Beck’s widow, his ex-wife and three daughters paint the man as someone whose success only complicated his life, estranging him from his family and eventually saddling him with crippling inertia. Pimping ain’t easy, but going straight is no picnic, either.

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.

The first hour is an absolute hoot, as the constant replaying of scenes lends a zany comic edge to Makoto’s otherwise banal social life. The animation is vibrantly coloured, the action fluid, the editing masterly and the voicework just on the right side of brash. It’s a shame, then, that the final third rejects the light touch of the preceding section to descend into drab moralising and a furious tying up of loose plot ends.

It’s hard to say if Faith works better as part of a whole instead of a triptych’s single panel until the trilogy is complete, but the unconverted may find this too much of a cross to bear.

The early scenes of Gabe Ibáñez’s impressively mounted but uneven thriller do some terrific dystopian world-building.

The acting is a bubbling fondue of clashing styles.

The 3-D effects, so promising on paper, don't really add much-and, worse, there's a overreliance on slow-motion, which kills the fun.

An overall lack of drive drops the pacing from languorous to a slow, stalled crawl, but the journey itself isn’t the point here. For once, it’s the destination--forgiveness--that really counts.

This animated sequel is tighter, funnier and sillier than its predecessor. It’s worth chicking out.

Go big or go home, they say; World War Z picks the wrong choice for its slow fade-out, and, instead of leaving you in fear of being chomped upon as you exit the theater, makes you feel enraged that you’ve been more than a little cheated.

The first feature from British theater director Rufus Norris deftly mixes gritty realism and lyrical impressionism, though its five-car pileup of a climax ultimately makes the film feel less a Greek tragedy than a miniseries in miniature.

Though bourgie audiences looking for a sun-warmed romance will be slapped; the movie may look pretty and may plod, but it also leaves a bruise.

The overall effect is not unlike watching a chef de cuisine experimenting in his off-hours; not everything takes, but you still come away with a pleasingly stimulated palate.

O'Grady, at least, gives a nuanced performance, even if she appears to be doing an uncannily accurate impression of Kristen Wiig.

The comedy runs out of steam when the jerk makes good, but laugh for laugh it's probably a better investment than "10".

But scary? Not so much.

Krakowski’s modestly charming culture-shock comedy has an unusual midpoint game changer, as it suddenly mutates into an intimate familial-generational drama.

Stick with the film, though, and you might find yourself strangely moved by its oddball mix of ripe melodrama, overwrought violence and regional verisimilitude.

There’s something oddly appealing about the fact that Rebecca Zlotowski’s understated thriller, A Private Life, stubbornly refuses easy definition – other than as a modest romp that allows Jodie Foster to perform in another language. And if you’ll watch Foster acting in anything, you’re gonna love watching her do it in French.

Basically, it’s an electrifying three-person play, as the determined Winstead, the complexly furious Goodman and Tony-winner John Gallagher Jr. (playing a lucky neighbor who made his way down) have it out in scenes that impart the nauseating futility of George Romero’s mall-ensconced "Dawn of the Dead."

If you'll pardon the cleverness, Frank takes time to wrap your own cranium around, faults and all, and that's a wonderful thing.

Even if you can forgive the crude JAP caricatures (et tu Minnie Driver?) and the blatantness of the film's attempts to make you sob, you're still left with lovely actors stuck in a lackluster cover version of the real thing.

The Friend is a poignantly affecting watch that mostly earns its emotional payoff, delivering gentle laughs along the way.

Jessica Lange, as rare as a unicorn these days, seizes on the role of a grieving mother with two taloned hands. If there are any tremors of shame to be felt here, they emanate from her.

The slow pace and persistent solemnity reduce tension, prefiguring the portentous nature of Stevens' later work. That said, the cast is splendid, and both the emotional tensions between Ladd and Arthur, and the final confrontation with Palance, are well handled.

Williams is cuddly enough as the man whose talents for nurturing a family are constantly undermined by a malign fate, and there is a performance of some dignity from Lithgow as a six-and-a-half-foot ex-pro footballer transsexual. But it's the kind of movie which is brave - or stupid - enough to ask the meaning of life without having enough arse in its breeches to warrant a reply.

Gardening has never been so creepy.

Those unfamiliar with Verdi’s tragedy won’t understand why this production was significant, nor see much of the fruits of such hard work; those onstage may become La Traviata’s tragic characters, but it’s tough not to feel that we, the audience, leave only half-transformed.