Flawed but compelling ... [A] hallucinatory gimmick feels a few rewrites away from working smoothly, and the thematic linking of Philippa’s plight with that of her subject’s never quite convinces. But Hawkins is quietly impressive.

The film’s focus may be tight – just a few tangled, formative years – but it encompasses so much.

Told briskly and with an unapologetic determination to yank at the heartstrings, The Keeper unfolds like the Great Escape meets the Match of the Day goal of the month highlights.

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.

Barnard once again evokes a grubby, gothic landscape that’ll get right under your fingernails. It’ll stay there for weeks.

What kept me smiling right through this overturned odyssey is that the men in it aren’t brave pioneers or scary outlaws or any such thing – they’re incorrigible nerds, a century before the word was coined.

First Reformed doesn’t come off as pastiche, or a raking-up of old ideas – largely because Schrader and his cast commit to the project with sharpened and unblinking seriousness, even when the going gets mesmerically weird.

[Haigh] hasn’t sacrificed a shred of the understated, observational style, lace-like emotional intricacy and lung-filling feel for landscape that all made his previous film, the Norfolk-set marital drama 45 Years, such a force to be reckoned with.

Rush hurls himself into the film’s star turn with a cantankerous abandon that more than compensates for his slightly unsteady accent. It’s a wildly entertaining performance that feels vividly inhabited both physically and vocally.

Wholly useless, entirely harmless, Stratton would be good clean fun, if it was good or fun.

The film has a cumulative power that sneaks up on you even as you think you’re keeping track of it, and a twilit afterglow that hasn’t faded yet.

An interesting film rather than an engrossing one, and it’s hard not to wish it was a little more energised by its subject’s enduringly transgressive spirit.

It takes a special kind of biopic to reduce its subject to the least imaginably interesting version of itself.

Elliot is a talent eccentric enough to make Nick Park look like an office drone, and the serious sadness underpinning his vision only makes the humour work better.

It’s a catastrophically bad movie whose aggressive dullness and dumbness can best be reproduced by picking up a brick and slamming it against one’s forehead for two hours.

This is a grand success – perhaps a new populist benchmark in what to do with a flagging franchise, and a witty, light-on-its-feet prequel.

A compromise, a ghastly hybrid, a film that appears to have pirated and wrecked its own potential.

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

Quantum of Solace offers next to no solace, if we mean respite, but in plunging its hero into a revenge-displacement grudge mission, it has the compensation of a rock-solid dramatic idea, and the intelligence to run and run with it.

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.

None of it works: the inexplicable alchemy between co-stars that can seduce the audience even in an indifferent rom-com doesn't arise between Thurman and Morgan.

It has the desperate vitality of something barely made-up.

My Name Is Albert Ayler is a loving and elegantly crafted documentary.

Gary Oldman made his directorial debut with this unflinching portrait of life in a London family. Bleak, violent and foul-mouthed, it's the story of people battling their way through miserable lives that are all they have ever known. [25 Sep 2010, p.35]

The film is very loud, and festooned with the sort of comic violence far more disturbing than anything in an 18-rated movie.

Centered on Mara Wilson's extraordinary young girl Matilda, the kooky fantasy is comprised of charm, warmth and screwball comedy.

Gymnasium attendants may have worked long and hard on Demi's body, but $12.5 million does seem an unconscionable amount for her to show us nothing we haven't seen before. If only half that money had gone on the rest of the film, then we might have had a better rendering of Carl Hiaasen's hilarious novel, which is an excursion into the by-ways of Miami's crazy culture.

Plays entertainingly like an Asian version of a Michael Mann film, albeit with the plot of Mean Streets. It's not quite essential, but the deeply felt ending looks like a jumping-off point for all that Wong has made since. [22 Jan 2005]