This is where the film slips up. With a Bond as dangerous but dour as Craig’s, the onus is on the villain to inject a little levity, hence the ham-tastic turns from Javier Bardem and Cristoph Waltz in the most recent outings. This film’s main bad guy is Rami Malek’s lacklustre Lyutsifer Safin.

Proof that even the most basic cinematic tools can be used to make fire.

As for Foxx and Jordan, their dialled-down discipline pays dividends, lending greater weight to those few moments (a courtroom showdown, a jailhouse breakdown) when Cretton briefly turns up the dramatic heat, with rousing results.

While the film is not particularly groundbreaking in its approach to the music documentary, it’s unusually candid and open in what it reveals about the cost of the creative process.

Decades on, I found its loopy humour and skew-whiff child’s-eye observations reassuringly in place.

While the direction may be deceptively unfussy, Deschanel does brilliant work bringing Kurt’s worldview to life, enabling us to understand his progress towards an artistic breakthrough, represented here by paintings conjured by (among others) Richter’s former assistant Andreas Schön.

Mortensen and Seydoux play it deliciously straight, jumping through the well-rehearsed philosophical and physical hoops with elegant ease, conjuring a sense of yearning humanity that saves the production from descending into silliness… just about.

The screenplay is so meta that at times it is practically consuming itself, an ouroboros of in-jokes. But there’s an affable appeal to the picture that disarms the more self-satisfied tendencies of the writing, and which stems from the chemistry between Cage and Pascal. Come for the industry satire, stay for the endearingly goofy buddy movie.

The film spends scant time exploring the implications of these darker themes, and doesn’t attempt to understand the root of Dreykov’s god complex. Instead, it’s more comfortable in comedy mode.

What makes it so compelling to watch is the choice of characters and the examination of what, beyond sporting glory, they are actually fighting for.

Swinton is massively overblown and Torres too wispy and diffident to balance things out.

Unfortunately, for all its daring, Eureka is often stultifyingly slow.

This is more of a dutiful plod through the facts than the kind of film that makes history come alive.

Inevitably, some chapters work better than others but it’s an interesting, sideways look at how violence can serve as a catalyst rather than a climax and how it can change – and galvanise – a community.

The stark beauty of Florian Ballhaus’s black-and-white cinematography and painterly framing can’t conceal the ugliness that unfolds as the death toll mounts and Herold starts to believe his own grotesque creation.

A well-acted, soft-centred example of pre-rock rebelliousness with one of Brando's finest performances, it features the celebrated exchange between local lawman's daughter Mary Murphy and Brando: "What are you rebelling against?" - "What have you got?" [31 Aug 2014, p.48]

A lumbering, humourless, tech-driven damp squib of a movie, this long-awaited (or dreaded?) sequel to one of the highest grossing films of all time builds upon the mighty flaws of its predecessor, delivering a patience-testing fantasy dirge that is longer, uglier and (amazingly) even more clumsily scripted than its predecessor, blending trite characterisation with sub-Roger Dean 70s album-cover designs and thunderously underwhelming action sequences. In water.

The central notion of discovering one's unique personal identity ("the only thing that matters is what you choose to be now") takes us back to an earlier China and it's free of jokey references to other movies.

The film is at its most successful in the first half, which shows the genesis of a pop phenomenon...But once Portman takes over the role, as a jaded, jangled pop veteran, the picture becomes less persuasive.

John Gielgud makes a rare, youthful appearance as an intelligence officer ordered to kill a spy in WWI Switzerland in a fascinating, uneven thriller based on two of Somerset Maugham's Ashenden stories. Madeleine Carroll (a fellow agent pretending to be Ashenden's wife) and Peter Lorre (his flamboyant bisexual assistant) provide excellent support. The striking set pieces include a climactic railway accident. [18 Jul 1999, p.10]

It’s a fascinating story that starts as an affable, strange-but-true tall tale but ends in a decidedly minor key.

After four decades of diminishing returns, the fact that a guy in a mask can still take an entertaining stab at a somewhat jaded audience is oddly reassuring.

There are pacing issues in a brooding, cautious middle section, but nothing terminal. There is also the problem that this elusive supernatural mystery has been mismarketed as a horror – unfortunate, certainly, but not the fault of the film.

Despite a spirited performance from Comer and an impressive roster of supporting turns (including a scene-stealing Harriet Walter as Jean’s withering mother, Nicole), The Last Duel has a tendency to mirror its central battle’s attempts to address complex issues with the blunt tool of rabble-rousing spectacle.

Byrne and Hawke, both easygoing, naturalistic performers at their best when they barely seem to be acting, have an utterly persuasive connection.

When Fine encourages him to elaborate, Wilson isn’t especially articulate, but his emotional responses to the individual songs are often lucid and revealing.

By comparison with 1999’s Pola X and 2012’s Holy Motors, Annette (which Carax tenderly dedicates to his daughter Nastya) is surprisingly accessible fare: adventurous, anarchic and unexpectedly heartfelt.

All loose limbs and exposed emotional scar tissue, Davidson is persuasively raw in a performance that becomes increasingly textured and interesting as Scott finds a father figure in his mother’s ex-boyfriend. It’s his bruised charisma that compensates for a certain spaced-out lethargy in the storytelling and an overlong running time.