★★★★½ - STUFF  - An exuberant and engrossing musical retelling of a classic tale -  In an unnamed French outpost, somewhere along the Mediterranean perhaps, there is a company of soldiers. Their captain – Cyrano de Bergerac – is an immensely popular and thunderously brave individual, as quick…

★★★★½ - STUFF  - Denmark's animated Oscars triple threat brings an amazing journey to life -  Like 2008’s Golden Globe-winning Waltz with Bashir, Danish documentarian Jonas Poher Rasmussen has made magnificent use of animation to bring a harrowing true-life tale to life. In this case, it’s the…

★★★★½ - STUFF  - Joaquin Phoenix's stunning turn in the best movie the Oscars snubbed -  In present day Detroit, podcast director Johnny receives an urgent call from his sister Viv. Viv's husband Paul is living with a mental breakdown and will need full-time care – for a while at least. But…

★★★★½ - STUFF  - Hate rom-coms? Welcome to your new favourite one -  It’s Norway’s answer to Toni Erdmann, Blue is the Warmest Colour, Promising Young Woman or Nymphomaniac. An evocative, provocative tale that focuses on a young woman’s search for identity and love in the modern world that…

★★★½ - MOVIEWEB  - A Superb Adaptation of Agatha Christie's Classic Murder Mystery -  Kenneth Branagh leads an all-star cast in a triumphant second outing as Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot. Death on the Nile has the famed Belgian sleuth investigating a series of salacious murders in Egypt.…

★★★★★ - THE GUARDIAN  - Kenneth Branagh’s euphoric eulogy to his home city -  There is a terrific warmth and tenderness to Kenneth Branagh’s elegiac, autobiographical movie about the Belfast of his childhood: spryly written, beautifully acted and shot in a lustrous monochrome, with set pieces,…

★★★★★ - STUFF  - Pedro Almodovar's lyrical, haunting, wonderfully entertaining film -  In present day Madrid, a magazine photographer is shooting a feature on an anthropologist. He – the anthropologist – is tall, urbane, swooningly handsome and passionate about his work. And she, Janis the…

★★★★★ - THE GUARDIAN  - Almodóvar delivers an emotional bundle of joy -  Not parallel actually: that would mean they don’t touch. Here we have convergent mothers; intersecting mothers whose lives come together with a spark that ignites this moving melodrama, which audaciously draws a line between…

★★★★★ - STUFF  - A paean to a tarnished golden age -  We are in LA's San Fernando Valley in 1973. Over the decades, the Valley has been a dream factory. And also home to more hustlers, wannabes, con-artists and shysters per square mile than pretty much anywhere else you could name. Many of whom…

★★★★★ - THE GUARDIAN  - Paul Thomas Anderson’s funniest and most relaxed film yet -  As a title for this California pastoral from the sunlit west coast 1970s, Licorice Pizza is whimsically inspired. According to writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, it’s actually the name of a now defunct SoCal…

★★★★ - SCREEN RANT The Eyes of Tammy Faye is a compelling look at the controversial, yet sweetly charismatic, Tammy Faye Bakker (later Messner), a televangelist who rose to fame in the ‘70s and ‘80s, only to have a humiliating, and very public, fall from grace following a major scandal in 1988.…

★★★★ - STUFF  - Kiwi doco looks back at important, inspirational protest -  Prolific New Zealand-born producer Matthew Metcalfe teams up with award-winning There Once Was An Island film-maker Briar March for this fascinating and engrossing look at a global movement that was started by four mothers…