Unfortunately, its 39 minutes unfold in such motor-mouthed haste, it feels like a dad belting through a bedtime story while the football’s on downstairs.

The Tree of Life enthralls right from the start.

Wei is magnetic as the would-be killer who uses her patchy Korean as an additional smokescreen to manoeuvre behind. She ties the detective in knots, a shapeshifter whose true nature is beguilingly unclear.

Spielberg gets the chance to do something he’s never done before and make a miniature high-school film full of giddy subversions and emotional truths.

It is a spectacular achievement hung on a remarkable performance by Savage. Like Barton’s startling artistic vision, Blaze is a masterpiece.

The film reeks of the authentic stuff of jazz, smoky with atmosphere and all as blue as a Gauloise packet.

Stripped to a minimum of editorializing (but, like "The Hurt Locker," flush with sympathy), this Afghanistan-shot war documentary takes its cues from the unblinking style of cinema verité.

The level of brainwashing, privation and systemic abuse makes for an enraging, confronting watch, but it’s refreshingly focused on the people, rather than geopolitics. Just like for its two fleeing families, Beyond Utopia is an emotional journey.

As always, Tarkovsky conjures images like you've never seen before; and as a journey to the heart of darkness, it's a good deal more persuasive than Coppola's.

Rousing, devastating, invigorating, painful, joyful, soulful--all those adjectives don’t even begin to describe Passing Strange, but it’s a start.

Meek's Cutoff has found its passionate defenders, those who admire it almost because of its meandering, heavily politicized nature. Yet you might try it-and try it again-and still only grab a handful of dust.

Coogler, who grew up in the same neighborhoods as Grant, evokes a tangible sense of place, and his staging of the climactic incident hits like a fist in the gut. It’s not enough to wipe out his reduction of this real-life figure into a composite-character martyr or the lukewarm filmmaking that’s come before, even if you’re left shaken all the same.

I’m Still Here takes you right into the machinery of a repressive regime, showing just enough of its dank jail cells and casual cruelties without overwhelming its deeper story of loss.

Ironically, the very slickness of the film and the attention grabbing 'sensitivity' of Hans Zimmer's score at times become intrusive. Essential viewing, none the less.

Witty, warm, but never sentimental, it also benefits from being set in the fading glories of the resort town of the title: grand seaside facades behind which lie more mundane realities, surrounded by decay and demolition.

It doesn’t all work: The pace can feel a little slow, and there are points where Park tries to have his tasty feminist cake and eat it too. But mostly, this is smart, sumptuous and wonderfully indulgent.

The effect is eerie, profound and emotional. As a mirror back onto humanity’s foibles and criminal excesses, EO is the perfect heir to Bresson’s long-suffering Balthazar.

Another gem (given his consistency in style and subject, how could it not be? ); the atypically emphatic music alone disappoints. [06 Aug 2003, p.74]

The pace is so plodding, and the general effect so stultifyingly unsubtle, that one is left impressed only by the fine landscape photography and Dean's surprisingly convincing portrayal of a middle-aged man.

Fortunately the story of an alternative future is realised with such visual imagination and sparky humour that it's only half way through that the plot's weaknesses become apparent

Though Lee's deft expertise keeps things pacy and (mostly) plausible, the material can't avoid a certain predictability and, in the end, a preachy sentimentality.

It’s uncompromising. It’s disturbing. But it’s also deeply human, allowing for many glimpses of human kindness and human frailty beyond a wall of anonymity and pain.

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is full of delights, poignant, peppery and plain life-enhancing. For anyone navigating the rocky journey into young adulthood, or any parent trying to help, it’ll feel like a hand stretched out in solidarity. Just like Judy Blume intended.

It’s full of symmetrical Anderson-like compositions, memorable characters and offbeat laughs. And stitched in are some smart, fly-on-the-wall observations about the often-abrasive relationship between capitalism and tradition too.

First-time director Shaka King stages Hampton’s fiery speeches with a crackle and energy you can practically taste. He also has a nice eye for Scorsesian violence too, knowing when to lean into his film’s crime thriller elements, and when not to.

With excellent performances (Davis and Pollack in particular), it's his finest film since "Hannah and Her Sisters."

This recasting of The Servant as a war film, with Courtenay playing the working-class deserter whose helplessness traps the liberal middle-class officer (Bogarde) assigned to defend him at his court-martial, fails precisely because the sexual element in the relationship, so explicit in The Servant, is so repressed.

It sits at the mature end of Tarantino’s work, bringing his tongue-in-cheek storytelling together with exquisite craft and killer lead performances from Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio. And yet, it’s still very much a Tarantino film, trading in genuine emotion one minute, unapolegetically silly the next.