Kari Skogland’s flashy yet dead-on-arrival drama turns Belfast’s backstreet battlefields into music-video backgrounds.

When violence eventually rears its ugly head again, the effect is as anticlimactic as the movie’s title is misleading. Brief bliss is a red herring; there’s only a lifetime of pain left in such acts’ wakes.

If any star’s life should lend itself to a grade-A guilty-pleasure biopic, its Hamilton’s, but My One and Only dodges the dirty details.

Rousing, devastating, invigorating, painful, joyful, soulful--all those adjectives don’t even begin to describe Passing Strange, but it’s a start.

Though wildly uneven, the film sometimes comes within screaming distance of the sick ironies of "Heathers." That's how loudly Goldthwait still knows how to yell.

There’s something admirable about the anything-goes energy that Van Peebles brings to this tall tale, but the amateurishness and Video Toaster–era technical tricks start to grate after a bit. It’s a funky, free-form fairy tale, but one that only a mutha could truly love.

Dime-store philosophy, coupled with the running commentary from the Games’ heinously Spicoli-esque announcers (“Dude, that was the hardest slam we’ve ever seen!”), ruins an otherwise gripping, in-your-face experience.

In using the urban poor and the queer community as punch lines, Casi Divas ultimately succumbs to its own criticism.

We are in the presence of a new classic.

No simplistic status parable. It’s more a psychological snapshot of a person forever doomed to remain a voyeur to her own life

The escapades are tossed off and fall flat, all products of the business-as-usual template created by the film’s producers, Adam McKay and Will Ferrell.

Lamely tries to update "Breakfast at Tiffany’s" for the Twitter set. Too bad Truman Capote’s not around for rewrites.

Though Aron Gaudet’s documentary never quite captures the relieved atmosphere of these homecomings, it does acknowledge the dark side of a cheery platitude: those on both sides of the divide are in need of healing.

The ideologies underlying Andersson’s oft-astonishing succession of extreme wide-angle, vanishing-point tableaux are a decidedly acquired taste.

Herb and Dorothy are adorable enough, but Sasaki’s documentary really shines when she gives center stage to the grateful artists whom they helped nurture.

Missing is Cameron’s signature action modification, best exploited in Aliens: the strapping female heroine. McG’s testosterone-juiced world feels a little doomed without her.

As brightly alive a movie as the season will offer.

Set against this is the blithe humour of the proceedings, a welcome shortage of love interest, Dolph's minimalist wit, and two arch-villainesses attired in black plastic and other form-fitting fabrics. Destructive, reprehensible, and marvellous fun.

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

It’s a familiar tale, but one told with gusto, wit and visual flare; of particular note is the dilapidated Germanic fortress where Capricorn and his cronies reside, which looks like it was plucked straight from the warped minds of a Gilliam or a del Toro.

To be fair, Craig is still the best Bond since Connery, and a Man Who Knew Too Much–style set piece at a Vienna opera house momentarily offers the fleetness and wit the rest of the film lacks.

That it doesn’t have anything new to say about the coldly efficient Hollywood machine and its stratum of fearsome executives only hinders it further, leaving you with a film that feels every bit the product of its purportedly ruthless and artistically corrupting milieu.

Dean Morgan’s cheeky-chappy act is grating indeed, while his tight-lipped rival’s so utterly stolidly Firthian we could easily be watching his Madame Tussaud’s mannequin. Painless anodyne fare, though genuine laughs are few, apart from comfort-eating Firth’s illicit ‘naughty choccy’.

Take Out is a sweet-and-sour look at the immigrant experience.

Part meticulous character study, part hyperrealist drama, Trapero’s film is as interested in documenting how such an institution functions on a day-to-day basis as he is in presenting the joys and pains of female cohabitation in such a confined space.

Deliberate camp (to paraphrase Susan Sontag) is never as successful as pure, or naive, camp.

The first-person recollections of Nanking’s survivors are as uncommonly wrenching as their captors were brutally thorough.

Schrader can’t seem to choose a proper outcome, and the lack of a higher morality is weird, especially from a filmmaker who managed hints of spirituality in a movie about Bob Crane. Still, if you suffered through Schrader’s Exorcist prequel Dominion, you’ll know he’s somewhat back on track.