2/10. Terrible. The film is a disaster on every level: a tedious, uninvolving and occassionally laughable plot is married to an unhappy mixture of the non-existent and the cliched characterisation, and then rounded off with dialogue of the utmost banality. Even the presence of a stellar cast (how were they persuaded to get involved?) cannot [...]

6.5. Simple, humanly-scaled and nicely executed with very good performances from the two leads.

6.5/10 (8/10 for “genre”). Small but (almost) perfectly formed. It’s hard to imagine many people outside the UK getting excited by this recounting of the ins and outs of Brian Clough’s early career as a football manager, but this production was elegantly put together with very effective use of (what look to have been) limited [...]

6.5/10. Very competently done tale of heroes and villains in the world of WWII Danish resistance with strong central performances.

6/10. Flawlessly acted and stylistically impressive but too impressionistic for my tastes — this was a film of vignettes lacking anything with sufficient continuity of direction to be termed a plot. As a result, unlike my experience of Sorrentino’s previous “Consequences of Love”, I was left rather cold. That said I’m still very much looking [...]

8/10. I had been unimpressed by the comic book which I had read only recently. However, the film, in part thanks to its excisions and several major changes to the plot (esp. to the nature of Veit’s outrage), and despite its occasional moment of overblown and unnecessary balletic violence was a real triumph.

5/10. Very so-so. Starts with some promise but one’s attention is wandering heavily even before the half-way point and the rather contrived climax centred on a pupil’s expulsion does little to bring it back. Having seen it I am baffled by the acclaim this film has received, it even won the Palme D’Or — perhaps [...]

6.5/10. Builds to a powerful climax from a rather ropey start — continually improving largely thanks to an excellent performance by Winslet. It would have been even better but for a script that occasionally slews into bathos (perhaps the fault of the original book which is rather old) and a very weak performance by DiCaprio. [...]

7/10. Still fairly unrelenting in his doom and gloom (cf. Requiem for a Dream) Aronofsky returns with a star turn by Mickey Rourke as an aging wrestler. More engaging than previous Aronofsky outings — in part because we were given some grounds for hope (even if they were later taken away) — this was definitely [...]

7/10. The first section of film was excellent. This was the part covering our hero’s life story up to the present via the (nice) conceit of explaining to the police of how he knows ‘all the answers’. Unfortunately, the second part, which takes place in the present was much less good. Not only was the [...]