So much dash, flash and thrill...there’s scant time left for character, let alone, story, fun, seduction, humour or wit.

Role Models isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel, just polish it up a little. What emerges is a memorable slice of modern slapstick, with charm to spare and just a touch of soul.

The shattering downbeat ending is well earned and genuinely shocking.

As a self-conscious exercise in kitsch graverobbing, ‘Viva’ succeeds through a combination of cultural nous and sheer aesthetic audacity.

That Anderson, the film’s writer-director, whose Boogie Nights was a riot but Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love both noble failures, has come to make this intelligent and enthralling masterpiece is both a little surprising and intensely satisfying.

The film’s meandering, surrealist-kissed, early scenes dance nicely in time with his urban protagonist’s disconnected, existential malaise.

The film’s real success is that Puiu impresses both with his compassion for human behaviour and his tight grip on realist, documentary-style filmmaking.

By far the most compelling voices are those of the impoverished Haitian people; unfortunately, they're only heard briefly at the end. While the film's real-life twists and turns are difficult to follow, the human desperation it depicts is all too easy to grasp.

A languid celebration of the pleasures of the moment, which climaxes with an image of startling sexual candour.

Coppola's rethink of his Vietnam War epic is intriguing, but no significant improvement. Some of the added footage is fine, some redundant.

At once an investigation, a polemic and, in its final sequences, a tribute to human endurance. A remarkable film.

Scott's sword and sandal spectacular is a bloody good yarn, packed with epic pomp and pageantry, dastardly plots, massed action and forthright, fundamental emotions.

All the performances are impressive, but Gleeson and Voight are especially memorable, lending an almost tragic air of inexorability to Cahill and Kenny's cat-and-mouse games.

Yet another quirky crime comedy, but on its own terms entertaining enough, with a distinctively sharp take on masculine behaviour and a surprising amount of the Bard.

After 15 years of computer-generated effects, apocalyptic sci-fi and Arnie movies with flippant kiss-off lines, the sequel feels hackneyed and pointless.

This risible hokum cashes in on TV's The X Files and invasion mania, but what it lacks in sophistication (everything), it partly makes up for in sheer gall.

The plot is impossibly dense and the characters – perhaps appropriately – feel like little more than cyphers, but for sheer mind-expanding sci-fi strangeness this is hard to beat.

Though the writer/director is working abroad and telling a linear story, it's immediately apparent - from the measured pacing, the immaculate compositions and elegant camera movements, the audacious ellipses and the inspired use of music - that this is a hallmarked Davies film. As such, it is extraordinarily moving, notably in a simple, underplayed death scene. Gena Rowlands' performance is a marvel of subtle nuances.

Grammer's first major feature after his TV success with Frasier finds him embracing a new persona. Out goes the intellectual cold fish, in comes the intuitive, warm, fun-loving leader of men. The role looks good on him, but it's a shame that he's also jettisoned the sophisticated dry wit which has been his hallmark in favour of a much broader, wetter humour. But what would you expect of a movie directed by Ward and co-written by Hugh (Police Academy) Wilson?

After the delightful Muppet Christmas Carol, this fourth Kermit and pals star vehicle comes as a slight disappointment, but it's a treat all the same.

Having jettisoned all but one of the original cast, this cynical sequel retreads familiar ground, provoking both disorientation and déjà vu.

Rarely has a film used London’s landmarks so cannily, and rarely has screen Shakespeare been so sharp and satisfying.

Harlin is never a man to shy away from the lure of Very Big Explosions, and, on a technical level, the spectacle's impressive. The only actor to make much of an impact is Malahide's colonial officer, who extracts tart irony from the merest crumbs.

Ormond's face is certainly not hard to gaze at, but she looks so often ill at ease that her 'confident' gay smiles suggest, inappropriately, some masked pyschological distress. Likewise, Ford's hard, impassive demeanour takes an age to warm up, almost past the patience point.

DiCaprio (Rimbaud) and Thewlis (Verlaine) provide dynamic if mismatched performances, though there's no excusing Hampton's own laughable cameo, nor the protracted coda with DiCaprio doing a Peter O'Toole in the desert.

About blood, blood ties and breakdown (of familes, relationships and, perhaps, an entire society), it's an idiosyncratic film, admired by many for its strong atmosphere, and by this writer for its absurd(ist) casting of a barely recognisable Fonda as Donovan's mad uncle Van Helsing.

An intimate and likeable picture. As a part-animated live-action movie, it harks back to less frenetic kids' fare from the '60s like Bedknobs and Broomsticks, rather than, say, the 'toon-laden Roger Rabbit.

Farley is the physical pratfaller, a clumsy oaf with the brawn of a bison and a brain to match; Spade the slimline sidekick with a long line in snide. It's some indication of the wit involved that Farley is reduced to cracking fat jokes at his own expense.