“The quintessentially American fear of accidentally mincing over the fine line between ‘macho’ and ‘gay’ — the terror of someone suddenly questioning the sweaty, towel-whipping locker room rituals that make the college quarterback into an Adonis — forms the heart of Blades of Glory’s comic premise.”

“M. Night Shyamalan undulates manically between disaster and brilliance. Like a vintage kilo thrifter, the erstwhile writer-director scoops up flashy armfuls of filmic tat, veering wildly across genre and subject matter, traditionally effecting his trademark plot twist to turn the whole wobbling confection into a triumph.”

“Belfast native and ‘British’ dramatic heavyweight Kenneth Branagh uses the wide-eyed gaze of his fictionalised ten-year-old self, Buddy (Jude Hill) to depict his homeland not as a problem to be solved, or even understood, but in the way that he experienced it: a close community defined by depth of feeling.“

“Joel Coen's vision turns the godlike powers of the entertainment industry to Shakespearean ends. Macbeth is destroyed by the false promise of a story to affirm his superior identity; Coen pulls off an equally stealthy and heinous murder on the viewer's ego.“

“The studio prose that helped propel Death in Venice to critical and commercial acclaim across the Anglosphere sums up the spirit of the film, a spirit that seemed as profitable in 1971 as it smacks of toxicity now. Death in Venice is a love song to decadence, and a passionately self-indulgent answer to a timeless question: what does pleasure mean?”

“The ‘villain’ appears only in the soft, maternal, eminently huggable form of Olivia Colman, turning her varied ability to draw tragedy from the most bizarrely banal characters to maximum effect: as a woman who does not love being a mother, her great crime (and the source of the traumatic guilt, rage and violence simmering in her harmless-looking head) consists of leaving her daughters with her husband to pursue a career.”

“Rather like the fashion line whose unlikely resurrection it chronicles, Ridley Scott’s latest modern drama clings onto a shred of substance under its gloriously tacky trappings, thanks to the toxicity of the domestic politics bubbling at its heart.”