The narrative is a mess despite the simplistic twinning of tales, and - worse yet - keeps interrupting the heart-stopping hoofing.

Like Crazy proves it's still possible to make a love story that's both genuinely sweet and bittersweet.

If the movie had a lead actress more delicate or malleable than the strong-cheeked Lawrence-a Natalie Portman, say-it would tip over into sexy-girl-killer celebration; the same goes for Harrelson's salty mentor, who is never too supportive or paternal. Both performers lean into the economies of survival, certain of the savagery that lies ahead, and come up with sharp work.

An inferior reworking of The Thing from Another World, which still manages to keep interest alive despite some poor special effects, a flat jokiness and stereotype characters.

As an American fighting with the partisans in the Spanish Civil War, Cooper makes a perfect Hemingway hero, robust and romantic in equal measures. Falling in love with Ingrid Bergman's peasant guerilla makes a lot of sense too, but the film's a mess dramatically. Wood approaches the material with kid gloves, when Hemingway was always a bare-knuckle fighter.

Brilliantly atmospheric San Francisco settings, memorably bizarre supporting performances, a superb use of subjective camera (much more effective than in Lady in the Lake) throughout the entire first third of the film.

Life in The Damned Don’t Cry is brutally unfair, and Boulifa offers no easy answers. But thanks to the compassionate filmmaker and his two impressive leads, it’s a compelling watch.

Clift (as the priest) and Malden (as the cop) make this worth watching, but it's heavy going at times and the more literary aspects of the script, adapted from Paul Anthelme's play (written in 1902), are uncinematic to say the least.

Step Up to the Plate doesn't skimp on the food-porn goods, but the dynamic between its two stoical subjects is too undercooked to truly resonate.

The big absence here is the man himself; Gibney couldn’t get the jailed Abramoff on camera, either due to unwillingness or a Justice Department intervention. Whatever the reason, it’s crippling.

Rather than treat its subject as the sort of martyr to democracy that makes good copy in the West, Bhutto digs deeper.

Is Family Romance, LLC a docudrama? A meta-doc? Staged reality? However you define it, it’s enthralling, unsettling and typically Herzogian.

It’s a towering achievement of imagination and the detail of each frame is a miracle of film artistry.

Her (Steen) emotional acrobatics are reason enough to sit through Applause's parade of pain, though it's a movie to admire rather than enjoy.

Galella's real crime goes conspicuously unmentioned: feeding the cult of celebrity while stoking a public appetite for empty gossip as news.

So long as we're watching DeNoble recounting the details of his laboratory experiments, Addiction Incorporated remains sufficiently gripping; when Evans is reduced to observing his saintly subject educating high-school students about the dangers of nicotine addiction, it's considerably less so.

Even Parker's direction, with its unerring sense of pace, cannot disguise an awkwardly episodic narrative which just cannot find a sense of an ending.

It's especially disappointing when the story takes an inevitable turn to starry-eyed mush, dulling the sharp satire of the crazy, stupid ins and outs of romantic entanglement with an unconvincingly saccharine one-true-love-for-all moral.

Stunningly acted and superbly shot (by Haskell Wexler), it is written, with Sayles' customary ear for vivid phrasing and telling details, as a meditation on man's desire to divorce himself not only from Nature but from his own true nature, imbuing the film with the intensity and rigour of an allegorical fable. And the ending truly makes you think about what you've just seen.

Merchant never loses our interest: He’s made a sparkly, strutting film that doesn’t apologize for or look down upon its heroes. A “soap opera in spandex” is what Hutch calls pro wrestling to his trainees, and the movie follows suit. Who doesn’t love a melodrama in tights once in a while?

If a subplot showing Orwell writing ‘Animal Farm’ as he becomes persuaded by Jones’s evidence doesn’t entirely work, there’s plenty in this thoughtful journalism drama that does. And not a single scene in a car park.

It almost becomes comical to count the number of "who's holding the camera now?" reverse shots that the filmmaker haphazardly inserts to propel the story forward. Such visual ineptitude, like much else in this tediously cocky enterprise, is downright criminal.

The laughs are purely surface; the film's women's-lib pretensions seem grafted on as if to lend significance to a story that would benefit from a lighter, less cerebral touch. Still, it's hard to resist La Deneuve's charms.

The routine story - members of a scientific expedition exploring the Amazon discover and are menaced by an amphibious gill man - is mightily improved by Arnold's sure sense of atmospheric locations and by the often sympathetic portrait of the monster.

Classic opening gunfight and first-rate performances from Garner, and from Robards as the tubercular, laconically resigned Doc Holliday. A determinedly old-style Western, made two years before Peckinpah shook things up with The Wild Bunch.

Smile is overall a solid horror, a fine way to make yourself scream at the cinema screen, but within it there are enough moments of horrible invention to make Finn a director to keep an eye on. There may be bigger, freakier surprises in store.

This lifelong Tintin fan was more than pleased, even while having to acknowledge that the movie lacks the subtle state-of-the-world commentary that Hergé often smuggled into his creation.

Like the wood-grained farmhouse itself — a beautiful piece of production design by Julie Berghoff — The Conjuring has an analog solidity that makes the terror to come almost unbearable.