Coleman's life and work are treated as a continuum, which Clarke pulls from at will.

The movie does an uncommonly sensitive job probing the psychologies of blocked men, less so the urges of a widow who needs more than comforting words.

Allen's neurosis is not to everyone's taste, but this movie - based on his own stage play about a film critic with seduction problems who takes Bogart as a role model - shows him at his best, exploring the gap between movie escapism and reality.

Angio reveals a band that is still committed and, almost without precedent, still seems to get along. “We weren’t musicians,” singer-guitarist Jon Langford admits. “We were just seeing how far we could take it.” If revenge can be measured in years of continued creativity, this film shows the Mekons have had theirs.

Rooted in an especially lawless moment of Australia's past, Jennifer Kent's impressive follow-up to The Babadook finds a new kind of scary.

A complex final scene — in which everyone finally lets the tears flow — only deepens the sense that well-meaning mother love can be as poisonous as it is nourishing.

Would that Grandma had given rascally Sam Elliott more time to express his magnificent unease as Elle’s old flame, still wounded by her own choices. Single-handedly, he saves the film from its cutesy instincts.

Vintage Hitchcock, with sheer wit and verve masking an implausible plot.

This is very effective, experimental filmmaking – and at 85 minutes it never becomes indulgent – and the most exciting thing Soderbergh’s done in quite some time.

Miller's choreography of his innumerable vehicles is so extraordinary that it makes Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark look like a kid fooling with Dinky Toys.

Destroyed yet defiant, Robbie walks the emotional tightrope of the most fabulously, tragically American film of the year.

By the end of this most ominous lullaby, it’s clear that the film isn’t a puzzle meant to be solved—it’s an oblique return to childhood, to a time when there was no clear boundary between imagination and reality, when everything you didn’t understand was beautiful and terrifying in equal measure.

Perhaps it isn’t such a terrible thing to remind us that this is, essentially, just a dark exercise in genre: a romcom gone horribly, upsettingly wrong. In this sense – and we suspect Barker would take this as a huge compliment – Obsession is the worst date movie imaginable.

Though the Tavianis’ intent is clear—to comment on the thin line separating part and performer, as well as on the quite literally liberating powers of art—the meanings rarely emerge with any elegance or resonance. Hardly a dish fit for the gods.

It may be petty to dismiss such a rags-to-much-better-rags story, but given how manipulatively constructed this music doc is, even in its rawest moments, you still leave feeling like you've been played.

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

Thankfully, the proceedings are carefully anchored in what are palpably human concerns, namely the cohabitation of humans and wildlife and the environmental cost of widespread urbanisation, and while this is not quite up there with best of the studio’s output, it’s still a striking and universally pleasurable experience.

It’s a film for cinephiles as well as musos and romantics, with its discrete ‘movements’ mirroring the movie making style of its time frame.

With Gosling and Hüller to the fore, Lord and Miller have delivered a cosmic adventure with hope in its heart and a twinkle in its eye.

Too much of the doc takes our taste for granted; Alice Cooper, Henry Rollins and others won’t persuade you that Death could have been huge, nor does a clichéd last-act reunion show. But the film’s alternating inquiry — into family love, slow compromise and, yes, death — resonates strongly.

It's first and foremost a teenage coming-of-age tale​, 65 electric minutes​ ​packed with financial hardship, racial demonisation and reggae.

You know there's truth in these drab small-town lives, but, regrettably, there's little drama or humour to sustain interest in Ruby's vague musings on her bleak search for paradise.

Thelma is neither as funny nor as Marmite-y as Little Miss Sunshine, a kindred spirit in the quirky indie realm, but its light shines in myriad little character beats.

Not top-notch Hitchcock, but engrossing enough.

The Marx Brothers' second film and one of their best, satirising the rich at play as they infiltrate a society party and beome involved with a stolen painting.

While the cinematography has dated rather badly, the story and the performances of both Tyson and her supporting cast are more than powerful enough to make it worthwhile viewing. [04 Sep 2008, p.72]

The batshit fever dream that Kristen Stewart’s fans have been waiting for, Love Lies Bleeding also happens to be the best B-movie of the year.

Whenever the film focuses more on Jarecki's hand-wringing than deconstructing the war itself, you wish someone would have looked the filmmaker in the eye and just said no.