A nightmarish triptych of loss, waste and grief that is nonetheless arranged with such visionary boldness that it dares us to look away.

It contrives to be a very funny and recklessly provocative homage to Woody Allen, channelling his masterpiece Manhattan and brilliantly finding a fictional way to tackle his personal reputation head-on.

Lean on Pete is at its potent, stirring best during the opening furlough, when it focuses on this makeshift hobo family as it criss-crosses the Pacific Northwest from one racetrack to the next.

This film offers something that is never in sufficiently plentiful supply: fun.

It spends its time among unfeasibly beautiful young people in microscopically tiny swimming costumes, and moves with them in a trance of heightened physicality, drifting across beaches, bars and dancefloors. The mood is dreamy unseriousness qualified occasionally by temporary stabs of jealousy or misery. The sexiness isn’t promiscuous exactly; more directionless.

The Third Murder is a captivating puzzle.

It is, perhaps, a little derivative and maybe finally fudges the dark mystery of the quest’s end point. But this is a film with thrilling ambition and reach.

Paul Newman is at his charismatic best as convict Luke Jackson, fighting to maintain inner freedom despite the brutalities of a deep south chain gang. Much in the style of the old Warner Bros melodramas, the hardnut action here is lightened by a funny streak, as in the celebrated hard-boiled egg-eating contest. [31 Aug 2013, p.46]

Thoman coolly creates an oppressive atmospheric charge, as well as a deadpan satiric view of a certain kind of chillingly affectless conceptual art. A disquieting and mysterious mirage of a film.

The Little Stranger is fluently made and really well acted, particularly by Ruth Wilson, though maybe a bit too constrained by period-movie prestige to be properly scary.

It is a finely constructed drama, avoiding stuffiness without slipping into camp territory and while diehard historians might disapprove, everyone else will be supremely entertained.

With a giddy irreverence and a cavalcade of stupendous comedic performers, Long Shot is outrageously funny.

It’s a hugely charming crowd pleaser, an infectiously entertaining coming of age film that feels primed to attract and retain a loyal eager-to-rewatch audience. There’s a wealth of snappy dialogue and what feels like an attentive grasp of teenage life.

Joseph L Mankiewicz's four-hour Cleopatra is a stately but sometimes mindboggling spectacle. The central moment is the queen's jawdropping entry into Rome, for which Mankiewicz creates a sensational Busby Berkeley fantasy, like the world's biggest Olympic opening ceremony.

The mystery remains: did the North Koreans get it? Did they not get it? Or did they choose a foggy condition of semi-incomprehension as the only state in which they could reconcile ideological piety with reaching out the hated west?

Ghost Stories is a barnstormer of an entertainment, a fairground ride with dodgy brakes.

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

Jason Clarke is strong as the weak senator, and he wisely goes easy on replicating the unmistakable Massachusetts accent.

The script’s nuanced treatment of the complex relationships and a feel for the many-faceted, multicultural city in which it’s set – a unique urban blend of hedonism and tradition, bound together by hummus and history – redeem any shortcomings.

This isn’t a particularly chancy film, unless the decision to go old school is considered such. It is still, however, quite good.

Utterly bizarre and entirely ridiculous – and yet effective, an imaginative Guignol festival, like the goriest of soap operas, in which one wrong move opens a portal to hell.

With Three Men and a Baby, Nimoy proved himself to be an adept handler of mainstream 80s comedy, updating the far more farcical (and chauvinist) French original Trois Hommes et un Couffin into something more Hollywoodised and slick. But within the slickness, he let his three leads, Tom Selleck, Steve Guttenberg and Ted Danson shine through with their own individual charm.

Dodgy history and dodgier accents, but Kevin Costner's medieval romp still has some magic – and shouldn't be judged on the weakness of its imitators.

Sometimes the shagginess of the film can make it feel a bit slight and at times it does work better as a concentrated character study, but it’s such a joy to spend this time with McCarthy, drunkenly scheming and grumbling, that it’s hard to complain.

Hotel Mumbai is an excellent, white-knuckle thriller – and an unlikely crowd-pleaser.

The film’s insidious crawl away from comedy into sweaty waking nightmare is arresting indeed. As is, finally, its insistence that some elements of American life remain too serious to joke about.

Watching Never Goin’ Back, it’s easy to see the frames of reference Frizzell pulled from, besides her own teenage escapades. But the film also defies easy categorization; it’s not consistently funny enough to be a comedy, nor lively enough to be a drama.

[A] highly entertaining and outrageously over-the-top Cinderella soap opera.