There's some magic in the grab-bag method, but with all the furious wand-waving, the story itself never gets to cast much of a spell.

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

Christopher Nolan’s frosty espionage sci-fi delivers visual intensity but little heart.

At once a lament to the ravages of age and an examination of those tiny foibles which separate reality from dramatic artifice, it’s a baffling and intricate film which, although light on conventional pleasures, still manages to provoke and beguile.

Part musical, part political treatise, and with more than a wink to Dante’s Divine Comedy, Noé is at his most decadent and devilish.

This is the disaster film which set the style for the genre in the decade to come.

A truly impressive portrait of self-destructive, smooth-talking alpha males, and a testament to an actor who waltzes across that Peter Pan–syndrome tightrope with the greatest of sleaze.

If Bastards is cold, it’s never clinical; rather, it’s a fully engaged, deeply moral movie about people who are neither.

As presented here (cut down from a longer edit), the film might have benefitted from more technical context related to the plant’s failure — this is a cautionary tale worth heeding. But the voices are valuable enough.

What you will find is a film that toggles between impressive fury and a kind of made-for-TV blandness that does Nat Turner’s 1831 uprising — still controversial — no favors.

The sound-track bops along nicely with jazz-tinged standards.

Awkward teenage energy is the secret weapon in Marvel's post-Avengers palate cleanser, one that strains to keep things light and fun.

About 45 minutes in, the film’s uneasy détente between subtlety and movie machinery fails outright, as heretofore shown-not-told themes are spelled out — “You forget where you live!” yell family members on both sides — and the paramours try to outrun violence and structural contrivance.

Despite such sleazy subject matter, the cast is outstanding, dominated by a fierce Shelley Winters, and Corman pulls no punches, delivering a searing Jacobean tragedy of a gangster movie.

Much flashier than Donen's earlier Charade (also scripted by Peter Stone, alias Pierre Marton) and very sub-Hitchcock.

The most heart-wrenching thing about the film is watching Fanning’s transformation from idealist to wreck, the father’s free-thinking daughter turned into the mother’s double in the space of a dinner argument. It’s not quite enough for a film, but it is for one magnificent scene.

All of this is fascinating in the moment, yet the doc never yokes all these threads into anything particularly deep or illuminating. The Galapagos Affair is less social commentary, more gossip.

What makes this hectic farce so fresh and funny is the sheer fertility of the writing, while the lives and times of Hi, Ed and friends are painted in splendidly seedy colours, turning Arizona into a mythical haven for a memorable gaggle of no-hopers, halfwits and has-beens. Starting from a point of delirious excess, the film leaps into dark and virtually uncharted territory to soar like a comet.

Amirpour’s career to date offers a triptych of stories of women navigating men’s worlds, and needing all their nous and resources to survive in them – and this is her most straight-up enjoyable survivor tale yet. It’s a feminist parable that may not linger as long as in the mind as her more provocative debut, but it’s irresistible fun in the moment.

Powered by a driving rock score, this is by turns sleek, reckless, and smoothly effective, like a Ferrari with a psycho killer at the wheel.

Though supported by Woodley’s subtle narration, The Fault in Our Stars is relentlessly outward. That’s part of the book’s inspiring touch, and even if some of the supporting cast comes off as merely functional onscreen, the core of the tragedy comes to life in a heartbreaking way.

It’s obvious that Welcome to Me is about an unusual person, but Shira Piven’s dark comedy makes it perfectly clear that the “me” of the title is no mere eccentric. On the contrary, this tragicomic oddity is that rarest of birds: a genuinely funny movie about mental illness.

A much more conventional and unexciting piece of work.

The longer this "Abbott and Costello's Lethal Weapon" goes on, the more the fun dissipates - until a queasily violent climax, which, naturally, fully embraces genre stereotypes rather than dismantling them.

Strong supporting performances, good locations, and well-staged fights contribute to what is an impressive example of how to assemble this kind of material.

It shows its age, what with indistinct sound, fluffed lines, quaint choreography, quainter songs, a stilted supporting cast and positively arthritic direction. But the Brothers' energy and madness is never in question: when the laughs come, they come loud and long.

The dialogue is a mite pretentious at times, and the plot comes perilously close to soap at the end. But the performances are excellent, and Walsh's sympathetic direction, wonderfully flexible in negotiating the pin-ball effect as characters and problems interact, gives the whole thing the touching, kaleidoscopic flavour of a prototype Alan Rudolph movie.

Then Plame's cover gets blown, and so does the film's; suddenly, the clunky melodrama that had been lurking in the shadows starts hogging the spotlight.

Though wildly uneven, the film sometimes comes within screaming distance of the sick ironies of "Heathers." That's how loudly Goldthwait still knows how to yell.

Mike Todd's inflation of Jules Verne, with Niven as Phileas Fogg and the Mexican comedian Cantinflas as Passepartout, becomes an interminable travelogue interspersed with sketches in which star-spotting affords some relief (there are cameos from hordes of luminaries ranging from Dietrich and Beatrice Lillie to Keaton and Sinatra).

If this is the end of the road for a British filmmaking great, it’s a thoughtful, heart-filled finale. British cinema’s old oak still stands tall.

It's no recipe for hilarity or pitter-pattering hearts, but like our hero's sweets, this pleasant, delicate confection goes down easy enough.

Until the movie's cathartic showdown (and a few backstory revelations that impress too late), The Drop putters along in a dozy register, less a simmering pot than a cooling one.

A quintet of actors carve out a beautiful, ill-fated geometry in John Wells's layoff drama, which might play like a retort to "Up in the Air" if it didn't have shortcomings of its own.

The polemic may seem obvious and at times laboured, but the action sequences are brilliant, and the film does achieve a brutal, often very moving, power.

A fringe Siegel Western (he spent two weeks finishing it off). The theme of a law and order marshal who has tamed a frontier town, only to become an embarrassment to the 'civilised' community, is sufficiently interesting for one to wonder what it would have been like if Siegel had done the whole thing.

Held back by a more conservative aesthetic and emotional approach, One Life comes nowhere near the power and veracity of Steven Spielberg’s film. But it does have an ace in the hole in Anthony Hopkins, whose performance delivers a subtle but profound gut-punch.

Only Falco gets beyond being merely a symbol for suburban angst.

It's supremely annoying to see the ups and downs of romance reduced to archer-than-arch line readings and bloodless mortal kombat. What's more frustrating is that the film, adapted from Bryan Lee O'Malley's popular comic, is an endless visual delight.

What makes Moore’s latest so ferocious—and pound for pound his most effective piece of journalism—is the way it pivots to a meaty central subject that isn’t Trump but has prescient echoes.

Still, if his doc is as toothless as Cookie Monster 2.0, it’s still a nostalgic treat to spend time with the man who gave us Kermit, Big Bird and the Goblin King.

It’s pleasantly perverse, but somehow never quite gels. Still, it’s a fascinating keyhole into a central Hitchcockian idea, the notion that the weirdest behavior comes not from criminals, but our friends and neighbors.

Roeg's debut as a director is a virtuoso juggling act which manipulates its visual and verbal imagery so cunningly that the borderline between reality and fantasy is gradually eliminated.

Horror film director Hessler and special effects man Ray Harryhausen combine brilliantly to trace Sinbad's mystical voyage. The effects aren't simply fascinating for their own sake - they genuinely convey a sense of the magical and otherworldly.

When you have an actor as suggestive as Kazan, swallowing up the lens with allure and complexity, your writer-director becomes superfluous.

Greengrass’s heart lies in exploring the ways a nation processes such a horrific, unexpected event, but Breivik’s odious ideas also get a comprehensive airing along the way. It makes for an uncomfortable, challenging watch.

At its best, this pomo oater gets within chaw-spitting distance of action-flick greatness; at its worst, the movie is simply unadulterated guns-and-guts fun.

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.

Wheatley, underplaying his stylishness, goes for a subtle national satire about geeks gone wild, and that’s the fun here: On as mild-mannered a vacation as two Brits might devise, a killer comes along—and, after a while, is politely welcomed in, the kettle simmering.

The transformation that you anticipate never comes; the movie feels strangled.

If The Harder They Fall occasionally feels like a collection of music-video riffs, each with its own momentum and rhythm, and it drags a touch in the middle, that stylised energy and ridiculously charismatic cast makes it a ride.

You can't believe what you're watching: Compliance, true to its title, digs into the rarely explored subject of psychological acquiescence (behavioral scientist Stanley Milgram should get a cowriting credit), with common-sense dignity being the first casualty.

What lifts things right out of the rut is the cynical commentary provided by the hero's dog, communicating telepathically (in voice-off admirably spoken by Tim McIntire) and kicking the daylights out of all those boy-and-his-dog yarns.

Though seemingly a prettily made, pretty erotic exploitation movie, one suspects that there is value in Wertmüller's observation of the potency of sexual chauvinism. The film fails, however, through the absence of credibility and objectivity, and its refusal to move into the realms of fantasy, allegory, or even irony.

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

Cassavetes and the two leads keep maudlin sentimentality at bay until the very bitter end, when the film basically 'fesses up that movie-style happy endings are the stuff of pipe dreams. Terrific.

A worthwhile portrait of a genius who made beautiful music, and a case study for how to tragically, epically self-destruct.

Every time the narrative's underworld schnooks and low-level lowlifes edge their way out of the periphery, a sense of snorting impatience takes over. This is Jacky's story, and when he's grabbing Bullhead by the horns, you don't want him to let go.

The narrative is a mess despite the simplistic twinning of tales, and - worse yet - keeps interrupting the heart-stopping hoofing.

Like Crazy proves it's still possible to make a love story that's both genuinely sweet and bittersweet.

If the movie had a lead actress more delicate or malleable than the strong-cheeked Lawrence-a Natalie Portman, say-it would tip over into sexy-girl-killer celebration; the same goes for Harrelson's salty mentor, who is never too supportive or paternal. Both performers lean into the economies of survival, certain of the savagery that lies ahead, and come up with sharp work.

An inferior reworking of The Thing from Another World, which still manages to keep interest alive despite some poor special effects, a flat jokiness and stereotype characters.

As an American fighting with the partisans in the Spanish Civil War, Cooper makes a perfect Hemingway hero, robust and romantic in equal measures. Falling in love with Ingrid Bergman's peasant guerilla makes a lot of sense too, but the film's a mess dramatically. Wood approaches the material with kid gloves, when Hemingway was always a bare-knuckle fighter.

Brilliantly atmospheric San Francisco settings, memorably bizarre supporting performances, a superb use of subjective camera (much more effective than in Lady in the Lake) throughout the entire first third of the film.

Life in The Damned Don’t Cry is brutally unfair, and Boulifa offers no easy answers. But thanks to the compassionate filmmaker and his two impressive leads, it’s a compelling watch.

Clift (as the priest) and Malden (as the cop) make this worth watching, but it's heavy going at times and the more literary aspects of the script, adapted from Paul Anthelme's play (written in 1902), are uncinematic to say the least.

Step Up to the Plate doesn't skimp on the food-porn goods, but the dynamic between its two stoical subjects is too undercooked to truly resonate.

The big absence here is the man himself; Gibney couldn’t get the jailed Abramoff on camera, either due to unwillingness or a Justice Department intervention. Whatever the reason, it’s crippling.

Rather than treat its subject as the sort of martyr to democracy that makes good copy in the West, Bhutto digs deeper.

Is Family Romance, LLC a docudrama? A meta-doc? Staged reality? However you define it, it’s enthralling, unsettling and typically Herzogian.

It’s a towering achievement of imagination and the detail of each frame is a miracle of film artistry.

Her (Steen) emotional acrobatics are reason enough to sit through Applause's parade of pain, though it's a movie to admire rather than enjoy.

Galella's real crime goes conspicuously unmentioned: feeding the cult of celebrity while stoking a public appetite for empty gossip as news.

So long as we're watching DeNoble recounting the details of his laboratory experiments, Addiction Incorporated remains sufficiently gripping; when Evans is reduced to observing his saintly subject educating high-school students about the dangers of nicotine addiction, it's considerably less so.

Even Parker's direction, with its unerring sense of pace, cannot disguise an awkwardly episodic narrative which just cannot find a sense of an ending.

It's especially disappointing when the story takes an inevitable turn to starry-eyed mush, dulling the sharp satire of the crazy, stupid ins and outs of romantic entanglement with an unconvincingly saccharine one-true-love-for-all moral.

Stunningly acted and superbly shot (by Haskell Wexler), it is written, with Sayles' customary ear for vivid phrasing and telling details, as a meditation on man's desire to divorce himself not only from Nature but from his own true nature, imbuing the film with the intensity and rigour of an allegorical fable. And the ending truly makes you think about what you've just seen.

Merchant never loses our interest: He’s made a sparkly, strutting film that doesn’t apologize for or look down upon its heroes. A “soap opera in spandex” is what Hutch calls pro wrestling to his trainees, and the movie follows suit. Who doesn’t love a melodrama in tights once in a while?

If a subplot showing Orwell writing ‘Animal Farm’ as he becomes persuaded by Jones’s evidence doesn’t entirely work, there’s plenty in this thoughtful journalism drama that does. And not a single scene in a car park.

It almost becomes comical to count the number of "who's holding the camera now?" reverse shots that the filmmaker haphazardly inserts to propel the story forward. Such visual ineptitude, like much else in this tediously cocky enterprise, is downright criminal.

The laughs are purely surface; the film's women's-lib pretensions seem grafted on as if to lend significance to a story that would benefit from a lighter, less cerebral touch. Still, it's hard to resist La Deneuve's charms.

The routine story - members of a scientific expedition exploring the Amazon discover and are menaced by an amphibious gill man - is mightily improved by Arnold's sure sense of atmospheric locations and by the often sympathetic portrait of the monster.

Classic opening gunfight and first-rate performances from Garner, and from Robards as the tubercular, laconically resigned Doc Holliday. A determinedly old-style Western, made two years before Peckinpah shook things up with The Wild Bunch.

Smile is overall a solid horror, a fine way to make yourself scream at the cinema screen, but within it there are enough moments of horrible invention to make Finn a director to keep an eye on. There may be bigger, freakier surprises in store.

This lifelong Tintin fan was more than pleased, even while having to acknowledge that the movie lacks the subtle state-of-the-world commentary that Hergé often smuggled into his creation.

Like the wood-grained farmhouse itself — a beautiful piece of production design by Julie Berghoff — The Conjuring has an analog solidity that makes the terror to come almost unbearable.

With a plot that plays like a string of incidental encounters, The Meddler could easily have felt like a glorified sitcom. But its heroine’s grief, her goodness and her complicated relationship with her daughter all feel so lived-in and true that the film stays grounded.

As an info dump, Table is admirably efficient, addressing everything from obesity to the limits of charity. As a film, it’s less compelling, with only one subject — Philadelphia single mom Barbie Izquierdo — getting enough screen time to put a human face on the crisis.

Only Lieberman's intrusive, slightly arrogant onscreen presence distracts from the profile, introducing an unwanted hint of American privilege to the film's perspective.

Wonderful stuff.

You'd follow these two anywhere - even down a long, winding and perilously close-to-pointless road.

Mostly though, it feels like we're watching a superficial gloss on Goodman's CV rather than a probing interrogation of his legacy. For the choir only.

The script—which Jones, Kieran Fitzgerald and Wesley Oliver adapted from Glendon Swarthout's 1988 novel—shifts uneasily between tragedy and comedy.

Despite impeccable performances from its talented cast, we never get to know the characters intimately enough to connect.

The movie toggles between two periods-before and after a catastrophe-and, were it not for Swinton's magnetism, it would be unbearable. Instead, you'll want to stay for the wallop.

Ultimately, though, it's an uneasy blend of horror and whimsy, with the allegory being hammered a little too hard for comfort. It's also marred by some dreadfully tacky special effects and set designs.

As so often the case, this Marvel effort is best when its talented cast is flinging around snarky banter and self-aware asides.

It seems a strange thing to say about a film featuring a giant man-eating mallard, but a bit more eccentricity wouldn’t have gone amiss.