A film that starts with a bang and ends in a fizzle, 'Vox Lux' impresses before it disappoints. Featuring a brilliant set of twin performances from Raffey Cassidy, along with a collection of mannered tics masquerading as performances from Natalie Portman and Jude Law, the film offers cinematic highs and lows in an uneven, uneasy mix. Brady Corbet is sure of neither story nor theme, delivering occasionally powerful set pieces that fail to come together in a meaningful whole.

Corbet…

'Roma' is the sort of film that successful pop filmmakers say they’d like to make but rarely do - a small picture against blockbuster scale that writer-director Alfonso Cuarón has been working on since 'Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban', though impressively mounted according to the contemporary standards of the international ‘art film’, aspiring to join the divisional poles of film culture.

Seemingly about nothing and everything simultaneously, this year-in-the-life story quietly - yet forcefully - observes the repetition…

2018 has been an uncommonly good year for studio comedies, with the likes of 'Game Night', 'Blockers', and 'Crazy Rich Asians' proving that it's still possible to combine strong plotting with consistent laughs. On paper, 'Night School' has all the necessary ingredients to be part of that trend. Unfortunately, it fails to even scratch a passing grade.

It doesn't help that 'Night School' is content to waste screen time on unfunny, meaningless set pieces. While Kevin Hart has been able…

Remember the magic of the movies? Something of an unfashionable phrase these days, but one glimpse of the ethereal genius of Ang Lee's first venture into martial arts cinema and you know you are witness to real movie magic. This is not about the suspension of disbelief, quite the opposite. It demands belief and repays it in full.

Lee has created a film about liberation - from the shackles of romantic convention imposed by 18th-century Chinese society, and from the…

‘Groundhog Day’ is film that’s so light on its feet that its brilliance goes unnoticed. It’s so wonderfully well-constructed. Above all, there is Pembroke J. Herring’s seamless editing, which accents the repetition of each day while emphasizing the breaks from routine with sharp, emphatic shocks to ‘Groundhog Day’s' system; and that while also doing the yeoman’s work of all editing in all comedies, which is making everything funny. John Bailey's cinematography, while plain, captures the flat greyness of an overcast…