Classic soap opera in which good old British understatement has a field day, everybody is frightfully nice, and sentimentality is wrapped up in yards of tasteful gloss.

Grudges, minor insults and found-out flirtations lead to mayhem and murder on a cataclysmic scale.

The ensemble acting is excellent. Remember, kids, it all comes down to Self Respect.

It reunites director Kitty Green with her ’The Assistant’ star Julia Garner and should marry provocative genre thrills with a cerebral feminist subtext.

Focusing on the personalities rather than the historical context, directors Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville illustrate how both men’s lives were changed by the debates, and how neither could let it go even decades later. The result is perhaps better suited to TV than the big screen, but it’s a timely, thoughtful piece of work.

Buzzard is both deeply unfun and something you can’t take your eyes off. It gets our edge of recommendation because there’s real focus to it: Marty’s ambitions are so low (his life seems to climax while wolfing down a $20 plate of spaghetti in a hotel room) that you truly fear for the future. Meet the new slacker.

Unfortunately, with its faintly uneven pacing and straggling structure, the film lacks depth or narrative economy. That said, Zhang's use of colour is as vivid as ever, his stylised depiction of violence is mostly effective, and Gong Li is gloriously watchable.

This is meat-and-potatoes genre work, certainly superior to a Hollywood product like "Edge of Darkness," but not by much.

The cast is good (though it remains very much Lester's film), the fights appropriately energetic, and it all moves along at a fair pace, sprinkled with a number of good gags.

A gritty human drama evoking the residual vibrancy of a threatened culture.

This reverential, sentimental and occasionally bittersweet film only erratically illuminates his (Eric Kandel) ideas. Rather, Petra Seeger prefers to honor Kandel’s boyhood remembrances as a Jew in Nazi-era Vienna.

Filho so completely calculates his causes and effects, even going so far as to have the villain of the piece literally swimming with sharks, that you never fully feel the senses-altering charge of a truly impassioned polemic.

Polanski has made a genre piece with a verve and vitality that’s in sadly short supply.

It’s beautifully observed stuff – its fractured but tender family dynamics and depiction of parental pain reminded me a little of Ang Lee’s "The Ice Storm" – as it gradually lets you into a world of well-heeled suburbia that’s carefully shorn of all the usual Sydney landmarks.

Zulu is a fairly tough-minded and interesting account of a company of Welsh soldiers doing their bit for somebody else's Queen and Country in an alien land.

The real draw is the script: based on stories by Damon Runyon and spruced up by His Girl Friday scribe Ben Hecht, it strikes such a perfect blend of salty and sweet that it’s almost a shame when the band strikes up and the jazz hands come out.

The Hunting Ground still shocks and awakens its audience in all the right ways, bringing the recent headlines of a Columbia University rape survivor carrying her mattress around into irrefutably urgent, sharp focus.

Where he ends up going—a place of real anxiety and envy—speaks to the filmmaker’s nervy ambitions. If this is Baumbach’s commercial breakthrough, he will have made it several steps up that staircase with nothing lost.

Harris Dickinson steps behind the camera for a bruising, brilliantly strange debut that channels veteran auteurs like Jonathan Glazer and Andrea Arnold, while carving out a distinctive voice all its own.

Her whole life has been about beating the odds — it’s inspiring stuff.

For three decades Clifton Collins Jr has been bringing a memorable spark to relatively small parts in everything from Capote to Pacific Rim. Jockey is his turn in the spotlight, giving the veteran character actor a nuanced lead role to inhabit in a slice-of-life racetrack drama.

Admittedly this is a legal "Rocky, convincing rather than realistic, witty rather than analytical, but it amounts to a far more effective indictment of the US legal system than ...and justice for all, and is the first courtroom drama in years to recapture the brilliance of the form.

Only 20 minutes in and you’re not going to think of another lead who could pull off this kind of reckoning — tangy, furious and about to become whip-smart.

A fun, bombastic, brilliant choreographed and totally enthralling film.

Blessed with an improbable-but-true story that functions on many ironic levels, this clever documentary ultimately conveys more about the complex American character - shifting between intimacy and criminality - than a whole shelf of fiction films.

Not every performance is assured – though Nina Ye is consistently impressive – and the script includes perhaps one twist too many. Yet Left-Handed Girl remains a sensitive and affecting drama that avoids sentiment in favour of more grounded emotional truths.

[Arcel's] crafted a kind of Danish The Last of the Mohicans that’s full of passion and political conviction. It should stand the test of time almost as well as its rugged hero.

Christopher Isherwood’s seminal queer novel deserves a film adaptation that captures both its sense of place and its activist spirit. Cowriter-director Tom Ford settles for the glossy ephemera of a Vanity Fair cover spread.