Search: Starring Anya

David O Russell's latest - a shaggy dog mystery with a deliberate air of penny dreadfuls - could do with more straightforward narrative and fewer screwball convolutions.

Although we see the girls struggle, we also see their agency, their humour and their wit.

It is Aurora herself who, unsurprisingly, provides the most poignant observations as she looks back at her life.

For many viewers, the film will require taking a step back, ditching assumptions and making a conscious effort to listen. It's worth it. These girls have a lot to say.

McKenna-Bruce is good in a role that first requires her to restrain her emotions and then pulls her in several directions at once.

Ultimately, The Beastmaster is low grade pulp with little sense of purpose, but Singer's clumsy dialogue and attempts to combine beefy manliness with chatting to ferrets lend it a certain camp charm.

Draws a clear line between Netanyahu’s ideas and behaviour and those of other Israelis; between the far right and the wider citizenry

The directors with their fifth feature take a humane view of the plight of their subjects but spare us any over-sentimentality

Its droll charm feels in touch with the slow, go-nowhere vibe of the Welsh countryside setting.

Beautiful Boxer documents Nong Toom's odyssey towards womanhood with considerable colour.

Cements Shashank Arora - so good in gritty drama Titli and demonstrating sharp comic timing here - as an up-and-coming Indian star to look out for.

We spend most of our time inside the house in spaces which could as easily be rendered on a stage, but presenting it as film allows the actors to go deeper inside their characters, improvising the dialogue, with Sanders knitting together the best stuff.

Trauma here isn’t a switch turned on by a force strong enough to propel it into being, but instead, it’s a slow-burning reflective state.

The film is part slash-and-dash, part domestic psychodrama, and all confounded with dream sequences, tarot premonitions and bizarre roadkill POVs.

Writer/director Henry Barrial approaches it with a confidence and consistency of vision that keeps it interesting throughout.

Its strong emotional hub keeps you with the film, even as it flirts with tourist board-style promotional material.

Not since Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette came out in 2006 has any film looked quite so much like a piece of confectionary.

Once or twice the CGI at least has the element of surprise on its side but any time we're asked to look for more than a moment at these digitally created animals, it ruins the realism.

If you take it for what it is rather than what it was marketed as, The End We Start From is an interesting watch.

With formal narration which captures the style of the period and similarly distinctive dialogue, the film quickly immerses viewers in its small but volatile world.

Grozeva and Valchanov allow a gentle absurdity to flow through the film.

The deaths are gory and elaborate, certainly, and the effects aren’t bad, but it’s nothing new.

You've seen it all before, but that's its strength. That cranked footage, those desperate eyes, the obscuring sand.

Dean Stalham's script is nicely paced, touching, and Nele Hecht's direction catches plenty of nuance in the cast's performances.

In Good Boy, Indy the dog delivers not only a great animal performance, but one of the best performances by anyone this year.

If this is just more of the same, is that really such a terrible thing?

I was surprised to be as pleasantly surprised.

Ultimately, it is the universality of a diasporic child judging an older parent’s decisions through the distorting lens of distance, age and solitude that will resonate with many.

This kind of layered story construction is a difficult thing to pull off and it makes the film shine.

A charming, if a dark hearted, coming of age story.

Neither its silliness nor its occasionally barbed wit can distract from the fact that it has a lot of heart.

On paper, Invisible Waves may sound like just another Asian action policier or revenge thriller, but in reality it is altogether more abstract and elusive than that.

If the plot is cheese, it never rises above the level of a Dairylea triangle

Late Phases contains one of the best portrayals of a blind person ever put on screen.

Thapa, Siddiqui and Gupta - not to mention the goat - are all eminently watchable but Mohandas' pacing leaves much to be desired.

Director Oliver Shmitz does a good job of balancing the immediate, visible tragedy of the characters we follow with a wider, national problem.

It’s a film which some viewers will find exhausting to watch, hammering home its emotive points rather than letting us explore on our own. Within this, however, there are some surprisingly delicate performances.

Lovingly crafted like the instruments themselves.

The politics are basic if not base and do not fulfil a rich man’s lunch hour.

This is a fascinating historical artefact, and for those interested in the cinematic art form itself, there’s a lot to unwrap.

Lola Sepa will always be for me now a real character I have seen, not a fiction.

The biggest flaw here is that, despite its excellent music and infectious energy, Lapperrousaz's documentary feels as though it is constantly skating across the top of much bigger issues that you wish he'd investigate.

Filmed with limited resources, Marin Blue is a great festival entry, with a lovely dreamlike feel.

This may become a cult movie.

Bleakly realistic and shorn of romance of all kinds, Mountain Fever may be set in desperate times but many of the dangers it depicts are mundane realities in harsh environments.

There are moments when the principal characters manage to lift the film, but these are few and far between.

If there’s a single word to describe the latest film from Signe Baumane, it’s vibrancy.

A really enjoyable piece of Celtic cinema.