Deauville Festival of American Cinema — A–Z of films

The narrative is paced with the urgency of a thriller.

This is a tense and enjoyable genre picture, and one which gets terrific central performances from all involved.

This isn't a lecture about acting your age, nor is it an advert for Viagra. It's far more sentimental.

The film has charm, due in most parts to Shameik Moore's performance

It's likely to be most appealing to people just too young to be officially allowed to see it.

The grandeur and beauty of the place is set against figures of climbers, like black ants, across a white wilderness

Almereyda jumps straight into the experiment which, over half a century later, is as fascinating and timely and important as ever.

The characterisation of this verdant terra incognito is decidedly old-fashioned, like a racist grandpa who insists on holding the door for ladies.

Less psychological and more formulaic than his previous feature, this is still relentlessly entertaining.

Hitchcock/Truffaut has the intriguing aura of a first episode with all the questions answered easily producing 500 more to be asked.

This film feels fresh and real even to those of us who have been there.

The director has uncovered a wealth of archive material.

Malick and his cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, if nothing else, deliver stunningly beautiful vistas and backdrops for his narratives and characters, yet like the characters, there seems to be something empty at its core.

Drifts dangerously close to irrelevance.

Car chases and retro dialogue clog up the machinery

The trouble is that the film takes great effort to counter everything that makes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's creation stimulating.

Villeneuve sustains the knife-edge tension without a blip.

If this is romance, it's dead.

Zhao is in no hurry, allowing the sense of life in Pine Ridge to seep in to the bones of the film.

The sadness and the courage and the ambition is here

Perfectly watchable and occasionally touching despite itself.

This film is a shot of dayglo-coloured adrenaline to the vein, a vat of sugar poured into the eyes.

There is a sense of the freshness of freedom but this a film that mainly deals in big emotions as though worried about getting down to specifics.