It’s Shannon’s slow, steady world of hurt that makes the film watchable.

Like its predecessor Koyaanisqatsi, Reggio's wordless eco-doc is visually stunning, but undermined by a fairly serious flaw.

A grippingly violent parable, a touching, tragic romance and – thanks to legendary cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond and an unprecedented attention to historical detail – quite simply one of the most beautiful, immersive films ever made.

Encounter has a whole lot of heart and takes a sensitive approach to PTSD that is underscored by a cultural tension that comes to a head in its high-octane, action-packed final act.

There’s little that can be done with material wrung of its complications to accommodate an ultimately life-affirming, it-all-works-out agenda.

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.

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

The Fifth Generation filmmaker has aced such recipes before (e.g. The Emperor and the Assassin); this time, both the spectacular and the human elements have apparently been offered to the gods.

Robustly entertaining.

Kari Skogland’s flashy yet dead-on-arrival drama turns Belfast’s backstreet battlefields into music-video backgrounds.

The action here is visceral and slickly handled, especially in the kind of expository opening credits sequence that Snyder is a master of (see also: Watchmen), but the patter is perfunctory and there's little grab to hold onto in this cadre of underdeveloped expendables as they negotiate the Vegas Strip, hotel corridors and the odd dull family dispute. Aliens is also a showcase for the kind of cut-to-the-bone editing Army of the Dead could have really done with. The zombies are fast here; the pacing definitely isn’t.

How I Live Now goes to that nuclear nightmare, and Ronan, who can’t hide her smarts even when the role isn’t as good as the one she had in "Atonement," makes a feast of the journey.

While his film is engaging enough when covering curiosities like a funeral directors' convention, the fact that it lacks an authorial voice of its own is a dealbreaker.

As a thriller it's a bit soft, as sci-fi it's a bit simple.

Bad Words soars in the bits of riotously offensive chitchat between Guy and a young Indian hopeful (Rohan Chand); it wobbles in plot developments involving the effortlessly starchy Allison Janney as the contest’s “queen bee”; and it splats in the I’m-secretly-hurting conclusion.

This writer-director still has some evolving to do.

The Fourth War may have been conceived as the thinking person's Rambo, but in the event it isn't a patch on First Blood; for a simple story, it's quite a mess, the very dubious voice-over hardly clarifying a clumsy sense of chronology.

The 3-D performance footage is impressively lavish, though the film's unending idolization of the amiable singer will quickly exhaust all but the most devoted fans.

Unsatisfactory both for fans of star-studded prison escape dramas and for football fans hoping to see cunningly devised tactics from Pele and his squad of internationals.

Zippy and saturated with soft-core nudity, The Look of Love isn’t hard to watch, especially when statuesque Tamsin Egerton enters the picture as a redheaded dancer who captures Raymond’s heart.

The performances are sound, but for much of the time the film seems undecided whether it's a mystery, a romance, a social document or an art movie. And that indecision is fatal, stifling the life out of what might have been an effective little thriller.

The unintentional hilarity of the whole enterprise - especially when Albert attempts to romance one of the hotel's naive employees (Wasikowska) - at least keeps you engaged, as does the scene-by-scene suspense over which pitiably wide-eyed expression Close will choose to use next. Hopefully, she's practicing her gracious-loser face for awards season.

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.

No one's asking for a somber account of simian life, but perhaps Buzz Lightyear could keep quiet for a bit and let the monkey business speak for itself.

Like a "Raging Bull" that’s been clocked one too many times in the head, Antoine Fuqua’s blood-simple boxing melodrama is so loaded with obviousness, it gets more pained groans from the audience than the guys in the ring.

If Instant Family manages to land more emotional and amusing moments than it deserves to, that’s thanks in large part to two of the performances.

Occasionally, the dizzying filmmaking style, a mix of practical stunt work and invisible VFX, feels like a video-game cutscene. More often, it just sucks the air from your lungs. The ending gestures pretty firmly at another sequel to come. It’ll have a tough job upping the ante on this.

It's diminishing returns for a horror sequel that grinds the original premise into the ground while shirking on scares.