Tim Mackenzie-Smith’s slightly breathless and overstretched documentary aims for a Buena Vista Social Club-style story of late-life rediscovery but gets a little bogged down in a few too many hagiographic quotes from high-profile fans. Still, the music is sublime.

I can’t shake the inkling that it would’ve worked better as straight documentary.

The famous apple incident is a taut centrepiece for Nick Hamm’s picture, and the action sequences are propulsive. The casting, however, is questionable.

Hardy is a highlight, playing Eddie as a man who has had more than enough of the party that’s raging in his head, but Kelly Marcel’s film is a sloppy, incoherent let-down.

A rather charmless remake of Hitchcock's classic 1938 comedy thriller, adding nothing of value and subtracting everything of significance. [04 Dec 2005, p.119]

Tension is frequently punctured by clunky dialogue.

Enitan’s trauma is revelled in but for what? Few new truths are learned here. A rushed, redemptive montage towards the film’s end is presented as ickily aspirational.

Fans will doubtless be dazzled by its meticulous imitation-of-life-in-miniature visual aesthetic, yet I swithered between whimsical amusement, mild curiosity and outright irritation.

In a chase picture that evolves into a war movie, the storytelling is propulsive, but it’s cheapened by crude and manipulative film-making choices.

It’s an alienatingly ugly technique and a mawkish tear-jerker choked up with synthetic sentimentality. You start to envy the dinosaurs their extinction event.

The frenetic pacing, intended to sweep the audience along, can’t draw attention away from Irvine Welsh and Dean Cavanagh’s platitude-riddled script.

Montages, seesawing Dutch tilts and profligate overuse of lighting gels fail to conceal the fact that the film’s writing doesn’t match the lure of the central idea.

It’s not unusual, unfortunately, for the victims of sexual attacks to find themselves distrusted and even accused. What rankles in the film’s approach is that the audience is also encouraged to question her story.

As Ellie and Abbie respectively, Sophie Hawkshaw and Zoe Terakes make light work of a somewhat heavy-handed screenplay.

Simon Kinberg’s film feels aggressively focus-grouped for the girl-boss crowd.

The always impressive Spall elevates this low-key mood piece a little, but even his skill as an actor can’t save the stultifying pacing.

James’s natural charisma should allow the film to soar but he’s bogged down by an avalanche of distracting cameos, from Gremlins to Game of Thrones.

Maslany is magnetic, her coiled fury and sexual energy threatening to erupt as her placid partner plods along beside her.

If you’re a paunchy, middle-aged geezer with a wholesale cocaine habit, an aversion to “woke”, and hobbies that include beer and punching people, well, have I got a movie for you!

Strays is a film that leans heavily on gross-out gags and a pre-adolescent fascination with pee and poop.

The impish Leslie Mann is well cast as his dead wife, Elvira, who provides a jolt of creative inspiration. Judi Dench’s screechy caricature of psychic Madame Arcati is less winning.

Electro-folk song interludes (written by Flynn) offer images about rivers and such that might better suit another film – one that doesn’t feel as if it’s waiting for darkness so that it can finally become a noir.

It’s not unenjoyable, just deeply unoriginal.

Mimicking the relapse-recovery cycle of addiction, the film’s timeline moves in unsatisfying narrative circles that stall the already shallow stakes.

The Liam Gallagher of old, with his shrapnel wit and swaggering crusade against being “suckered in by the dickheads”, would have tossed a grenade into the editing suite rather than sanction a doc that is more extended corporate rebranding exercise than it is rock’n’roll.

While the picture looks wonderfully atmospheric throughout, with its frostbitten monochromes and consumptive colour palette, the story disintegrates into a lurid and rather silly final act.

A generally lacklustre affair. [03 Mar 2013, p.44]

Its writer-director, John Sayles, is one of my favourite American film-makers, when he is pursuing tough social and historical subjects as in Matewan, Eight Men Out and City of Hope. He's that rare being, a political director, but I don't care for Sayles's excursions into lyricism (Passion Fish, for example), and this present exercise in stage Irishry. [11 Aug 1996, p.8]