There’s much to admire here, but with Legge’s keen eye for the technical side of cinema stronger than his narrative impulses, LOLA ultimately has to go down as an ambitious failure.

The tone balances realism and optimism with the accent on the latter; ultimately Patti Cake$ has the kind of uplifting, defiant-misfit mood that’s easy to compare with fellow Sundance hit "Little Miss Sunshine."

It’s a lurid psychological horror that’ll thrill midnight movie crowds.

Once the rote plot takes over - the tension brought on by the film's you-are-there verisimilitude quickly devolves into soapily overwrought theatrics.

Eventually, biting on a little more than it can chew, the film reverts to type. But in addition to Fishburne, it gives us a first-rate soundtrack, a clutch of splendid cameos, fine, grainy direction from Duke, and much pointed stuff about the hypocrisy behind the USA's so-called war against drugs.

When sitting through this detail-heavy documentary, nonaficionados may feel like they're watching paint dry, albeit in the company of an artist who savors each and every shade.

There's not much beyond all the fawning, but the effusively talented Channing more than deserves the gush.

In comparison with near-impenetrable Garrel efforts like "Regular Lovers" (2005) and "Frontier of the Dawn" (2008), Jealousy cuts straight to the heart.

There's probably a moderate little romantic comedy crying to get out here, but the film's vain striving for casual hip proves suffocatingly obtrusive.

The film is overcrowded with story lines and short on thrust, but fortunately, its protagonists carry the day with their candor and precocious poise.

For a movie defined by its restraint, this travelogue is remarkably physical; as a valentine to the rueful desire of grown-ups acquainted with both joy and disappointment, the film is a true rarity.

Frank Marshall has crammed the screen with plenty of knee-jerk thrills interlaced with black humour. Designed to reduce the audience to a squirming mass, the film yields plenty of grisly pleasures.

Too many movies come to us as preordained cult objects - this is the real deal.

So, sure, the plot is overstuffed, the cross-cutting is frenzied, and Pegg’s goofy asides are the only light relief from the underlying somberness. If you’re looking for flaws, The Final Reckoning definitely has them. But with action sequences this adrenalised, no one is leaving short-changed.

Lots of elements of the story feel familiar, but they play out in unusual and unpredictable ways here. We’ve seen the heavy-with-a-heart character before, but Jarvis gives Arm real pathos, even at his most violent.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has more going for it than those MCU B-sides, but it still falls a long way short of recapturing the exhilarating glories of director Ryan Coogler’s 2018 smash hit. The visual and storytelling flaws here are only exacerbated by the seriously unsnappy runtime (they’re really not kidding with the whole ‘forever’ thing).

There are hints of greatness in Chevalier, but it’s worthier of polite applause than a standing ovation.

If only the script had been content to stick with its let's-start-a-band verve. Like many a musical biopic, Nowhere Boy wants to explain away the man (as if a song like "In My Life" weren't explanation enough).

These women - performance artists, models, butch lesbians and transsexuals - expose their unique beauty under close scrutiny, and rather than simply chronicling a concert, Atlas incorporates candid interviews and playful banter to define his picturesque subjects.

Deitch is well served by Shaver as the teacher and Charbonneau as the young seducer. Best of all, however, is the way the movie dignifies all its characters.

It’s an unabashed celebration of a maverick talent, with all the highlights you’d expect from an extraordinary career.

Unlike recent, sharp-witted examples like The Lego Movie and Paddington, there’s zero interest in mocking or freshening up the material—think what Wes Anderson might have done with this—thus dooming the movie to nostalgic types only. It trudges along like that black, jagged stripe on our hero’s yellow polo: up and down, scene by scene.

Even if you can forgive the crude JAP caricatures (et tu Minnie Driver?) and the blatantness of the film's attempts to make you sob, you're still left with lovely actors stuck in a lackluster cover version of the real thing.

The movie is a coming-of-age story, but whose age is coming? That's the profound question we're left with, in a stellar adaptation that balances gore with black humor, ethical quandary, hope and—yes—plenty of brains.

If you think Donald Trump is a better POTUS than his predecessor, then fair warning: this is most certainly not the documentary for you. The problem is, if you’re of the exact opposite opinion and are, indeed, an irrepressible President Obama stan, you might just find it a bit hard to stomach too.

Hipsters is also a musical (in an intentionally naive "Absolute Beginners" vein), and while everything looks glinty and gorgeous, the story's political edge is dulled by excessive levity.

Overtaken by East-West events, and with an over-optimistic ending which sets personal against political loyalty, it's still highly enjoyable, wittily written, and beautiful to behold in places, at others somehow too glossy for its own good.

At its best, Outrage offers a meat-and-potatoes look at an age when battles of honor and humanity are AWOL in yakuza society. As things wind toward the inevitable hierarchical breakdown, however, the movie too often resembles a repetitive cycle of tough guys shouting, shooting and shuffling off this mortal coil.

Such overall familiarity makes the over-the-top soap-operatic elements, such as a histrionic screamathon between mom and daughter, that much more grating-and Hrebejk's upending of cathartic clichés that much more gratifying.

This unflinching parable brings the hammer down on its cinematic brethren's fetishization of cell-block Rockefellers. R's final shot says it all: The house wins. The house always wins.

It’s brimming with fascinating insights into the skill, conviction and sheer slog that went into tackling several rogue states, climate change and the odd dead cockroach on the West Wing floor without losing optimism, sanity or custody of the kids.

Ultimately, points may be scored on the balance sheet of workplace exploitation - usually we see it go the other way around, gender-wise - but these conference-room banalities have been better explored elsewhere, and the effort here feels like a rough draft.

Wild Canaries may be modest stuff, but its madcap misadventures are loaded with honesty, and it earns the conclusion that love never feels like a cage when you fly with the right flock.

Michael Jackson was obviously shooting for the moon right before his death, as you can tell from these stunning bits of concert spectacle.

Though Aron Gaudet’s documentary never quite captures the relieved atmosphere of these homecomings, it does acknowledge the dark side of a cheery platitude: those on both sides of the divide are in need of healing.

The difference between a movie about emptiness and an empty movie becomes abundantly clear.

It’s tamer than its deeply unsettling predecessor, but still unhinged enough to keep you nicely on edge.

As a micro-to-macro tour of Germany's fraught relationship with its Jewish citizens, In Heaven Underground couldn't be more connective; as a straight doc, its aesthetic choices couldn't be more confusing.

Langella offers the best interpretation of Stoker's villain since Christopher Lee, and Badham's film, shot in England, gives him a classy environment to devastate. But the decision to create such a sympathetic vampire (especially alongside Olivier's hammy Van Helsing) leaves the film short of suspense, and so romance has to take most of the weight. As a result, it begins to drift badly at the climax.

Milius once more reveals that his overriding concern is with the formation of myth rather than realism, as he balances the fates of his two legendary figures - Brian Keith's Roosevelt and Sean Connery's kidnapper Raisuli - to dynamic effect.

As a piece of watch-through-your-fingers outdoors filmmaking, The Alpinist stands right up alongside the Oscar-winning Free Solo.

It all feels a touch schematic, trying to satisfy every audience type, when each haircut is different. Barbershop: The Next Cut actually ends up in the chair, with a highly symbolic snipping that could have come straight outta the 1950s.

The mood of this movie will brew with you for a while, even if it swirls around characters who aren't quite persuasive.

All the retroactively enlightened symbolism gets monotonous, and reaches an absurd apex with the introduction of a party-line newspaperman played by that scowling emblem of Teutonic depravity, Ulrich Tukur.

A scattering of fine one-liners , but one can't help wishing that Allen would investigate pastures new.

Barreling toward its rapidly modernizing future, China takes Internet addiction more seriously than most nations: To watch Web Junkie, an often scary yet half-realized documentary, is to see a society trapped in its old solutions.

Given the way the film consistently relies on the talented actor's left-of-center charms, you end up with a cake-and-eat-it-too critique: You get to acknowledge how one-dimensional the male fantasies of hot nerd-messiah chicks are while basking in exactly the same thing. Nice try.

The quaint time machine and Oscar-winning special effects hold one's interest initially, but the overall effect is one of glossy emptiness.

It’s a human-size tragedy, one that shows how deadening it can be to remain subject to those who give us life.

Once A Simple Favor hits the first of several I-can’t-believe-they-went there moments (there are a few too many), it loses some of its lure, and Feig never quite regains tonal control. But you won’t be bored by this.

Very hard to take with the film sitting up and practically slobbering in its eagerness to prove how loveable it is. A pity, because the score isn't half bad (the show-stopping 'If I Were a Rich Man' almost gets lost), the choreography has possibilities, and Topol is distinctly personable.

Ultimately, the returns of the film's premise can't justify a nearly two-and-a-half-hour squirm. The savagery is honest, raw and hardly entertainment.

Never finds a common ground between the fantastic and the heartfelt. Such unintegrated flip-flopping between a muted character study and a horror flick relying on cheap scare tactics leaves you feeling mildly schizophrenic

There's still tremendous vitality here, and Wheatley's avoidance of yet another Guy Ritchie gabfest is a pleasure in itself.

Kravitz expertly flits between tension, horror, black comedy and social satire, sometimes delivering all four simultaneously. It’s a film about the abuses of power, the dangers of being a woman in a man’s world and the importance of female solidarity, but is never didactic, just gripping.

The esteemed director, Ken Loach, isn’t really a fantasist--and it shows.

You just wish the moviemaking were as consistently graceful and momentum-fixated as the film's rail-grinding subjects.

Visually though, Kung Fu Panda 3 is a candy-colored 3-D treat.

Beautifully shot and well acted (Meredith Salenger in a fine performance as Natty), there's a real sense of period, even if the film does occasionally become over-sentimental.

Whereas Spheeris' The Wild Side was weakened by sentimentalising its disaffected punk heroes, her second feature presents a tougher and more balanced view of teen violence; while we're allowed a glimmer of understanding into the murderers' feelings, we never indulge them with misplaced sympathies: these boys are monsters.

Although the film takes place in a fantasy version of brownstone Brooklyn, it’s more cutting than the book, especially for the way it shuns the concept of a star vehicle and sharpens the material into a forum for several moments of guilt.

There’s no real pleasure in any of the musical performances. And when married to the scenes exploring Hendrix’s tumultuous personal life—particularly his semi-abusive relationship with long-term girlfriend Kathy Etchingham (Hayley Atwell)—you’re left with a monotonously grim portrait that’s more rewarding in theory than execution.

Indeed, the doc works best as a relationship study, filled with endearing moments of intimate bickering. Takei is a self-admitted ham but a playful one, projecting his confidence in increasingly meaningful directions.

Which would be fine, were the characters not a punchable quintet of overdrawn saps, the acting (Ringwald and Hall excepted) overplayed and unsympathetic, and the script the wrong side of the line that separates smart from smart-arse. Its continuing cult popularity is mystifying; as teen movies go, this is a long way off, say, Fast Times at Ridgemont High or Pretty in Pink. Hughes: stay behind for detention afterwards. And write me four sides on why this, uh, sucks.

Though play with fire she might, couldn't screenwriter Jonas Frykberg have played with a little button called DELETE? There's no reason why a two-hour movie should feel like three, nor require quite so much fidelity to Larsson's plot curlicues.

As exposed as the actors allow themselves to be, their mostly improvised script never takes them anywhere, and the rough edge of their banter seems to acknowledge as much. At least they get to eat.

A fairly obvious story, perhaps, but one that is helped enormously both by Ritchie's reluctance to move away from simulated realism into melodramatic plotting, and by his customary generosity, clear-eyed and unsentimental, towards his characters.

Very little seems to happen in this social vacuum, and none of it is memorable.

Director Sidney J Furie’s indulgence of the queer manners of an army-based British spy culture remains seductive, as does Caine’s rash character, a mild flirt who is proud of his cooking skills (a superior calls him ‘insubordinate… insolent… a trickster… perhaps with criminal properties…’). More quaint is the film’s dated science.

The old-fashioned vibe, in fact, does more than just distinguish the story of skinny runt turned supersoldier Steve Rogers (Evans) from every other comic-book movie out there, though its fetishization of retro-techno gizmos and getups-call it leatherbucklepunk-immensely adds to the fun.

Kids will squeal with delight. Adults will smile indulgently at the mildness of it all.

Smash & Grab aims to replicate the mesmeric tension of a Michael Mann thriller (the crime-cinema impresario is even explicitly referenced by one of the cops assigned to hunt down the group), though the film is so all over the place stylistically that it often seems like several different movies cut together.

It’s a testament to the deftness and love with which Brian and Charles is made that its sweetness never becomes saccharine, and the eccentricity never feels forced. The result is a total delight – the surprise package of the year.

Curtis gives a careful performance, but can breathe little life into this expurgated cliché.

Somehow, writer-director Raymond De Felitta pulls off these proceedings way better than anyone has a right to, thanks to his light touch with potentially lurid plot developments and his generosity in letting actors flesh out their sitcom setups.

As with 1999’s deceptively deep South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut and, more recently, The Lego Movie, the script works hard to invest its scenario with an existential and political dimension, crudely but effectively expressed.

With no Ghibli film in the offing (although My Neighbor Totoro is getting a UK cinema re-release in August), The Imaginary is an often delightful way to fill the anime gap.

It's directed by Hitchcock with imagination and, especially in the first half, much comedy. Essentially though, this should be filed under 'Novello'.

Woo claims it started out as a zen movie about internalised conflicts, but it plays like a regular martial arts melodrama; only the tone is darker and more cynical than usual.

The authenticity is immersive, even if the historical exposition occasionally feels like prep for an exam no one’s warned you about.

Ably aided by a fine cast and Jack Green's no-nonsense photography, Eastwood constructs a marvellously pacy, suspenseful movie which is deceptively easy on both eye and ear.

The perfectly sculpted, entirely sure-of-himself Tom ultimately seems more of a construct than a character, his carefree nature shaped almost entirely by the very wish-fulfillment clichés that the movie otherwise sidesteps.

The public appetite for high-school high jinks may be limitless, but the pretentious camerawork and empty ideas of this feature-length mope yield little pleasure or insight.

Occasionally Hill comes up with some nice touches of the unexpected: a few moments of black humour, the suggestion of a deliberate pastiche here and there, but on the whole he's too resolutely fashionable a director to really get behind Vonnegut's idea of time-tripping. It ends up the wrong side of unadventurous.

A cinephile's film, stuffed with influences and allusions which, together with the precocious brilliance of every single image, can become numbing at times rather than stunning; but the absolute assurance and ingenuity make this a debut as startling as Eraserhead and every bit as spectacular.

The movie strays too far into fantasy - Abe suffers mightily - but Solondz still has an ear and an eye for a specific hell in the real world.

The film makes a compelling case for the damage wrought by business-funded feel-good activities that turn attention away from the disease, as well as using funds for endless drug research while ignoring the toxic environmental factors.

impressively, the movie compensates with some fascinating father-son Drago tensions, the Russian oligarchs swarming, redemption at hand.

Ben Is Back has seriousness in mind, but too much showmanship in the making.

Despite a gritty screenplay by Pete Dexter from Kim Wozencraft's factual book, Zanuck's debut feature fails to keep its dramatic sightlines clear.

En route to the harshest, most unremittingly bleak film of his career, Solondz unleashes some of his sharpest commentary on human mortality and regret.

Like the product that inspired it, The Founder is tasty enough while it lasts but never quite fills you up.

Slick, silly romantic thriller, with Dunaway as an insurance investigator falling for McQueen, the property developer led to commit a bank robbery through boredom. Much obvious 'significance' (the pair playing chess; symbolic, see?), much glossy imagery (courtesy of Haskell Wexler) fashionably fragmented into interminable split-screen nonsense, and little of any real interest.

Loach coaxes an endearingly poised performance out of nonprofessional Brannigan, and largely sells these scuffling characters as neither hopeless nor heroic—just terribly human.

Never very popular by comparison with Easy Rider probably because it suggested that dropping out was mere escapism, it has far greater depth and complexity to its curious admixture of feminist tract and pure thriller.

The Last Showgirl may begin – as its ever-romantic heroine exclaims – with a shiny celebration of ‘breasts and rhinestones and joy!’ But in Gia Coppola’s (Palo Alto) sensitive telling, the glitter swiftly disperses to reveal an elegiac meditation on memory and age, femininity and beauty.

The ersatz Parisian atmosphere, circa 1910, is a wonder. As Scatman Crothers has it: 'Everybody's picking up the feline beat, 'cos everything else is ob-so-lete!' Purr-fect.

The Fast and the Furious movies haven't exactly gotten better as they've gone along.