The real richness of the movie, though, comes well in, as the improvised script gets around to deeper anxieties of aging and avoidance.

Two-and-a-half hours long, Pacifiction is a film of extremely long and naturalistic takes in which tiny details become hypnotic – whether it’s the refreshing drinks served at a meeting or the way a woman dances.

Blessed with a wealth of golden b&w footage (Lambert and Stamp always planned to document their managerial brilliance), James D. Cooper’s poundingly fun, scrappy profile has an unusually satisfying nuts-and-bolts perspective on the ’60s fame machine.

There are also juicy supporting roles for Shirley Henderson and Midnight in Paris’s Nina Arianda as the comedians’ long-suffering wives, Lucille and Ida. The film may be called Stan & Ollie, but it’s never more alive than when the four of them are onscreen.

Starring a tough-minded band of scrappy teens who actually do some solving, it's the movie "Super 8" wanted to be - or should have been.

King Hu's mastery of pace, humour, colour and design makes most other movies around look tatty.

If the subject matter is bleak and bitterly serious, the tone throughout is darkly comic, while the precise imagery effortlessly conveys the tension, the claustrophobia, and the madness of the situation.

Scorsese, that sly spiritualist, is out to make us sick on commerce and greed run rampant. He moves us beyond the allure of avarice so that we might take better stock of ourselves. What starts as a piggish paean becomes, by the end, an invigorating purge.

Essential, if artless, baseball exposé.

The film plays like a Trump-state "Big Lebowski," as Ruth and Tony’s amateur sleuthing teases out a much deeper conviction, perfectly stated by its main character.

The first of Corman's eight-film Poe cycle, and one of his most faithful adaptations. Price is his usual impressive self as the almost certainly incestuously inclined Roderick Usher who, having buried his sister alive when she falls into a cataleptic trance, becomes the victim of her ghostly revenge; but it is Corman's overall direction that lends the film its intelligence and power.

Meirelles injects enough visual snap to remind you that he once made City of God. If the second half gets a little sidetracked by flashbacks, another meaty Vatican scene is never too far away. Watching these two actors chewing over big issues—God, aging, loneliness, celibacy, abuse in the priesthood—under the vast ceilings of this gilded palace is a joy.

The film manages to span from feisty Wilson Pickett to Confederate-flag-flaunting Lynyrd Skynyrd, but if ever a music doc needed insight from the fans who went along for the ride and forgot their troubles, it’s this one.

The Landlord succeeds thanks to terrific performances, political nous, flawless photography from Gordon Willis, a handful of sublimely witty moments and an overall sense of rebellious fun.

You still leave impressed at the way Stanton fiercely protects the aura of mystery that makes him such an indelible onscreen presence.

No matter how predictable his arc is, writer-director Thomas McCarthy (The Station Agent) never loses sight of the difficulties of cashflow and making one's weekly nut. You'll want to give his movie-and his secret weapon, the lovably neurotic Bobby Cannavale, as a recent divorcé hoping to co-coach the team-a pass for sweetness.

Schepisi's matter-of-fact direction and the rather undernourished screenplay don't mine much beyond the lousiness of the press and the unknowableness of the victims, but Streep (the best thing she has done in ages) carries it along.

The lovely substance is in the wit, the nuances, the rhythms, and Ceylan's own very fine colour camerawork.

As gritty as Heaven Knows What often feels, it’s leavened by empathy and poetic moments: desperate kisses, a passed-out couch nap lit by slanting sunbeams, the beautifully eerie synth music of Tomita. This isn’t an easy watch, but it validates every risk we want our most emboldened filmmakers to take.

The ironies of the piece, adapted by Arthur Miller from his own 1953 play on the perils of McCarthyism, are savage and well served by a top-notch cast perfectly attuned to the poetry of the dialogue and the parable's fiery passions. Hytner holds the action together with solid, unflashy, well-paced direction, ensuring that this is no mere period piece but a compelling, pertinent account of human fear, frailty and cold ambition.

It’s nice to see this great filmmaker sculpting something that feels genuinely revelatory. That’s not to say that the 3-D Goodbye to Language is always an easy sit.

As a supernatural chiller, In Flames finds itself undermined by its own everyday horrors.

Much easier to admire and appreciate than it is to fall head over heels for, The French Dispatch has Wes Anderson in full megamix mode as he packs three short stories into an anthology structure that bubbles with flamboyance and ideas, before keeling over under the weight of own narrative cargo.

Matthew McConaughey finally locates his perfect métier as the town's Fordian skeptic, a district attorney who smells a rat.

The third, and along with Road to Utopia, probably the best in a series which began in 1940.

Wiig comes out a winner, but nothing is worse than watching a perfect marriage of performer and material get so perversely undermined.

Treat Benedetta as a pile-up of shallow pleasures undercut with a sardonic wink and some fairly obvious comments on power and corruption, and there’s fun to be had. Look for any deeper logic and you’ll be disappointed.

Traditional immigrant films from Hollywood (The Godfather?) end in fame, money and beautiful women for the inheritors of the new found land's promise; but El Norte gives us a vision of the downside of the American dream. The film's concentration on the plight of its young hopefuls, however, is done with much humour and compassion, so that the tragedy of its message is very bracing.

The movie deepens as Nelly, destined for the gossip columns and a peripheral attachment, becomes painfully aware of her own fragility (Jones’s performance is devastating).

Everyone rises to the occasion of a special project of subtle significance: a comedy about nothing less than the proper way to say goodbye to the past.

It’s a story of dehumanisation, children in cages, and the blurting, vote-craving policy-making of government by id – and it’s shattering to experience.

Borden charts the explosive coming together of the women as they forge their own liberation, handling her story with audacity and making even the driest argument crackle with humour, while the more poignant moments burn with a fierce white heat.

A remarkably committed portrait of NYC homelessness in which Gere—grizzled and often topped in a wool cap—hunkers destitute. Call it an actor’s stunt if you must, but that would be overly dismissive of an indie with a serious mission of social awakening on its brow.

The year’s most shocking transformation arrives in the form of Gary Oldman’s Winston Churchill, a creation for the ages.

Knight has mined her own traumatic experience to bring emotional depth to the character, and this extra layer of authenticity gives the film its impact.

And by the time Thornton has deftly flipped the script regarding the titular Biblical parable's misogyny, you'll feel as if Aussie cinema has indeed discovered its next great voice.

Its stunningly composed images showing how Isaac is himself something of a ghost-given to staring off into the distance, being condescended to by those around him, a man perpetually outside the times. What he needs is to take that one extra step toward his spectral siren; the scene in which he does so might be one of the most exhilarating visions of death's sweet embrace ever filmed.

As the Sherlock Holmes of the second Zhou Dynasty, Lau is so effortlessly appealing that he manages to anchor the fatigue-heavy proceedings, even when his character has to outrun both the rays of the sun - don't ask - and a collapsing statue while crawling over and under a pack of stampeding horses. Now that's star power.

Funny, visceral, bloody, no-nonsense entertainment with a touch of class.

Brooks could certainly write a line and direct action, but his taut and disillusioned yarn of American mercenaries intruding into the Mexican revolution to "rescue" Cardinale had only a couple of years in critical favour before it was comprehensively eclipsed by Peckinpah's ostensibly similar The Wild Bunch.

Cocteau's last film is as personal and private as its title suggests, and it makes little sense for viewers unfamiliar with his other work.

Santosh positions its protagonist as a fundamentally decent woman in an impossible situation, rather than a crusading cop on mission. If ‘Training Day with more grey areas’ sounds dull, it’s anything but.

It is Depardieu who supplies the heart and soul of the film with a performance of towering strength and heartbreaking pathos.

Though it’s been two years since they collaborated on "The Heat," Spy makes the case that Feig and McCarthy are still just warming up.

As a procedural study, Night Moves is undeniably effective: The buildup is slow, painstaking and intense, the fallout inevitable but still shocking...But the soul is somehow missing.

De Palma is not a director one looks to for conscience, and his track record on the issue of rape has been innocent of moral debate. It's odd to find him dealing with both, and the non-sensationalist approach seems to have taken a toll on his energies: Casualties of War is dull.

Berlinger is fully invested here, but a little distance might have helped.

Happily, Send Help is both a return to the world of horror and a major return to form for the Evil Dead man, who’s been waylaid with bland franchise fare in recent years.

Possibly the most uplifting film ever made about a time of unending violence, Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast comes with a bruised heart and an unquenchable spirit of optimism.

You could chalk this kid’s flick up as another manic Saturday-matinee time killer if it weren’t for a singularly impressive element. It’s not the stretchy, lava-lamp–ish animation, which offers the usual in-your-face 3-D tricks.

It’s a pungent articulation of American chaos. The problem is that it’s not telling us much that we don’t already know.

It’s a reasonably diverting piece of work, falling somewhere between the high of "Magic Mike" (2012) and the low of "Haywire" (2011), among his recent efforts.

A movie filled with gags and excellent stunts which remains curiously humourless at heart. Stunted, not stunning.

The film’s rigorous commitment to probing the undersea kingdom’s oddities separates it from the usual tepid Discovery Channel fare, and those looking for marine exotica and savagery will thrill to a sea slug that shimmies like a flamenco dancer and an orgiastic feeding frenzy involving dolphins, sharks and a school of sardines.

The grizzled veteran actor, naturally, elevates the material like a pro, yet the entire exercise feels thin and reedy, trading in geriatric sentiment instead of hard-forged emotion.

Circuitously derived from the tale of the rape of the Sabine women, this rather archly symmetrical movie musical is best seen as a dance-fest, with Michael Kidd's acrobatic, pas d'action choreography well complemented by ex-choreographer Donen's camera.

These victims are now no longer invisible-an achievement that shouldn't be dishonorably dismissed.

Feels like the kind of movie that would have been designed for Meryl Streep or Sigourney Weaver back in the day, ragged yet sumptuous, filled with moments for devastating monologues yet never so obvious as to be self-aggrandizing.

Those euphoric moments, scored to Black Sabbath, show the brothers sneaking out in their masks, discovering activism and growing into individuals. You’ll wish Moselle had started, not ended, there.

A quiet, sneaky sense of dislocation vibrates through Chad Hartigan’s indie comedy, which contains so many ideas about race, child-rearing, fatherhood and accidental exoticism, that to call it a mere coming-of-age movie would be a shame.

It’s a wonderfully rich gambit for talking about the push and pull of long-term commitment; of the fine line between complacency and wilful denial; and of the bonds of love that can remain intact regardless of your own toxicity. The

It’s a daring spin on history and the power, or otherwise, of the individual: a puzzle that is well worth trying to solve.

It comprises documentary footage from 1967 of the great pianist in transit, in the studio and playing live, intercut with interviews with relevant dudes; a downbeat, often dull, but unfailingly honest imprint of a singular mystique.

As brought to life in the stentorian tones of Ben Kingsley, the curator comes off like a driven visionary, but his actual efforts aren't dramatized enough. The paintings speak more articulately: doomy, dank colors and oppressive shapes.

Maier’s images are truly stunning—vivid documents of the working class that are off-the-cuff yet rigorously composed, always capturing that enigmatic bit of her subject’s soul that leaves you in spine-tingled awe.

Great blue moments in black-and-white from a director whose early work is still outstanding: the film burns with the humanity that Raging Bull never quite achieves, an expression of masochism mixed with futile pride that is the essence of boxing as a movie myth.

This is humanistic drama done right.

What is impressive is the filmmaker’s facility with atmosphere, plus his ripe eye for giving blue-collar bruisers just enough dimension to make them more than mouth-breathing meatheads.

A cross-pollinated mixture of Hollywood-blockbuster bombast, Asian cool and '60s Vegas ring-a-ding swing.

Sensation trumps cogitation-unsurprising in a Hollywood production-which doesn't negate the enduring allure of this beautiful bauble.

Its trick is to generate considerable suspense while withholding nothing from the audience. Its pleasures are not profound ones, but there’s enough dimensionality up on the screen to compensate. [2013 3D Release]

For all the alleged ethical complexity in this thriller’s noirish narrative, everything’s a little too neat here.

The most harrowing revelation of all comes during two of Macdonald’s many interviews with friends, family and associates. It’s a piece of digging that adds investigative weight to the film and a hard-hitting coda to his exploration of the fragile psychology of stardom.

Even if it lacks the multiversal flexes of Everything Everywhere All at Once and feels just as busy, Polite Society is bundles of fun and announces Manzoor as an exciting, energetic filmmaker to watch.

Thoroughbreds plunges you into an ice-cold bath of amorality, but debuting writer-director Cory Finley has such a command of details—the perfectly soigné clothes and hairdos, the lavish Connecticut living rooms and attentive gardening staffs—that you’ll laugh your way through the shivers.

Like Talk To Her, it doesn’t completely satisfy when it comes time to resolve its intrigue. But, as with their debut, the Philippou brothers show a real skill for creating believable teen characters, Barratt and Wong create a tender, affecting chemistry that make the chills all the more affecting.

It's the kind of silliness that's too strained and self-indulgent to be enjoyable.

Luna Carmoon’s debut feature about the daughter of a hoarder comes home bearing prizes, after premiering at the Venice Film Festival, announcing a young British talent capable of blending realism with surrealism to create a vivid personal language that defies simple interpretations.

This isn’t a straight documentary — part of what makes the film so suggestive is the idea that we’re seeing a double performance pitted against our own prurient interests. As for the movie’s final scene, you won't witness something as confrontational all year: a yowl from beyond the grave. It’s a small piece of revenge for a lost soul.

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.

Based on a banned short story from the 1920s, Caterpillar might be read as a reaction to hawkish nationalism, but it's more a cry for the unknown soldier in the kitchen and bedroom.

From its mundane beginnings to its melancholy closing grace note, Microbe and Gasoline is such a wonderfully touching film because it remembers the urgency of wanting to get older without growing up.

Trainwreck, about a commitment-phobic NYC writer, is the funniest film of the summer — outrageous and out to make you think.

By the final act, Sister Midnight breaks free from the shackles of submissive feminine stereotypes and raucously leans into a woman behaving very, very badly.

However slight the recorded romantic history of a well-known female author is, you can be sure it will become a key part of her biopic. Joining the trend now is this account of the life of Emily Brontë, which spends a chunk of its time on a romance that may not have happened. It’s well played and well written, but it’s an odd addition to a story that is remarkable even without invention: studios need to start letting spinsters be spinsters.

This may not be Wilder at his best - the story develops along fairly predictable lines, with Arthur switching her starchy uniform for a glistening evening gown - but there are some precious set pieces, notably a seduction among a row of filing cabinets and Dietrich's club act, not to mention a crackling script.

Wilkerson’s book offers a new way to look at age-old concepts. DuVernay’s film gives us a new way to process them.

Point Blank fires nothing but blanks in the end, dealing in increasingly ludicrous plot twists and one fizzle of a finale.

Bloodlight and Bami defiantly reflects the experimental whirlwind of Jones’s existence: her ability to look and feel relevant decades since she started out.

Those first 40-odd minutes are unbearably tense. Ferguson is a standout in a strong ensemble cast

The flood images are stark, conveying all the terror and pity that modern disaster footage imparts. But Morrison and Frisell infuse the film with warmth and, where appropriate, a touch of wit, causing its subject to breathe anew.

Bakri has charisma to burn, but the complexity of Abu-Assad’s previous movies is traded in for weak genre thrills.

One of the most impressive American thrillers of the late '80s.

Will it polarise moviegoers? Absolutely. But while it’s perhaps not as laser-focused as Raw, once seen Titane is impossible to dislodge – another gut punch from a director who will hopefully be unleashing her pulverising, punky visions on cinema screens for years to come. Strap in.

Eclipsed by its contemporary, Dr Strangelove, Fail Safe eschews the former's black humour and opts for a deadly serious mix of cold-war melodrama and rampant psychosis.

The dialogue and script are fatuously Americanised from Scott's original, but these chivalric Hollywood sagas still have a strange poetic quality about them, perhaps partly because of the way they unscrupulously and inaccurately ransacked literature and history for ideas and images.

With a stunning score by Miklós Rozsa, carefully modulated performances, lush location photography, and perfect sets by Trauner, it is Wilder's least embittered film and by far his most moving.

The film may be a brilliant visual record of the Floyd playing, but sadly the music works on you more if you just close your eyes.