Darren Aronofsky’s big-ticket retelling of the biblical legend of Noah (Russell Crowe, so damn serious) is a wildly stupid, yet still train-wreck-fascinating piece of work.

There’s more than enough here to hope that Cronenberg still has a masterpiece or two yet to be emerge from within.

It's cheerfully nonsensical, of course, shot in a sun-drenched luxury compound straight from the big book of action movie clichés, yet lacking the flourishes of a John Woo or a Michael Bay.

A few flaws keep Black Widow a rung or two below top-tier Marvel, including a sluggish final act, some generic villainy and yet another overlong runtime – seriously people, two hours is fine – but if you’re after a big, expertly-crafted, self-aware chunk of blockbuster entertainment to watch on the big screen, Marvel, as usual, has your back.

Marcia Gay Harden is the picture’s treasure; watching her swell with concern at her daughter’s choices, you understand how hard it is to let go.

A spectacular movie whose technical achievements - notably the sharp editing - will surely provide a gauge by which subsequent comic strip films are judged.

The question of winning Ann sexually takes on an ugly character, and the film dumbs down fast. This is how the world ends: not with a bang but a wimp.

Verges on the nasty for the nippers; sails close to déjà vu for fantasy fans; fated, probably, to damnation by faint praise.

The major change is that the domestic, Eun-yi (the great Jeon, star of "Secret Sunshine"), is now more of a victim than an aggressor.

Losier has made a quietly revolutionary work that treats a pair of people on the fringes with the decency all humans deserve.

For those of us who’ve been fans of Dequenne since her role as a blanc-trash Belgian waif in "Rosetta" (1999), her subtle portrayal of the pathological perpetrator proves that she’s monumentally talented.

While these ninnies' antics and banter are remarkably entertaining, the quality of the satire depends on when the movie is sending up ludicrous extremist logic and when it's just engaging in repetitive buffoonery.

Hutton succumbs firstly to a thin role, and secondly to the film's lack of any strong viewpoint about its leading men. As usual Schlesinger is more than half in love with what he might be satirising.

All the trademarks are here: minimal plot, striking set pieces, baroque camera movements, misogynist violence. As always, though, the most horrific thing is the dubbing.

Into Eternity has the grandeur of ominous suggestion, but might have benefitted from a director more creatively unbound-an Errol Morris ready to play around at the end of the world.

Terrific performances and superb cinematography (by Claire Denis’s right hand, Agnès Godard) lift cowriter-director Ursula Meier’s feature debut above its thuddingly metaphorical premise.

While Stephenson and Brewster’s big-picture attempt to tackle a sociopolitical issue from the most personal of perspectives lacks the state-of-the-nation impact of that landmark doc, it doesn’t mean you won’t feel the pleasure of these kids’ triumphs, the pain of their tragedies or the pressures of ambition, affecting parents as much as students.

The screenplay offers limited room for character development – Akilla arrives pretty much fully formed – and what we’re left with is an uneven puzzle, eye-catching in pieces but not entirely convincing when put together.

Effectively banned in Britain until 1968, Brando's biker seems disarmingly tame by comparison with the wild angels he spawned. Yet the film isn't half bad as it sets up characters and situation with neat economy, tracing the seeds of explosion when the Black Rebels ride into town, are detained by a minor accident, and hang around trading insults with a rival gang.

‘The most dangerous thing about Pandora,’ someone muses sagely at one point, ‘is that you grow to love it too much.’ Jim Cameron disagrees. He can’t love this place enough – and it’s infectious. 

Harmony is a finely tuned comedy, complete with precisely scripted jokes and comic set pieces that swerve toward the playfully perverse.

Brook knows he can't have his 10- to 12-year-olds mouthing philosophical and poetic paragraphs, so he shoots it like a documentary, overcoming the starvation budget, the location problems, and the sometimes awkward performances. However, the principals are excellent.

One of the most successful of the early '70s blaxploitation cycle.

Hardly original stuff, and morally the film wants to have its cake and eat it, celebrating working-class simplicity while revelling in the luxuriance of beach club life. But the performances compensate, with Dillon turning in a light and touching portrait of confused ambitions.

Raw, messy and unkempt (as a domestic cancer drama should be), Saturday Night Live writer Chris Kelly’s feature debut is also a woe-is-me gay rom-com, a showdown between siblings and—at its best—an out-and-proud minimusical. If that sounds like too much, it is.

For an animation studio that too often specializes in the frivolous and glib (begone, Shrek series!), the move to the dark side is refreshing.

Where have all the bees gone? That's the question Taggart Siegel's documentary attempts to answer by interviewing organic farmers about the phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder.

The pleasure of watching the star sling barbs at Sarsgaard's sandpaper-dry android, shyly court sexy librarian Susan Sarandon and rage against geriatric befuddlement doesn't offset what's essentially a mediocre character study dipped in sci-fi conventions and Social Security–age sentimentality.

Foley has opted for a mixture of documentary realism and set pieces which have clearly escaped from over-lit pop promos. Mingle this with Penn and Walken going heavily over the top in usual Method fashion, and the brew is less than intoxicating.

This sweet if somewhat implausible first feature is a gentle, occasionally dark comedy-cum-coming-of-age drama, held together by strong interplay between the conflicting leads (Place is particularly good) and by a wry, pleasingly understated sense of humour.

An uneven but fascinating spectacle.

Children of Invention seems furiously scribbled in shorthand, undermining what it has to offer in contemporary resonance.

The juxtaposition of clips is mindless; and between the indigestible chunks come newly-filmed scenes with Kelly and Astaire, which manage to be even worse than some of the clips. And their asinine commentary damagingly intrudes into the numbers.

Both acting (particularly Phoenix) and characterisation are top-notch. A film about lives indelibly marked by the past, and by the lies we tell each other just to protect ourselves, it displays the narrative sophistication and ironic grasp of moral and emotional nuances characteristic of Lumet's best work.

A highly inventive updating of the Phantom of the Opera story to the rockbiz world - complete with borrowings from Faust and The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Script, photography and performances (including Dillon before he decided to become a teenage Stallone) are all top notch, while Kaplan directs with pace, imagination, and a fine ear for dialogue and music.

Based loosely on a couple of Somerset Maugham's Ashenden stories, this thriller may not be one of Hitchcock's best English films, but it is full of startling set pieces and quirky characterisation.

Bergès-Frisbey and Duvauchelle make for a deliciously ripe pair - their cheekbones defy both gravity and sound facial architecture - but Auteuil is less interested in young lust than old world values.

Elevate works as a sympathetic portrait of cultural adjustment (learning in a nonnative language, sticking to Muslim dietary restrictions), but never adequately addresses the problems of what's essentially a neocolonialist system designed to shape impoverished Africans into first-world profit-makers.

It’s a hit-and-mostly-miss affair: For every gut-buster like McBride and Franco’s lengthy exchange about drenching each other in seminal fluid, there’s a fall-flat gag.

Ambiguities trump answers, and possibly even logic. For those who aren't burdened by such things, the loopy, off-kilter pace and frontal-lobe frying provide their own unconventional pleasures. It's a cult film, in more ways than one.

The honesty and robustness of the images prevents the movie from lapsing into pretension or preciousness; it remains extremely interesting as a source of Cocteau's later work.

These guys belong in the avant-odd pantheon. They also deserve a stronger, more penetrating tribute.

Though its blanketed voiceover narration can be too on-the-nose—it’s a metaphor, we get it—the film packs a psychic punch, thanks to Gedeck’s spectrally wearied face.

Workman’s study, complete with a fawning sit-down with Steven Spielberg, feels slightly awestruck: The films certainly deserve it, but you’ll want more of Welles’s Illinois schoolmate, rolling her eyes when the subject is described as “humble.”

What elevates Halloween beyond mere fan service is the presence of Jamie Lee Curtis, whose willowy Laurie Strode has been converted, Sarah Connor–style, into a shotgun-toting shut-in with more than a hint of crazy about her.

As it is, this attempt at an Altmanesque ensemble piece feels a little dramatically flat even as it's dazzling your retinas.

Yip's chop-socky sequel does manage to up the (admittedly modest) ante of the original.

The documentary's technique of cutting between warm exchanges and the bellicose rhetoric of then-presidents Ahmadinejad and Bush wears thin with overuse, but the big-hearted Sheppard makes for an amiable tour guide.

Some amusement is derived from watching a film that so obviously had to be worked out backwards. The bits in between feature likeable Martin as a keen but clumsy detective - with all the good lines, which is no bad thing because he's the best part of this fairly amusing, clever exercise in editing.

A vividly told but crushingly literal dramatization of an event that’s in every psych textbook published during the last 40 years, Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s new film is compelling and useless in equal measure.

Given Armstrong’s squirminess on the couch, you’ll wish this profile had traded a portion of its deep background for a little in-the-moment boldness.

Within the first ten minutes, the movie proves the point that exploitation in Africa is rampant, but never goes any deeper than that; it's an undercover endeavor that never feels as if much is actually being uncovered.

It’s not quite Roman Holiday, but it’s got a charm of its own.

There’s something oddly appealing about the fact that Rebecca Zlotowski’s understated thriller, A Private Life, stubbornly refuses easy definition – other than as a modest romp that allows Jodie Foster to perform in another language. And if you’ll watch Foster acting in anything, you’re gonna love watching her do it in French.

The Family Fang goes deep into dysfunction, but even more impressively, it smuggles in the daredevilish art theories of the late Chris Burden and his ilk.

Tossed together from a Hanif Kureishi screenplay which labours so many right-on themes that none leave their mark

The big challenge for The Last Duel is to depict a world in which women are marginalised and disempowered without doing the same thing to its female characters. Maybe it should have ceded more of its cold stone floor to Marguerite.

His look at an Old World continent reeling from the New World values is both thrilling and damning.

Far more than a sterile exercise in suspense: Communion constantly keeps the audience on its toes with a wealth of incidental detail, excellent set pieces and technical versatility.

Great fun, with Wilder for once giving an impeccably controlled performance as the factory's bizarre owner.

All in all, a superbly controlled exercise in the malevolent torments of despair.

This spoof fly-on-the-wall documentary is funny, scary, provocative, and profoundly disturbing...Purely on a gut level, it may offend; but as an exploration of voyeurism, it's one of the most resonant, caustic contributions to the cinema of violence since Peeping Tom.

The doc's straining for a larger, Varda-esque metaphor about the sad humans on the sidelines is ill-advised.

The film's commitment to representing the harsh truths of an unfortunate historical moment is admirable, but it tends to grate rather than illuminate.

There's shockingly little thrill in watching Carano bounce off walls and pummel antagonists.

As a storyteller, writer-director Hafsia Herzi is not coy, but she’s careful, allowing intimacy to emerge with the same tentativeness as it does for Fatima.

T​his​ smart and taboo-defying social ​​horror draws you in before abruptly bearing its teeth.

The denouement isn't very surprising or enlightening, but at its best this works as both a critique of Japan's pop culture system and an effective woman-in-peril psycho-thriller.

Full of stunning visuals, the ideas in the film more than compensate for the awkward scene-setting of the beginning.

It’s such a loopy endeavour overall that Annette will likely have some audiences running from it screaming as much as it will have others worshipping at its altar. It’s a hard film to adore, but an easy one to thank for its very existence.

The four leads more often than not transcend the material's calculated moroseness; Ivanir is especially good as a man whose perfectionist facade masks a soul in perpetual turmoil.

Offering only hackneyed insights into the war, the film makes for stodgy drama. But Williams' manic monologues behind the mike are worth anybody's money.

It's based on Evan Hunter's moralistic bestseller about a young New York teacher at a tough school, and is very worthy in its intentions. Highlights include Vic Morrow as a confused knife-wielding delinquent, but the studied pseudo-documentary atmosphere never quite convinces.

If it fails, ultimately, it's because the relationship between the rational gangster Lau and the impetuous Jacky Cheung never really rings true. A cut above the usual HK action melodrama all the same.

Kubi is often wildly funny in Kitano’s straight-faced style, and it’s never less than a lot of fun. Fans of visceral, cynical action movies will lose their heads over it.

Philip Seymour Hoffman and a ratlike Paul Giamatti are the competing spin doctors - you wish the whole movie were about them. And Marisa Tomei brings a hungry sense of scoopmaking to the (unavoidable?) role of a New York Times journalist who's seen it all.

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.

While it lacks the emotional intensity of the duo’s Oscar-nominated The Square—a rousing 2013 look at Egypt’s Arab Spring—The Great Hack still feels of a piece, inviting viewers to contemplate the power and irreversibility of their online footprint.

Aimed squarely at the under-12s, it won't displease most parents, if only for the welcome absence of marketable accessories.

Somehow one leaves aside the blatant implausibilities, the coincidences, even Eric Roberts, and takes great pleasure in a breakneck ride to the end of the line. And Voight has finally found his niche, abandoning all those wet-eyed liberal roles and playing to the hilt a hideous, raving beast, with scars. Great ending, too.

You can feel Chbosky's blood, sweat and tears oozing out of this highly personal project, but that holy trinity of fluids isn't enough to wash away the sense that you've seen this before - many, many, many times.

A vivid character study in the tradition of the not dissimilar The Hustler. Marvellous performances throughout ensure interest.

It's a credit to both the actors and Franco-Algerian filmmaker Rachid Bouchareb (Days of Glory) that the film never dives headfirst into mawkishness.

It may not be the sharpest satire, but Barlow and Senes have a heap of wicked fun wielding the blunt trauma as Sissy takes a wild stab at everything from influencer culture and wellness voodoo, to body image crises and backstabbing (literally) so-called friend circles.

The film adheres closely to a well-reviewed theater production cocreated by and starring Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, both of whom get to riff on their prickly "My Dinner with Andre" rapport.

The jarring juxtapositions only heighten the enigmatic air of the film's subject; even when he's right in front of us, he seems to be plotting his next wily act.

An idiosyncratic romance, and a far lighter movie than is usual from Cassavetes. Detailing the problems that background and character bring to a relationship, he creates a captivatingly witty and sympathetic picture of a pair of misfits deciding to make a go of it together despite numerous incompatibilities and adversities.

The Sapphires might pass muster as escapist fluff, but its pretensions of significance go woefully awry.

The Israel-Palestine conflict is reduced to a crystalline, though still complicated, essence in Nadav Schirman’s alternately tedious and engrossing documentary.

Swaddled with a lacquer of nostalgia that passes for cultural insight, this one-night-in-sweatpants drama will make you yearn for a moratorium on teen movies-at least ones so aggressively dewy-eyed.

While Unforgivable stays true to this approach, its disparate souls feel too scattershot to be interwoven into a meaningful narrative tapestry.

A percussive, Velvet-y score by John Cale and several casting surprises (including the long-absent Barbara Steele) help keep both pace and interest high. It's no more than passable as a thriller, but the density of invention and energy in other respects is enough to shame a dozen contemporary major studio movies.

But when it’s being dumb enough to have Charlotte drop molly and space out in an impromptu war room during a crisis, it has just the right amount of irreverence, thanks to fun performances (including one by O’Shea Jackson Jr. as Fred’s superwealthy friend, cruising on a LaCroix-fueled cloud of serenity).

Working from autobiographical material, Sebastián Silva does wonders with these two dedicated performances — the ice king and the earth goddess, both of them neurotically detached from their sunny surroundings.

Visual Acoustics goes out of its way to remain as kindly and pleasing as Shulman himself.

The look of the film certainly achieves the right rubble-strewn, monochrome period feel with precision and genuinely cinematic scope. Perhaps the greatest hurdle cleared, however, is the problem of incident. Radford's achievement is to have incorporated the impossible preaching and crazed ideas into the fabric with hardly any loose threads. The locations look very like modern Britain; and Burton at last found the one serious role for which he searched all his life.

Director Castle gets lost in fantasy, spoiling a promising portrait with some heavy-handed emotional manipulation and an escapist conclusion.