The opening half-hour is outrageously brilliant, but descends into a pot-boiler of repetitive, if animated, soapbox preaching about the manipulation of punters by the denziens of Madison Avenue and their international brotherhood.

The funny thing? It all works reasonably well, especially if you have a yen for the urbane register of city kids and their amazingly cool parents.

The film’s tendency to wax sentimental occasionally undermines its authority, but you won’t find better behind-the-scenes looks at the era’s mouse-eared power struggles or at the making of modern Disney classics.

Ultimately, Rollerball gets by on its sheer monolithic quality - an abundance of quantity. Despite indifferent direction and dire humour, it is well mounted and photographed.

Admirers of Playtime won't be too disappointed, but for the Tati heretic it's a long, slow haul between the occasional brilliant gag.

There's too much going on here - of a winning, thoughtful nature - to dismiss Josh Radnor's back-to-college romance as the nostalgia bath it mainly is.

While the frequent recourse to talking heads burdens the documentary with a choppy cadence, directors John Haptas and Kristine Samuelson manage to offer moments of great humor.

Too many digital effects ruin the spell of a tactile world of evil objects scheming your demise. But even a mediocre FD is better than more Jigsaw.

The ugly Americanism gets piled on thick - racists, dickwads and ignoramuses, oh my! - but there's a melancholy to this indie's cross-cultural explorations and communication breakdowns that compensates for the broader swipes.

The ideologies underlying Andersson’s oft-astonishing succession of extreme wide-angle, vanishing-point tableaux are a decidedly acquired taste.

The film never finds the right mix of the epic and the intimate - the personal as seen through the 20th century's Euro-geopolitical turmoil - that it aims for.

It's pleasant enough, as a view of small-town Americana, but played very straight.

Tuschi leans too far into an admiring position, and you thirst for some commonsense critique. It's all a bit rich.

Unsane's script is marred by faulty trip wires and too many clichés, but director Steven Soderbergh, the alchemist of American movies, is interested in the plot only as a means to experiment with style.

Kormákur creates some effective jump scares and considerable suspense as the lion stalks its prey with blood-chilling growls one minute and deadly silence the next. The CGI budget can’t always quite match his ambition, however, and perhaps as a result, his timing sometimes seems off.

Al Pacino’s done so much Acting over the last 25 years (hoo-ah), it’s disquieting to see him digging deep again—often with subtlety—into a rich role with hidden depths.

Director Sam Garbarski’s focus occasionally skews narrow, but he does evoke the anxiety of reconciling a strict faith with secular times.

For Gunn, who has injected superhero movies with a winningly irreverence since his R-rated indie Super, ridding the DCEU of its bombast and self-seriousness is a step in right direction. Whether, like his alien hero, he can arrest the march of time and reinvigorate this tired genre is another matter.

A horror movie that should have been a lot more fun.

Despite an occasional burst of self-mocking glibness (mostly via Robbie, who skirts but never quite tilts into the manic-dream-pixie playground), this is a movie that isn’t afraid of sincerity, and it brings a bit of silver-lining energy to our overcast world.

As brought to life in the stentorian tones of Ben Kingsley, the curator comes off like a driven visionary, but his actual efforts aren't dramatized enough. The paintings speak more articulately: doomy, dank colors and oppressive shapes.

Breathtaking imagery competes with a scary lack of human interest in this hypnotic, potentially alienating documentary.

Aguirre is a find—she has none of the precociousness of the typical screen tween—but the movie’s magical-realist elements don’t jibe with the unstudied naturalism of her performance.

While watching a bunch of Nazis get offed in a variety of grisly ways offers some midnight movie thrills, the stakes only get lower and lower.

Classic opening gunfight and first-rate performances from Garner, and from Robards as the tubercular, laconically resigned Doc Holliday. A determinedly old-style Western, made two years before Peckinpah shook things up with The Wild Bunch.

Weaknesses from the original remain, including a mustache-twirling villain straight out of a Bond film (Sharlto Copley) and a Freudian master plan that unravels the more you think about it. Give credit to Lee for staying fresh, even if this feels like slumming.

Despite poor dubbing, this is a more interesting and unusual film than its schlock-horror title and subject matter might suggest. Its pointed attack on exploitative film-making seems somewhat rich in the circumstances, but this is well made, uniquely unpleasant and almost deserving of its huge cult status.

Occasionally flummoxed by the scale of the period canvas, [Dunham] slathers too many somewhat shapeless scenes in Carter Burwell’s incessantly cheery a capella score, and gets stuck in a plodding pace that makes the movie seem longer than it actually is. The flaws though, don’t stop us getting caught up in Catherine’s world, and it’s refreshing to encounter a medieval story which eschews savagery for a humane generosity sure to spur many useful parent-child conversations.

Ron Howard has come through with a frisky space caper that zips along like a speeder on a bed of air. It’s far from perfect, but it’s much better than it has any right to be.

The film's sure-to-be-brief theatrical release is a mere stopover on the way to basic-cable eternity.

It’s a pungent articulation of American chaos. The problem is that it’s not telling us much that we don’t already know.

First-time director Yuzna is happier with the sly humour and clever plot shifts than with the appropriately iconic but sometimes dramatically unconvincing cast. He nevertheless generates a compelling sense of paranoid unease, and shifts into F/X overdrive for an unforgettable horror finale.

While veteran director Fernando Trueba (Belle Epoque) and writer Jean-Claude Carrière don’t bring much novelty to the May-December/muse-artist/naked-clothed cliché, they do imbue the material with genuine feeling—exploring the melancholy of waning days and a defiantly naive belief in artistic transcendence.

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

Apart from the devastating material itself, some of Lapa’s aesthetic choices are extremely off-putting.

Diplomacy’s origins as a play (written by Cyril Gely and starring the same actors) are always evident. Despite Schlöndorff’s attempts to give the movie some pop through widescreen lensing and noirish lighting, it’s a visually staid affair—very “filmed theater.” Fortunately, both Arestrup and Dussolier are captivating presences.

The film’s final moments mix compassion and vengeance to create something genuinely surprising, and if Cronin ultimately pulls a few punches in his body count, chances are you’ll be too traumatised by all the gore to notice.

Split trots out many of Shyamalan’s pet moves (it’s amazing how well we know this filmmaker), including his tendency to infuse genre nonsense with the deeper trauma of child abuse.

Bold performance or not, you can see history weighing heavily on Elba’s shoulders (in later scenes as an older man, you can see the makeup, too).

Antal and his performers’ pure B-movie esprit is undeniable.

Combining the knowingly arch style of Abbas Kiarostami (whose "Certified Copy" towers over and belittles this film) with the didactically educational passion of your favorite art professor, La Sapienza alternately feels like a self-reflexive love story or a haunted history lesson—its best scenes play like both.

If nothing else, Ruedi Gerber’s celebratory portrait of Anna Halprin--a postmodern-dance pioneer and Gerber’s former teacher--is a fascinating testimonial to the healing, age-defying powers of both her art and artistry.

If the pay-off aims for the gut and misses, the journey to that point provides a searing microcosm of a corrupt and degrading system.

It’s often enthralling – especially with Murphy at its heart – though rarely explosive.

An uneven but fascinating spectacle.

There’s more than enough here to hope that Cronenberg still has a masterpiece or two yet to be emerge from within.

There's something of a soft shoe shuffle to avoid treading on national sensibilities. But the climax, in particular, manages to be more than just a shoot-out, with Fleischer's intelligent direction generating a real feeling of chaos and apocalypse.

Simply skip the first part entirely: "Killer Instinct" bulges with a disconnected jumble of nightclub attacks and fence-clipping escapes you've seen better elsewhere. Yet a tide change happens with the superior Public Enemy No. 1, which takes the subject's raging ego as its cue.

The first ten minutes of Michael Mann's ’50s-set Ferrari offer a wordlessly kinetic ode to industry: glossy racecars speed across open Italian tracks, stately trains glide into stations packed with anticipation, bedside phones jangle off hooks and onto nerves. But then the dialogue begins, and this carefully engineered movie starts its downshift into neutral.

Tony Scott almost wins us over with this fun thrill ride.

Spring isn’t coy about the fact that Louise is harboring a dark secret, and the film’s appeal is rooted in its refreshing eagerness to focus on aspects that most monster movies would think too human.

It’s an adoring portrait — almost cloyingly so — with an emotional soundtrack that grates a little.

Imagine "Goodfellas" without much in the way of stakes, and you’ll get Clint Eastwood’s pleasingly square and forgettable adaptation of the Tony-feted 2006 jukebox musical.

Thelma is neither as funny nor as Marmite-y as Little Miss Sunshine, a kindred spirit in the quirky indie realm, but its light shines in myriad little character beats.

It exists in fits and starts: a Blade Runner–esque moment of rainy contemplation on a hotel balcony; some weird sexual tension with a lizard girl (statuesque Svetlana Khodchenkova) who steals away Wolverine’s healing powers.

The results of this technological bonanza are pretty mixed.

The quiet, delicately observed slapstick here works with far more hits than misses, although in comparison with, say, Keaton, Tati's cold detachment from his characters seems to result in a decided lack of insight into human behaviour.

New director Steve Caple Jr (Creed II) isn’t as slick a director as Michael Bay – it’s sometimes hard to orient yourself in his larger battles – but he’s efficient and can land some solid gags. It feels generally similar in tone to Bumblebee, by far the most fun Transformers movie.

A sumptuous romantic epic that's too polished for its own good.

It's a winning farce, if one that's far too broad.

Anderson makes often-inspiring use of the 3-D effects.

There's too much beauty and ballast in the movie's early stages to dismiss Ceylan's cerebral cop drama, and too much genuine banality in its latter acts to justify a sluggish slouch into the shallow end.

Call it "Brokeback Talmud"--not just for its taboo-busting depiction of a gay affair between Orthodox Israelis, but because it adopts Ang Lee’s slow-burn seriousness almost to a fault.

The action is largely routine and the dialogue rarely more than functional, but DeMonaco, marshalling the franchise’s best production values yet, shrewdly taps into the angry zeitgeist; his vision of an America where the citizens are encouraged to express their basest emotions is more relevant than ever.

Now, with this underwhelming sequel, Spain proves it can stand toe to toe with any nation in the manufacture of unnecessary follow-ups.

If you see only one Sono film, check out this flick; you will have then seen them all.

The movie’s ideas run out quickly, but De Niro is easygoing, and The Intern is indulgent good fun. Just don’t go in expecting nutrition.

The film wants to be inspiring, when it might have been cosmic-a far greater ambition. Tossing boats and dreamers, the huge waves perform beautifully.

It's more a summarizing project than an act of investigative journalism or a revelatory indictment.

Though Lemmons’s parable-like intentions are clear, almost every beat of Langston’s tale, with its absent father figures and heated gun-pointing melodrama, rings false — hardly a fitting contemporary complement to the Greatest Story Ever Told.

The sets, costumes (by Cecil Beaton), photography, and Hermes Pan's choreography are all sumptuously impressive, and Harrison makes a fine, arrogant Professor Higgins; but Hepburn is clearly awkward as the Cockney Eliza in the first half, and in general the adaptation is a little too reverential to really come alive.

There’s a directness and swift pace to the first hour or so that works on an elemental level, and the final act is a delirious sugar rush of city-smashing spectacle (in Tokyo, of course, which has been evacuated to avoid any pesky collateral damage), delivering precisely the goods the movie promises.

The filmmaker strikes gold in her varied selection of defectors, especially the military man fed up with the myopic chain of command.

Henry Hobson’s zombie movie does for coping with terminal illness what "Dawn of the Dead" did for consumerism, the difference here being that Hobson isn’t interested in satire, only sadness. Oh, and he’s got Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The Roses gets off to an enjoyable start, but like the marriage at its centre, the novelty wears off.

If Last Ride leans heavily on fugitive-life lyricism, it benefits from an incredible father-son chemistry between Weaving and Russell-one that makes the movie's inexorable drive toward tragedy that much more gut-wrenching.

Even with its two A-list stars as jet boosters, Fly Me To The Moon’s bloated runtime and messy plotting mean that it doesn’t quite make it beyond the Kármán line. Then again, the art of the formulaic romcom isn’t rocket science. Houston, we have a likeable, if somewhat forgettable romcom – and that’s okay.

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.

Part meditative exploration of grief in the wake of the sudden loss of her father, part exhaustive detailing of the process of training a complicated and challenging creature, the film adaptation hews closely to the same description.

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.

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.

Thanks to Field's no-nonsense performance, this potentially maudlin scenario is briskly handled...With all the male characters kept strictly functional, it makes a shameless bid for your heart, aiming to have you smiling one moment, sniffling the next.

Flimsy dialogue and fickle characters undercut the weighty historical demons in this fractured family portrait of three generations of men dealing with their emotional scars.

This is one case where there’s more life in the morgue than out.

Only a periodic focus on the troubled backstory of the team’s coach, American cyclist Jock Boyer, strikes the wrong note, distracting from a far more compelling tale.

It’s hampered by a pedestrian script and an improbable ending, but always catches fire when the supercharged Law is on screen.

As a chronicle of grief and passion, however, the film is perilously close to being an exercise in tactile but touchy-feely passive-aggression.

LaMarque foregrounds her scenario’s awkwardness—it never quite feels like a comedy—and the pair of male suitors she brings in (Jake Johnson and Ron Livingston) are, refreshingly, as unfixed as her main character. But you still wish Kazan had more to work with.

Looks like a throwaway Eastwood vehicle, through which he drifts as the older partner, allowing Jeff Bridges to strike most of the sparks and steal the movie as his good-natured sidekick.

Unlike the clothes, though, the film is shapeless, running at its subject from all directions but never quite reaching its core.

Gibson simply turns his signature righteous rage into a crushing inward sorrow-Sad Max?-and Foster boldly plays everything straight, rendering her actor's unnerving turn to mania (and a pitch-black third act) with zero tongue-in-cheek.

There are lovely moments – the Carpathian landscapes are stunning, Kinski’s performance is compellingly vile, and it ends with a stirringly weird, Fellini-esque plague festival. But some of Herzog’s choices are simply confounding: Isabelle Adjani has nothing to do except look pale and worried, Walter Ladengast’s Van Helsing is so decrepit as to border on pastiche, and there’s a grey, plodding quality to the film which sidesteps oppressive, doom-laden inevitability and goes straight to slightly dull.

The people of Downton Abbey have never been relatable, but they’re really pushing it this time.

Playing smarter and smoother than the plot, Cisneros uncorks an antimacho performance that deviates from type. His unconventional hero is worthy of a more original treatment.

Unknown is probably the movie "The Tourist" wanted to be, if it had a pulse. Its sheer momentum makes Neeson and Kruger more attractive than even Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie.

Schepisi's matter-of-fact direction and the rather undernourished screenplay don't mine much beyond the lousiness of the press and the unknowableness of the victims, but Streep (the best thing she has done in ages) carries it along.

A lively black comedy, surprisingly stylishly directed by DeVito (his début), it thankfully soft-pedals on the hysteria front to concentrate on verbal non-sequiturs and quirky characterisation. If it all gets a little soft-centred towards the end, there's more than enough vitality and invention to be going on with.

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.