Kore-eda has crafted a piercing, tender poem about the bittersweet ebb and flow of paternal love, and his status as Ozu's heir becomes ever more assured.

As hot and wet as freshly butchered meat: every second, every frame of its three-hour running time is virile with a lifetime’s accumulated genius.

The legend loses something in the retelling, but what’s new here is mostly worth the trip.

It is three parts The Mighty Boosh to two parts The Goon Show, which, when mixed with the quite astonishing lack of wit and finesse seen here, makes for pure cinematic strychnine.

It’s really a radical experiment in non-fiction cinema – not seeking to enlighten or inform, but to disorientate us, practically to drown us, in a nightmare vision of the ocean’s power.

Fill the Void is a real collector’s item: a film in which the forces of religion and tradition are shown to be working together, however haltingly and imperfectly, for the good.

The second leg of Peter Jackson’s three-part adaptation of The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien, is mostly stalling for time: two or three truly great sequences tangled up in long beards and longer pit-stops.

Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado, the two-man writer-director team, are swinging at serious targets here... But their point soon wears itself out, and what remains is schlock with airs and tired black humour.

This is a simple and beautiful journey undertaken purely for its own sake, and approached in that spirit, Tracks will lead you to a place of quiet wonder.

Just squeezably lovely.

It’s a misguided enterprise all round, and while it’s perfectly possible to applaud everything the film wants to say, you find yourself cringing at the ways it’s saying it.

Other than sniggering about what an outré stereotype they’ve served up, it’s hard to see how Lee and Copley can justify this performance, which is quite the worst of the year, and sends the whole final act of their movie straight to oblivion.

This meat-and-potatoes B-thriller stays modest and grounded: compared with the noisy excesses of higher-budgeted action flicks, it has a kind of crude integrity.

What gives the film its lip-smacking, chilli-pepper kick is that we are never entirely certain who is conning whom, or even if what we are watching has any truth to it at all.

The 3D photography is shallow and muddy, although a David Attenborough voiceover helps sustain interest.

With the magnificent Elba to anchor it, the film gradually achieves a sort of grandeur, in the manner of the hero it depicts.

Klaartje Quirijn’s engaging film portrait of Dutch rock-photographer-turned-filmmaker Anton Corbijn goes a long way towards explaining the emptiness and isolation that characterise his work

Writer-director Jeremy Lovering, in his feature debut, keeps a skilful handle on technique — his film is a calling card that could give you paper cuts.

It feels like a film that is attracted by the shape of love and pain, but is a long way from understanding the content.

The Butler might bite off more history than it can chew, but it packs a sustained emotional punch, more than a pinch of wit, and a superb performance from Whitaker as a man burning with passion beneath his immaculate, repressed exterior.

The movie doesn’t have a funny bone in its body, clomping from one unoriginal set piece to the next with a head-scratching lack of urgency.

For all its innovativeness, Everyday has the rhythms and intrigue of a not-very-interesting family’s Christmas letters.

It’s a critic’s instinct to auto-praise any blockbuster that tries to do something different, but Catching Fire is so committed to carrying on the fine work started by its predecessor that the applause flows utterly naturally.

[A] mildly engaging print-the-legend documentary.

Using home movies and other footage, Kopple provides a discomfiting portrait of a family’s deep-seated dysfunction.

This starfighter-recruit blockbuster is refreshingly idea-driven.

Rather than bionically enhancing all its characters, a better movie might have found ways to celebrate their sloth and slime.

For all its properly surreal mayhem, this flick isn’t quite as nimble or emotionally rounded as its predecessor.