It’s impossible entirely to recreate the effect of being in the room with this play, but this ear for eye is still essential for the art and power and relevance of tucker green’s unique wordplay.

Close Your Eyes builds up slowly, deliberately, allowing ample breathing room to supporting characters who were, once at least, elemental in Miguel or Julio’s lives so we can paint a picture of who they are as artists and as people.

With superbly handled action sequences, excellent cinematography, and a Morricone score worthy of his Man With No Name efforts, it's a film to be seen.

It’s another fascinating entry in the director’s ongoing exploration of the sadistic and masochistic facets of human behavior.

Kravitz expertly flits between tension, horror, black comedy and social satire, sometimes delivering all four simultaneously. It’s a film about the abuses of power, the dangers of being a woman in a man’s world and the importance of female solidarity, but is never didactic, just gripping.

Robustly entertaining.

Nikou’s film is brimming of humour and excellent ideas, but is mostly a rebuke to anyone who thinks algorithms and technology are the answer to human problems.

Return is almost too underdramatized to seem like a piece of today's zoomy entertainment, but its anxieties-the bare cupboards, the vague sense of purposelessness-are at the heart of the American experience for many. It's what indie filmmaking ought to be.

It’s a gut-wrenching yet redemptive tale of fathers, sons and the horrors of war, which Marder allows to unfold with minimal intrusion or manipulation.

A mockumentary as sparky, big-hearted and entertaining as its cast of bright-eyed kids and the wannabe thesps who coach them in the ways of ‘turning cardboard into gold’. The affection for musical theatre is so sincere, it’ll win over even the most Sondheim-averse.

Brace yourself and go see it.

Roadrunner was a chance to talk about the role that drugs play in the life of an artist – which is exactly what Bourdain was: an artist dealing in foods and words and travels in ways that few can match.

You will see the man toiling and revising - killing off half-good ideas, struggling for clarity - and it's a routine well worth demystifying.

Director Christian Carion (Merry Christmas) establishes a low-key yet threatening atmosphere right from the start, and gets terrific performances from Kusturica and Canet.

It's an equally insightful and excruciating journey, with our quip-ready protagonist perpetually caught between two modes: eager-to-please caffeinated and near-breakdown frustrated.

Despite such sleazy subject matter, the cast is outstanding, dominated by a fierce Shelley Winters, and Corman pulls no punches, delivering a searing Jacobean tragedy of a gangster movie.

In outline, this is the stuff of soap opera - rags to celebrity plane crash via grievous bodily harm - but of a superior kind. The two main performances are excellent: Lange plays the singer without a hint of condescension to her dreams of 'a big house with yellow roses', while Harris is persuasively menacing, with an inventively foul mouth.

There's savvy in Schwarzenegger's understanding of his appeal. Always foreign yet weirdly Americanized in our dreams, the big guy is a craggy monument in need of a countryside. He's back in the place that deserves him.

Costa and O’Connor are terrific.

By far the best of the '50s cycle of 'creature features', Them! and its story of a nest of giant radioactive ants (the result of an atomic test in the New Mexico desert) retains a good part of its power today.

The animation initially looks like something produced on an early Nintendo console, but what it lacks in finesse it more than makes up for in feeling. It makes sense of how a small child sees the world, saturated and magical but not yet subtly detailed.

Credit should also go to the crew; to Jack Cardiff for his frond-filled imagery and maestro sound recordist John Mitchell for his atmospheric soundscape.

It's a juicy story, though that doesn't excuse Jarecki from fixating above all else on the tabloid-ready twists and pop-psychological turns of Durst's story.

The cast make the most of an intelligent script, with Rowlands and (especially) Jett providing most of the emotional punch. They create a powerful feeling of real lives being lived and lost.

Forget those who decry the '50s Hollywood melodrama; it is through the conventions of that hyper-emotional genre that Sirk is able to make such a devastatingly embittered and pessimistic movie.

It’s Woodard’s film from start to finish. She’s been great for three decades, but this is her best work yet.

Quietly epic and sad but never sentimental.

Helter-skelter, a bit mad and full of heart, it bounces along with the out-of-control energy of the early adolescence its depicts. When it pauses, it also offers a seriously touching snapshot of mums and their daughters, as well as a smart critique of why the burden of family expectations and the inevitability of teenage boundary-pushing usually results in carnage.