Kudos for stepping outside your comfort zone, sir, even if the result just translates as old-fashioned cultural slumming masked as tear-jerking humanism. Better luck next time.

Unlike its grim predecessor, there are at least two chuckles this time round, a slapstick routine at a Buddhist monastery and a witty Apocalypse Now gag.

Everything is wrapped up a little too neatly by the final act. But with the epidemic of loneliness only growing larger, maybe, every once in a while, a sweet, hopeful ending is exactly what audiences need from cinema. To feel seen. To be reminded that it's going to be okay.

Weaponising the cinema’s Dolby Atmos into a delivery mechanism for frights is a clever ploy that Undertone never maximises.

West holds your interest with material that should feel like a rip-off of The Shining. If this is mere placeholding until something more ambitious comes along for the rising director, it'll do.

As each character veers between confidence and awkwardness, it feels credible but doesn’t dig terribly deep.

The curtain can't come down fast enough.

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?

Sometimes, the debunking is overshadowed by cringe-inducing graphics involving pills with little legs running toward a finish line.

Superbly scored, beautifully designed by Boris Leven to highlight the genre's artificiality, and performed to perfection.

Despite being as pathetically penile-obsessed as any postmillennial comedy, Goon prevails where other sports-film farces fail thanks to Scott's winning, unwinking performance; Liev Schreiber's spot-on turn as a wizened, clock-punching rink assassin; and a pucked-up love of a bloody game.

Beyond the music, Meet Me in the Bathroom makes a compelling study of the whole idea of a ‘scene’: how does it happen, why does it end and what’s it all about?

Cinematographer Pal Ulvik Rokseth’s handheld camera work, some really slick editing and canny use of real news footage, combined with impressive CGI, give it all a pulse-raisingly immersive quality, like a plunge into the underworld.

There’s a kinetic strength to star-in-the-making Aswan Reid’s screen presence as we first glimpse his unnamed ‘new boy’ attempting to throttle the life out of a policeman much bigger than himself.

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

Cry foul, you documentary purists, but narration by Jena Malone and others pulls the gamble off. The film makes its point ingeniously.

Better to think of this as a star vehicle for Farahani, who almost single-handedly carries the film; the range the Iranian actor displays here proves that she’s destined for bigger things. Fans will just have to be patient.

Jean Gentil shares a certain searching quality that marked the best of Bresson's films - and for once, the inevitable analogy with his work seems appropriate.

At least Mark Ping Bing Lee’s luscious cinematography distracts from the shallow storytelling. There are worse things than luxuriating in a two-hour Côte d’Azur travel ad.

One yearns for a routine cops and robbers story, but Grosbard lingers with illusory impartiality over the technical details of the parole system, the problems of finding accommodation and work, and the nastiness of the backyard pool-and-barbecue life-style of riche America.

The movie is never less than involving, but rarely amounts to more than a third-generation grindhouse knockoff.

The Bad Guys 2 gets a bit high on its own supply; there are moments of indulgence. But to a large extent that’s because Perifel and co know they’re onto a good thing.

The material is worthy, but this continuing struggle deserves a more nuanced take.

Closer to a special episode of "Diff’rent Strokes" than to "12 Years a Slave," the movie seems to exist to give its white characters belated moments of conscience.

It’s only hours afterward that Guadagnino’s film will cohere for you and yield its buried treasures: the bonds of secret sorority, the strength of a line of dancers moving like a single organism, the present rippling with the muscle memory of the past. It’s so good, it’s scary.

The survey the film provides is bracing, and there are plenty of talking heads to guide us through the kaleidoscope of imagery. Unfortunately, there’s also a public-television vibe to the proceedings that mutes the overall power. It’s essential info presented with little imagination.

A ridiculously infantile film, one that flatters itself by intimating a deeper comment about suppressed masculinity or romantic passivity.

When the action eventually switches to an Austrian rehab retreat, Dalle gets to make like the best of the Old Hollywood divas and waste away with devastating reserve - an icon quietly, crushingly crashing to earth.

Though it’s culled from 600 hours of footage, Medora feels thin in terms of memorable imagery, and bounces a little too hastily between scenes. But it’s utterly impossible not to pull for these boys, or for a film that sees them as complex individuals rather than sociological evidence.

Thankfully, the 3-D is surprisingly well-used, not just for arterial spray but to accentuate the constraints of the mega-bland, housing-bubble architecture of the characters' neighborhood. That anonymity is the real horror show.

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.

As games go, this one’s a little too easy to outfox, but it’s worth playing if you need a quick diversion, or if the chess moves of The Favourite felt overly vicious—Ready or Not is pure checkers.

Cloud 9's plot is thin, the conflict lazy, and the resolution sudden and unsurprising. That's a shame, because stronger development in the story department might have made this film a minor sensation.

Here, absurdity is piled on absurdity for broadly comic effect: The kidnappers seem aimless, Houellebecq is fairly unbothered, and the world is, presumably, unmoved. Scrappy in style and surely improvised, the film is a lightweight literary in-joke, amusing enough.

A little on the bland side in its two leads, though suave Kruger and sweaty Lloyd compensate with their vivid villainies. Lots of echoes of earlier British Hitchcock, plus the charmingly bizarre encounter with the caravan-load of circus freaks, the charity ball from which there appears to be no exit, and the classic climax atop the Statue of Liberty.

Parallel families, Lassie-style pet dogs who turn hunter-killers, savage Nature: exploitation themes are used to maximum effect, and despite occasional errors, the sense of pace never errs. A heady mix of ironic allegory and seat-edge tension.

While The Whale indulges in hippyish sentiments about the connection between man and beast a little too often, the footage of Luna at play is singular and breathtaking.

Rather than presenting the original Czech version, American distributors have opted to release an English-dubbed edition, headed up by writer, director and actor Vivian Schilling (who voices the kidnapped doll Buttercup) - and the result is a tonal disaster.

This attempted follow-up to Carrie almost entirely lacks its predecessor's narrative thrust and suspense.

The scenes of the film’s exuberant, frizzy-haired protagonist wandering Naples and revisiting old haunts, however, seem much more unfocused—a ramshackle search for insights into the man’s art and life that rarely come. The instruments are in tune, but the rhythm is off.

The film survives cuts to deliver some great, gross, comic book capers. And rock history gets its most intelligent illustration since Mean Streets.

Every trick and technique here, from ingenious match cuts, to split screens and even comic-book cells, works to soup up the storytelling.

Beguilingly sharp at first, but the later stages, with Fonda's toughie reporter tagging along for a story but going all mushy inside, wallow in sentimentality about integrity, ecology and all that jazz.

Best are the film's tender ghostly visitations from Dad, evoked with a minimum of artiness, and the authentic, impoverished locations.

While Araki has finally perfected a shoegazey visual aesthetic that's simultaneously sensual and too cool for school, it's hard not to feel that his reprise of yesterday's greatest snits borders on being stuck in a rut.

There are sweet moments and callbacks to "L’Auberge," including a neat trick in which we see snippets from all three films in the credits, but ultimately Puzzle lacks the magic of its predecessors.

Ridley Scott delivers a spectacular but flavourless French history lesson.

Only Gandolfini comes off as a character as opposed to an effigy, his sad-sack posture and f-it-all unprofessionalism truly capturing the tragedy of a working man with a one-way ticket to 99-percenter hell.

As medium-grade satire (hardly another The Truman Show), Downsizing works fine enough. But it makes a series of wrong moves that throw off the delicate tone, raising the pretension levels to toxic.

Langley has a tough time persuading people to care as much about Richard III as she does, and so does this film.

Far more deserving of the hoopla Mike Figgis received for his single-take, multicamera drama "Timecode" (2000), Finnish visual artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s experimental narrative truly pushes forward the possibilities of split-screen cinema.

One can maintain the energy and patience for donnybrooks and general insanity only so long.

Ruffalo, a master of rumpled befuddlement, finds his signature role here—it can't be overstated how deftly he eases into the tricky creation, a blue-blooded slacker who aches when the world won't hug him back.

Notre-Dame on Fire is really good at conveying an iconic building’s place in a nation’s soul, and the grief that its potential loss can provoke. Most of its symbolism is well-earned and resonant.

Cheadle is so good as the cryptic Davis—coiled to strike, soulful, wounded, boldly outspoken—that you wonder if a more traditionally structured biojazz picture à la Ray or Bird might have been a better showcase for what's obviously a passion project.

Strikingly picturesque locations and a terrific ensemble cast help this tonally inconsistent adaptation of Posy Simmonds's comic series pass by with relative ease, though it leaves a very peculiar aftertaste.

Shepard is perfect as the dumb hick in cowboy gear who likes lassoing the bedpost; and Basinger, as the faded girl in a red dress, brings a curious, tatty dignity to the role, and proves at last that she can act when not required to pout in her underwear. It's the best of Altman's series of theatre adaptations, capturing the original's dreamlike musings on the nature of inherited guilt; what one misses is the sexual ferocity.

The film's greatest moments of comedy spring from the bigamous Moore's escalating panic in the face of keeping two marriages together but separate, culminating in a double delivery in adjacent hospital wards of frantic delirium; Keystone cops meet The Hospital.

Vallée and his lead get high marks for kittenish revisionism. In all other respects, however, this movie is indistinguishable from every other throne-and-scepter biopic to hit the screen.

And then, Robert Duvall appears—or, should I say, insinuates himself out of the muck. Cagily, his character wends his way into the story, played by the one American actor who might best understand the limits of bluster. “It’s foolish to ask for luxuries in times like these,” he mutters in the Duvall twang, the weather and indignity beaten into him, and The Road suddenly feels major.

Sombre and claustrophobic photography, an intelligent script, and Peckinpah's clear understanding of a working platoon of men, are all far removed from the monotonous simplicity of most big-budget war films.

Chastain is a wonder. Her character could give Cersei Lannister in "Game of Thrones" lessons in cunning and wreaking vengeance.

Gideon Koppel's free-form portrait of a Welsh farming community may be the most subtly poetic piece of cine-anthropology to come down the pike in eons.

Family entertainment: cosy, intimate, a touch cloying.

Na keeps pulling the rug out from under us, and his brawny genre exercise doubles nicely as a scream of social anguish, since most of the twisted screwups occur at the hands of bumbling or corrupt cops.

Part meticulous character study, part hyperrealist drama, Trapero’s film is as interested in documenting how such an institution functions on a day-to-day basis as he is in presenting the joys and pains of female cohabitation in such a confined space.

Despite its radical gloss, this over-long, lifeless epic of doomed true love falls into all the predictable traps: excessive pageantry, Monty Python-like peasants, dialogue that drips with sentiment, and even the sight of young lovers running through rural England.

It's an equally insightful and excruciating journey, with our quip-ready protagonist perpetually caught between two modes: eager-to-please caffeinated and near-breakdown frustrated.

The more the veteran actor strives to give Joe a final dose of funereal dignity, the more the film around him seems intent on deep-sixing its MVP.

Rudd’s affable wit makes him a perfect choice for the part. But his performance is uncharacteristically inhibited, as if he felt there was too much at stake to try something new.

One of [Moore's] more hopeful and celebratory efforts.

The Naked Prey inverts many of the conventions of Hollywood films about "the Dark Continent." The warriors are given more character depth than Wilde's protagonist, and the film seems seriously engaged in a debate over whether man is driven by Darwinian brutality or rises above it.

Icky and unsettling, this British horror film crawls under your skin.

Headily atmospheric, Duigan's film takes place in an outback of 'perpetual tumescence'. It's all very DH Lawrence, and consequently a mite predictable. The picture's strongest suit is Duigan's deft, witty touch, and the confident, classy playing (Grant's familiar stuttering Englishman notwithstanding). Duigan seems to lose his sense of irony entirely, however, when it comes to celebrating the standard soft-core coupling.

For a bright and breezy franchise with a talking tree and wise-cracking racoon, it gets unexpectedly bleak.

It's a quietly witty film, much like the dude himself.

Famous fans (Rosanne Cash! Oprah!!!) attest to the book and film's greatness, but at best, this is a half-hour A&E Biography episode padded out to feature-length with forgetful trivia, frustratingly facile history lessons and far too much fawning.

Despite the faux-realist aesthetic (gritty handheld camerawork; all-natural sound), we never feel like much is at stake, though Pistereanu and Condeescu have an easygoing rapport that makes the quieter moments between them affecting.

Ken Adam's sets are inventive, but the special effects are shoddy, the songs instantly forgettable, and the leisurely length an exquisite torture.

The problem is that the film also refuses to move beyond a glacial pace, and its choice to go slow-and-low doesn’t scream art-house aesthetic so much as unintentionally sluggish. For such a small character study, that decision ends up being a doozy of a deal breaker.

Despite the impressive desert locations and an array of tanks (to represent the ills of modern militarism), it's still staged like a student revue. Most notable moments are the garden of Gethsemane scene, where Jewison cuts in leering Pharisees and crucifixion details from Flemish masters to supremely kitschy effect, and the scene of Christ being flogged, shot in sadistic slow motion.

Mona Achache's character study plays like a Gallic version of a Sundance flick, complete with on-the-nose references - Igawa's character is named Mr. Ozu - and just enough offbeat touches to make it seem more deep than it actually is.

The satire becomes more scattershot and strangely cuddlesome (didja know sequestered holy men enjoy socializing and playing sports, just like us?), while the usually great Piccoli-saddled with a ridiculously contrived failed-actor backstory-comes off like an unholy mix of Gérard Depardieu and Robin Williams at their sad-puppiest. That's some cinematic blasphemy, Moretti.

The film has a thesis: hitmen must have psychopathy on their CVs; but even bad guys have souls. It's Roth's tough job to illustrate this, which, in his finest performance to date, he does magnificently.

There are a couple of rocky moments, but the large cast of unknowns go through hell convincingly, and illustrate the randomness of mortality.

St. Vincent has nothing on Rushmore, an obvious forebearer, even though it strains for the same egalitarian spirit of thrown-together family, one that includes a pregnant Russian stripper (Naomi Watts) and a sympathetic but firm Catholic schoolteacher (Chris O’Dowd).

Screenwriter Amanda Silver gleefully exploits parental fears, and skilfully depicts the shifting loyalties, malevolence and escalating paranoia within Claire's household. But as the film progresses, malicious schemes and loony excesses are combined, with Hanson's self-conscious direction rendering one particularly sensational murder even more implausible.

If co-directors Svetlana Zill and Alexis Bloom paint a sometimes confronting picture of the price of ‘free love’, that never tarnishes their subject. You’re left with the sense that she was a butterfly neither the Stones nor any of the other men in her life could ever trap – a fitting epitaph to a mercurial life.

Yes, it’s basically an episode of the show stretched out to two hours, but like the Crawley family silver, it’s so polished you can practically see your face in it.

The film, meanwhile, gives Wahlberg and Ferrell beautiful opportunities to turn their anger-mismanagement-meets-milquetoast act into an absurdist version of Abbott and Costello.

It’s a portrait that’s equal parts shtick and soul — in other words, exactly what "The Love Guru" should have been.

The band ride after half a million's worth of stolen gold so they can turn it in for the 50,000 dollars reward; it's that sort of film. Loads of male camaraderie and big country theme music, plus Ann-Margret riding along as a box-office concession and to get the rest of the cast horny in a U Certificate sort of way.

Less subversive than his earlier work; still hilarious, though. [03 Nov 2004]

There isn't a half decent performance to be found here, and his own daughter in the female lead is particularly awful. Also, a barely credible plot and uneven pacing don't help. Yet Argento's occasionally brilliant camerawork and the evident glee with which he sets about the decapitation scenes make this just about worthwhile.

But for all its flaws, it’s a colossally entertaining ride that never stints on its efforts to wow you with its scale and spectacle.

In Saeed Roustayi’s Woman and Child, a carefully crafted and endlessly gripping drama that follows a Tehran family’s slow disintegration, it’s the supposedly joyous occasion of a marriage proposal that set the wheels of fate in motion.

Directed by Ilya Naishuller (Hardcore Henry), Nobody is a big old nothingburger. It has none of the balletic poise of Wick’s bombastic fight sequences, nor the droll humour that undercut those movies. It’s a real slog.

These scenes make you wish the rest of the movie had similar bite, but Gibney tends toward that dutiful doc style that mixes talking heads and archival clips into a flavorless stew—a bland complement to Fela’s zesty on- and offstage presence.