Steve Tesich's script sometimes smacks of screenwriting classes, but Yates (who worked with Tesich on Breaking Away) easily accommodates these lapses with his unfussy, medium-fast direction. Indeed, he guides his cast around the furniture better than most. The result is an enjoyable entertainment whose box-office failure was thoroughly undeserved.

Derived from assorted Hitchcocks and noir classics, the tortuous storyline of writer-director Dahl's determinedly sordid thriller has its moments, but the whole thing is fatally scuppered by the Kilmer pairing.

Sticking quite happily to the level of parody, it's full of energy, good nature, and the gross-out humour of fairly obvious targets (the tits and bums of a sexploitation trailer; the festering stiff of a TV charity appeal for the dead). The central sketch is an excellent spoof of Enter the Dragon. Great fun for an undemanding night out.

All the way back to "Donnie Darko," Jake Gyllenhaal has had an inchoate sense of evolution about him, a tricky quality that better actors can’t pull off half as well. So it’s hard to say if splitting the star into two doppelgängers — Adam, a mousy college professor, and Anthony, a rising actor with a healthy ego — is the best dramatic plan.

The script starts explaining in embarrassing memory flashes, the echoes of Easy Rider multiply, bits of mysticism and a blind black DJ called Super-Soul are injected, and the woodenness of both direction and Newman's performance becomes increasingly apparent.

For those of us with a love of actorly indulgence, though, the film is a treasure trove, filled with enough molten-gold performances to gild a thousand Oscars.

Wenders' first American movie is no conventional biopic, but a stunningly achieved fiction about the art and mystique of creating fiction.

The second in a proposed self-reflective doc trilogy, director Doug Block's embarrassingly honest follow-up to "51 Birch Street" (2005) is a neurotic, occasionally poignant rumination on his teenage daughter doing just what the title says.

While that mood is ultimately a bit too monotonous to be completely persuasive, a strong cast convincingly captures the many ways in which adulthood proves far more complicated than what's imagined at 18.

When the foot comes off the gas, the cracks become apparent.

The Informer is a film that favours brawn over brains, punching its way through any plot predicaments. A smart hairpin or two would have made it a juicier watch.

The whole film seems dead set against offering up any kind of salaciousness. Like the overly arty "Zoo" and other indie experiments, it misses the point in a disturbing way.

Finely crafted, though, with some marvellous camerawork (Franz Planer), an outstanding performance from Heston, and a vague message about violence predictably underscored by a marathon fist-fight between Peck and Heston. [31 Aug 2005]

The comedy runs out of steam when the jerk makes good, but laugh for laugh it's probably a better investment than "10".

Shallow snapshots don’t diminish the raw emotional potency of this inspiring tale, in which art provides in-need kids with both an escape from daily hardship and a vehicle for restoring confidence in themselves and the future.

Even those that have acquired a taste for Green's rigorous, super-ascetic aesthetic may find this French drama about a starlet (Baldaque) to be almost as bare as it is spare.

It's a sluggish portrait that neither captures nor replicates the dazzle, pacing and polish of an El Bulli meal. Check, please.

Fourth in the series, promisingly reuniting Edwards and Sellers with their respective careers not exactly buoyant since A Shot in the Dark ten years earlier, The Return of the Pink Panther delivers a good deal of that promise, from Richard Williams' ultra-ritzy animated credits to the four or five brilliantly timed set pieces of Clouseau-engineered mayhem.

There are memorable cameos from collaborators (Josh Homme take a bow) and a triumphant coda, but most of all, the rather melancholy sense of a visionary struggling to stay relevant.

The plot is so simple that psychological interest is needed to sustain it, and this would require stronger performances than those Widmark and Monroe give.

Emotionally charged, Last Breath offers a forensic study of cold professionalism in the face of unfolding disaster. It’s deepened, too, by a rich cast of supporting characters, including Lemons’s fiancée in Scotland, the surface crew who recall the fateful night and his teary-eyed dive leader and mentor.

To Cool It's credit and its detriment, the movie establishes that Lomborg quickly made enemies, without spelling out exactly why he's so loathed besides refusing to toe the Green Party line.

Eager to please and easy on the eyes, The Kings of Summer sails right down the middle, safely tacking between sitcom setups and grandiose MGMT-scored montages without forming its own distinctive feel.

Johnson may not quite have Lubitsch's lightness of touch, but he puts an excellent cast through their paces with great verve, and the charm is as potent as ever.

This isn't a film, it's a recording of canned ham-tasty, certainly, but creaky nonetheless.

The film’s conclusion sadly carries the taint of silly schmaltz (‘What kind of magic is this!?’ one character actually says), but like all those non-Disney takes that came before it, this Pan deserves some credit for trying something different.

This is a film equally grounded in realism and empathy, and a reminder that no two people have the same story.

The cheap 'message' of the ending fails to salvage a film that at best is well-meant but misguided, at worst, flashy and garbled.