Quite remarkably, there is no gratuitous violence in the film, despite the palpable tension all around. Even the climax rests on merely the hint of an unspeakable crime, an idea planted Inception-like in the mind. And just as the last scene of Inception leaves you to figure out if the spinning top stopped or not, the last scene here has you wondering: did Gordo do the dirty deed or not? Go figure.

Shaun the Sheep Movie is, without exaggeration, as close to perfection as an animated comedy can get. And it works because everything from the storyline to the character delineation to the animation technique retains an elemental simplicity that marks a throwback to a lost age of innocence in filmmaking history.

There’s really no nice way to say this: Pixels is inarguably the most god-awful film I’ve seen in a long while. It’s premised on nostalgia for a niche memory of the 1980s — centred around the universe of first-generation video games — but that’s just a thin veneer for a celebration of utterly useless geekdom that reeks of self-gratification in the extreme.

The Inception-like quality to the narrative would probably leave you muddled, but old faithful Arnie fills in the comprehension gaps with some robotic regurgitation of scientific mumbo-jumbo.

…thank the Gods of Cinema that George Miller, who directed all three earlier Mad Max films, never gave up on his signature project! For what we have here is an enormously entertaining film that passes on the baton of the classic ‘road warrior’ saga to a new generation of cinemagoers.

A modern — and chromatically rich — retelling of the old classic fairy tale.

The Exorcist for the post-millennial age. Cliched but spooky nonetheless.

Groundhog Day meets Saving Private Ryan for an enormously entertaining Cruise action flick.

The many-layered narrative, which shifts back and forth in time and space, requires a mind-bend to grasp, not unlike Christopher Nolan’s Inception. But it is a tribute to director Bryan Singer’s finesse that he transports us on that epic journey without inducing motion sickness or getting us muddled.

…in the absence of passion, what we’re left with is an unsatisfying memory of how good the quirky Woody Allen style of storytelling was, and how both he and his art form stand vastly diminished over the decades.