Bobby Sands: 66 Days

There’s much more to Brendan J Byrne’s engrossing, even-handed documentary Bobby Sands: 66 Days than its title might at first suggest. The timeline that led up to the death on 5 May 1981 of the IRA prisoner provides the immediate context – an increasingly dramatic one as the countdown of Sands’s hunger strike nears its inexorable conclusion.

Barry Lyndon

Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975), which has been re-released, is one of the most stately costume dramas films ever made. It is also a monument to tedium, a tale told so deliberately, ponderously, and humorlessly that it raises the question, as do Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut, of whether their maker was a genuine master or is a sacred cow. 

Jason Bourne

When Matt Damon's Jason Bourne makes his introductory appearance, as a bare-knuckle boxer somewhere in the lawless Greek-Albanian borderlands, it speaks volumes. Bourne is severely muscled-up, but he looks older, wearier and existentially imperilled. You could say much the same for this belated franchise addition, which is bristling with technology and intensely-detailed action scenes, but struggles to find much that wasn't done better, or more purposefully, in the earlier films.

Star Trek Beyond

This is the third of the rebooted new generation Star Treks, and ultimately leaves you with the feeling that the intrepid crew of the starship Enterprise continue to boldly go, but still haven't quite arrived. On the other hand, the fact that a sprawling high-tech movie like this can manage to recapture some of the friendly intimacy of the old TV series gives it an undeniable charm.

The opening sequence, where Captain James T Kirk is on a diplomatic mission to deliver...

Summertime

Set at the beginning of the 1970s, Catherine Corsini’s Summertime (La belle saison) is a story of love in a political climate, one in which the post-1968 assertions of a changing society have infused the public context in theory but do not ultimately translate into liberation for the film’s two lead women characters.

Ghostbusters

Ghostbusters 2016 has suffered from dire predictions on the internet from fans of the 1984 original. Scorn has been poured on the trailers, the all-female cast and the very notion of rebooting the much-loved 1984 comedy. In the end, it’s an enjoyable blockbuster, not great, but not disastrous either.