Playing superbly on the personae of his leads, Leisen creates a movie of warmth and immense style, which never quite trips over into excessive sentimentality.

Hopper keeps things light and off-the-cuff, allowing his performers free rein - sometimes too much, as in the case of the screechy and shrill Farrell - to explore grim territory without falling into heavy-handedness.

Strange and scary enough to fascinate parents and offspring alike.

The dog of the title – a sinewy, reputedly rabid greyhound mix – offers Lang a foil and a path to rediscovering his sense of self. Their snappy early encounters give way to a deepening bond; two solitary souls forming one of the most touching on-screen relationships of the year.

Voice-over narration makes effective use of the real-life Shaw's correspondence, but in terms of authenticity the battle sequences are truly impressive. Marching across open fields amid cannon-shot, or plunging into hand-to-hand combat, the stark clarity of Freddie Francis' cinematography combined with Zwick's intimate style evokes immediacy and fear.

An aggressively unpleasant man somehow lands a perfect series of gigs in this rudely funny documentary: first as a pounding rock drummer who revolutionized the field; then as a fearless, rage-filled polo player; and finally as an impatient interviewee.

Floridly romantic and serenely excessive (men shot a dozen times don't die, guns never need reloading), it has the bravado of a minor classic.

By the end of this funny, insightful doc, you get a sense of an extraordinary mind that both fueled and fed the zeitgeist. Don't miss it.

Loznitsa would have done better to embrace the story’s enigmas as opposed to explicate them.

Redemptively, the cast goes a long way: Jean Desailly is perfect as a jowly literary celeb deep in midlife crisis, while the aloof Françoise Dorléac is magnetic as his airline stewardess and all-too-scrutable love object.

But the focus is way too far over on the side of personalities. There's scant political revelation: it's less behind-the-scenes than the scenes from a different perspective.

Given the months-long hype, what’s most bewildering about Sundance sensation Precious is its overall shrug-worthiness.

The likeable and graceful Chan directs, sings and performs jaw-dropping stunts. Few of his American or Austrian rivals attempt a fraction of that.

There are strong shades of Bo Burnham’s 2018 movie Eighth Grade here. That’s not to call Dídi derivative at all, but to say that it nails that high-school yearning to be cool and complete lack of any idea how to get there, making things worse for yourself with every attempt.

Moore makes it all play like the classic club remix it is.

Kids train for guerrilla fighting in a gorgeously atmospheric film that feels like a transmission from the future.

Il Buco is certainly thoughtful and worthwhile, but perhaps just short of the revelation we were hoping for.

It’s real Streetcar Named Desire territory as the fights pile up, and if you think that doesn’t sound entertaining, know that it is, in a hypnotically catastrophic way.

Poised between childhood and adolescence, arrogance and insecurity, the kids still make for compelling subjects.

It Comes at Night is a film of tense gradations, a chamber piece set at the twilight of humanity.

She has real sympathy--characters that might have been brittle, mockable creations in another writer-director’s hands gain resonance here. But the filmmaker also might have very little to say apart from the way guilt enters into life, and then suddenly recedes.

Excellent writing by Katy Brand leaves plenty of room for both light-hearted humour and deeply personal moments, with Thompson bringing her A-game and newcomer McCormack matching her. They’re a captivating, unlikely duo.

For all its simplicity, this is bold, heartfelt filmmaking. A masterpiece.

A marvelous movie, shot in stunning black-and-white by Freddie Francis.

Porterfield has proved he can do grit and atmosphere. Should the young director ever decide to channel this talent into storytelling with purpose and a point, he might be someone to watch out for.

Perhaps it isn’t such a terrible thing to remind us that this is, essentially, just a dark exercise in genre: a romcom gone horribly, upsettingly wrong. In this sense – and we suspect Barker would take this as a huge compliment – Obsession is the worst date movie imaginable.

The casting, needless to say, is perfect, and Bergman keeps the various escalating intrigues clipping along at a brisk pace.

It’s almost churlish to complain that some of the carnage is too basically carnage-y, but at 169 minutes there’s a lot of it to sit through. That running time might test the casual fan, but for Wick devotees this character’s battle through assassin hell will be close to action-movie heaven.

Are its cultish mysteries for everyone? Undoubtedly not. But if there’s a place in your heart for dark, folky mind-benders that plug into the cosmic energy of remote, oceanic terrain (ie your favourite film would be a cross between The Wicker Man and The Lighthouse), you should take a trip across Jenkin’s freaky landscape asap.

New Yorkers and those who've been following the neighborhood's plight know exactly how this ends; at the very least, Paravel and Sniadecki have preserved the memory of what was. Sometimes, that's the most you can do.

Roadrunner was a chance to talk about the role that drugs play in the life of an artist – which is exactly what Bourdain was: an artist dealing in foods and words and travels in ways that few can match.

While there are some atmospheric and absorbing moments, all involving Isaac monologuing or close-ups on his face depicting stormy thoughts brewing underneath, Schrader ultimately abandons his gambling subplots in favour of a two-fold ending that is both anticlimactic and empty.

Western iconography, noir-ish lighting, and visceral horror are fused with an affecting love story in this stylish 'Vampire Western', which (unlike Bigelow's rather static debut feature The Loveless) is driven forward at a scorching pace, a subtle study in the seductiveness of evil and a terrifying ride to the edge of darkness.

This is a pleasant but overgenerous and predictable film, so eager to embrace the good in people that it never fully succeeds as drama.

There has to be room for this kind of plea, especially a work that, obliquely, captures so many largely unreported details: the night raids rounding up children, the torn-up olive trees and kids' soccer games in the battle zone.

A spectacular tribute to the American flyers of World War I, born of Wellman's and John Monk Saunders' own experiences with the Lafayette Flying Corps, it's distinguished by matchless aerial photography, logistically-detailed battle scenes and dogfights, a unique blend of 'European' directorial touches with Hollywood pace, and solid performances holding the straightforward love/duty/camaraderie plotline together.

It’s Poots who carries the story, giving heart and soul to a performance of a woman who cannot help but careen her way through life like a bull in a china shop.

Rudolph's script is both playful and precise, his images fantastic yet real, the music elegiac but ecstatically sung by an impassioned Marianne Faithfull. Part thriller, part comic fantasy, part love story, Trouble in Mind even offers an ambiguous, high-flown ending that suggests this really is the stuff that dreams are made of.

Diego Maradona has the football and the drugs – think Scarface with screamers – but it’s a surprisingly emotional ride too. In the spirit of all good docs, it’ll make you reappraise your feelings about the man and the myths around him.

Nobody trusts anybody, and they're right. Dern, always awkward, has matured into a showpiece of behavioural hairpin bends. Excellent.

Not for literary purists, but if you like your entertainment well tailored, then feel the quality and the width.

Spellbound is also a tale of suspense, and Hitchcock embellishes it with characteristically brilliant twists, like the infinite variety of parallel lines which etch their way through Peck's mind.

There are points when the director allows his voice to ring a little loudly from behind the camera, but the richness and depth of both the photography and the characterisation manage to brush any signs of preachiness and sentimentality from view.

Grand scale or no, this feels like a blockbuster on autopilot more often than not, curiously detached and self-importantly somber even by the director's standards - and without the cerebral heft of his best work.

The grandeur of this movie is off the charts. For a certain kind of old-school film fan, someone who believes in shapely, classical proportions and an epic yarn told over time, it will be the revelation of the year.

A film about the unknowability of grief ends up feeling a little too unknowable itself.

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.

Sweet and fiercely humane, Song’s layered family portrait is decidedly Buddhist: silent when it needs to be and steadfast about approaching inevitable tragedy with care and patience.

In narrative terms, it's mostly an excuse to work in a trio of crooks whose banter may be even better than that of our hero; Mark Strong's disgusted rant about paying off policemen and Liam Cunningham – led musings on Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe" are enough to justify the entire movie on their own.

Writer-actors Tim Key and Tom Basden’s three-hander, set on a remote British isle, have delivered a rare blend of unkempt charm, emotional precision and soulful folk music with this feature-length expansion of their own 2007 short, The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island.

The result is a film that starts with a bang and ends with a shrug, but keeps us entertained throughout.

Robson tries vainly to give the movie the look of a thriller with lots of shadows and bleak lighting, but Yordan consistently returns it to the field of melodrama by setting his drama in the home - as Bogart and his wife Sterling agonise over his job of exposing the fixed fights - rather than in the boxing ring.

Updated from London 1890 to contemporary California, George Pal's version of the HG Wells novel still works pretty well, thanks to its attractive special effects.

A ravishingly shot slice of teen-ness that eschews narrative altogether in favor of a moody, watchful wistfulness, this mild-mannered debut plays something like "Bestiaire" for contemporary slacker youth.

Nobody made this heart-warming fluff better than MGM.

Because the movie’s on-the-fly style is as scruffy as its protagonists, it’s easy to underestimate the intelligence and artistry it takes to make something so silly.

Aided enormously by George Diskant's high contrast camerawork and by Bernard Herrmann's stunning score, which emphasises the hunt motif in Ryan's quest, it's a film of frequent brilliance.

At times, there is something almost spoofy about this film’s relentless miserableness. Its 30-minute long hallucinatory dream sequence didn’t work for me – it might be that you need a degree in Russian history to make sense of its allegory on the nature of power.

The film must come with several warnings. It’s extremely disturbing at points (there’s a horrific backstreet abortion scene), and the silence itself—actually, the nonspeaking, atmospheric sound takes on a life of its own—is hard work, meaning that you have to let whole swathes of story wash over you. But those same obstacles also give this strange story a deeply original, hallucinatory power.

The Sisters Brothers may be a violent movie but it’s not an especially graphic one; the bad guys are coolly dispatched from a distance and with minimal Peckinpah-ish splatter. The one genuinely stomach-turning moment comes at the hands of a surgeon, not a gunman. Prepare yourself.

The director illuminates how the town's racial and economic dynamics have changed, while simultaneously reflecting on the ethics of nonfiction filmmaking. It's a powerful testament to how far we both have and haven't come.

Instead of showing how prejudice seeps into the private intimacies of daily life, the film turns its attention to the other characters, including Flipper's junkie brother Gator (Jackson), who fuels a subplot evoking the destructive effects of crack on black society. Sadly, this aspect, which allows Lee his most unsettling and impressive scene, seems loosely tacked on to the main thrust of the film.

You can expect Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman-like banter from Robert Kaplow’s finely-tuned screenplay, an expert evocation of the ‘40s.

Corman at his intoxicating best, drawing a seductive mesh of sexual motifs from Poe's story through a fine Richard Matheson script.

Much like climbing a mountain, the two-and-a-half-hour runtime may occasionally feel arduous, but the emotional release is worth it once you reach the peak.

It has a certain compulsiveness, but as with Dead End (also based on a play by Sidney Kingsley), the main interest lies in the admirable set.

Made the year after 'Bicycle Thieves', this is a less coherent but more exuberant film, with De Sica injecting a stiff dose of fantasy into what could have been another plangent tale of gentleman tramps and shantytown life. [07 Sep 2005]

Marvellous performance from Stanwyck, all snap, crackle and pop as the brassy nightclub entertainer Sugarpuss O'Shea.

An interesting if poorly constructed and self-contradicting drama, directed with something less than assurance, but given some appeal by the honesty of its performances.

The movie feels like too much of a lark. To paraphrase the play’s voice of reason, Friar Francis, it would be better if Whedon paused awhile and let his counsel sway us more.

A toughened docudrama (schools of BBC/old Warners/Corman) that carries the same force as the improvised weapons Ray Winstone uses to bludgeon his way through the Borstal power structure.

Taut and gripping.

Director Nora Twomey’s film is about the ways we try to cradle each other from the harsher realities of life. This is a day-to-day survival story that stirs the heart and fires the imagination.

Beach Rats could have explored that ethical quandary with more depth; instead it settles for something blocked, oblique and fascinating.

Period is tastefully evoked, and loving care has gone into the visuals; but crucially, a weak script (based on Elizabeth von Arnim's novel) lets down any spirit of adventure. Personalities clash but are cheerfully reconciled, and marital tensions are swiftly resolved.

Arid, crowd-pleasing stuff, in which the soul-searchings take place very conveniently on annual holidays in France and in a variety of luxuriously furnished interiors.

Cregger plays brilliantly with your expectations throughout. The characters constantly make the wrong choices – peeking round dark corners, going back to check out a noise – but those choices don’t go in the usual directions. Cregger isn’t smug or sly about that. He isn’t winking at the audience. He’s using your horror knowledge against you by rarely giving you what the genre has conditioned you to anticipate.

The filmmaker provides intellectual rigor to spare, yet precious little narrative focus (you virtually wander into plot strands) and there's a stiffness to the proceedings that neither Wilson's charisma nor Ulliel and Thierry's screen-ready beauty can remedy.

Fine biopic which showcases a brilliant performance by Busey as Holly, and conveys a real, raw feeling for the music.

Bronstein crafts a thriller of teeth-grinding magnificence centred on Byrne as the indefatigable figure at the centre of this whirlwind of unsolicited advice.

Transplanted Australian director Schepisi confidently threads his own route through Peckinpah territory (a Mexican patriarch demanding honour; a graveyard resurrection), less concerned with Peckinpah's gothic haunting than with teasing dark, absurd ironies from the symbiosis of sworn enemies.

As with The Shape of Water, del Toro makes no secret of where his sympathy lies and who the real monsters are, but there are surprises here. Not least of which is how moved you might feel in the end.

The documentary is strongest during these conference-room brainstorms, similar to those of a political campaign. (It could have used more of Boies’s witness-demolishing courtroom eloquence.) The draw here is watching a careful process unfold, regardless of the outcome.

Fans of The West Wing will really dig it. Director Dror Moreh rarely lets the news headlines intrude on the backstage bartering.

Costa and O’Connor are terrific.

Lent a stout overall unity by Ray Bradbury's intelligent adaptation, by colour grading which gives the images the tonal quality of old whaling prints, and by the discreet use of a commentary drawn from Melville's text which imposes the resonance of legend, it is often staggeringly good.

On the surface a glossy tearjerker about the problems besetting a love affair between an attractive middle class widow and her younger, 'bohemian' gardener, Sirk's film is in fact a scathing attack on all those facets of the American Dream widely held dear.

Away has the mild rush of a coming-of-age dream, the sort that lodges in your memory as symbolic and significant as you pass from one stage of life to the next.

1917 is a work of sweeping scale yet pinpoint intimacy.

These beasts awaken something within the people, making them kinder and more playful. If Kedi did the same for audiences, that wouldn’t be so bad.

If you see only one Sono film, check out this flick; you will have then seen them all.

It probably would have helped if Walker (who credits two other codirectors) had chosen just one of those avenues for deeper study; her doc has a vertiginous way of feeling arty and ephemeral at one moment, humane and maybe too earthbound the next.

The tone is incredibly specific – darkly funny, exuberant, sad and enraged – and the small cast nails it.

When the plot stops cold for a beauty-pageant performance of exquisite purity, you’ll feel like you’re watching the most American film of the year.

Despite a lightness of plot, it most beautifully captures the book's free-floating, fantastic sense of adventure and wonder.

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

Bitter-sweet and very charming.

This Nosferatu is a worthy modern addition to a classic horror lineage. Get lost in its shadows.