It’s absolutely a period piece (heightened by being in black and white), but its humanity is ageless, serving up an irresistible amount of thrills, spills and jaw-aches.

It’s a film that oozes clear-eyed empathy and has the lived-in feel of a story, director and cast working in strong harmony.

Combining the knowingly arch style of Abbas Kiarostami (whose "Certified Copy" towers over and belittles this film) with the didactically educational passion of your favorite art professor, La Sapienza alternately feels like a self-reflexive love story or a haunted history lesson—its best scenes play like both.

But for every Thelma & Louise–like golden-hour drive into the sunset (there are several too many), you wish the movie also had the sophistication to cram from that classic script’s complex sense of injustice, one that had room for a subplot involving a sympathetic lawman. Believe in Matsoukas, though; she’s the real deal and she’ll get better material.

Betts aims divinely high and succeeds in both understanding and respectfully critiquing organized religion. Is faith escapism or an act of surrender? In grappling with the essence of spirituality, Novitiate—not unlike Martin Scorsese’s Silence—asks more questions than it supplies answers.

It possesses a mythic clarity, yet there's also a welcome complexity at work, in the vivid characterisations and the unsentimental celebration of community and collective action. The result is witty, astute, and finally very moving.

Roxanne is far and away [Martin's] richest film to date, lyrical, sweet-natured, touching, and very, very funny.

Urushadze’s excellent cast imbues their thinly drawn characters with a great deal of life, but the roles are so transparent that the film feels like more of an advertisement for peace than it does an argument for it.

While the film glides from Malcolm's early years as a hustler and petty criminal to his emergence in the Nation of Islam, it plays surprisingly safe as a solidly crafted trawl through the didactic/hagiographic conventions of the mainstream biopic.

This movie does exactly what a horror reboot should, taking the best bits of the original and heading in a smart, inventive new direction. There’s minimal reliance on nostalgia. It’s daft as hell and a heck of a good time.

It’s a compelling, edgy story of exploitation with no easy answers.

Much like the case itself, a crime drama performed and crafted with this level of care and social resonance is well worth investigating.

The film’s release after weeks of Black Lives Matter protests may be coincidental, but Miss Juneteenth rises to the moment.

With tinkling thriller music and dramatic voiceover narration, this modest but engrossing first-person documentary comes on like a true crime caper.

West is far more adept at and interested in sustaining an unrelentingly ominous mood than in executing the genre-required spook shocks.

The handling of the drama is always sensitive, anchored by a perception-busting performance from Efron. Even the High School Musical phobic would have to admit that he’s a revelation here.

For all his brilliance with choreography, Woo is flummoxed by the thousands of actual human extras, though there’s no denying his commitment to the finer points of battle tactics (yawn).

Lyrical touches and the most moving use ever of Katy Perry's "Firework" almost cancel out a cheap-shot third-act tragedy, yet it's the actors that save the film from soaping itself into Euro-miserablist irrelevance.

Many actors hold their secrets and their craft close; Kilmer throws his out to the universe.

Even if you’re not boned up on your classic Ozu family tragedies, see it before Spielberg does his remake.

Kubrick himself rarely spoke about his work – which means this is a valuable insight into Kubrick's character and filmmaking process, as well as a frank look at what it means to give up your life to work at the side of a difficult creative genius.

Reisz nimbly avoids the Big Theme style, finds the pace of his material early, and sustains it brilliantly, emerging with a contemporary classic of hard-edged adventure and three superb character studies.

As the tragedy unfolds, there’s a strange solace in seeing this captivating enigma somehow emerging intact.

There is plenty to relish, notably Newton and Morley hamming it up (as, respectively, the rumbustious Bill Walker and the overbearing tycoon), and Deborah Kerr in her debut; but it does tend to just sit there.

What really makes the film stand out is its focus on the women, identifying Davis and her girlfriends as the unsung heroines of a cruel economic and social trap; even at their moment of triumph, the girls' future is defined by an uncertain and unsettling fog.

Seems doomed to remain a period piece.

The result is an empathetic, emotionally candid treat – Pixar’s own brains trust back at full capacity.

This documentary raises enough questions about the ends justifying the means during an era of endless war that it earns the right to be called essential viewing.