Wadjda is the first full-length feature film shot entirely inside Saudi Arabia, a conservative Islamic country where women are denied civic freedoms or any public role. It’s director is Haifaa Al-Mansour, a Saudi-born female filmmaker who now lives in Bahrain. While shooting on location in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, Al-Mansour had to hide in a production van, directing her actors via walkie-talkie, because she could not publicly mix with her male crew.

Sofia Coppola's satire on celebrity obsession...

Before Midnight is the third in Richard Linklater’s intermittent catch-ups with Jesse and Celine, characters played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy who the filmmaker first introduced in 1995’s Before Sunrise.

"Release the World Engine!"

Behind The Candelabra reminds me a little of a Scorsese film, with Michael Douglas’ toupe in particular bringing to mind the extraordinary hairpieces worn by the elderly Midwestern crime bosses in Casino. This is Steven Soderbergh’s frequently hilarious biopic about Liberace and his 6-year relationship with the much younger Scott Thorson. It is a world of palatial kitsch, excess and small dogs, Lear jets, plastic surgeons and boogie woogie piano.

This isn't the one...

Tired final act of lucrative gross-out franchise...

The cover story of this month’s Vanity Fair paints a disturbing picture of a major Hollywood movie going off the rails. Over-budget and with its release date delayed, the film is further troubled by a lack of creative vision and no clear sense of how to deliver a concluding third act. These are production problems that you might assume would beset a mainstream blockbuster – the film in the Vanity Fair story is Brad Pitt’s zombie epic World War Z, by the way.

Entertaining documentary about the notoriously cantankerous drummer...

Pedro Almodovar's latest: high altitude, high camp comedy...