This is a movie that preaches to its rafters-raising choir.

The result is a soil-under-the-fingernails, forest-bound mindmelter – with bonus pagan chills.

Schrader certainly has his finger on the pulse of the times, and the universally strong performances do ample justice to his sensitive ear for dialogue. But the story meanders, and it echoes Taxi Driver and American Gigolo so closely that Schrader is working less than fresh variations on over-familiar themes. For all the film's conspicuously adult intelligence, it elicits a disappointing sense of déjà vu.

There’s a lot of cinema to admire here. And being reminded of the directorial talents of Affleck—undeniably a more accomplished filmmaker than an actor—is no minor event.

Ceaselessly upbeat and just short of zany, Let My People Go! will bring smiles of recognition to anyone who hasn't seen early Woody Allen in a while.

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.

Wiig comes out a winner, but nothing is worse than watching a perfect marriage of performer and material get so perversely undermined.

Quite a few very funny moments, but one doesn't laugh so much as admire the ingenuity.

The script, partly credited to Lost's Damon Lindelof, is so filled with talky lectures about divinity (and boner plot holes) that you realize, with embarrassment, that Scott, at age 74, wants to join the cosmic company of Terrence Malick. Does he not think that making a drum-tight horror film was ambitious enough?

There is an affection – for the people, for the animals, and for the land – that suffuses Lunana with a warm glow.

It's by some way the best of the killer doll series, and as stylish and witty a horror movie as you could want.

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.

John Wick feels like action manna for its cleanly designed gun-fu sequences—ones you can actually follow—and brutal takedowns. But the revenge plotting is deeply dopey and we shouldn't have to choose one or the other.

The animation is fluid and inventive, balancing action and slapstick with aplomb.

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

If such outré flourishes don't fully lift the story past the limitations of innocence-lost storytelling, they do suggest Ávila is an artist worth keeping an eye on.

Harry Mcqueen keeps the film's emotional temperature in check, and Tucci and Firth do the rest, with sparingly expressive performances.

The Broken Tower feels unique as a young man’s tribute to an adventuresome, doomed soul.

This is hardly a symphony of terror, but it’s still a solidly composed exercise in suspense.

There’s no room for such soul-searching uncertainty with Gibson. After a few rapidly ticked-off minutes of gloom, the mission is clear: Get the sons of bitches, and make ’em pay.

Cribbing from countless Tinseltown efforts, this music-video-cum-perfume-ad is awash in excessively melodramatic flashbacks, car chases and references to the domestic illegal-immigration debate.

The performances are solid, with an excellent Jude Law all inscrutable psychopathy as a younger Vladimir Putin and Alicia Vikander the perfect embodiment of an amoral post-Soviet arrivista, and the chilly world-building works well enough, but there’s a missing ingredient – actual Russians.

It's a tricky thing to pull off in a movie-equal parts talk and rock-but in a way, this mix of cerebral and kinetic is just what LCD strove for over the course of its ten-year life.

The whole phantasmagorical enterprise is so sweetly confident that it just about gets away with its entirely casual approach to believability.

The sheer ambition is still there, but the storytelling rigour – Lasseter’s great forte – is again missing in Elemental, the studio’s latest big-screen offering.

Persuasive sci-fi tech talk, soulful romance and an earnest stab at metaphysics combine in director Mike Cahill's polished second feature.

Though Lee's deft expertise keeps things pacy and (mostly) plausible, the material can't avoid a certain predictability and, in the end, a preachy sentimentality.

It’s a movie that tips toward overkill--even Ronan’s voice is amplified into a weird whisper. More quiet would have helped.

The odor of musty, late-’80s nostalgia may still hover around this already threadbare brand, but you simply don’t see movies that leave both the curious and the fans who truly care this viscerally satisfied anymore.

With greater faith in its material, the movie could have dispensed with its time jumps and saved the reveals for when they matter most.

No matter how predictable his arc is, writer-director Thomas McCarthy (The Station Agent) never loses sight of the difficulties of cashflow and making one's weekly nut. You'll want to give his movie-and his secret weapon, the lovably neurotic Bobby Cannavale, as a recent divorcé hoping to co-coach the team-a pass for sweetness.

Here, though, everyone involved seems above the rom-com conventions they’re satirizing, so anxious to get to each punch line that they let the connective tissue languish. You howl often but quickly forget why.

Ultimately, though, there’s not enough story to fuel a three-hour musical stretched across nearly five hours. What once was brisk and bright becomes a bit of a slog. Fans will be obsessified; everyone else, ossified.

Ed Harris is a performer made for Westerns, and he’s perfectly utilized in debuting director Michael Berry’s middling if still very watchable modern-day oater as Roy.

Baby Done offers a typically Kiwi spin on the we’re-having-a-baby genre, powered by the awkward-girl charms of standup star (and Edinburgh Comedy Award winner) Rose Matafeo.

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.

Editor Marshall Harvey stitches the messy pieces together with considerable panache.

Documentarian Mark N. Hopkins gives us a mature look at the bracing yet very human personalities attracted to crisis.

It's a treat to see the double-barrelled menace of Woods and Madsen together at last.

A troupe of guerrilla performers led by hunky Ryan Guzman stage synchronized routines on Miami's escalators and restaurant tables.

Dank with the effluvia of a proudly unhygienic, sex-obsessed German teen, this frenetic adaptation of Charlotte Roche’s notorious 2008 best-seller is a standing dare to anyone who thinks the movies have gotten too tame.

An engaging study of the disparate characters who are drawn to speak out when the authorities crack the whip.

There’s no escaping the fact that this is a nasty, vicious little film – the climax is startlingly unpleasant. But with its sharp dialogue, beautifully streamlined story and fistful of surprises, the Mel haters are going to have to find another brickbat for now.

The movie skips along episodically; it's not quite as sharp as a war narrative needs to be, even if its nightmarish psychology feels spot-on.

The kids pick up the filmmakers' lyrical slack more often than not, but this ode to the power of verse could really use a redraft.

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.

It's fun intermittently, but a bit of a stretch at two hours, and Matthau's Cockney accent is about as convincing as the rubber sharks. Perhaps the key to understanding what it's about lies in considering Polanski's displacement: of Polish extraction, exiled in Paris, faced with arrest should he return to the US. The only flag he could comfortably wrap himself in was the Jolly Roger.

When the movie is doing its tough-guy-seeking-redemption thing, it’s more than just good.

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.

Densely plotted by director Yuval Adler and Ali Wakad (the former Israeli, the latter Palestinian), this informant crime drama finds admirable complexity in the folds of its shifting allegiances — even if you’ve seen this dynamic done better in movies like "The Departed."

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.

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 bewitching stuff when it doesn’t feel like a waste of invitations.

There still hasn’t been a truly great film based directly on a video game, and the characterisations here are more likely to annoy than delight the hardcore fans, but the jetsetting and sunshine here is a welcome break from more serious action movies, and Holland will just about hold the interest.

Along with the usual streamlining of history, we get a good deal of first-hand emotion and little critical perspective.

Though its insights are slight-the movie feels as delicate and ephemeral as its sleepy winter surroundings - you can't help but admire the overall generousness O'Brien shows to his characters and performers.

Clooney occasionally shows a surer hand: He gets great work from Downton Abbey’s Bonneville — notably in an emotionally charged scene revolving around Michelangelo’s Madonna of Bruges — and has a fine monologue himself, in which Stokes dresses down a high-ranking German commander (a moving encapsulation of the American spirit at its best).

Anderson utilizes slow-motion 3-D to hyperbolic effect while again casting Jovovich as the epitome of badass sexiness.

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.

Audiences with infinite patience and no need for linear storytelling do get an intimate tour of The Anchorage's picturesque island off the coast of Stockholm, its landscapes lensed with loving appreciation. Past that, the experience of sitting through Ulla's daily routines yields little more than a travelogue and a vaguely contemplative vibe.

If you take The Alto Knights on its own terms – as an eccentric but engaging curio – there’s still plenty of fun to be had.

Disney knows how to bewitch a crowd, but the sense that Tangled was made more by corporate mandate than artistic spark remains constant throughout.

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.

Melodrama often risks the ridiculous to achieve the sublime, and though this unabashedly earnest tearjerker doesn’t completely transcend its narrative absurdities, it’s enough of a distinctively odd duck to keep you engaged.

Fortunately, Teegarden and McDonell make up for the hand-me-down plotting with a sweet, unaffected chemistry.

Always effortful and desperate to impress, The Lion King may serve as a virtual substitute for going to the zoo (don’t slide down the Black Mirror cynicism of that idea), but let’s hope it never replaces such outings, nor its 1994 forebear, a passport to something far more sublime.

Apart from one muted action sequence in which the participants try not to wake a sleeping bundle of joy (“Put that baby down,” one of them demands, and the order is obeyed, with a little tucking in), there’s scarce humor here for adults to relish. And Samberg’s characteristic snark has been sanded down to a nub.

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.

Savoca skilfully negotiates the nastiness of the opening scenes: four Marines organise a party, the object of which is to see who can bring along the most unattractive date. She is almost as successful with the potentially maudlin central section, after Phoenix has picked up Taylor, and remorse segues into affection and tenderness.

You never feel the burn in The Skin I Live In, certainly not the way you do in an immortal shocker like "Eyes Without a Face." It's almost as if Almodóvar wanted to reach out into a gory genre, but couldn't do so without wearing prissy gloves.

The sights and sounds are splendid--a lovingly hand-detailed portside city, a touching musical interlude in a windswept field--though they're largely disconnected from the narrative proper.

Capably directed by debut filmmaker Lee Haven Jones, The Feast won’t challenge Midsommar for the modern folk-horror crown. Like a Welshophone episode of Inside No.9 stretched to feature length, it’s more of a sinister little snack than a full-blown feast.

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.

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.

Lively remains impressive throughout, but with plot-driven fare like this, such lapses are a let-down.

Unlike satires that coast on winking self-satisfaction, Anusha Rizvi's debut is both a heartfelt and a genuinely funny skewering of India's convoluted caste-consciousness.

As the film reminds us, this Kentucky city included a world-class philharmonic, one that became the first to actively recruit new works from contemporary composers.

Wachowski is still full of ideas, even if she doesn’t always wrangle them into a strong plot, and there is much to enjoy in this revisit to one of cinema’s most original worlds.

By the Sea is a so-so film, but its meandering stretches of decaying glamour make it about 10 times more interesting than most Oscar bait.

You can't necessarily blame Wahlberg, as his modest performance is the one element that feels truly authentic and heartfelt.

Maggie Smith and Alan Bates successfully personify the cold spirit that Rhys held to be pre-war England, but Adjani manages merely to reduce Marya's fatalism to spinelessness. The direction, intimate yet retaining a sense of distance, is true both to Rhys and to Ivory.

Both Robert and Gus seem defined purely by their eccentric speech patterns, and it takes a while for the duo to register as anything other than acting-exercise conceits. But once the story takes a defiantly odd turn into thriller territory (really an excuse to hole up two talented thespians in a single location), the affected nature of the performances becomes a virtue.

What happens when you haul all the trappings of a genre rooted in post-war cynicism and lay them out raw for modern-day moviegoers? You end up with something like Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, a heady, fleeting pleasure that prioritises craft over moral complexity, with themes of class friction and fraudulent spirituality that would once have landed like haymakers packing much less punch today.

This is obviously a deeply personal subject for Noé, who has spoken about experiencing the fallout of dementia first-hand. But while his film gradually pummels you, it can’t match 2021’s superb dementia chamber piece The Father for impact or insight. As it grinds towards its slightly contrived ending, it does start to feel like rubbernecking.

The 'Nashville' of its day, Grand Hotel's reputation has outgrown its actual quality, and it is now interesting only as an example of the portmanteau style: an interwoven group of contrasting stories allowing a bunch of stars to do their most familiar turns.

The final screen outing for stars Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable, this is a sparky but rather shallow story of emotional frailty in the Nevada desert.

Connoisseurs will thrill to hints of composer Akira Ifukube’s original orchestra motifs or the passing mention of an “oxygen destroyer,” but mourn the lack of political stakes. It’s big dumb fun (a sequel with King Kong is on the horizon), and maybe that’s what these sequels always were.

More interesting as a way station in Eastwood's career than for anything intrinsic to its lawman/vigilante scenario, this was his first American Western after the spaghettis.

Scheinman is so keen to pile on the moral precepts, that the proceedings never really take on an imaginative life of their own. The film does, however, avoid tub-thumping triumphalism and manages better than most Hollywood sports movies to integrate its roster of real-life players within the contrivances of the storyline.

‘Tell It to the Bees’ is a poignant story of a romance that’s crushed before it can take wing, even if it lacks the messiness of Fiona Shaw’s source novel.

Were it not for the hard-R violence and a generous amount of computerized splatter, The Predator would play like a slightly naughtier Independence Day or Armageddon, sci-fi movies that had their squareness dirtied up by pop-culture-riffing jokesters hired to polish up a draft or two.

There’s something deeply moving, almost tragic, about a good man being slowly enveloped by the dark times around him. Munich captures it nicely.

We've been here before; you may now yell "Cut!," print it and call the concept a wrap.

Sweet and sincere.

Though it does have its moments, the result is never as funny as it should be. Williams and Russell, although fine individually, don't spark off each other as a comic duo should, and the ending is so predictable it's almost unexpected.

This demonstration of journalistic integrity sits uneasily beside the unscrupulous methods Travolta deploys in his health club story, and if that's the point, the movie certainly meanders towards it.

This expensive, star-heavy retake on the Arthurian legend works well enough as Hollywood Gothic hokum: Connery is his usual reliable self as the renowned first among equals; Ormond is quite excellent as a thoroughly modern maiden torn between love and duty; and Gere's fearless Lancelot may be about as medieval as a roller disco but still has charm and athleticism (less Lancelot du Lac than Lancelot du Lacquer).

White’s revelation-free, nostalgia massage of a film works the archivals with genuine fondness.