Search: Starring Geraldine Chaplin

A beautifully drawn portrait of a complex situation that doesn't resort to the usual empty assumptions that nothing like this can ever work.

The film is neither fish nor fowl, one thing or another, comedy or tragedy. It wavers between vulgar and vapid.

Saura's film acquires much of its lasting power from the combination of Torrent's dark-eyed, solemn gaze and its representation of how an impressionable child can have their imagination activated by events they don't fully understand.

Every image drives the story on, or highlights the characters’ tragedy.

What is quite wonderful in all this flowing and "fade, fade, fade," fading is that the characters and their stories belong to no one specifically. They belong to a cinematic spirit world and maybe nobody even wanted them.

Director Juan Antonio Bayona spins the focus in on a single family caught up in the disaster, personalising the horror and bringing it home in unashamedly melodramatic fashion on its very own tidal wave of emotion.

So riddled with logic gaps, dumb character decisions and simple confusion about how we should view the entire conceit, that the actual genetic recreation of dinosaurs from 65 million years ago starts looking believable in comparison.

The greatest achievement is perhaps that the far-reaching illusions constructed around the experience of the central characters do not distract from what is an enjoyable film.

Structured like a Greek tragedy, steeped in Gothic gloom, this is a bold and dramatic tale but also a sly one.

Bayona knows how to turn the screw of sentiment, not so much jerking tears as gradually filling a well of sadness until it can't help but spill out.

Sanchez and Bayona never lose sight of the requirements of the genre, providing plenty in the way of seat-gripping tension and finding suitable shocks in the everyday.

This is a film filled with longing that, appropriately, leaves us yearning for more.

The film is absorbing rather than depressing, uplifting rather than sad.

Altman handles it all beautifully, with his trademark 'hands off' direction and overlapping dialogue capturing the mood perfectly.