film, but there is something unsatisfying in ignoring the band’s later stages. Perhaps Part II is in the works.

Dinklage always holds the screen with his natural charisma.

This is a documentary that discreetly does not concern itself much with Peterson’s personality, and concentrates on the music, which is entirely worthwhile.