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I LOVE this film. It's beautifully written, directed and played by all concerned. A wonderful study of life as a non-Hollywood teenager, with all its angst, misery and confusion that seems so unfair at the time, and which is so funny/irritating/infuriating to everyone else. Earl Cave is eminently slappable as the morose teenager who is expecting to spend the summer in Florida but instead has to stay home with his mum. Handled with understated aplomb by Simon Bird, who quite rightly concentrates on the characters and who draws out some lovely performances, but whose interesting choices also make the film look just that bit different and lend an air of magic realism to the dullest of suburban moments. A real pleasure to watch and rewatch.

A movie with potential made into a frustrating watch by terrible construction and some glossed-over trauma.

The performances are good throughout, and the plot was original, but was then cut to shreds in a series of confusing flashbacks, flashforwards and some flashes where I wasn't sure if it was backwards, forwards or what. At one point there was a scene which I'm not sure even now wasn't a dream sequence.

The child's trauma is underplayed throughout.

Ryan Reynolds is excellent as the father under suspicion, but how the plot was resolved is almost impossible to tell from the disjointed information to hand. In otherwords, there are holes in this that you could drive a bus through.

A right old mix of good acting and setting, and editing/ direction so awful that it's like is rarely seen in modern films.

Two families exploit each other with dire consequences. Beautifully shot and well acted, but devoid of emotional engagement. Little comedy, horror or tension and at no point did I care about anybody involved - which amounts to a wasted trip to the cinema, in my book. Very disappointing, given that it beat some truly exceptional films to the Oscar.

Was really expecting something special from Uncut Gems. Reviews had used words like 'insane' and 'relentless' but now I realise that was not in a good way. I found it impossible to care what happened to anyone in this movie, as all were equally repulsive. The only point of interest for me was Kevin Garnett, who notably good playing himself.

A derivative and unsatisfying film in which giant intergalactic squid travel through space and time, only to be sorely disappointed by Amy Adams with an Etch-a-Sketch. Close Encounters still blows this clean out of the fishbowl.

I must be stupid.

I feel like I just handed over the family cow for a handful of magic beans. I saw the trailer for Baby Driver and thought it looked dreadful. But I was still stupidly suckered into seeing the whole movie by the post-truth IMDb score and enthusiastic reviews from trusted sources.

They're dead to me now.

I've enjoyed Edgar Wright's work in the past but Baby Driver is the puerile fantasy of a twelve-year-old boy. It's a fantasy where bopping along the street in tune to your 'beatz' makes you look super-cool instead of like an attention-seeking tosser, where simply not talking has the power to turn a pudgy-faced teenager into Robert Mitchum, where the hot waitress falls inexplicably in love with you before you've even ordered a Coke, and where driving at full speed into the back of a lorry in a crash that kills both your parents, leaves you with only two cool little scars and a slight ringing in the ears, instead of hideously squashed and sucking soup through a straw for the rest of your life.

It's also cool - when you're a getaway driver - to drive very very fast and with a lot of squealing tyres and crashes - even when your shitty driving is the only reason the police are chasing you in the first place. God forbid you should just mirror, signal, manoeuvre - and disappear quietly into traffic. God forbid you should just... GET AWAY!

There are so many ridiculous inconsistencies, unlikely coincidences, dumb actions and unintentionally hilarious lines in this film that I kept expecting Leslie Nielsen to pop up and make a beaver joke.

Baby Driver has tinnitus which comes and goes as the plot requires (or not - either is fine). He has an endless supply of iPods and sunglasses - as one pair is slapped off his face, he pulls another from his sleeve like Paul Daniels on a sunbed. Baby Driver is an orphan but he cares deeply (aka shallowly) for his foster dad who is black AND disabled AND deaf, which is like the Cliff Notes way to Create Sympathy. But it still doesn't work. Baby's not sympathetic. Or heroic. Or sexy. Or even a good getaway driver.

Likwise, Kevin Spacey's Doc is supposed to be 'the best' at putting together tip-top teams for heists, and yet he employs a series of infantile squabblers who all resent the hell out of the toddler-of-mystery that is Baby Driver.

Throughout the film, Doc has Baby Driver in a brutal iron grip - threatening to break his legs and slaughter everybody he loves. But then he wilts like spinach at the sight of Baby Driver with his instant girlfriend and within seconds showers them with money, tells them to get away and 'never look back' and - in the grand emotional fulcrum of the whole movie - reveals: 'I was in love once'. Another one for Cliff Notes, I think.

In short, Baby Driver is a stupid film where stupid people do stupid things while saying stupid lines to each other.

Avoid at all costs unless you're a twelve-year-old boy.

A stupid one.

I went to this screening of Battle Mountain expecting a film that would appeal to a niche market. Luckily it's quite a big niche, and the cinema was filled with fellow cyclists in an optimistic testament to how the sport has blossomed in the UK. But I left thinking that - with just a small consideration - it could easily find a wider market. The filmmaker, David Street, has produced an unexpectedly cinematic vision of a man on a home-made bicycle, and there's great pleasure to be had in watching Obree's quirky engineering choices (including rollerblades, a sideboard and a saucepan) and his infectious enthusiasm for a new cycling challenge.

Where the film falls just short is in assuming that its audience has prior knowledge of Obree's frankly incredible history in the sport of cycling. While it is covered, it's not covered in a way that would allow anyone but an enthusiast to really appreciate his journey. To enjoy any achievement, we need to understand its historical context. For instance, while it is the core of his story, the iconic Hour record is never explained, and so Obree's feat in breaking it on a home-made machine is so diminished that it may offer only passing interest to the unconverted, instead of astonishment. And for a film like this to find a wider audience it HAS to convert! There are moments like this throughout the film, where the emotional impact could have been exponentially heightened by the brief use of voice-over to explain WHY Obree's achievements have been so gobsmacking. Without those contextual pointers, his (literal) kitchen-sink struggle to push yet another cycling envelope is interesting and well made, but ultimately a little sterile. That's a shame when the man himself burns with passion for the subject and is an engaging on-screen presence.

There's always a fine line to be trod between patronising a knowledgeable audience, and under-informing an ignorant one. For me, Battle Mountain errs just on the side of the latter. It's admirable that it was made at all (with the help of Kickstarter) but without some context for emotional guidance, I fear it will remain of interest to a far smaller audience than it probably deserves.

It's over folks. This is the death of the Die Hard franchise. Please.

Die Hard has been a guilty pleasure for nearly 20 years, but there's no pleasure in this latest offering.

Loud, unbearably stupid, cartoonishly unbelievable, this movie has the emotional impact of an episode of Thunderbirds, but without the clever plot.

In a nutshell (which is big enough for this plot, with room to spare) Bruce Willis as John McClean tracks down his errant son to Moscow in the usual Hollywood bid to 'reconnect'. There he finds him working as a CIA operative trying to smuggle a vague dissident out of the country. Bruce joins in - as you do. They would have got away, too, if it wasn't for that pesky dissident getting out of the safety of the car and virtually thumbing his nose at the bad guys to make them chase him. There follows a car chase that's so long and stupid that I considered going to get an ice cream. I could have had a three course meal and they'd still have been there, demolition derbying through rush hour. During this chase, a transit van roars through dense traffic jams like a knife through butter, while the armoured car chasing it is forced to bulldoze its way through walls and over cars to keep up, and an RPG rocket is launched at Bruce with the velocity of someone throwing a tennis ball for a dog, giving him plenty of time to steer around it.

Then after many more bullets are dodged - even really fast ones from an Apache helicopter - the pair are captured by a bad guy and about to be executed. Having just slaughtered about two hundred people in half an hour of mindless violence, in this scene the bad guy suddenly slows down and takes time to eat a carrot and emote about a career he might have had in tap dancing, just long enough so that Bruce and Bruce Jr can break free and overwhelm half a dozen heavily armed men with only their distracting giggling and a small knife.

As usual in Die Hard, Bruce remains remains virtually unmarked and limp-free throughout, although his regulation white singlet does get grubbier every time he's blown up/shot at/beaten/thrown off a building/falls through a window. So that, at least, is realistic.

Everything else is not.

Stupid action, stupid dialogue, stupid baddies, stupid plot twists and stupid science. Did you know that radiation that's been 'pooling in here (Chernobyl) for years' can be easily eradicated by a quick squirt of weapons grade Domestos and an iPad? Nor me. Lucky for Bruce, though, as he rushes into the defunct nuclear plant with only his stubble for protection.

Oh, and did I tell you? All this happens in one day - from Bruce's arrival in Moscow, through the mayhem and explosions and the nuclear waste and the drive to Chernobyl, which is apparently in a suburb of Moscow. Oh, and that the drive is made in a car they steal that just happens to have a small arsenal in the boot? Lucky again.

None of it matters, because - surprise surprise - Bruce Jr forgives Bruce for years of neglect and calls him Dad for the first time, and they fly home as heroes in a sunset glow. The fact that they leave Moscow smoking behind them, littered with corpses of innocent bystanders and disappointed film-fans is neither here nor there.

There's a running 'joke' where Bruce keeps yelling 'I'm on vacation!' One can only hope it's a long one.

I'm not an all-out fan, but I've defended Tom Cruise for years on the basis of great acting in movies like Magnolia and Rain Man, so I was prepared to suspend disbelief while he acted six foot five.

Unfortunately, for the first time ever, his height bothered me. And the fact that it must have bothered him might explain why Jack Reacher pulls its punches on the the smart/funny front and descends predictably into a shoot-em-up. A more secure - oh let's face it, a TALLER - actor could have pulled off the Man of Mystery thing, but Tom Cruise JUST CAN'T. He has the look of a well-scrubbed, well-fed farm boy who's been working out in the barn, not a dangerous lone-wolf drifter, appearing from the mist to solve crime with his intellect and his fists.

Without that definitive central characterisation, Jack Reacher could only have saved itself with a cracking plot and sparkling humour - making Cruise taller with knowing wit. There are a few stabs at it, but Tom Cruise is out of his depth here and he's not even in the deep end. Instead he flails for the lifesaver of fast cars and big guns, while the plot is only workmanlike. His skills as an actor are redundant, and in their absence, he's exposed in the spotlight and found wanting by ten inches.

Everything else about the movie is standard fare. Rosamund Pike does her usual deer-caught-in-the headlights thing. To keep Cruise seeming sexy in the absence of sex, she's required to be a lawyer but with a very low neckline. More headlights-caught-in-the-headlights. It's distracting to everyone but Cruise, who's not tall enough to look down her cleavage.

I don't know how Lee Child handled the plot, but it's spoilt here by having the reveal right up front, which is an unusual technique when you then have Jack Reacher take 50 minutes to reveal what you already knew.

The action is generally poor, with Cruise looking dumber and dumber as the film goes on. He walks backwards out of doors into crowbars and chooses the loudest possible method of sneaking up on villains. More than once his well laid plans depend on slapstick crooks and trained killers who can't shoot straight.

Werner Herzog is a comic-book baddie who chewed off his own fingers to stay alive in a gulag. Not sure quite how he got into construction after that, but this part of the plot/motivation is so weak it's more like an afterthought and doesn't matter.

In smarter hands, even Tom Cruise could have made us believe he was Jack Reacher, by embracing his lack of height and making it work in his favour. But the flashy attempts to distract us from his stature only makes us think about it constantly.

The trailer-makers knew what the film should have been - a roller-coaster of thrills and laughs and original, quirky moments. Sadly, it's more like the teacups.

For me, Margin Call has more tension and drama than many action thrillers. Despite a small cast, minimal locations, 12-hour timeframe and potentially dry subject matter (the start of the global financial crisis) Margin Call turns its limitations into opportunities and becomes a compelling, fast-moving film with the thrum of a violin string. The casting is superb throughout, with Paul Bettany outstanding and Zachary Quinto outgrowing Spock to make for compulsive watching as the two young traders who start to realize there's something rotten in the kingdom of New York. Honesty in writing and performance only adds to the horror that you feel unfolding on screen.

I imagine this started life as a play - or will finish it that way - but in the interim, Margin Call has defied even that humble restriction to become THE definitive Wall Street movie.

I like a lot of French films but this one is dreadful. A lifeless, ugly, horribly miscast piece of tedia that has all the hallmarks of a first film - a first STUDENT film. Utterly lacking coherence or tension, it dawdles aimlessly between mystery and 'comedy' without ever achieving either. Scenes are choppy, dialogue is stilted and flashbacks are particularly irritating, denoted as they are by giving the lead actor a laughable haircut. However, he is unlikeable in any timeframe or tonsure.

Quite apart from the dire content, the film looks as though it's been shot on tape by a bunch of refugees from a Human League video. Truly awful.

I haven't read Life of Pi, and feel that being too faithful to the book may have been where screenwriter David Magee went wrong.

At its heart it seems to be a simple story - an allegory about a boy and a tiger that masks an horrific experience on board a drifting lifeboat. However, the structure of the piece means that when the truth is finally relayed in the film, all its impact is lost in the confusion of what has gone before. Instead of shock, I felt only irritation that the two-hour allegory had been so unambiguous and had given no hints to the truth which - for maximum effect - should have immediately become apparent in the telling of the second story. So instead of feeling illuminated by the end, I felt cheated and disappointed.

Visually it's gorgeous, the acting is first rate, the CGI seamless and the 3D is nice enough, but the movie drags in several places (the mangrove island is just pretty padding) and although the animals portrayed are CGI versions, they are so realistic that I was more upset by the scenes of their slaughter than I was when that was related to the deaths of real people. I would not take a child to see this movie without considering the scenes of animal suffering. Just because they are CGI animals does not make it less traumatic.

All in all, a disappointing trip to the movies, where I felt the writer and director lost sight of the most important emotional arc and thereby diminished any impact at the end which would have made up for a rather slow - if beautiful - film.

I'm not a great fan of Ben Affleck as an actor OR as a director. Plus, the publicity pix for this movie makes it look like yet another dull/ridiculous Ben Affleck spy/cop thriller.

Not so. Argo is a really well written, well directed, gripping movie, that spins easily between high drama and sharp wit. The fact that it's based on a true story is an added bonus.

Not only is the movie very enjoyable and tightly produced, but it's shot like one of those great 70s thrillers, like The China Syndrome or The Taking of Pelham 123. From the film stock to the production design, Affleck really covers every possible base in making a great looking period piece set in 1979 Iran.

Alan Arkin is glorious as the producer and there are some good laughs amid the tension, but in the scenes in Iran, it was easy to forget I was watching a movie, because it felt so authentic.

I came out feeling smarter. Is there any higher praise?

Before I gush, let me say - hand on heart - that I have NO connection with this film or its makers. I just went along to see it because documentaries nowadays are increasingly more interesting than 'real' films.

Ping Pong is no exception to that rule. It's the antidote to the X Factor - the story of eight pensioners from around the world competing in the World Ping Pong Championships in China. Each competitor is interviewed at home about their lives and participation in the sport, and we watch them prepare (or not!) before setting off.

Their stories are funny, admirable, affecting and astonishing; their characters diverse as the nations they represent. My own favourite was Inge, the German woman who was saved from what sounds like dementia by ping pong. I found myself laughing and filling up in turn as these feisty old folk set off for the contest with a range of ambitions and emotional baggage.

The entire film is uplifting and gently gripping, sucking you in to the lives and backgrounds of these people. It would be the perfect film to show schoolchildren, as it reveals old age in all its wonderful, terrible incarnations.

If only most screenwriters could capture one tenth of the emotional impact of Ping Pong, the film industry would be something to behold.

For a film littered with violence, this is painfully dull. Writer/Director Andrew Dominik wants to be Tarantino. He wants to be Scorcese. He is neither. The characters are unappealing, un-smart and un-funny. The dialogue has all the meandering of Tarantino's, and not one ounce of its wit or drive. The violence is in-your-face and lovingly shot, but has no visceral impact because of the aforementioned unattractiveness of the characters. The soundtrack is hip but jars, instead of enhancing the action.

Several scenes are ripe for witty or gritty dialogue (the robbery scene, the beating scene) but instead opt either for violence or silence.

The acting is good, as you'd expect, but it quickly becomes obvious that stars of the calibre of Gandofini and Pitt have been attracted by sheer screen time, rather than quality. There are long tedious shots of talking heads, saying nothing interesting, and a few monologues that peter out lamely, as if they have been ad libbed.

There are possibly three laughs in the film, but they don't make up for the rest of the dirge.

To add insult to injury, the movie has ideas well above its station. Not content with being a lousy Tarantino rip-off, it is intercut with hopeful Obama election campaign speeches pouring from every electrical appliance, which is somehow meant to highlight just how cutthroat the world of these lowlifes is. Tell us something we don't know. It's a very immature piece of political paradox.

I would have been happy to walk out, but I'd taken my boyfriend for his birthday. Afterwards he said he'd hated it too, leaving us both filled with the double regret of having chosen to see it in the first place - and then felt compelled to stay put by the niceties of social convention.

A very poor effort all round.

Prometheus is the story of a trillion-dollar mission to discover the origins of human life on a distant planet. Basically, this is supposed to be the greatest exploration undertaken in the history of mankind.

So who do they send? A gaggle of fractious goons whose collective scientific nous is rivalled only by that of the Three Stooges. Within minutes of touching down (conveniently beside the only 'man-made' structures on the planet, a'la 1960s Star Trek) the 'scientists' are yanking off their helmets, on the basis of 'it seems fine to me', dipping their fingers into strange organic ooze, and lugging a severed alien head back to an unquarantined spaceship in a sandwich bag.

Once there, they speedily discover the meaning of life. Then, while one of them gets a bit drunk, his two female companions decide it would be useful to stimulate the head electrically to reanimate it. They don't say why. They give it a bit too much juice, then too little,then dither over too much or too little like a couple of schoolgirls fiddling with a dicky bunsen burner, while the most important scientific discovery in human history waggles its ears and rolls its eyes - before eventually blowing up like a frog in a microwave.

Are the scientists abashed? Is the man angry? Do they all calm down and remember they have degrees in clever things, not diplomas in macramé? Do they heck.

The WHOLE MOVIE is a litany of ludicrous so-called science, schoolboy errors, and pseudo-profundity about the origin of species. Ironic really, when none of the crew would have a chance in hell in any sort of contest governed by Darwinian rules.

Crass stupidity is rampant in every department. Hi-tech helmets record every heartbeat - apparently until anything worth recording happens; stranded crewmates are abandoned to their fate in favour of a quick shag, and the spaceship door is opened to anyone who comes a-knocking. Although, after hitting the 'welcome' button, Idris Elba does do a double take and go 'Hold on a second!' but that might have just been an involuntary ad lib at his own character's baffling idiocy.

There is spectacular cinematography and effects, but not one iota of originality has been squandered on plot, subtext, tension or characters - which are as shallow as the Prometheus's muddy little gene pool.

Ridley Scott is a hero of mine, but Prometheus is not the intelligent, emotionally satisfying prequel that Alien deserves. It's a derisory, empty experience - and anyone who loved Alien is surely too old and too smart to be fobbed off with something this bad just because it's shiny.

Despite the dreadful title, Moonrise Kingdom is simply wonderful.

Since his flying start with Bottle Rocket and the triumph of Rushmore, I felt that Wes Anderson had rather tottered off a true path. The Royal Tenenbaums was hit and miss, The Darjeeling Limited was too twee, and The Life Aquatic was simply AWFUL. I take against ANY film that wastes Bill Murray.

Moonrise Kingdom doesn't repeat that error. Despite covering ground Anderson's already visited to an extent in Rushmore, MK looks at a teenage crush with fresh eyes, and surrounds it with a fantastic cast of oddballs and misfits. Unlike his films where the characters are irritatingly quirky for the sake of it, these oddballs seem organic to their strange island home. Star among them is Ed Norton as Scout Master Ward, who looks as if he's having the time of his life in shorts and woggles, in charge of a troop described as 'beige lunatics'.

Bruce Willis, Frances McDormand and Bill Murray all play their parts but never feel as though they're elbowing for the spotlight, which keeps the mood kind, befitting the hearts of all involved in the search for runaway scout, Sam, and his pen-pal, Suzy.

Visually, it's a feast of saturated colour and fabulous design, but - as with the best of Wes Anderson - the devil's always in the detail. The laughs come from minutely observed accessories (keep an eye on the scouts' badges!) and from throwaway truths. And the soundtrack is a great mix of wistful Western and classical pieces. Definitely buyable.

Anderson flirts with surrealism, but never gets Burtonesque, controlling his story with a firmer hand and to better effect. His situations might be bizarre, but the people in them are always painfully, wonderfully human. It's also a rare film - one you could watch with your grandmother or your grandchildren, with only a couple of moments where young eyes would have to be covered, and no real violence or swearing.

There is an overwhelming feeling of innocence and good will throughout.

I loved it from the opening frames, and it only got better from there.

Headhunters is FANTASTIC. If you hate subtitled movies, DON'T wait for the US remake - go and see it now, and have your mind changed in two hours flat.

I have never read Jo Nesbo, but if this adaptation reflects the calibre of his novels, then he deserves every plaudit he gets - as do all connected with this very cool movie.

The set up is original, the plot is twistily well executed, the characters are completely believable, the action is unrelenting and shocking, and the black humour is a complete joy.

I squirmed, I laughed, I hid behind my hands, I gripped my armrests then laughed some more.

This film kicks Hollywood's ass, and for fans of early Tarantino and the best of the Coen brothers, it's a must-see.

That's it. Steven Spielberg needs to stop making movies RIGHT NOW before we all forget how ET and Jaws and Close Encounters shaped a generation of young film fans in a GOOD way.

War Horse is the most tired, clichéd, derivative, predictable, laughable, emotionally-empty piece of film-making I have seen in a very very long time.

It's National Velvet without the great script but with a Grand National that lasts for four years; it's Gone With the Wind without Scarlett O'Hara or Rhett Butler; it's Driving Miss Daisy without the gritty realism.

Like poor George Lucas, Steven Spielberg is apparently too famous now for anyone he works with to him to tell him when he's wasting money on set pieces and scenery, instead of spending it on character development and emotional truth.

I don't object to a bit of emotional manipulation and certainly expected to have my tear-ducts mined. Things started well when I found that during a very short hiatus from my nearest cinema, ticket prices had gone up to almost £9. Lucky I'd taken plenty of tissues, in anticipation of a marvellous cry. I got one out as soon as the film started, just to be on the safe side. But it stayed dry. I didn't even snivel.

And the reason was that I felt utterly detached from the story and the characters. Of course, Spielberg plucks furiously at every heart-string like an irritating toddler on a forbidden guitar. The result is a tuneless cacophony of increasingly desperate appeals for emotion, which only made me dig in my mulish heels.

The horses were outstanding, and horses normally guarantee a good old weep from me just for being so Ahhhh, let alone being injured, maltreated and gunned down. But I was so annoyed by the film that I couldn't even shed a decent tear! What a swizz.

I know this is from a children's book, and that explains a lot of the dull, episodic nature of the film, but it is the filmmaker's job to ADAPT a book for screen to hopefully stay true to the heart and the spirit of the story, rather than be a slave to every word. War Horse is so literal that we (and Joey the horse) are whisked from owner to owner, for no other apparent reason than to show that some Germans like horses, and so do little girls. Each episode is so brief and/or so badly written that we have hardly established characterization before Joey is off to another new home. Situations that should be heart-rending are instead predictable and trite. While I'm opposed on principle to animals talking in movies, I think this may have been a film that could have worked better with a horsey voice-over, or even with a thorough rewrite, even if it was at the risk of alienating those who loved the book.

The film is very miscast and the characters are clichés, while the situations are totally unbelievable. From the strapping, straight-toothed Dartmoor farm boy and his drunken father and his hardworking mother and their evil, rich laughing landlord etc etc etc, to training a young horse in five minutes to do what would actually take weeks, if not months. The film lost credibility hand over fist, culminating in a glaring anachronism of a dirt-poor farmer drinking from a jolly market-stall mug with cows on it.

Like all his movies from Schindler's List onwards, Spielberg simply can't end a movie any more. Either he rambles on for half an hour past the perfect end-point, or he tries so hard to squeeze emotion out of his audience that things come full circle and become simply ridiculous. I won't spoil the ending because Steven Spoilberg has already done it for us. Suffice to say, I laughed out loud.

HOWEVER There are two AMAZING scenes in War Horse - in a field of tall grass and of Joey running across Nomansland - both totally original reminders of how great Spielberg used to be. I give the movie a star for each of those and NOT A TWINKLE MORE!

The Kill List is totally brilliant - and absolute rubbish. More specifically, the first 75% of the movie is fantastic - sharply written, wonderfully acted, supremely directed, and filled with tension and realism.

And then it all goes wrong.

I'd heard a few reviews of this film before choosing to see it, and it irks me that not one of them revealed that the last quarter of The Kill List is so divorced from the first that it's like watching a different film altogether. It reminded me of Charlie Kaufman's brilliant Adaptation, where the lead character's idiot brother suddenly steps in to finish the movie. Hilarious in that case - mystifying in this.

Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump start by crafting a stunning examination of the family life of a suburban hit-man that makes The Sopranos look glitzy. Neil Maskell is unnerving as Jay, whose long hiatus from 'work' has led to constant fighting with his wife. Their son witnesses the discord, and the tension and humanity is palpable.

Then Jay is drawn back into doing a well-paid job by his old crony, Gal, and the plot starts to thicken. Gradually the low-key family realism gives way to a realism of a far nastier kind, coupled with sudden moments of real mystery and total surprise.

Wheatley layers the non-action with skill, and really knows how to ratchet up the intrigue. The three main characters are all very good, and even the smaller roles of the son and girlfriend are well played and brilliantly written. You get the feeling you are watching something very special unfold on screen, with no indication of how it will all be resolved. I am a hardened end-guesser and am often right, but with this movie I had NO IDEA where it was going, which is exciting and rare.

However, just as I was preparing for a stunning denouement with all the seemingly-impossible ends tied up, The Kill List turned an ankle and tripped into a ditch full of dung.

O. M. G.

I'm not into writing spoilers - even when the filmmakers have done more spoiling than I ever could in this case. Suffice to say that 'and then he woke up and it was all a dream' would have been a more credible ending, and would at least have made sense of SOME of the set up, instead of none of it at all.

If there was ever a progression of narrative here, it is lying somewhere on a cutting room floor, crying its eyes out at the wasted opportunity.

When the credits came up, there was a stunned silence in the packed cinema and someone turned to his mate and said:'That's the last time YOU choose the effing film'. Judging by the snorts of sympathetic laughter it caused, I'd say it was the best review I'd heard of The Kill List.

I've never been so disappointed by a film that promised so much.

EDITED TO GIVE TWO MORE STARS AS ONLY THE ENDING LET DOWN ONE OF THE MOST AMAZING MOVIES I'VE SEEN

Do you love Lemmy?? No, nor me. Or at least, I didn't before I went to see this documentary as a brownie-points concession to my metal-head boyfriend.

Now I think Lemmy is AWESOME! Still don't like metal or Motorhead, but that is really irrelevant because this film is so engaging and its subject so endearing, original and wonderful.

I knew little about Lemmy apart from the cowboy hat and the warts. But my heart was truly warmed - both by him and by the loving regard that fellow giants of metal apparently hold him in.

The man's a total one-off and on that basis alone, this documentary is well worth seeing.

I still hate metal but even if they're only indifferent to the music I think most people would love this film. And if you're a fan already, then it's absolutely unmissable.

Forget that it's a documentary, forget that it's about motorbike racing, this is simply a fantastic movie, with more tension and heart than almost anything I've seen on the screen this year - or any year.

Sometimes a documentary really captures the human condition the way feature films find it hard to do. It happened in Anvil:The Story of Anvil and it happens in TT3D. I defy anyone not to fall in love with this movie within minutes of the opening shots, which are possibly the only poor shots in the film - rider-eye-views of the TT track which should have been terrifying but which suffer for the lack of a horizon in the framing. At this point your girlfriend might be excused for wondering whether she could drag you out of TT3D and into Pirates of the Caribbean before she misses a single frame of Johnny Depp.

But these moments are brief, and as soon as Guy Martin pops onto the screen with his eccentric, selfish, bawdy, but strangely innocent, obsession about winning a TT race, you know you're in for an amazing ride, and so it proves. With just the right mix of characters, contemporaneous footage and vintage thrills and spills, TT3D takes you on an incredible journey into a place where glory is often harder to come by than death.

Like Anvil and the outstanding The World's Fastest Indian, this is a movie that transcends its subject matter and takes you on a white-knuckle ride through the Isle and the soul of Man.

Going to a movie with low expectations is almost always the key to enjoyment. Having seen the appalling trailer (no pun intended but apt anyway)I was really not happy about being dragged to see Paul.

I was pleasantly surprised that it was reasonably engaging, reasonably funny and had a reasonably interactive 'spot-the-Spielberg-reference' running gag.

The language is unnecessarily four-lettered, which adds precisely nothing to a film which would otherwise do pretty well aimed at kids, but what do I care? I'm not an investor.

Pegg and Frost are watchable enough to keep the whole thing ticking along nicely and although it's all quite tame and predictable, there are a few laugh-out-loud moments and plenty more smiles. Good ones from Pegg, who appears to have bowed to the Hollywood dental gods and had his teeth fixed. Bit of a shame - bad teeth can sometimes be the only way to recognise British actors.

Not a patch on Sean of the Dead, but not as stupidly over-long as Hot Fuzz, and I'll probably pay to see these guys again.

This movie is OUTSTANDING. And so is Colin Firth, I freely admit! The film I saw previous to The King's Speech was Tron Legacy, and this movie had more tension in the first two minutes than Tron had in its entirety. And after that, The King's Speech just gets better and better. If anyone had told me that a movie about a guy stammering could be this good, I would never have believed them. Seriously - you have to see it with your own eyes, because it sounds pretty lousy. Colin Firth is astonishing, but every other part is played to perfection and Geoffrey Rush is superb.

Moving, funny, dramatic and compelling throughout. Deserves every award it picks up and - for once - the huge score it's getting on IMDb.

Without a doubt the most disappointing, dullest film I've ever seen. Forget the 'Legacy' tag - this is just Tron 30 years on. And every bit as tedious as the original.

Saw it in 3D which was a mixed blessing, as the film is so darkly lit that the tint in the glasses made some scenes truly muddy and hard to see. Far from being a CGI spectacular, Tron is monotonous in every respect - the colours, the script, the tone, emotional content. The fact that several characters are versions of Jeff Bridges is ironic, and symbolizes the entire one-note movie. It hits its strident stride about three minutes in and sticks with it throughout. Everyone shouts everything and none of it means anything.

The plot is utter tosh which ticks staid little plot-boxes and moves on swiftly before it can be examined for any evidence of original content. There is none; it's depressingly old hat. Like the first film, you get the feeling the only point of making Tron Legacy was to show the bike-racing but with improved CGI. And, like the first movie, the dullness and confusion of those scenes in cannot be overstated.

Jeff Bridges tweets in his usual old hippie routine - the Big Lebowski meets Robocop. He has bare feet! How very Zen! Everyone else in the film is too cardboard to review.

There's no tension, no sense of threat, and the uniform uniforms make telling the goodies from the baddies a distinction not worth bothering with. Even the big Tron 'reveal' is a joke of Stig-like proportions, as he never takes his helmet off, so who the hell knows WHO he is? I would pick the plot apart, but fear I might expend more effort than the makers did in putting it together - which is not saying much.

Halfway through this movie I left my friends and went to get an ice cream, just for something to do. Three airheads in front of me took forever to decide on cups or cones, nuts or sprinkles, one scoop or two. Far from being enraged by their time-wasting, I felt myself getting Zen like Jeff at the thought that - in this place and time - waiting in line for Phish Food was actually the highlight of the evening.

I find it hard to believe anyone could write a spoiler for this movie more damaging than the screenwriters already have.

A complete waste of money from beginning to end. Only YOU can stop it!