Make room for the modest but affecting pleasures of veteran actors tearing into the subject of golden-years resignation.

Sidney Hayers shoots the whole thing with an almost Wellesian flourish, and the script (by Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson) is structured with incredible tightness as the sane, rational outlook of the hero (Wyngarde) is gradually dislocated by the world of madness and dreams.

Curtiz knocks it together without so much as breaking sweat.

Delightful screwball comedy.

If the film was clearly a sincere castigation of the militarist fervour that swept Japan during the war, it nevertheless suffers from its rather deliberate heart-warming tone and a too leisurely pace that tends to over-emphasise moments of pathos. That said, it is hard not to be swayed by the pacifist sentiments.

Mottola's dysfunctional family comedy is a bit arch, but sometimes sharp. Indie cinema and Neil Simon intersect on the corner of pathos and farce.

Smart storytelling and snappy editing elevate the jokes and enrich the emotions.

Barely 17 when she had Thomas, she's more like a peer than a parent, enough so that their uncomfortable relationship starts to take on a smattering of sexual tension. There's a nagging vagueness to this aspect of the movie, one that's difficult to square with the opening claim that it's based on real events; at a certain point, you may wonder which events they mean.

Something, Anything doesn’t really engage with issues of faith or materialism.

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.

As a piece of gore, Train to Busan takes the swiftest path from A to Z.

Hauntingly sad, the film elegantly deranges the viewer's sense of time: this seemingly unchanging world is in fact riven by off-screen incidents - which change everything.

Maybe this is a good time to mention that the director is Richard Linklater, usually a lot more versatile. Try to imagine a version of Linklater’s "School of Rock" that didn’t pivot on the manic music teacher played by Jack Black but instead, perhaps, on his boring roommate.

American Sniper is a superbly subtle critique made by an especially young 84-year-old.

No one else has come close to translating England's homegrown blend of deadpan and madcap for a younger audience, much less with such impressive Claymated technique. You couldn't ask for better lesson in "Anglo-Absurdism for Beginners."

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.

Still a mystery: Harlan’s own sense of guilt. But there’s plenty to go around.

No matter how sincere, Marston's effort also suffers from the lack of a burning lead as he had in Maria's Catalina Sandino Moreno. Fierce acting is a virtue you don't have to travel the world to find - or to lose sight of.

This is a movie about a subculture, made for that subculture; only hard-core Xboxers need apply.

Parenting relies on stamina as much as compassion, and Donzelli has, against all odds, crafted a genuinely moving ode to both the tenacity of filial love under extreme circumstances and the toll it extracts. Consider this a coup.

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.

Prince Avalanche — Green has admitted that the unrelated title came to him in a dream — evaporates after a while, although it’s never less than quizzical and charming.

For this rites-of-passage drama, screenwriter Jenny Wingfield draws on personal recollections; but while she brings intelligence to the depiction of teen angst, her attempt to follow formula means that the heart-warming tone steadily becomes overheated.

The Grandmaster, five years in the making, feels like a waste of Wong’s talents.

Set in WWI France, the film is Garbo's even before she appears on screen to dazzle her willing audience; once there, it becomes impossible to dissociate the legend of the star from the myth of Mata Hari.

Taking on tricky subject matter with gravity and depth, Honey Boy can’t be dismissed as yet another LaBeouf caper. It’s a reminder of a talent that, despite its own worst instincts, refuses to be snuffed out.

Like a hollow-point shell, David Fincher’s slickly enjoyable assassin thriller is explosive but empty.

Pretty irresistible, nevertheless, with Rogers doing a beautiful job of dovetailing sexual provocation and demure innocence.

What makes Splitsville stand out? Simply put, it’s goddamn hilarious.

Results is the work of an elusive talent who’s built his entire career on the strength of his curveball. This seriocomedy of self-improvement clarifies how all of Bujalski’s stories are unified by characters who are trying to camouflage their loneliness.

For all the brazen charms of this warm, funny debut, though, its quieter moments signal a profundity that’s really worth getting excited about.

The movie isn’t particularly scary--not a crime when your goal is laughs. More egregious is the niggling fact that this simply isn’t as witty as "Shaun of the Dead," forever the yuks-meet-yucks standard.

The first ten minutes of Michael Mann's ’50s-set Ferrari offer a wordlessly kinetic ode to industry: glossy racecars speed across open Italian tracks, stately trains glide into stations packed with anticipation, bedside phones jangle off hooks and onto nerves. But then the dialogue begins, and this carefully engineered movie starts its downshift into neutral.

Instead of a study of alienation and solitude, News of the World is about connection – about two traumatised people finding silent comfort in each other. About the promise of healing. It’s a long road, cautions this elegiac film, but it’s always easiest when travelled together.

The subjects - a husband and wife struggling to make ends meet, mostly for the well-being of their infant daughter - are eminently engaging.

There are no lava-spewing natural phenomena or gut-wrenching slaughterhouse sequences in this unofficial companion piece, but you do witness sex tourists in Bangkok choosing numbered "girlfriends" as if they were picking out lobsters in a tank.

The spirit of the movie is nonjudgmental, an observational intimacy that, in turn, becomes inspiring.

The first half has pace, and the wisecracking wit is often laid on thick and fast by Jerry Wald and Richard Macaulay's script, particularly in a scene with Ann Sheridan as a roadside café waitress. All the performances are good.

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.

Shot on actual locations in just nine days by Levin, a former documentarist, and improvised within a detailed scene-by-scene outline, this is a perplexing mix of truth and falsity, spontaneity and cliché.

The script - Wilder's first with IAL Diamond - has its moments, but by and large it's conspicuously lacking in insight or originality, while Hepburn's fresh-faced infatuation for her all too visibly ageing guide to the adult, sensual world comes across as faintly implausible.

Perverse, provocative entertainment.

Mea Maxima Culpa only gets messier the more it tries to iris out to a larger indictment. The central tragedy ends up diluted to a fault.

It’s a fun setup with a rousing finale that broadly compensates for a baggy middle section (at two hours, the film seems a little too long).

Well, Ghost Protocol ultimately ends up as an eye-rollingly towering totem to L. Ron's favorite son, complete with treacly music cues and longing glances - bromantic and otherwise - that will send you screaming into the thetan-stealing clutches of Lord Xenu.

Hive is never quite a feelgood film – the deep trauma that underpins it militates against any jaunty Calendar Girls vibes – but there is a tangible sense of joy as Fahrije begins to lead her fellow, long-suffering widows to a place of healing and the promise of better times ahead. And the comeuppance one or two of the menfolk get is definitely mood-enhancing.

Filmmakers from Jacques Rivette to Hou Hsiao-hsien have treated the City of Light like Alice’s rabbit hole; writer-director Hong Sang-soo similarly embraces the fantasy, but goes one step further in this extraordinary character study by fully erasing the line that separates the actual from the fictional.

An absolute eye-opener, this unusually rich sports portrait should be seen on the biggest screen you can find.

Quintessential Capra - popular wish-fulfilment served up with such fast-talking comic panache that you don't have time to question its cornball idealism.

Bogdanovich invests the story with warmth, generosity and considerable power.

A justifiably angry film, fast and full of violent action, though there's plenty of humour too; and the lack of originality is amply compensated for by its manifest sincerity.

Not merely the best of Arnold's classic sci-fi movies of the '50s, but one of the finest films ever made in that genre.

Given Robert Rossen's strikingly literate script, Sol Polito's wonderfully eerie camerawork, and Robinson's terrific performance - all pulling together to elaborate the Luciferian motto borrowed from Milton by which the captain lives, 'Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven' - this is one of Curtiz's best movies.

Leigh, in her first film since Gone With the Wind, is fresh, needy, poignant, while Taylor's unexpectedly assured restraint allows her to carry the film's surge of emotion.

Nary a tear-jerking trick is missed (our family loses one son to the Titanic, the other to World War I), and the strangulation is compounded by the staginess since the film, at Coward's insistence, slavishly followed the Drury Lane production.

It’s as interesting for what it doesn’t show as for what it does.

Some poignant and charming moments undercut the Munchkin aspect of the ethnic elderly portrayed here, but on the whole Silver's direction spoon-feeds chicken soup covered in a slightly unpalatable patina of schmaltz.

There have been better animated sequels and more epic ones, but has there ever been a fluffier follow-up than this bouncy, buoyant caper starring at least half the nature world?

Intrigue and eroticism abound, all of it watchable, none of it particularly exciting. And the misty widescreen photography lends the proceedings a funereal air of respectability that's like catnip to Oscar voters.

It’s an absorbing, prickly tale, which Bhalla doesn’t tell as coherently as he could have — oddly fitting, considering this is a story about frustrated ambitions and unfulfilled potential.

Cheaply made, disreputable, and blatantly anti-authority, it's a winner all the way, what with a stunningly laconic performance from Mitchum, white-hot night-time road scenes, and an affectionate but unsentimental vision of backwoods America rarely seen in cinema to this day.

Of course we all hate insidious environmental destruction; it’s valuable to have movies about that. This one works fine enough. But let the other less-talented filmmakers make them.

Attenberg shares with the Oscar-nominated "Dogtooth" a weakness for overgrown innocence and deadpan perversity.

Viewers who can't get enough of ESPN's "30 for 30" docs will lap up this dual portrait.

If it hardly breaks any new ground either formally or politically, it's nevertheless a moving and highly professional affair, in which Brown and Thompson give particularly good performances.

Innocuous animated fare (with songs) from Hanna-Barbera, based on EB White's fantasy.

It’s a vicarious pleasure to let The Dig’s warm, gauzy light wash over you. Blanketed in defiant optimism and soaked in summer sun, it’s definitely one to watch with your nan. When you’re allowed to, obvs.

Athena’s dystopian view of our present day, showing a collapsing world with black-and-white mentalities, selfishly motivated, and with a desperate underclass left angry and adrift, feels like an urgent message. Anyone who loves their cinema to be spectacular, immersive and a rollercoaster ride will soak it up.

Hollywood begins to package its feasts, and That's Entertainment! has all the flavour of the Vesta dehydrated line.

There's a more courageous profile waiting to be made by someone who understands the man better.

In hindsight, it all looks like a rather tentative Hollywood essay at the race angle, but the actors do mesh together convincingly despite the obvious narrative contrivances, and debut girl Hartman's persuasive account of the everyday travails of the sightless is engrossing without overdoing the self-pity.

The pieces here are wonderful, even if the documentary fails to make any kind of overall analytical point.

For all its surface effectiveness, however, The Blue Room never quite makes that intangible leap into greatness. It’s a phenomenally executed exercise that, like its protagonist’s memory, is too wispy for its own good.

If the story were more arresting, and the filmmaking more original, then the notions of post-9/11 assimilation might be more compelling. As it stands, the movie just serves up another warmed-over Ellis Island rehash.

There aren’t too many surprises in the journey – especially if you’ve seen La Famille Bélier, the 2014 French film that Coda reworks – but writer-director Siân Heder’s deep affection for the Rossi clan is infectious.

Likely to be criticised for being less than murky Waters, even with its 'Odorama' card to scratch for olfactory pleasures/displeasures; but then it's clear from an opening helicopter shot that bad taste has found the budget to go middle of the road.

With so many firsts, a film might buckle under the avalanche of the accompanying expectations. Thankfully, Bros is so belly-achingly funny, sharply observant and wryly self-aware that it can more than withstand such a crushing weight.

Whether for little kids or very big ones, this Matilda is fantastically fun. Great songs, great performances and plenty of baddies to boo.

Cary's charm works as successfully upon audiences as it does upon the film's characters, and his relaxed wit plus Loretta Young's delicate loveliness makes for a frothily touching comedy.

Through some ingenious production design and costuming, Timestalker creates a time-hopping menagerie of madness, with Lowe centre stage and always game.

If you remember Larry Clark’s downbeat 1995 "Kids," a vastly more adventurous movie, you’ll feel a depressing sense of indie sellout.

Fans, of course, will fiercely argue that Buckley has so much more to offer. And in the strongest compliment to Berg’s affectionate portrait, she makes a similarly convincing case, with ample and tender grace.

It’s definitely a horror movie but a wonderfully witty one, not for gentle souls.

The filmmaking is patient and participatory, getting down in the dirt with the workers (in one case the lens is even soaked by a spray of sludge) and allowing several touchingly distinct personalities to emerge.

It's a well-constructed and long-overdue tribute, yet Fortune refrains from delving into larger questions that surround Ochs's work. Did the singer's unwavering dedication to agitpop leave him stranded in the '60s? And does Ochs's diminished legacy among today's essentially apolitical neofolkies amount to a second tragedy?

Pfeiffer is nothing short of heartbreaking in a part that requires her to be completely unvarnished.

Didn't Soderbergh notice there was pathos enough in Matthew McConaughey's beefcake proprietor, an ab-slapping, spandexed Peter Pan? Between this role and his owlish DA in the subversively sly "Bernie," the actor has finally found a way to subvert his six-pack. He's the magic here.

All kinds of fraught encounters ensue before the pals are reunited - and I drifted off myself. A live-action feature, it scores high on the cute-ometer, what with narrator Dudley Moore working himself into a frolicsome frenzy, a singalong signature tune, and more animals than you'll find at Whipsnade.

There’s way too much inside-baseball money talk here, when a simpler plot—one about a band whose apocalyptic vision comes to pass—would have been plenty.

Sure, Juror #2 appears to be yet another polished, predictable courtroom drama; the kind we got a lot of during the ’90s. But thanks to Eastwood and first-time screenwriter Jonathan A Abrams, it’s a deeply involving and thought-provoking new spin on the genre, which serves up a ripe moral quandary that goes deeper than anything John Grisham ever managed.

The movie works best in the clan’s private world (even if rock climbing in the rain seems like poor parenting). But then it deflates: Frank Langella, normally a welcome presence, is clownishly directed as a mean grandfather, and the plot abandons its tensions too abruptly.

Hollywood movies have rarely spoken such tough and tender truths.

Its strongest card is the outrageously charismatic Schwarzenegger, but its view of musclemen and physique contests in general has a charm not unlike Rocky.

Streets ahead of the average blaxploitation effort, yet is still something of a disappointment. Partly the fault lies with the script, and partly with a certain commercial gloss; one or two of the characters nevertheless do come over with some distinctiveness, thanks to OK performances.

The resolution, cynically demonstrating the relativity of good and evil, comes a little too pat; but the performances, the set pieces, and the overall tone are irresistible.

Like a conversation with your grandparents, the film reaches points where it can be a little bit drawn out and repetitive. But when the curtain falls on A Bunch of Amateurs, you’ll really miss these character and their stories.

Fred Zinnemann's feature debut, a neat, unpretentious and really rather enjoyable whodunit about the hunt for the killer of the town's crusading mayor.

The various strands of plot are interwoven with phenomenal mastery, and Yang's images are as effortlessly precise as ever. It's his sharpest funny/sad vision of city life yet.