This slice of class-baiting British ordeal horror from writer-director James Watkins is potently made. It's also exploitative trash, serving up silly levels of alarmist editorialising about kids today.

It’s in the wit department that this trifle wobbles most, dodging irony and cosying up with convention.

Laid-back caper movie, adapted by William Goldman from a Donald Westlake novel and directed with the lightest of touches by the perennially underrated Peter Yates. There's lovely footage of early 1970s New York and Quincy Jones provides the ultra-cool soundtrack. [09 Jul 2011, p.30]

The film is much too anxious – desperately so – for us to feel that Barry is a fundamentally decent guy.

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.

For all its seeming modesty, this is a mature, contemplative and mostly rewarding experiment: no awards-season bruiser, but a worthwhile B-side for Ashby’s venerable American classic.

Seyfried reads the tone of this hokum better than anyone, and knows restraint is hardly called for, using every excuse in the book to go completely bananas.

It’s callous and conscience-free, the work of an auteur in the mood to flex his style chops while saying literally nothing.

A cram-it-all-in adaptation of Ben Macintyre’s 2010 history book of the same name, which knuckles down to its task with sleeves rolled, upper lips stiffened, and vast sheaves of exposition to whip through.

Maguire tries hard, and has a good stab at Fischer’s twitchy rage, but can’t bring much freshness or specificity to anything else.

Peter Baynham, best-known for Borat and Alan Partridge, co-wrote this script, which offers just the right of blend of madcap farce and piercingly precise gags about social media.

Late in James Stewart's career he made this sturdy western, the beauty of which lies in its simplicity. [09 Jul 2016, p.32]

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.

After the subterranean sluggishness of the last film, too thinly spun out from the first third of Suzanne Collins’s final book, Mockingjay – Part 2 returns the series to its characteristic high gear.

It’s Thompson as the heroically unbiddable Travers who makes the most of it; her bravura performance effectively dominates the film.

It’s the music that makes it particularly special, and appreciating that is entirely the point of the live-action remake.

This is one of very few westerns that casts African-Americans in the lead roles. [27 Jun 2015, p.32]

Scott’s Alien: Covenant is a mad scientist film – arguably, one of the maddest. It’s grandiose, exhilarating, vertiginously cynical and symphonically perverse.

It is a confection in every sense, but plump with natural sweetness.

Metro Manila is so spellbound by its setting that it is a good hour before we discover what kind of film it is going to be. It begins as a swirling drama of survival in the Filipino capital — but then suddenly it slips off down an alleyway, only to emerge a scrupulously engineered, Christopher Nolan-ish crime thriller.

The animation is photoreal – startlingly and mesmerisingly so. And the depth of feeling the tale of their friendship evokes is matched only by your incredulity, as you paw at your eyes six minutes later, that you are crying about two computer-generated umbrellas.

The fourth-wall-smashing is fun in a Ferris Bueller kind of way, but it’s never pulled off with the devious panache of Blazing Saddles, let alone Funny Games or Hellzapoppin’. Since it's this stuff, rather than the ongoing thud-thud-thud of bad language and gore, that feels mould-breaking, it’s a pity Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick’s screenplay doesn’t have the courage to experiment a little more.

Cooke’s sturdy, old-fashioned approach to staging and shooting pairs well with his leading actor’s precise, engaging performance, and makes scenes like this anxious backstreet exchange – or Greville and Penkovsky’s two visits to the ballet, each one serving as a clever psychological pivot-point – all the more fun and absorbing.

It’s the sort of film that rattles you in three ways at once: through the grim candour of its themes, the chill precision of its craft, and the nightmarish throb of its images.

Everything is adequate might not have the same ring to it, but it would make a fitting jingle for The Lego Movie 2.

Art was a labour of love for Maud Lewis: that much Lewis’s film makes clear. But by zeroing in on both the love and labour of it, the art itself – and the point of Maud’s life story, by extension – gets exasperatingly short shrift.

Not a hugely comfortable fit for the silent treatment, Noël Coward's play might have transferred better in the stagey confines of the early sound era. [14 Jul 2012]

Ballard’s concept is meticulously, lovingly recreated, like a museum exhibit of itself. But the tone is always more playful than it is disturbing, a walled-off black joke which opts out of saying anything new.