Though working on a thin budget from Allied Artists, director Don Siegel managed to create a compelling and violent tale of juvenile delinquency. [05 Jul 2014, p.32]

The headline draw remains the headline draw – and sometimes it’s enough for two lead actors to animate, complicate and enrich a project by lending it all the mysterious gravity you could ask for.

For all The Escape’s weaknesses, it’s held together with real sinew by Arterton, who lives and breathes the stifling air of Tara’s habitat without needing to act up a storm at any point.

Long Promised Road doesn’t really bring us any closer to comprehending the inner workings of Brian Wilson’s extraordinary mind, but it might just remind us that there is a real suffering human being behind the musical magic.

The animation is state-of-the-art – but isn't it high time superheroes stuck a pin in one reality and ripped up their passports?

Director/co-writer Babak Anvari made a startling debut with Under the Shadow (2015), but like his follow-up, Wounds (2019), this is a shakier pot-boiler – diverting, provocative in spots, a little head-scratchy in plot terms. The secret weapon is Ascott, an actor you itch to see cast in more films

[Burton] never thought acting was a manly profession, and seemed to be involved in a tug-of-war against himself, tangled up by his roots. To have half explored these themes, as Evans’ film does, means we’re left wanting more, but there’s a pleasing ache to the experience as a platonic love story.

It’s considerably too polite to do Philip Roth justice. Only in that single tête-à-tête does it truly crackle with the cold, white heat required.

Director Cave stages some nicely gripping scenes of suspense, toggling between camp and grit as nimbly as the swoony soundtrack, which occasionally cuts out for comic effect.

An enjoyably silly police thriller,

There’s very little marring this as a pleasant experience all round, even if little, outside the performances, ramps it up into the realm of the truly memorable.

The film leaves you enlightened and disillusioned, but still furious at Armstrong, who seems to have drawn the conclusion that he is now a tragic hero.

The film’s a satirical thriller, which is a novel enough entity in itself these days; it has a pungent, can’t-miss-the-point premise, and a big, weird, sharkish performance from Jake Gyllenhaal powering it up. It’s a must-see and a must-talk-about film, electrically overblown in the moment, if not wholly in control of its pay-off.

The film hinges on the bond between dad and daughter and on the expressive face of Fanning, as we see her shift from a sort of nervous adoration of the unpredictable, if loving, Joe, to something more steely and independent.

It’s the Pixar film that has to remind its audience what a Pixar film is.

Copshop has a certain sub-Tarantino appeal, which is very much the way director Joe Carnahan (Narc, Smokin’ Aces, The A-Team, The Grey) wants to play it.

The evidence is inconclusive, and by the final credits we’re back where we started – confused about Smollett’s guilt or innocence, but aware that somebody on camera has to be lying through their teeth.

This starfighter-recruit blockbuster is refreshingly idea-driven.

There’s nothing at all wrong with Respect, which is colourful and pretty well played, other than an overall air of caution – and the thing about Aretha Franklin’s voice is that it really swung for the rafters.

It’s tough stuff, though the skateboarding interludes, full of low-gliding camerawork and Jackass-like gallows camaraderie, go a long way towards leavening the gloom.

Titane is the kind of film that makes quibbles over plausibility seem foolish: you just have to sit back and enjoy being ridden over, or at least accept that’s what the exercise is about.

Campillo has mounted a methodical tribute to this era of activism which successfully balances everything on its plate: what’s brought to the table is a filling meal from a good chef, only lacking the genius of inspired presentation.

A jazz-loving kid from a musical family, Williams has been breathing music since he could talk and, though open and forthcoming as he recalled his enduring career, he was clearly happiest when talking about the nuts and bolts of his craft.

Patriots Day is stirring, well-acted, moving and built with conviction and flair. But a film about such a senseless attack shouldn’t be scared, now and then, to make a little less sense.

Sketchy it may be, but the film finds dreamy consolation in the final curtain.

De Mornay is oddly compelling as Mott. There’s a gleeful joy in watching her slow, insidious progress, and it’s hard not to secretly root for her character.

The hardship of the trek is vividly and stomach-lurchingly portrayed, particularly when the storm sets in, but it never makes the crucial leap from the screen into your bones.

Unlike Walter Salles’s recent adaptation of On The Road, which embraced the Beat philosophy with a wide and credulous grin, Kill Your Darlings is inquisitive about the movement’s worth, and the genius of its characters is never assumed.

The result is a film that does perfectly respectable justice to Lomax's ordeal, without ever making a strong case for itself as independently stirring art.

In its best moments, which tend to involve Gambon lurking at the back with a seedy grimace, or Broadbent looming almost motheringly over a rival’s shoulder, the film’s writing and acting have the grubby energy of good Pinter. In its worst though, it’s business-like and, for all the vivid performances, oddly bland.

Strange as it sounds – and is – Kumiko comprises a lingering display of empathy for its heroine, marching stridently on through her own peculiar headspace.

The director’s game is level, and typically mischievous, but lacks something - and it’s not just the vicious sting at the end of, say, Hidden.

The film gets too caught up in its svelte, talky stylings to stay properly watertight as a suspense piece, and when it goes for broke in the last reel, it has too many characters – major and minor – behaving like buffoons. It definitely could have ended better.

This is cinema as decathlon – a string of tribulations to sap your stamina and make your ligaments burn.

The film is awfully methodical, almost mathematical, in working through the various emotional steps every character must take in reaching an end point we readily guess. You appreciate the effort, even as you sense it.

while every detail matters, they don’t all point towards a kick-yourself climactic revelation. All you have to do is climb aboard, keep checking your blind spots, and enjoy the rackety ride.

That it largely succeeds says much for writer-director Turturro’s sly, subtle skills.

It’s a pleasant mini-break that should keep little monsters quiet for a while, and a welcome excuse to hide in the crypt-like cool of your local multiplex’s air-conditioning.

Sure, the film is crude, calorific and full of groanworthy half-jokes, but it holds together. It stacks up as an oafish pleasure for an undemanding summer – a rewriting of myths in scrawled crayon, with a nonchalant quality that makes its judiciously brief running time fly by.

If they had to give Drac an “origin story” this literal-minded, at least they had the sense to keep it keen and lively, whittled to a point.

Spirited never gets you to a place of soaraway joy, exactly, but it’s busy, silly and not a bad time.

While the animation itself doesn’t quite match the dazzle of its inspirations, it’s energetic and bright, and springy with wit.

Skarsgård’s ripe performance, with its wicked childishness and sarcastic self-pity, remains an asset Muschietti knows how to use. But the Losers are a mixed bag, convincing less well as a unit than they did as children.

Reminders of Shaun of the Dead (2004) abound. However, an endearing cast...and a satisfying mix of gore and gorblimey charm more than compensate.

Audiard’s expressionistic flourishes are in shorter supply here than usual, although the shootouts have a dreamlike quality, with pistols blasting showers of sparks like miniature steam train funnels.

Okja is plenty of fun, and smart around the edges, but the girl-and-her-pig stuff can drag, and it feels like it’s pressing for resonance more than properly achieving it.

This is a sober, stiff-collared procedural, handsomely shot but also oddly bloodless until the more conventional paranoid-thriller rhythms of its final act kick in.

Conclave is briskly enjoyable, but once you’ve wafted the white smoke away, it leaves you with frustratingly little to chew on.

It’s only in the final stages of assembly that you start to realise some bits are missing.

The recommendation might be stronger if the mortifying moments for Craig didn’t make me, personally, want to cower rather than laugh.

Woodley and Dern breathe a ghost into the machine. Willem Dafoe has fun, albeit not too much, in a brief, vital role as a creepy writer. Most crucially, the words that survived from Green’s novel did so for a reason.

Scriptwise, it's as stilted as any other 1950s studio horror flick, but De Toth does a great job at making the melting waxworks look genuinely creepy, and, yes, that really is Charles Bronson (credited with his original surnme, "Buchinsky") loping about the museum as Price's deaf-mute assistant Igor. [28 May 2005]

The United States vs Billie Holiday might be all over the shop – a tatty red carpet for its much-ballyhooed star turn. But this other Lady Day still seizes her moment.

[Folman's] film is an alluring curio, a protest against the digital frontier which gets stuck with a knotty internal paradox – it starts out as thoroughly its own experiment, and ends up like a counterfeit of too many others.

The film has whizz, and bang, and you’ll forget it by tomorrow.

Atlas is a preposterous rollercoaster directed in workmanlike fashion by Brad Peyton (San Andreas, Rampage). However, it is helped hugely by the fact that Lopez (a co-producer) takes it all so seriously.

McQueen’s work seldom features memorable lines; the moments that stay with you are the ones where nothing is said, and his camera stays fixed on an actor’s face.

You’re left wishing that Adler had focused more on the no-win moral tangle of the handler-informant relationship, and less of the mechanics of its execution.

We all know Smith can deliver barbs like blow-darts, but Parker’s screenplay gives her a too-rare chance to do something more – and when she delivers a bittersweet, profound monologue towards the end of the film, it feels like you’re watching a classic Ferrari reach the end of an average speed check zone and whistle off into the distance.

There’s a coldness in Schrader’s calculations, and disturbingly he seems to swallow the entire myth of Mishima, an extreme right-wing nutjob who wanted to return Japan to samurai values. Philip Glass’s score, however, still takes the breath away.

Imagine Arabian Nights, filtered through a Sofia-Coppola-esque feminist sensibility, but spiced up with camp. That gets you some of the way into 100 Nights of Hero, a British indie romp based on a graphic novel by Isabel Greenberg. It has saucy wit –especially up to the hour mark.

The film fares best when the chief negotiator, a fellow Marine vet played by the late, great Michael Kenneth Williams, steps into the fray. It’s one of his final performances, and a wary, angry one that elevates the material.

Think of it as a slightly self-nobbling version of Enchanted, the wondrous (and original) Disney blockbuster that both sent up and celebrated the Disney princess musical tradition in 2007.

Inkheart is cheerful and amiable, and in the absence of a Harry Potter film this winter, it fills a gap neatly.

Middleweight, non-intelligence-insulting fare right to the core, Bleed For This keeps you squarely in your seat, but barely once excites you enough to leap up out of it.

This long-overdue sequel to the 1980s hit romcom is no masterpiece, but it’s full of slick cameos, zany set-pieces and eye-popping style.

Given his otherwise grim recent form, Allen himself may have simply got lucky with this one, but the charm and sparkle here are real.

The film often rings hollow.

In the end it amounts to not much, but in the moment I laughed a lot.

It’s hard to decide if Black Sea is a good idea put over with sub-par execution, or an iffy idea handled as well as possible in the circumstances.

To describe Wonder Park as Paramount Animation's Inside Out would be significantly more of a stretch, but it gets to the heart of what this efficient Easter holidays time-passer is trying to do.

Lopez is particularly good at this stuff, giving another of the messy lioness performances at which she’s excelled in the past.

Sleekly enjoyable.

It’s Deneuve who musses up the formula and makes the film worth seeing, by generously bringing out her inner vulgarian.

For all the film’s merits, the suspicion persists that McDonagh’s a little too pleased with his own fulminating thesis. Time and again the writing is showing off for effect, delivering a fire-and-brimstone sermon with cocky swagger.

For the microscopic subset of cinema-goers who watch Magic Mike films for the plot, Last Dance may prove disappointing. Returning screenwriter Reid Carolin doesn’t come up with anything novel to do with the hackneyed let’s-put-on-a-show premise.

Strip away the wiring, and Cahill’s film connects most tangibly as a fable about drug addiction – hardly a shock, with all the crystal-obsessed scurrying to make one grey reality bearable, or switch to another outright. He’s had more ingenious ideas, but the whole thing’s strangely charming.

Captain America: The First Avenger is all utility. It has everything you might want from a movie of this kind — bangs, baddies, nonsensical backstories — except for the most important element of all: surprise.

We’re missing any real sense of awe – but for all its faults, this lands somewhere between noble failure and endearing oddity.

François Ozon and the late Ruth Rendell is a great match of sensibilities: it promises the French director’s winking subversion, wedded to the late crime writer’s slippery command of psychological twists.

Beneath the mounting contrivances, Dunne’s sturdy performance supplies an earnest core which Lloyd should have trusted more completely.

It’s a brawny, inventive action romp that’s as happy firing rockets at helicopters as it is contemplating the Cartesian model of mind-body dualism, which gives it a satisfying, sweet-and-sour tang of its own.

The whole business, this time, is passable eye candy without being any kind of brain candy.

It’s a watchable national identity crisis in microcosm.

The film, rather like being in A-ha, just comes across as a bit of a slog.

It’s daft, disposable fun while it lasts.

If you want to watch an elaborate metaphor being wrung out like a bathing suit for an hour and a half, The Platform might be the film for you.

Everett overdoes the lachrymosity right at the end, the one part of the film where a more subdued rigour would have served him better. At the very least, though, it’s a command performance he puts in front of us, an uncompromising feat of empathy in the role he’s made his own more than any other.

For long periods, it is just Tipton and Teller on screen together and it is testament to the fizzing chemistry between them that their evolving relationship remains compelling.

Monster Hunter is silly, it’s loud, and it has a synth score by Paul Haslinger that pipes away addictively, manoeuvring the film’s tone into an optimal space for this sort of junk. It achieves a kind of jokey bombast.

This is a fun piece of play-acting for as long as it lasts, but it never quite feels like much more. Things may become kinky in front of the lens, but you can sense Polanski lurking behind it throughout, always ready with his safe-word. Cut!

The History of Sound has fashioned a deliberate non-epic from wispy material, keeping such a tight lid on sentiment, it’s like an obstinate clamshell with its secrets. Expectations need recalibrating beforehand so as not to feel lightly underwhelmed.

[Sachs'] subtle, often quite special film shows us a shared life as a series of impositions: sometimes we’re imposed upon, and sometimes we do the imposing, and love is the net result.

The Eternal Daughter is a minor film at least partly by design, but it leaves an ethereal trail of sadness and creepiness.

It’s hard to shake the suspicion that Depp is playing a type – almost as if he’s trying to replicate the kind of performance Nicholson might have given in the same role. You long for him to roll his sleeves up and grasp the character’s shape and soul himself, ideally without the aid of those distracting prosthetics.

For a series that has always torn through technical boundaries at speed but whose storytelling stays scrupulously between the lines, it’s business as usual to the last.

Well-played and divertingly handsome, it’s one of those pedigreed visions of love and war which backs away from specifics, reassuring us almost to death with its lavish craft. It’s thoroughly easy to sit through, when it should probably have been harder.

Square, lacquered, and livelier than you’re expecting, Joachim Rønning’s film obviously adheres to all the formulae a doughty sports drama needs, starting crucially with the backdrop of adversity.