Period charm accounts for much of the mild enjoyment to be had from this sunnily nostalgic adaptation of William Faulkner's novel about an unholy trio - small boy (Vogel), dimwitted young buck (McQueen) and wily black (Crosse) - who 'borrow' a 1905 Winton Flyer and drive triumphantly off to Memphis for three days of illicit pleasure.

It’s a long movie and when its star isn’t on screen and cracking wise, the boundary-pushing shocks and endless self-references wear thin. Still, if you’re the Deadpool fanatic who recently had Reynolds’s name tattooed on his arse, you definitely won’t be grumbling.

Ben Affleck steps back in front of the camera in a weighty but weary comeback drama that feels like catharsis.

A worthy but irretrievably dull homily (based on the novel by Chaim Potok) about the conflict between adolescent friendship - two Jewish boys, one orthodox and Zionist, the other a Hasidic - and filial devotion within the demands of the faith.

The Infiltrator works best when it owns its Miami Vice–esque sizzle: Composer Chris Hajian breaks out the percolating Jan Hammer synthesizers, and the ’80s decadence wafts offscreen like a stink.

This film could have done with a few more mouth beats and unlikely moments of extracurricular celebrity.

Emily Blunt is hypnotically charming in the year's sweetest surprise—a big-hearted contact high.

Deadpan clownishness is The Fairy's raison d'être and its superior mode; when the lovey-doveyness turns cloying and the atrophied message-mongering creeps in, you wish the threesome knew when to keep their traps shut.

Cheesier than a wheel of Stilton and about as edgy, Downton Abbey bows out with a cosy but loveable final instalment that will leave few dry eyes among long-time fans of Julian Fellowes’ British TV thoroughbred.

A somber romance that’s as much about the cultural confluence of city life as it is about the unlikely couple who manage to find each other in it, Maxime Giroux’s Félix and Meira captures the dislocating loneliness of "Lost in Translation" without leaving its characters’ native Montreal.

It’s far from a total failure, however, and although Kokotajlo doesn’t feel entirely at home in the horror genre, he is clearly a talent to be reckoned with.

Eventually runs out of gas--or rather, pedal-power--as the filmmakers grope for how to cap the Beavans’ story.

Nothing here is new, but you can’t call expert craft like this warmed-over. Solidly satisfying with ruthless forward momentum, the film plays like a minor triumph.

The film has the look of unflinching truth, yet it too often feels like a calculated ploy to stoke viewers' liberal-guilty consciences.

When the sing-song Jones and beatifically smiling Streep are allowed to carry the dramatic weight, you can see the raw, tough-love film that Hope Springs wants to be - until Frankel starts trying to be lighthearted and cute, at which point you see the movie's real troubled marriage in full bloom.

I'll respect the studio's wishes to abbreviate all plot description. God knows, they're marketing it like the second coming of "The Crying Game," though the revelations that await Nev are only shocking if you believe P.T. Barnum was really in possession of a genuine Fiji mermaid.

It's one of the few truly major Westerns of the '70s, with a very clear vision of the historical role played by fear and violence in the taming of the wilderness.

Sadly, it collapses dizzily amid a baroque shower of bejewelled costumes, Kenneth Anger style colour overload, mock fairytale purple prose, and pixillated anti-naturalistic performances. Finally pretty tedious.

Albou’s film conjures an irresistibly evocative atmosphere of stifling limitations, as well as a frank view of the female body that vacillates between carnal, sacrificial and beatific. Its caustic beauty is hard to shake.

It all makes for an immersive evocation of time and place, and a more sober, if still stylish, filmmaking flex from Wright. Gone are the trademark crash zooms and whip pans, and the hairpin cuts of his recent action thriller Baby Driver. Gone, too, the comforting cameos and goofy banter of the Pegg and Frost trilogy – in ice-cream parlance, this one is more Twister than Cornetto – and that unmooring from the director’s previous work makes this an especially satisfying trip into the unknown. Like its eerie Soho back alleys, you’re never sure what’s around the next corner.

Snipes and Harrelson bounce off the screen like Michael Jordan, while Shelton and cinematographer Russell Boyd perfectly capture the agile thrills of the game itself. A double-whammy slam-dunker of a movie.

The movie's real asset is Reynolds himself, utilizing his comedy chops for unexpected levity.

What does resonate is how the film captures McCartney in laid-back ambassador mode, walking around in midtown and turning big names into awestruck fanboys.

The somewhat heavy-handed direction and the ultimately two-dimensional characters leave you admiring the workmanship without plucking at the necessary emotional/romantic heart-strings.

Exploitative as this may seem in theory, it works beautifully onscreen, mostly because of Binoche’s radiantly complicated humanity.

Heavy-handed, humourless and patronising.

A likeable but aimless musical which doesn't know what to make of its plot (designed to cash in on the pioneer spirit of Oklahoma) about the Harvey House restaurants which followed the railroad into the West, bringing demure waitresses into the domain of rowdy saloon girls.

The overall effect is not unlike watching a chef de cuisine experimenting in his off-hours; not everything takes, but you still come away with a pleasingly stimulated palate.

Considering its incendiary subject, Curry's approach is disarmingly tame; perhaps reframing the debate in less volatile terms is some kind of lukewarm triumph.

A trio of contrasting personalities, the veterans bring both a mischievous wit and a sense of subdued anger to a familiar comic plotline, and the film achieves a rare balance of laughter and compassion.

No masterpiece, but very engaging.

Once again Schatzberg proves himself a strong director of actors, but keeps the film within the safe confines of semi-sophisticated Adult Entertainment.

Less deadpan spoof than loving act of possession, Black Dynamite near-fully channels the look and feel of its blaxploitation ancestors, warts and all.

Fortunately, Roth himself proves to be a fascinating presence — soft-spoken, sharp and bearing a vague air of melancholy that offsets the surrounding adulation.

Kuhns makes time for political insights, provocative montages of race riots cut with the movie’s hick militia, and the comments of owlish Romero himself, who recounts the shoot like the enthusiastic 27-year-old he was.

The more the story unravels, the more of a sorry mess this feels.

Vaguely redolent of Salvador, only slowed right down to a walking pace, or The Passenger without its seductive sense of place (and Jack Nicholson), The Stars At Noon is a mercurial thing and, as an unsuccessful Denis film, a rare one too.

Viewers familiar with Daniels’s idiosyncratically vulgar work might be disappointed that there’s little here that compares to Nicole Kidman loosing a yellow stream on Zac Efron’s jellyfish stings in "The Paperboy" (2012).

The sincere director, Oliver Schmitz, injects too much movie into his movie; life (above all) would have been enough.

If the film ends up somewhere a little too neat, Comer makes the journey always worthwhile.

Inspiring if straightforward, the film boasts music that makes for a pleasantly innocuous soundtrack to buying Frappuccinos.

Essentially a queer-cabaret-cum-performance-art-spectacle, the Croquettes went from local phenomenon to international sensation, opening up sexual mores in then-repressive Brazil and wowing Paris before their AIDS-fueled downfall.

he wild-eyed Celedón and stealthily empathetic Saavedra introduce a farcical element to this otherwise mournful milieu, but the tonal clashes yield something genuinely cathartic, if also ultimately irresolvable.

Technically cruddy and tiresome in its we’ve-seen-a-lot-of-movies dialogue.

Charlie Victor Romeo would probably work best as a training tool for commercial airline pilots (the play, interestingly, has already been used in this fashion by the Pentagon). In a movie theater for a paying crowd, it’s little more than minimalist snuff.

Made with all the awareness of hindsight, Shampoo offers a sharp sexual satire and a mature statement on both America and Hollywood in 1968.

Like a shaggy dog story operating inside a chase movie. Chinese Bookie is the more insouciant, involuted and unfathomable of the two; the curdled charm of Gazzara's lopsided grin has never been more to the point.

The first half, unfortunately, is poor: the producers (Casablanca Record) have lumbered it with undigested lumps from the company rock catalogue; there is some pretty variable comedy, dreary travelogue footage, and a very ugly use of filters and soft focus. But gradually a much more interesting film takes over.

A no-frills propaganda piece put together by professionals.

Despite the chronological juggling, the film's stylistic debts (a Hitchcock flashback borrowed from Stage Fright, a Bertolucci-esque apartment sequence that could be titled Last Tango in Auschwitz) are simplistic to a fault; they lack the multifaceted suspense and sensuality typified by those directors at their best.

Swooning but shallow.

Although the script (by Faulkner, among others) gets stranded with the usual slightly wooden dialogue considered necessary for ancient times, the story moves along at a stately but never sluggish pace, and is scattered with lovely moments, most notably the grim finale when Collins gets her ironic come-uppance.

Think of it as if it’s an adaptation of good Austen fan fiction. It might not have the quality of the real deal, but it has plenty of the same charms.

For a while it’s a low-key fish-out-of-water comedy (with McDonald’s as one of its many obvious punch lines), then it morphs into a cumbrously sentimental tale of redemption.

One of the more homely Disney animated features, neither hip like The Jungle Book nor (pardon the expression) trippy like Fantasia. We're back in that serene Disney woodland where bright flowers dot heavily shaded glades and snow plops off branches like ice-cream.

The Bay, a real creepfest, joins the suggestive company of eco-terror entries like Hitchcock's "The Birds" and 1979's "Prophecy."

As a take on a very difficult topic, made even more so by current events, this is admirable and handsomely executed, but it’s rather like walking through a museum exhibition: it’s packed with fascinating detail, but doesn’t let you close enough to touch it.

The pomo thrill was already wearing thin a few "Shrek" entries ago; here, the reliance on self-referentiality really risks coming off like yesterday's Purina.

Redford and Segal are both good, parodying their normal images, as the thieves who steal the Sahara Stone from the Brooklyn Museum and spend the rest of the film chasing after it. Like Cops and Robbers it's a lightweight film, but enjoyable nonetheless.

The film captures a few surprising similarities to the West: One dead-eyed club kid says she’s “tired of everything,” while a hopeful young actor seems to be trying out for her own reality show, breaking down in front of her estranged mother. The experiment isn’t more than a slice of life, but at least it’s a generous one.

It isn't until the story reaches its fancifully abstract final passages, where cinema displaces music as Douglas's weapon of choice, that Chase's reverie reveals itself as a particularly exceptional exploration of how art ceases being an idle hobby and becomes an obsessive vocation.

It's all very humorous and engaging, if only for proving that American whodunits don't have to have car chases and brutality; and it has a wicked eye for the vacuity of middle-class good life and what it may conceal. Lots of feelthy girl talk, too.

It plays like one of Linklater’s most intimate gifts, an adult rumination on the tricky subject of patriotism.

Another theatrical metaphor fails to transfer to the screen. This adaptation of Michael Frayn's stage hit undoubtedly has its moments, but will still disappoint those who laughed themselves silly at the original.

A cheap and efficient comic horror movie, it's funniest when its dialogue and characters' behaviour are at their most non sequitur.

Given the film's inability to posit any significant objections - or, for that matter, alternatives - to the turbines, it all feels like so much petty sniping against progress.

Often, Faust plays like a lost cousin to Andrei Tarkovsky’s haunted Stalker (1979), catnip for the slow-and-low crowd. Settle in, because this requires your charity, but you’ll dream it all back up the next night.

So even though the science fair was something your other classmates did while you mastered Pitfall!, the sights in Whiz Kids will no doubt stir you.

The first major motion picture to come out of Congo in decades happens to be one of the best neonoirs from anywhere in recent memory.

Alice Rohrwacher's debut fictional feature is an uncommonly insightful portrait of nascent womanhood, assisted in no small measure by Vianello's disarmingly naturalistic performance.

A '60s-radical alternative to the 'flying glass' action pic prevalent in Hollywood, the film is sustained by a personable ensemble who generously trade off each other rather than grandstand.

The closer this parable inches toward tragedy, the more you can feel the gap between good intentions and generic exotica-grandstanding widening into an unbridgeable chasm.

The script seems to lose interest in its latter stages and Witcher never evinces a depth of insight such that you sit up and take notice.

The real drama in Parnassus comes from the troupe of sideshow performers, led by a terrifically morbid Christopher Plummer.

The usually distinctive filmmaker – Black Swan, The Wrestler, Mother! – is in unflashy form for this solid, starry but not very memorable thriller about one man’s very bad night.

Unfortunately, he's retained his previous work's touristy mondo italiano! vibe, all whimsical tunes and postcard scenery, while piling on enough ogling shots of nubile young women to make Hugh Hefner feel uncomfortable.

The tangential artist interviews and constant lionizing of the star couple meander, but given how museums between the coasts rely on collectors for life support, 50x50 still acts as a provocative call to arms: Those who love art must support it.

If you’re on the hunt for a diverting slice of prestige espionage hokum that comes with a side helping of real history, Operation Mincemeat is a satisfying night at the pictures.

There's lots of volume in these tunes--the soundtrack is killer--and at least everyone gets their rocks off.

There's only one thing worse than a leaden moral fable that tackles issues of forgiveness with sledgehammer contrivances, and that's one that attempts to mask its manipulative corniness with an air of trumped-up gravity.

Reisz's direction is panoramic, with aspirations towards the epic, when it should have been closer in and faster. The result is a highly melodramatic and romantic film, for all the veneer of disillusion, whose weighty statement too often swamps the potentially strong suspense.

An engaging, sharply scripted comedy (Elliott Baker, from his own novel), with Connery oddly but not inaptly cast as a poet driven berserk by the frustrations of wage-earning in New York.

As so often with this director's work, the film is craftsmanlike rather than brilliant, but the performances, Robert Surtees' lush camerawork, and Mulligan's solid psychological insights make for thoughtful, sometimes even chilling, entertainment.

How Göran and his new charge bond (party boy Sven quickly splits) is the stuff of time-tested trite melodrama.

With elegant fin de siècle sets superbly shot by Harry Stradling, and the ironic Wildean wit understated rather than overplayed, it's that rare thing: a Hollywoodian literary adaptation that both stays faithful and does justice to its source.

The filmmaker’s second feature is an unfortunate sophomore slump, an abrasive and opaque artist-in-crisis story that feels protracted at barely 80 minutes.

Simon Curtis's watchably third-rate biopic doesn't try to sort out truth from fabrication; that would be like "teaching Urdu to a badger," as the short-tempered Olivier - played by a whole-hog-slicing Branagh - might say. Better to print the legend and be done with it.

Perhaps too deliberately charming for its own good, but this adaptation of a Paul Gallico novel about a 16-year-old waif who falls unhappily in love with a carnival magician (Aumont), thus adding to the bitterness of the crippled puppeteer (Ferrer) who loves her from afar, is actually rather delightful, thanks to Caron's touching performance and Walters' delicately stylish direction.

There’s a heart here, but with all the superficial noise, it’s hard to hear it beating.

Jolie must eventually become a comic-book supergirl impervious to explosions and bullets, all the better to set up a "Bourne"-like franchise by the final fade-out.

People who like their comedies pitch black (we're talking midnight, no stars or moon) should get a kick out of the tale of Steven Russell (Carrey).

You’ll learn that karaoke is an effective rehab tool; that their dad, Richard, the film’s real hero, molded his daughters into fierce competitors; and that Venus and Serena actually do love each other. Anyone looking for deeper insights than that or into what really makes this twosome tick will find themselves at a real disadvantage.

The "bumpkins are people too" message will certainly please the Appalachian Anti-Defamation League; midnight-movie fans, however, will recognize that this mess misses the mark by a country mile.

By the time Nick decides to have an emotionally purgative yard sale-the primary holdover from the short story-all the adult ambiguities have been traded in for facile Indiewood profundities.

The movie might very well have come off as a too-clinical experiment if it weren't for Leo, who maintains a rivetingly mysterious aura even as her character's behavior becomes increasingly bizarre.

Saving Mr. Banks turns Travers’s tense collaboration with Walt and his team of Imagineers into — naturally — a schmaltzy journey of closure, climaxing in a teary screening of the finished musical.

Sally Hawkins cruises into her new movie the same way she did her breakthrough, "Happy-Go-Lucky."

You feel for the potential Wesleyan parent who asks an administrator if his daughter is going to have to move home after graduating: His question is met with an uneasy pause. Crucial stuff.