It’s a remarkable story, but it’s undermined by some odd directorial choices.

Crystal's self-pitying character starts out promisingly - an early highlight being his lecture on ageing to schoolchildren - but the constant rapid-fire quips become increasingly predictable.

In each instance, the limp pay-off undercuts strong performances (manic Woods and sympathetic Drew especially), and the usual caveats about cumulatively unsatisfying portmanteau pictures certainly apply.

The film isn’t perfect. It’s slightly too long and drifts a bit in the middle. But the final showdown left me in a cold sweat.

Nine years in the making, this impressive doc pieces together the story of the biggest global protest in history.

A tasteful grieving-family weepie, it's conceived and performed with utmost sincerity, yet lacks the intemperate human authenticity, the sense of profound strangeness in the everyday, that made Trier's ‘Reprise’ and ‘Oslo, August 31st’ so hard to shake.

[An] informative documentary.

This is a fun action adventure that resonates because it doesn’t glamorise everything. You feel a warmth after watching it, as there’s something in its depiction of imperfect, loving family relationships that stays with you.

De Palma actually has the gall to combine the plots from both Vertigo and Rear Window in one big voyeur-fest and pull it off with a certain sly efficiency.

There’s plenty of warmth and compassion here, and the true story is a belter, but this ‘Lion’ doesn’t quite roar.

It's a long way down from even the second in the series.

As the actors move fluidly between various states, shedding one skin while assuming another, Polanski makes this subversive parlour game matter.

This microbudget indie about a pair of brothers in small-town USA looks great, sports strong performances and doesn’t outstay its welcome. But it’s impossible to shake the feeling that we’ve seen all this before, and better.

The film is touching, but more than that it’s wise, witty and thought-provoking.

The result is entertaining and insightful, balancing cold statistics with real-life stories of success and tragedy, presenting a broad, clear-eyed view of an increasingly complex issue.

Into the Woods starts better than it finishes but it’s a great-looking film, with a nicely old-school, easy-on-the-CG feel.

Franco’s script teases out the character’s tangled ambiguities with immaculate control: even as the story proceeds in the lowest of keys, our nerves never settle.

After a period of directorial uncertainty, the film demonstrated Eastwood's ability to recreate his first starring role, as the mythic Man with No Name of the Italian Westerns, and to subtly undercut it through comedy and mockery.

Director Alexandra-Therese Keining clearly loves the book and tries to squeeze a little too much of it into her overcrowded film. But it is visually lovely – the transformation scenes are magical – and the young cast are terrific.

One-joke comedy which indulges Moore's perpetual drunk act as his wastrel playboy attempts to mend his ways in order to get his hands on an inheritance and a blushing bride.

Still, it’s one of the terrorist's wives (Melissa Benoist) who carries the film’s most riveting and provocative scene.

Inspired by They Live by Night and the original Gun Crazy, this is a love-on-the-run yarn, with the incendiary Barrymore immensely sympathetic as the promiscuous, sexually mistreated teen who goes on the lam with former prison pen-pal LeGross. Although it doesn't seek to excuse their wrongdoing, the film stands out for its convincing depiction of the up-against-it white-trash mentality and the overriding demands of youthful desire.

Jim Jarmusch's 16mm feature debut, made not long after the writer/director graduated from film school, is an oblique study of a young man (Parker) adrift on the streets of New York. As he roams, he has chance encounters with a car thief, a saxophone player and a grizzled war veteran, among others. Learning their stories, he begins to seem more and more isolated.

Bell is so goofy and likeable I found myself willing the film to keep up with her. But the funny bits are never quite funny enough, and the script loses feminist points bigtime for its sour bitch ex-wife character.

Like Cry Freedom, it's still whites debating racial injustice: fine for a book published in Afrikaans a decade ago, but a poor premise for a message movie.

This is all fun all the time, a dizzying carnival of wisecracks, fisticuffs, explosions, chases and truly eye-popping effects.

Fundamentally a quite serious movie, relevant to contemporary personality problems and stresses, but shot through with a wicked streak of black humour. It doesn't always come off, but Romero makes stunning use of his Pittsburgh locations to create a desolate suburban wasteland, and at its best it is rivetingly raw-edged.

This is a solid take on the material, but it could have done with a little less narrative incident and a little more cinematic sparkle.