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.

The Horse Boy comes off as both an edifying work of advocacy and an invasive home movie.

Some who found his last two films an eccentric romp might end up feeling like some of the unfortunate folk in this – bruised, battered and stuck – but anyone who shares Lanthimos’s pleasure at swatting his humans like flies will surely extract wry pleasure from it.

Carlino's direction doesn't help: he was responsible for the atrocious Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, and The Great Santini suffers from the same triteness, with its Deep South setting and a 'progressive' racial subplot that plunges deep into tear-jerk territory. See it for the acting; wallow in the sentiment.

It’s a CGI-heavy fantasia that will pop your eyeballs, but giddy as it is, it never quite sells its characters or gets much purchase on your emotions.

In short, a very bleak - but very funny - comedy.

Hoffman predictably knocks a familiar role out of the park (and just as unsurprisingly, wrings excellence from his performers) in this rather trivial, downbeat four-hander about a working-class couple trying to connect during a Gotham winter.

The three ghosts of Christmas are wonderful. Elsewhere, Fozzie Bear bears a resemblance to Francis L Sullivan in the David Lean Dickens adaptations, and there's a shop called Micklewhite. As an actor, Kermit can corrugate his forehead vertically. Good fun.

The 'camera' takes a conventionally objective viewpoint, perpetually rolling over rolling countryside, which effectively robs the plot of all its terror and tension. And the bunnies are a crudely drawn, charmless bunch, with the final nail provided by the soundtrack's famous voices, who help turn the film into a radio play.