Graham Buchan

What a disappointment. I liked Florida Project a lot and loved Red Rocket, but this is over-long, over-blown, has awkward tonal shifts and and has too many implausabilities. Maybe it's time for Baker to stop obsessing about sex-work.

Most original movie this year. So much about it shouldn't work, but because Audiard follows his vision with such confidence and style, it does. I loved it, and if there is any justice it will clean up at the awards.

I wish I could say I liked it, but the more I thought about it afterwards the less satisfying it became. It has good elements: steamy lesbian sex, sleazy criminality, nasty graphic violence, but the elements do not gel, there are loose ends left hanging and it is badly uneven in tone. There are two scenes incongruously butted together which any decent editor would not have let happen. The surrealist sequence near the end definitely did not work. A second-time British director tackling the underbelly of American society? Sorry, must work harder.

Feels very much like an adaptation of a novel which never quite takes flight. Directing, script and some acting of the minor roles could have been better. Very promising material but other holocaust-based stories have been done a lot better. This sort of stuff should make you weep; I was almost totally unmoved.

Truly awful in every possible way. Please delete my one star.

Worst film I've seen this year.

Yet another example (like Ammonite, and the BBC's Great Expectations) of a 21st century film-maker grafting contemporary concerns and modes of expression onto an existing historical narrative, and doing neither a favour in the process. Some of the dialogue in this piece resembles what you might hear in today's Oxford Union. To write persuasively for 18th century characters and make what they say seem authentic yet important and relevant to today is a skill which is not on display here. A huge shame because a great opportunity has been missed. Joseph Bologne's story is really interesting - such a pity he has been short-changed. And very little of his actual music is heard. History is complex: here it is rendered in tired cliches.

This is a film about a film-maker spending the night discussing his film, and the critical reception of his film, with his partner who is partly the inspiration for his film and might have, but didn’t, act in his film. You want self-indulgence? You’ve got it. You want tedious, wordy discussions about the art and purpose of film? You’ve got it. You want a repetitive cycle of antagonism, accusation and reconciliation? You’ve got it. You want two totally self-absorbed people stuck in a house and endlessly discussing what’s unlikeable about each other? You’ve got it. But do you want an interesting film which rises above the level of interminable navel-gazing? You haven’t got that. Not by a million miles. Do you want a cinematic experience? You haven’t got that either. Do you want to do something useful for two hours? Go walk the dog. Write a poem. Oil your bicycle. Do anything except watch this film.

Annoying. The film carefully avoids telling the audience anything substantial about why they committed the crime, or the details of the trial, as if it has something to hide. She says "Desperate people do desperate things." Yeah, that is so profound. No amount of her posturing in church got me to like her. Yes, 60 years is an inhumane sentence, and yes, the disproportionate incarceration of black men is a scandal and the symptom of a vengeful society, but this film does nothing to further the cause of reform. 13th and Just Mercy do the job much better. As usual, a good number of the heavyweight critics have been taken in.

I really liked this film. So clever, so thoughtful. Very brave of both of them: she for wanting to make a documentary about a subject most people find hard to confront and talk about, especially involving the father she loves; him for enthusiastically agreeing to take part. I have one small reservation though. Just as a poet sometimes goes through a terrible experience but then consoles him/herself with the thought “at least I got a poem out of it”, here there is an inescapable parallel whiff of career advancement. But I still admire its honesty.