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.

The Breaker Upperers is Sami and Van Beek’s show through and through. The film coasts off the energy and rapport of this affable pair, whose smart-mouthed performances are full of pep and fizz. What they lack in wit they compensate for with sheer likability.

The speeds on such narrow, winding public roads are hair-raising and superbly photographed, the crashes spectacular and the riders far more likable than anyone involved in Formula One. Particularly engaging is the zanily amusing, leathered lunatic Guy Martin, a Lincolnshire lorry repair mechanic by day.

Egilsdóttir carries the drama, and her overwhelming feeling of relief makes sense of that gigantic landscape.

This Korean war drama was as taut and gripping as one of [Malden's] performances, containing many of the pros and cons of his acting style, fervent but sometimes overemphatic. [02 Jul 2009]