Film review: Hello Carter (15)

Hello Carter
(15) 81mins
★★✩✩✩

According to the support notes to this film, Londoner Anthony Wilcox sold his house  and spent a year writing the script for Hello Carter, his full directorial debut.

Film review: Paddington (PG)

Paddington
(PG) 95mins
★★★★★

Clear the decks, grab the children, make a note - there's a new tradition elbowing its way into Christmas schedules.

Film review: Third Person (15)

Third Person
(15) 137mins
★★★✩✩

There's something wrong here. You ask yourself, how come something that reeks of quality, with a quality cast and a quality writer-director reprising - structurally at least - his finest hour, feels so limp and insipid?

Film review: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (12A)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
(12A) 101mins
★★✩✩✩

When mindless Megan Fox thinks about the loss of her father and her role in the whole Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle circus, her eyes tell a story.

Film review: Effie Gray (12A)

Effie Gray
(12A) 108mins
★★★★✩

If Effie Gray lacks the emotional release that the painstaking accumulation of frustrations appears to demand, it is perhaps testimony to the artistic courage of script writer Emma Thompson (who also stars).

Film review: Filmed In Supermarionation (PG)

Filmed In Supermarionation
(PG) 119mins
★★★★✩

Thunderbirds visionary Gerry Anderson railed against the limitations of puppetry.

Film review: A Most Wanted Man (15)

A Most Wanted Man
(15) 122mins
★★★✩✩

Director Anton Corbijn's sombre spy film is dressed in graffitied concrete, kebab shop neon and cold steel blue.

Film review: Lucy (15)

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Lucy
(15) 89mins
★★★★✩

Nothing in Lucy feels particularly new. It doesn't require a great deal of brain capacity to spot the references - 2001, Limitless, The Matrix, Inception.

Film review: The Rover (15)

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The Rover
(15) 108mins
★★★✩✩

Guy Pearce is mad, bored and has nothing to lose. Well, he has one thing to lose and that's his car (not the Rover of the title, sadly). When the dusty Aussie emerges from a roadside bar and sees criminals making off with his wheels, he finds a purpose that makes him less bored but more mad.

Film review: God's Pocket (15)

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God's Pocket
(15) 88mins
★★★✩✩

The work of Philip Seymour Hoffman has always been compelling and watchable.

Film review: Begin Again (15)

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Begin Again
(15) 104mins
★★★★✩

Actors secretly harbour a dream to be a musician and musicians want to be an actor one day." So says Brit James Corden, who turns up in this love song to the power of music which is heaving with job swappers.

Film review: Three Days To Kill (12A)

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Three Days To Kill
(12A) 117mins
★★✩✩✩

Sometime soon, a bright young thing will find a revivalist project for Kevin Costner, who appears to drag himself forlornly around the fringes of the big time wondering where it all went wrong.

Film review: TS Spivet (12A)

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TS Spivet
(12A) 105mins
★★★✩✩

The Young And Prodigious TS Spivet was an instant success as a book - with a 12-year-old mini-genius telling a tale of his cross-country adventure to pick up a scientific award told with digressions, subplots, marginalia and footnotes.

Film review: The Two Faces Of January (12A)

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The Two Faces Of January
(12A) 96mins
★★★✩✩

Film-maker Hossein Amini confesses this, his directorial debut, is a labour of love, a project he has nurtured for years ever since he first read Patricia Highsmith's difficult novel of guilt, secrets and self-destruction.

Film review: Plastic (15)

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Plastic
(15) 102mins
★★✩✩✩

"Hollyoaks meets Hustle" is what springs to mind as this glossy, crime caper - based on a true story - begins to reveal its twisting tale of twentysomething wheeler dealers.

Film review: Frank (15)

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Frank
(15) 95mins
★★✩✩✩

Chris Sievey is a curious footnote in the history of alternative music and performance art. He was an animator, comedian and jobbing musician with various bands and appeared on a number of TV shows, mostly in the North West, during the '80s and '90s.

Sundance review: Obvious Child

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Obvious Child
(tbc) 83mins
★★★✩✩

Obvious Child opens with scatty and scatological stand-up Donna Stern (Jenny Slate) ruminating on gussets and female flatulence.

Sundance review: Dinosaur 13

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Dinosaur 13
(tbc) 105mins
★★★★✩

Up until 1990, only 12 fossils of Tyrannosaurus Rex had been recovered, the best being 40% complete. The one miraculously preserved in the badlands of South Dakota Hills was 80% complete and a scientific marvel.

Sundance review: Fruitvale Station

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Fruitvale Station
(tbc) 85mins
On general release on June 6
★★★★★

We know it's going to end badly. Genuine mobile phone footage captures the chaos and discord on the platform of the eponymous station where a bunch of lads are corralled by jittery transport police on New Year's Eve in Oakland.

Sundance review: The Voices

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The Voices
103mins
★★★✩✩

If the measure of a movie is the decibel of debate that follows the closing credits, then The Voices will surely rank among the most memorable at Sundance London.