As with many young-adult book-to-film series, Beautiful Creatures plays like an illustrated compendium of scenes from the novel, as opposed to a finely tuned narrative all its own.

The film works to inform as well as to preserve an air of mystery around Bernstein, an apt approach that occasionally slips into the willfully opaque. By all accounts, this secretly important man was tough to live with, but not too hard to love or admire.

The acting is a bubbling fondue of clashing styles.

Mediocre action pulp.

Based on a French play (La Cuisine des Anges by Albert Husson), it's static and laden with leaden talk, with nothing to interest the eye as recompense.

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.

Notwithstanding Brown's occasional half-baked critical comment about the sport's corporatization, the film ends up as a cliquish circle jerk that flatters those in the know and leaves neophytes little to mull over.

It's a treat to see the double-barrelled menace of Woods and Madsen together at last.

There are few traces of irony, intended fun, or Casanova-style exoticism here: the director may intened a feminist Visconti, but he ends up with a Zalman King Red Shoe Diary crossed with a Dick Lester Dumas adaptation.

The film cuts with such precision that there's scarcely any room to breathe; it's the rare thriller that is perhaps too tightly structured.

Everyone in this movie - adapted from a flummery stage comedy by Hugh and Margaret Williams - stands around like mannequins in Bond Street stores.

There are powerful and enlightening scenes, and there’s a catchy energy to the battlefield action. But the immediacy and credibility of the women’s mission feels compromised by one-too-many corny moments, unconvincing dialogue and a sense of uncertainty on Husson’s part over whether she wants to take a poetic or realist approach to her tale.

Across 146 minutes, the film does its best to cram in every detail on the pop singer and actor (played by Naomi Ackie) and her meteoric ascent from the gospel choir to the Superbowl. Such a tack normally spells only the most surface level engagement with the subject. Unfortunately for this biopic, it follows suit.

Only Streisand's second movie, but already (as co-star Matthau grumbled) she was hogging the screen. The trouble is that there isn't much to hog in this elephant which gave Star! a helping hoof in burying the Hollywood musical.

The badly miscalculated meat of the film is an endless parade of to-camera addresses by performers such as Lindsay Lohan, Viola Davis and Uma Thurman, all reading clumsily from Monroe's recently discovered letters and journal entries as if it were final-exam time at the Actors Studio.

The resolute Greyeyes and the always-brilliant Chastain chart their respective characters with real chemistry, and White captures the pair’s brewing romantic tension. For underscoring the brief but beautiful optimism of two ill-fated outliers, her woman comes out ahead.

The mix of comedy, '90s sensibility, and swashbuckling action is more hit than miss, even if the overall effect is rather slapdash. Spirited, irreverent stuff, but not for those who like their myths kept sacred.

Dedicating a movie to John Hughes doesn't equal capturing the master's ear for the universality of adolescent angst.

This fun, pacy addition to the dino disaster franchise doesn’t do much that’s particularly new – though what it does, it does with a fair whack of panache.

Moodysson hasn’t exactly descended to "Babel"-level pabulum with Mammoth, his first foray into English; these characters are too fascinatingly thorny, and he still has a supple way with a pulse-throbbing dance tune.

Luisito (Perez) is the only vegetarian butcher working in the Dominican Republic-which may, alas, be the only original aspect of this well-intentioned, well-worn revenge saga.

A better movie would have explored Foster's way-of-the-future objectives with more beyond-the-hype insight and less Zen-master bullshit.

Problems arise from an uncharacteristically loose structure, which frequently brings the movie to the brink of narrative collapse; Craven's visual flair and enthusiastic pacing nevertheless deliver ample (if sometimes frustrating) rewards.

William Goldman, in his first solo script credit, plays knowing games with the Chandlerish conventions, while director Smight pumps up the pace and tags along with the allusive casting of Bacall. Enjoyable performances throughout.

Low key and, despite the music, rather likeable.

Although one may mourn the lost opportunity to say something about the Stones other than that they are twenty years older than they were twenty years ago (cue 'Time Is on My Side'), a Stones concert is still worthwhile entertainment.

Filmed in the usual crisp AIP style, with dazzling sunlight and ominous shadows.

It has a kernel of raw torment and an unforgiving streak that hints at still-unreconciled wounds, too. It’s not the best film of the year, but it’s definitely one of the most personal.