Once the sharp, clever satire gives way to what feels like a special must-see-TV episode, the movie’s promise slowly deflates.

Grab your nan, put the kettle on and enjoy some exceedingly fine thesps hamming it up royally.

For all its timeliness, the movie works best when it’s echoing the 15-year-old The Rules of Attraction, upping the vapidity of Ingrid’s prey.

Bertrand Bonello’s sci-fi epic-cum-period-romance-cum-stalker-thriller is absolutely teeming with ideas. That they don’t all come together in an entirely convincing way doesn’t spoil the overall effect of something thought-provoking, very handsomely made, and appealingly weird.

The movie’s not especially urgent or inventive, but it has small moments of grace.

Despite some rather silly dialogue, scripted by the usually reliable Donald Ogden Stewart from a French play, Cukor's civilised handling of the actors and his often expressionist visuals lend credence to the tale, with atmosphere thick and juicy enough to cut with a knife.

An experienced SNL staff writer might have infused the script’s basic nostalgia with deeper knowledge. But when Reitman does take chances, it’s an exhilarating success.

This stilted but oddly compelling Milwaukee-based throwback to Me Decade cheapies pays homage to the entire spectrum of '70s exploitation cinema, from the mucky Super-8 to the copious nudity.

Wenders’s reverent enthusiasm for his subject is evident throughout the film, and he details every chapter of Salgado’s life with an acolyte’s inability to separate the wheat from the chaff.

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.

It doesn’t have the balls to be ‘McHarold and Maude’, but it does deliver an engaging, prettily scored (Debbie Wiseman), likeable warning about the dangers of wasting your life.

Godland is every bit as striking and otherworldly as you would expect a story inspired by a collection of long-lost wet plate photographs to be. It’s tailor-made for those who enjoy sitting by the window and watching the snow fall, but less so for those who can’t wait for the grit van to come and melt it all away.

Prince Avalanche — Green has admitted that the unrelated title came to him in a dream — evaporates after a while, although it’s never less than quizzical and charming.

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

The horror-lite element gives it a boost, with Branagh’s direction conjuring up a few jumps, but this gently entertaining mystery could have used far more scares. If he’d gone the full leering Hammer Horror, rather than tastefully occult, this could have been a scream.

Alexei Kaleina and Craig Macneill's proudly minimalist affair favors ambiguity over soap-operatics, evoking the inescapable heartache of a loss so great, it cannot be uttered.

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.

This may be terrifying news to Rob Zombie fans, but after years mining the 1970s for gunky shock moments, the musician-turned-filmmaker has emerged as an unusually sensitive director of actors.

Fellag does for the film what his Lazhar does for the pupils: He's soothing and entrancingly enigmatic enough to keep us fixed to our seats.

Yuzna and fx maestro Steve Johnson put human flesh on the plot's bare bones, without ever losing sight of the central offbeat romance.

The movie will make you tap your toes; don't expect much for your head or your heartstrings.

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

The visually icy Disobedience lacks the absorbing emotional pull of the filmmaker’s best but packs a rare kind of generosity in its attentiveness to complex customs, navigated without judgment.

It’s frenetic, brashly executed and so full of shooting, you’ll stagger away with tinnitus.

For a sci-fi indie of vast ambition but limited means, Coherence does a sterling job with coherence.

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

Unfortunately, this austere allegory for the difficult process by which kids start to think for themselves only hints at the turbulence of its characters, who are kept at too far a remove for us to feel their growing pains.

Even with its cramp-preventing intermission, Occupied City’s epic runtime doesn’t deliver the same accretion of emotional power that makes, say, Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour Holocaust doc, Shoah, so great. Instead, it begins to open itself up to monotony and worse, glibness.

Getting old's a bitch. But the long-in-the-tooth quintet (Chaplin, Fonda, Guy Bedos, Claude Rich and Pierre Richard) at the center of Stéphane Robelin's featherweight French comedy has it all figured out.

Keanu Reeves’s five-years-in-the-making directorial debut won’t dispel the notion that his acting range begins and ends with monotonous recitations of “whoa.” But this wuxia does establish him as a deft helmer of cinematic combat.

Treat Benedetta as a pile-up of shallow pleasures undercut with a sardonic wink and some fairly obvious comments on power and corruption, and there’s fun to be had. Look for any deeper logic and you’ll be disappointed.

Yes, Friendship does feel in many ways like an expanded I Think You Should Leave sketch built on bizarro absurdism and a waterfall of exacerbating circumstances. To his credit, though, DeYoung – a TV director making his feature debut – does take advantage of the opportunity in some satisfying ways.

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.

It’s an absorbing, prickly tale, which Bhalla doesn’t tell as coherently as he could have — oddly fitting, considering this is a story about frustrated ambitions and unfulfilled potential.

The film works best during its (too-brief) getting-to-know-you section, which balances humor against snarly danger.

It's a film of unrelieved blackness, from the seedy photographer who snaps his junkie wife cowering in the bath to homicidal babies, from mongol child at a petrol station to Kennedy's brutal sergeant. It's all the more absurdly fatalistic for refusing to draw political, moral or social conclusions.

After the story takes a cloyingly sentimental turn, this lean-and-mean thriller becomes bathetically bloated. Just a few spokes short of a wheel, guys.

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.

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.

You'd follow these two anywhere - even down a long, winding and perilously close-to-pointless road.

It's a strong theme, unfortunately undercut by faulty pacing and odd lapses in the tension. Still worth seeing for its latently political story and its gory special effects.

Resident turned filmmaker Ryan McGarry sometimes displays shrewd instincts for hardheaded vérité — there’s compelling stuff here, even if you shear away his occasional stabs at issues of bureaucratic overcrowding and corporate cost-cutting at the expense of intimacy.

Greengrass’s heart lies in exploring the ways a nation processes such a horrific, unexpected event, but Breivik’s odious ideas also get a comprehensive airing along the way. It makes for an uncomfortable, challenging watch.

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

Farmiga persuades as a kooky monster of a matriarch, while Javier is an ideal vessel for Duchovny's laconic line readings (he's grown into an even more deadpan Bill Murray). Goats may cover an all-too-familiar terrain, but at least it grazes it well.

With so many ideas to work with, why does Bell infantilize her elsewhere-confident main character as yet another disheveled woman-child?

You can barely stifle a laugh, and the way Wright and Watts deliver rote, morally searching dialogue with deer-in-the-headlights stoicism (“We’ve crossed a line,” Lil blankly notes) doesn’t help matters.

Although the prevailing tone is comic, there is plenty of grue and gore; the heart stops several times. This may be Craven at his crummiest, but the resulting sick still ranks higher than anything his imitators can come up with.

Isn't in the same class as Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, but still provides plenty of prize pickings for kids, kooks and academics.

Much easier to admire and appreciate than it is to fall head over heels for, The French Dispatch has Wes Anderson in full megamix mode as he packs three short stories into an anthology structure that bubbles with flamboyance and ideas, before keeling over under the weight of own narrative cargo.

With his sophomore feature, "Tony Manero" (2008), filmmaker Pablo Larraín gave us both a memorably maniacal main character and a black-joke metaphor about the free-floating psychosis wafting through Pinochet's Chile.

Though there’s no shortage of biographies on the notoriously private writer, no one has had the stones to try making a comprehensive visual documentary on someone as camera-aversive as the Catcher in the Rye author. The effort itself should be applauded.

These filmmakers got halfway there, but Carpenter's genius was about more than just a look.

Visually dull and intriguing in only the most generic sense, but still a showcase for the twin talents of Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie.

Obviously made on a TV budget, the plot is weedy, and the film is saved only by some neat stunts and the splendour of the Australian landscape.

Barely over an hour, the sketch feels lovely, unhurried and a bit insignificant. That may be your definition of cinema, but if you've hired a babysitter, this isn't the film for your date night.

If the story were more arresting, and the filmmaking more original, then the notions of post-9/11 assimilation might be more compelling. As it stands, the movie just serves up another warmed-over Ellis Island rehash.

Proving that a comedy’s performers are sometimes more important than its jokes, this remake of Frank Oz’s dreary 2007 British farce of the same name livens up the proceedings by subbing in a comic African-American all-star cast.

Amiable yarn based on the mid-'60s TV series about a growing youngster and an orphan dolphin.

The script is sharply written, while Jewison is a lot more sensitive to the material than he was on that earlier Levinson-Curtin effort, And Justice For All. But though engaging and agreeable, the film is never wildly funny.

This quiet, deliberately paced documentary favors interviews over fly-on-the-wall footage, but one interruption of an on-camera talk by armed soldiers is a potent reminder of how precarious the lives of this population can be, and how the perseverance of its characters represents a strikingly female display of strength.

wWen the filmmaker lines up her characters to confront their respective fears of intimacy, the loosey-goosey vibe clashes with the script’s clunky machinations; like her characters, Shelton doesn’t know what to do when things actually happen.

The School of Rock funnyman flies highest; passion, be it for rare birds or the Yardbirds, is a plumage he wears wonderfully.

No Hollywood film can ever solve the central problem of adapting this book, in that it inevitably does too much of the imagining for you. DuVernay makes a big-hearted go of it, even if she seems slightly dazzled by her own magical mystery tour.

It’s a reasonably diverting piece of work, falling somewhere between the high of "Magic Mike" (2012) and the low of "Haywire" (2011), among his recent efforts.

Hellion aims to cut deep, striking a tone that melds the hysterical moralism of Larry Clark’s Kids (1995) with the coming-of-age melancholy of Mud’s Jeff Nichols (also this film’s executive producer).

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.

If anything distinguishes director Régis Roinsard’s take on well-trod material, it’s his Technicolor-bright widescreen palette (recalling many a late-’50s pillow-talk romance without a hint of snooty irony) and energetically game cast.

And Pattinson? He’s solid enough, but the role seems to neutralise his greatest strengths, stifling his edgy, eccentric charisma under a morose, dutiful shell. He’s just another ever-searching crusader in a shadowy world. Hopefully next time he’ll be able to find the fun.

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.

But the focus is way too far over on the side of personalities. There's scant political revelation: it's less behind-the-scenes than the scenes from a different perspective.

The aural and visual overload that marks most of the director's work is here in spades--few documentaries look and sound so distinctive.

It’s an old cliché about biopics that if the story wasn’t true, you probably wouldn’t believe it. The Keeper takes it a step further: you know it’s true and you still don’t believe it.

This is a more rugged affair than, say, "Frozen," and any admirers of that film might find themselves yearning for a few more songs and a little less testosterone.

The Irving Berlin score, including 'Easter Parade' and 'Let's Say It with Firecrackers' (which gives Fred his best moment) makes up for the thin story about a love triangle at the eponymous vacation resort.

Some great laughs, but it isn't hard to see why the film was never released theatrically in Britain: at times it just gets bogged down with over-the-top performances. The ending is great, though.

The Rover is almost worth it for the coiled central performance of Guy Pearce, who outfuries Mel Gibson with his pinpoint shotgun skills and monomaniacal quest.

Not a patch on the original but amusing enough none the less.

No performances stand out, which is a shame given Affleck's track record with actors. Ultimately, it comes down to a chase to the airport, with a scary Revolutionary Guardsman at the gate.

Ashby forever treads the thin line between whimsy and absurdity and tough sentimentality and black comedy. It is most successful when it keeps to the tone of an insane fairystory set up at the beginning of the movie.

The Best and the Brightest's sharp one-liners and strong cast, especially McDonald's gleefully lecherous performance as an unabashed Republican pervert, help make it a sturdy bit of subculture-tweaking silliness.

The themes are dignity and compromise, freedom and betrayal; if it all gets bogged down occasionally in its macho-violence trip, it's nevertheless very exciting, very witty, and elevated above its action-movie status by Aldrich's deliberate references to Nixon in Albert's characterisation of the warden.

Sellers's performance—as the innocent neuter figure who rises accidentally to political power on the strength of vacant homilies—is remarkable. But Ashby's direction is marred by the same softness that made The Last Detail and Coming Home so morally bland.

While in no way as powerful as Barbara Loden's Wanda, Newman's film none the less captures the quiet desperation of enforced life in sleepytown America.

There's some magic in the grab-bag method, but with all the furious wand-waving, the story itself never gets to cast much of a spell.

Photographed with an alluring sheen that complements the coldly commercial wheelings and dealings of its subjects, Red Obsession fascinatingly reveals how Old World vintner artistry is being shaken up by New World supply and demand.

Messina and Ireland thrive under that gaze, and dismaying affectations aside-the characters go needlessly unnamed - the movie articulates the enduring allure of a love defined, and heightened, by restrictions.

"Rosemary's Baby" it's not, but color us stoked that a Twilight movie even strays into evil-fetus territory.

What starts as a flipped survival tale turns into historical tragisploitation that wallows in its slog of endless suffering.

Though far from Aldrich’s best, it still makes for an amusing and enjoyable romp, with Davis’s schizophrenic ravings deepened by the poignant awareness the director shows of loss, ageing and faded glory.

Whereas Yuen's speciality has always been gonzo, gravity-defying spectacles, now he's spiced his set pieces with plasticine computer-generated flourishes-effectively puncturing the inventive, handmade charm and fluid flurries of artistry that made his classic fight scenes so thrilling.

Burton, as usual, is great on atmosphere and comic timing (these are his weirdest moments since Ed Wood), but less so at reining in an overcomplicated plot and dimly lit action scenes.

For brain-free Friday night viewing, you could do much worse than spend 90 blood-soaked minutes with not-so-gentle Ben.

Until someone delivers the definitive 360-degree chronicle on the populist uprising, this collection of dispatches from the front is the best primer you could hope for.

Walken is particularly alive in a way he's rarely been since "Catch Me if You Can," adding untold shades to Hans's mystery-shrouded past - wait until you see what's under his cravat - while still giving his singularly eccentric line readings.

Then Plame's cover gets blown, and so does the film's; suddenly, the clunky melodrama that had been lurking in the shadows starts hogging the spotlight.

An overall lack of adventurousness negates any genuine sense of surprise, but credit this Indian-themed indie for spicing up a familiar and routine dish with reasonably tasty flavor.

The script gradually falls apart into a mess of philosophical pottage under the whimsically pretentious Tolkien influence. But visually the film remains a sparkling display of fireworks, brilliantly shot and directed.