The film is led by a performance of thrilling regality and nuance from Saoirse Ronan as Mary.

The great coup Washington delivers, beyond framing his co-star’s virtuous anguish so well, is the risky, brilliant, and frequently alienating performance he gives as Troy.

To watch it is to be waterboarded by joy. In terms of both visual dazzle and invention and sheer comedic stamina and pep, it handily surpasses the original Trolls from 2016, which itself set an impressive new standard for films based on novelty keyrings and pencil toppers.

There's an Oscar-winning performance from Ingrid Bergman, who is driven slowly mad by her husband (Charles Boyer at his smoothest), who's after her dead aunt's jewels. Joseph Cotten plays the urbane detective who smells a rat; Angela Lansbury is excellent as an insolent maid. [06 Jun 2020, p.20]

Nichols’ film delivers a grubbily glamorous blast of underworld machismo of the sort that Scorsese himself made a mid-career speciality: think wildly charismatic performances, elegant camerawork, regular jabs of barbarous violence, and a skin-fizzingly sharp jukebox soundtrack.

This is a handsome and mature entertainment, rich with novelistic intrigue, that asks for very little in exchange for its rewards.

Camping out at the film’s doleful core is a very skilled Baruchel, so crestfallen and cowed as Lazaridis that to watch him is to feel the years ebbing away in virtual real time. Rise-and-fall stories so often gloat after the bursting of the bubble, but this one is all condolences.

Against this enticing, enigmatic backdrop, the odd sops to mainstream taste – some comic shrieking, a sprinkling of toilet humour – feel unnecessary, but forgivable. It’s the sort of film you’re relieved to discover still exists.

Carlyle shoots the story with a propulsive, page-turning energy that’s enjoyably at odds with the Glasgow backdrop, which is dilapidated to the point of timelessness.

You could hardly ask for a sharper reminder of blockbuster cinema’s charms than the crescendo from swelling dread to snappily choreographed chaos that comprises the film’s tremendous 10-minute prologue.

If you're a fan of hers, you've heard it all before. Still, if you're a fan of hers, there is plenty here to enjoy.

It's part sex comedy and part critique of the social divisions of Thatcher's Britain and despite its politically incorrect nature, the film is keenly observed and funny. [09 Apr 2011, p.34]

Unashamedly rousing and immaculately crafted, The Swimmers is up there with Creed as a sports drama with more at stake than individual glory – a global-humanist purview to which it ascends without getting the slightest bit preachy.

For all the placidity of its cud-chewing subject, Cow has a thrillingly alien charge.

Zombi Child is the kind of lithe and lucid dream that gets its tendrils round your brain stem, so that when all hell finally breaks loose, you can’t jolt yourself awake from its grip.

This wintry tale of art blooming in adversity is far from a schematic feel-good jaunt. . . it’s an anthem for doomed youth in a familiar Bennett key: wry, melancholic, sneakily profound.

As a toy-advert movie full of artistry and heart, it’s as slyly progressive as it is shamelessly nostalgic.

Elke Sommer is good as the devious maid Maria Gambrelli but it is Sellers who steals the show as the inept detective fumbling and bumbling his way around solving murder mysteries.

It’s an elegantly pleasurable period thriller, a film of tidy precision and class.

A seamless patchwork of reminiscences, tracing John’s voyage into darkness with an astute and sensitive cinematic imagination.

While a late twist may potentially dismay, it also allows Mackenzie to raise the stakes in a battle of wits whose participants previously felt more like opponents than foes. It gets personal – nasty, even – and this ice-cool throwback suddenly bursts into flames.

The script makes a heavy meal of Naru’s personal growth, where a concentration on pure survivalist reflex would have made it leaner and meaner. But when the film knuckles down in sequences of wordless action, it slays.

Suzume is perhaps Shinkai’s most spookily beautiful work to date, while remaining treasurably odd.

Onward may be middle-of-the-pack Pixar but it’s still a real pleasure.

With her actors, Belo captures moments of staggering grief that are moving in their restraint: we deal, usually, with the stricken aftermath.

Varda by Agnès is unquestionably one for the fans ... But this film also serves as a tantalising crash-course for newcomers.

Reflecting the mood of Nixon's America, the film plays on the anxieties of surveillance. [27 Oct 2012, p.36]

It’s a nocturnal fantasy, seductive and ablaze with threat.