A drama about the dirty business of gaining power, it needs bared fangs - and more bite.

Director Morley has at least restored something of a soul to her subject.

For the most part this is a pleasing, polished affair, honest enough to steer a compassionate middle course without succumbing to caricature or conservative sentimentality.

In this 'movie-isation' of the justly top-rated Nickelodeon TV cartoon, the producers have left the formula intact, changing little beyond extending the running time, fleshing out the animation (unobtrusively), inserting an 'Indiana Jones' pre-movie sequence, and giving the Pickles family a new member (baby Dylan).

Not all heroes wear capes, some wear swimming caps – and The Swimmers is an empowering reminder that it is a human right to live safely, no matter where you come from.

With its slow-burn pacing and horrifying reveals, Aftermath remains a deeply compelling puzzle.

When violence eventually rears its ugly head again, the effect is as anticlimactic as the movie’s title is misleading. Brief bliss is a red herring; there’s only a lifetime of pain left in such acts’ wakes.

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.

Despite its thorough classiness and pristine presentation, it is not a film you can really warm to – much like its characters.

A financially successful exercise in target-marketing, but not much of a movie.

Carell and Wiig make a splendid vocal pair — Nick and Nora Charles with ice guns and lipstick Tasers.

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.

For a Jacobean-style drama about deadly emotions, the film lacks passion; only in the final half-hour, with Michael Nyman's funereal music supplying a welcome gravity, does it at last exert a stately power.

Neither Dekker's sloppy direction nor the cheapo make-up and effects do justice to the hand-me-down but sporadically lively script. Not the most sophisticated or scary horror film of the year, perhaps, but enjoyable enough in a ramshackle sort of way.

The question remains: Is Mugianis a shaman or sham?

MacFarlane may need to jettison his adolescent belief that cramming every moment with two winks and a zinger exponentially ups the gutbusting, however, before he can hit his real artistic stride.

Unfortunately, the draggy movie is one thing definitively, and that’s exactly like all of Reggio’s other films. His formal devices haven’t changed in 30 years, and the po-faced presentation, once hypnotically strange and cosmic, now feels like an overused gimmick.

While the filmmaker may favor a classic Amerindie art-house style - shaky cameras, peekaboo framing, fill-in-the-gaps storytelling - he doesn't offer much in the way of corresponding insight regarding this social-issue case study, preferring to just construct a bare-bones stage on which his gifted performers can rage.

The mostly dialogue-free middle section is a scare-film master class - and when a becalmed smile does finally cross his lips, it's in the most giddily mordant of circumstances. As Arthur embraces the darkness, so does the darkness embrace us.

More shakily, Payne’s obvious pathology isn’t probed as deeply as it should be. A jaunty musical score smooths over what might have been a tougher profile about an expert liar, to self included.

Excruciatingly embarrassing at the time, it now looks grotesquely pretentious and pathetically out of touch with the realities of the life-styles that it purports to represent.

Not a comfortable film, but humane and savagely beautiful.

This is the same old safe, sappy movie that shows up on TBS every weekend.

The result is overlong and rarely groundbreaking – there are hints of The Truman Show, Edge of Tomorrow and, visually, Inception – and suffers from some obnoxious filmmaking shorthand in its portrayal of other cultures late on.

Imagine "His Girl Friday" crossed with "Armageddon" and you’ll get a sense of the unfortunate disconnect that prevents an enjoyable light entertainment from achieving rom-com nirvana.

When the movie keeps its focus on retribution and Rambo-esque ambushes, however, this slice of Ozploitation doles out grind-house pleasures by the dozens.

The sequences in Micmacs are contorted too: impressive and bendy and aggressively shallow.

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.