Branagh and Thompson, as Beatrice and Benedick, seem on the whole happier with the romance than the comedy - but do a fair job with some of the best verbal jousting in the language.

Fashioning "The Great Dictator" and "Inglourious Basterds" into a cross joint and then lighting it from both ends, Goldberg and Rogen’s second directorial effort follows the hysterically violent misadventures of idiotic talk-show host Dave Skylark (James Franco, hamming it up) and his underachieving producer, Aaron (Rogen).

Even if you have mixed feelings about the new suits and other shortcomings, Power Rangers will leave fans feeling sentimental.

Other English Hitchcocks may be more provocative, but few offer such a ripping good yarn.

Swinging it to compelling are irresistible performances from Felicity Jones and Guy Pearce.

Director Samantha Grant scores an interview with Blair himself, whose too-little-too-late admissions (along with his reemergence as a postguilt life coach) might drive your crowd to hisses.

Fogel is a little out of his depth, but he has a killer tale to tell.

Calling the new A Star Is Born a “valentine” from its star, Lady Gaga, to her fans sounds a bit coy and delicate, so let’s call it what it really is: a hot French kiss (with full-on tongue), filled with passion, tears and a staggering amount of chutzpah.

Mike Cheslik’s Hundreds Of Beavers is that rare thing in the current film landscape: a genuine cult classic.

An epic brilliance conjures up impossible monumental castles, shadows and monstrosities, with exciting action marvellously orchestrated across the CinemaScope frame.

Very little gets in the way of Lebanon's apocalyptic mood; if it turns its audience even slightly away from barbarism, it might have done its job.

It’s a story of achievement against all odds, of community and kindness in the darkest places, and of the simple power of putting one foot in front of the other to reclaim a life. I challenge even the coldest of heart to not be touched by its message.

It reunites director Kitty Green with her ’The Assistant’ star Julia Garner and should marry provocative genre thrills with a cerebral feminist subtext.

What elevates the film is a pervasive, palpable sense of loss — between lover and beloved, young and old, stage and screen.

Perverse, provocative entertainment.

It works because we haven’t seen this story a thousand times before, and because it leaves behind the grim-dark posturing of ‘Suicide Squad’. It’s nice to see a joker who doesn’t take herself too seriously.

The humour couldn't be blacker, and the quality of invention is outrageously high.

One of [Moore's] more hopeful and celebratory efforts.

What makes it work so well, aside from a rollickingly funny but never smirky McDonagh script that arms every member of its small ensemble with killer moments, is the reuniting of In Bruges’s two leads, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson.

History nerds will note the strenuous efforts to capture the realities of the conflict, but the film’s use of smart Spielbergian grace notes to share its emotional truths is a real strength, too.

It’s comforting to know that when Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O and pals put themselves through the most dangerous, juvenile stunts they could imagine, a hilarious time will be had.

Following up on Paperhouse, Rose stages the suspense and horror with skill and panache, making this one of the best sustained horror movies for some years.

A lesser movie might hammer home the idea that the cult squashes Martha's sense of self. This distinctive and haunting effort implies something much scarier: that there is no self to start with.

Despite being the subject of nearly every shot in the film, Hoss maintains an air of mystery, simultaneously projecting severity, sensitivity and sensuousness throughout.

It turns out it’s okay to cross streams: Here’s a summer movie starring a girl squad proud of its big brains and tacky jumpsuits. You could call that a supernatural event in itself.

The oft-hilarious push-and-pull between director and subject - Williams wryly notes that the film is turning into "the Steve and Paulie Show" - effectively hacks away at the celebrity-enthusiast divide. By the end of this perceptive dual portrait, both men are content to merely be human.

Perkins asks us to bask silently in the majesty of an artist in his element; in one unforgettable shot, Francis stands atop a newly finished canvas, utterly transfixed. It’s a stirring snapshot of that strange space where the act of creating can be a religious experience.

Thankfully, the actor-director prepares this potential recipe for hokeyness with all-natural ingredients, casting four of the feistiest biddies he could find, who are all the more endearing for being unadorned.

Life During Wartime slices deeply into its characters' weaknesses.

As the tragedy unfolds, there’s a strange solace in seeing this captivating enigma somehow emerging intact.

Less Hitchcock, however, than writer Norman Krasna, who at his best could twist conventional characters and plot patterns in such beguiling ways that you'd almost forget their antiquity. This comes near his best.

This metaphor-movie is both touching and tasteful. It allows Foster to play scared and alone, traumatised and neurotic, and, most importantly, free and inspirational.

Kurosawa’s eclectic style is a delight: his striking, varied compositions reflecting the old man’s journey from darkness to some kind of light right until the moving finale.

While the cinematography has dated rather badly, the story and the performances of both Tyson and her supporting cast are more than powerful enough to make it worthwhile viewing. [04 Sep 2008, p.72]

Cinema isn't just a medium here, it's a healing balm, able to save the Deliriant’s tormented soul by exorcising his darkest impulses and replacing them with moments of sheer filmic wonder.

Its historical import as a peripheral civil-rights document can't be understated.

Firing on all cylinders for the first time, Araki throws in decapitation, spunk munching, outrageous visual and structural puns, Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss, and a running 666 gag, all in the service of American sexual liberation. Imagine Natural Born Killers with a sense of humour.

Sparse in dialogue, High Life demands unrelenting restraint from Pattinson, whose Monte, an off-kilter ascetic, is fascinating.

Many actors hold their secrets and their craft close; Kilmer throws his out to the universe.

Roberta Torre’s debut takes true incidents from the Mafia wars that plagued Palermo in the late ’80s and kicks them into a deliriously gaudy farce.

Comedy horror that really does give Vincent Price a chance to do his stuff, with deliciously absurd results.

It has a scrappy, throat-grabbing energy and a sincerity that never feels hectoring.

At a time when movie screens are clogged with indistinguishable superheroes in obnoxious crossover events, Incredibles 2 kicks it old school and rises above the noise with its defiantly humane soul.

It’s hard to understand the emotions coursing through Marvin’s body, as it’s wrapped in gaffer tape or barbed wire in a series of improvised exercises in fashion-as-armour. She admits to fear, but never to doubt as she embarks on her single-minded mission to subvert Russia's remorselessly anti-LGBTQ+ agenda.

Philippe earns his keep, not only by mounting a crisp, elegant production well above the standard of your typical video-lensed making-of, but by skewing toward anecdotes that most corporate clients would frown upon.

Arrival director Denis Villeneuve pulls off the dare of the decade, hatching a thoughtful, expansive sequel to a sci-fi classic.

The movie belongs to Hugo Weaving and David Wenham, both playing what one newspaper dubs "the lost children of the Empire," men broken by the appalling conditions that met them in their new homeland.

At its best (which is often), director James Marsh’s affecting biopic of the cosmos-rattling astrophysicist Stephen Hawking plays deftly against schmaltz.

Aldrich appears to be against everything: anti-military, anti-Establishment, anti-women, anti-religion, anti-culture, anti-life. Overriding such nihilism is the super-crudity of Aldrich's energy and his humour, sufficiently cynical to suggest that the whole thing is a game anyway, a spectacle that demands an audience.

A collective sense of psychological turmoil seems to weigh heavily on the entire country as much as Champ, reaching critical mass once chaos creeps into the city-leading to a quiet, climactic walk into darkness that earns the right to be called haunting.

The blend of humor, pathos and wall-crawling antics is perfectly judged. After a handful of overblown misfires, Marvel appears to have rediscovered its heart.

This potent emotional undercurrent goes a long way toward counteracting the movie’s clumsier moments, carrying us aloft to a finale that, in its strange mix of trepidation and tenderness, is truly sublime.

Occasionally, the dizzying filmmaking style, a mix of practical stunt work and invisible VFX, feels like a video-game cutscene. More often, it just sucks the air from your lungs. The ending gestures pretty firmly at another sequel to come. It’ll have a tough job upping the ante on this.

There's some beautiful dancing and a wealth of detail about the world of classical ballet. Interesting and entertaining.

Musically, it's a matter of opinion, but from the sparse funk of the title tune to the bebop blow-out around Charlie Parker's Now's the Time, this guiltless grooving in Eden fizzes with brilliantly choreographed wit and invention.

Angio reveals a band that is still committed and, almost without precedent, still seems to get along. “We weren’t musicians,” singer-guitarist Jon Langford admits. “We were just seeing how far we could take it.” If revenge can be measured in years of continued creativity, this film shows the Mekons have had theirs.

For the majority of the film, Östlund’s combination of sledgehammer and scalpel work a treat. They’re fast becoming the hallmarks of a satirist who’s unlikely to run short of subject matter any time soon.

Crawford has produced an inspiring primer, sure to remind viewers that the power has always been in their hands.

The Brothers have never been so chaotic or so aggressively funny.

Winner of the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes, Young Mothers brings nothing new to the Dardennes’ canon, but there’s comfort in the familiarity of their methodology. They’ve always had a knack for coaxing tremendous performances from even the youngest of actors, and the cast here is uniformly excellent.

Beyond the regular crunch of fist on bone, The Smashing Machine is an unexpectedly gentle, soulful character study that has Johnson undercutting his crowd-pleasing ‘The Rock’ persona with vulnerability and boyish uncertainty.

A moving meditation on history, knowledge and mortality.

Provocatively, the film suggests that winning small battles was victory enough; Saigon natives, also interviewed, were left behind to endure death camps.

From the (prolific) output of a largely unfashionable director, Wyler's Wuthering Heights has a distinctive look that elevates it above the blandness Goldwyn productions are so often charged with.

You’ll find yourself scouring the frame for this malign force in the tiniest refraction of light. Whannell knows you’re doing it, too, and lets scenes go on so long, you start to doubt your own eyes. There shouldn’t be any doubting the magnetic Moss, though: she’s the real deal.

The Human Voice is the Spanish director’s first English-language film and you’ll inevitably go away yearning for more as soon as the half hour is up.

De Niro's gift for pantomime, glimpsed in his plumber for Brazil, is a non-stop bombardment of mugging on the silent screen scale. There isn't much left for Penn, which is okay by me. Very entertaining.

Unusually moving (not only to stray film critics in your crowd), director Steve James's keen profile of the late, great Roger Ebert works both as a compact appreciation of the reviewer's vast public impact, as well as an unflinching peak into a cancer patient's final months, fraught with pain, hope and constant treatment.

The tone sometimes wavers into self-parody, and there are occasional crude patches, but overall this edge-of-seat revenge movie marks the most exciting debut from an Australian director since Peter Weir.

By boiling a dysfunctional couple down to a worst-hits clip reel, the director created one painful autopsy of an affair, the polar opposite of those frolicking montages so prevalent in American rom-coms. (He's also gave his actors a hell of a valentine; neither Yanne nor Jobert has ever been better.)

The welter of meticulously researched, perfectly chosen interview material cements Richard’s status as chat show gold – he initiated the term ‘Shut up!’ and could have probably made ‘fetch’ happen too – an endlessly engaging raconteur.

Dan Stevens turns in a vibrant comic performance as Charles Dickens in this drama about writerly inspiration that plays like a smarter Shakespeare in Love.

Never extraneous, Flee’s smaller details make this true-life story buzz with life.

The disparate styles and the absence of clear links between the stories make for unusually provocative viewing, because their shared themes (deviancy, alienation, persecution, monstrousness) are merely implied through the cutting. Compelling and quirkily intelligent; Genet, one feels, would have been impressed.

A sharply observed rites-of-passage comedy set in Brooklyn in 1965.

Martel’s forensic doc shatters any sense that, for her fellow Argentinians, the colonial burden has been lifted. It’s an intimate pinhole camera capturing an IMAX-sized story.

There are splendid economies, too: Rogers' mirrored dressing-room registers first as a social humiliation for the cop, who can't find the exit, but later his intimacy with her surroundings gives him an edge over a killer. There's little waste, though the thriller element could have been tuned up a bit.

Beyond the music, Meet Me in the Bathroom makes a compelling study of the whole idea of a ‘scene’: how does it happen, why does it end and what’s it all about?

Evil Dead Rise is not for the faint-hearted but for long-time fans and horror nuts, just sit back and let the blood wash over you.

The symbolism is lightly worn here in a gently observational film that’s underpinned with humanism and compassion.

As ever, it’s Zellweger that provides the secret sauce.

Endgame often pays tribute to itself, which makes it as fascinating as it is self-serious. It taps into a live wire of doomy tragedy and phoenix-like rebirth that comics do so well.

Encounter has a whole lot of heart and takes a sensitive approach to PTSD that is underscored by a cultural tension that comes to a head in its high-octane, action-packed final act.

Modern cynicism and efficient acting hold the potential mushiness at bay, and the pair's picaresque odyssey through the Kansas dustbowl, during which they vie for control over their increasingly bizarre partnership, is admirably served by Laszlo Kovacs' marvellous monochrome camerawork.

A gritty, naturalistic comedy blessed with a wry, affectionate eye for the absurdities of the band's various rivalries and ambitions; and the songs are matchless.

Sure, Raimi’s latest Marvel entry is a theme-park ride, lighter on character development and heavier on gnarly sh*t that may signal a shift into a darker, more deranged phase of superhero storytelling. But it’s one hell of a ride.

You’ll get several movies for the price of a single ticket in Ryan Coogler’s (Creed) period drama-thriller-romance-musical Sinners. And while some of these disparate elements are more successful than others, the combination is audacious enough to leave you simultaneously awed and overwhelmed by his outsized ambitions.

Would be fascinating by virtue of its subject alone. But the filmmaker wisely emphasizes how Harris also represents something bigger; this isn’t just the story of one man but also the dawning of the virtual über alles age and the death of privacy.

There are none of the usual artist-biopic clichés here. Frame, as embodied by three uncannily-matched actresses, is bright but intensely, awkwardly passive, and inhabits a chaotic, arbitrary universe. Watching her hard, slow struggle for self-respect, happiness and peace becomes a profoundly moving, strangely affirmative experience.

His own worst enemy, Finkelstein has both trouble and tragic writ large on his brow.

Ocean’s 8 sticks to the formula, though Ross never quite matches the breezy vigour of the Soderbergh-directed trilogy, but the jokes land and there’s a satisfying twist to bring down the curtain.

A brilliantly staged early scare signals that the safety rails are off and, despite an unexpected, last-minute swerve into the supernatural realm, the edge-of-the-seat tension is sustained to the very last second.

Mainly, it’s a fun and boisterous countdown to the big meal.

The concept is a doozy, ripe with comedic juice and packed with visual thrills.

Ferrara’s unconventional methods only manage to serve Chelsea on the Rocks, his loving portrait of Manhattan’s boho landmark, the Chelsea Hotel.

It's overlong, but that reflects the nature of Mexican cooking: like water for chocolate, which must be brought to the boil three times, the characters continually bubble and boil over.

Challenging, witty, adventurous and utterly singular.

One by one, all the Western clichés are turned upside down and reinvented, with William Bowers' fine script proliferating enough invention and wonderful gags to make one forgive the occasional sag.