CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER (3D)
(136 minutes) M
★★★☆

The Steve Rogers/Captain America character burst onto cinema screens three years ago fighting Nazis in the 1940s. The new movie, again in 3D, takes place in the present. "Cap" (Chris Evans) doesn't like thenew ultra-weaponised airships under construction at SHIELD, the CIA-like agency run by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford). In a plot borrowed directly from the 1975 Redford thriller Three Days of the Condor, Rogers goes underground, trusting no one except his new friend Wilson (Anthony Mackie) and his colleague Natasha (Scarlett Johansson), the ex-KGB assassin.
The new movie is  rambunctious, funny, complex and engaging. It's far less "patriotic"than the title might suggest, with a plot that questions the American response to 9/11, at least for a moment. The finale is crafted by the numbers, calculated to appeal to all stripes of the American audience with a depressing predictability, and an ear-bashing finality. PB
General release

THE LEGO MOVIE
(101 minutes) PG
★★★

Emmet, voiced by Chris Pratt, is a construction worker whose life changes course when he stumbles upon the fabled Piece of Resistance and is hailed as The Special, the hero destined to overthrow the tyrannical Lord Business (Will Ferrell). As pure pop the film peaks early, in the inspired scene introducing us to Emmet's home town of Bricksburg - a shiny happy metropolis where everyone bops along in unison to the electro anthem Everything Is Awesome. The joke about this irresistible earworm is that it does exactly what it's meant to do: make conformity seem like fun. Indeed, for all the film's conceptual brilliance, the multilevelled satire leaves little room for the characters to emerge as individuals (the exception is Will Arnett's growly LEGO Batman). By design, Emmet is a stock dorky everyman, Lord Business is a stock villain, and Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks) is a stock female sidekick, the kind who proves far tougher and smarter than the hero yet remains consigned to a secondary role. JW
General release

FAITH CONNECTIONS
(115 minutes) MA
★☆

Once every three years or so, Hindu pilgrims converge at the Kumbh Mela festival in Northern India to bathe in sacred waters and discuss matters of faith. Last year's festival, held at Allahabad, has been described as the largest peaceful gathering in human history - attracting close to 100 million people.
An event of this magnitude is awe-inspiring on multiple levels; the logistics alone boggle the mind. Who owns all this land - and what is it used for, when it isn't carpeted with colourful tents and corrugated iron shacks? Who is responsible for the clean-up afterwards? Such questions go unanswered in Pan Nalin's Faith Connections, a slick yet mostly tedious documentary. In a striking early shot, the camera weaves  between groups of worshippers while sticking close to the ground. Children are central to the film's vision: one ongoing subplot concerns the hermit Hatha Yogi Baba, who has adopted a small boy and as a result finds himself half-unwillingly reconnecting with the world. JW
ACMI

MINUSCULE: VALLEY OF THELOSTANTS
(88 minutes) G
★☆
The Americans continue to lead the world in computer animation, in part because this is a field where it's hard to innovate artistically without a great deal of money. A spin-off from a French TV show about the funny ways of insects, Thomas Szabo and Helene Giraud's Minuscule has been a critical and commercial hit at home, but seems unlikely to repeat the trick elsewhere. The characters don't talk, though they communicate with other sounds: whistles, tweets, and buzzing noises. A tranquil, bucolic mood prevails over whatever tension arises from the slender plot - involving a ladybird who befriends a group of black ants, and must help them save their colony from the wicked, slant-eyed red ants who want to steal their sugar. This plot, it must be said, is one of Minuscule's drawbacks. Once the red ants start using pine cones as battering rams and spraying insecticide at their enemies, why not have them ordering bombs by mail like Wile E. Coyote in the Road Runner series? None of this would matter if the film were funnier or more compelling. JW
Cinema Nova

Now showing

12 YEARS A SLAVE
(132 minutes) MA
★★☆

The British director Steve McQueen is fixated on bodies pushed to the limit, struggling to transcend their status as mere flesh - which provides a slightly disconcerting context for this Oscar-nominated historical drama, in which the hero is yet again stretched out on a cross. It's the story of Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an African-American violinist from New York who in 1841 was kidnapped and sold into slavery, labouring for more than a decade in the cotton fields of Louisiana. The film is harrowing, though more emotionally straightforward than McQueen's previous work; while Solomon is forced into some degree of complicity with his oppressors, he never loses our sympathy. Ultimately, he tends to be overshadowed by his more psychologically complex ''owner'' (Michael Fassbender), and McQueen's talent shines through most when he's using alienation devices to complicate the stock response of righteous indignation. JW
Selected release

ALL IS LOST
(106 minutes) M
★★★★

All Is Lost, written and directed by J. C. Chandor (Margin Call) is an engrossing drama with a spare, simple premise: it's about a man (Robert Redford) alone and adrift on the ocean. Rich, thoughtful, almost wordless, it's a character-driven film, but it's about character in action, in the minutely observed detail of the careful, practical, seemingly doomed measures a man takes in a struggle for survival. Redford gives a perfectly pitched, low-key performance which seems to be without artifice or self-consciousness. All Is Lost unfolds slowly, giving us a sense of effort and a feeling for the passage of time, yet there are moments when it has the suspense of a thriller. PH
Selected release

ARE WE OFFICIALLY DATING?
(95 minutes) MA
★★☆

This mildly raunchy romantic comedy plays as if director Tom Gormican woke up with a brainwave: ''Let's do Sex and the City - but with guys!'' Zac Efron plays Jason, the cocky leader of a trio of Manhattan pals who vow to keep things casual with the women they pursue. Gormican's wit is very much of a sitcom kind, and all three leads put together can't equal one Justin Timberlake. But it's gratifying to encounter a ''bromance'' which manages, on the whole, not to be misogynist, racist, or homophobic: when the boys joke about being gay for each other, the tone is playful rather than freaked out. JW
General release

THE ARMSTRONG LIE
(123 minutes) M
★★★

Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney had signed on to make a documentary about Lance Armstrong's return to the Tour de France in 2009, four years after he had retired. It was supposed to be a story of triumph, but events overtook the project, and when Armstrong made his extraordinary admissions about doping to Oprah, Gibney had to start over. The Armstrong Lie is an act of retrieval, and in some ways quite a skilful one. It doesn't really give us much that is new, but it has some interesting small revelations. Its last glimpse of Armstrong shows a man who, despite everything, is still trying to recast a story to his own advantage. PH
Selected release

HALF OF A YELLOW SUN
(111 minutes) M
★★★★

In the Nigerian civil war of 1967-70, starvation was used as a weapon against the Biafrans. The images that reached Australia were horrible. Half of a Yellow Sun uses real TV news reports to background political events, but sparingly and threateningly. While Kainene (Anika Noni) takes over the family business, her twin sister, Olanna (Thandie Newton), goes north from Lagos to teach sociology at the university town of Nsukka, where she has fallen in love with Odenigbo (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a radical professor. By delaying the intrusion of politics, the film establishes a sense of what is about to be lost, and how easily things can go bad. The turmoil closes in on the characters almost without their noticing. We see almost no films from this part of the world. This is a UK-Nigerian co-production filmed in the country, with a rare degree of passion and commitment. It is a superb piece of work. PB
Selected release

THE GREAT BEAUTY
(141 minutes) MA
★★★★

Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty is extravagant, knowing, bleak and spectacular. It begins with a quote, the image of a tourist overwhelmed by beauty and a protracted immersion in a late-night party to end all parties, then winds its way, in episodic fashion, through a city and its implications. The city is Rome, the people we see are almost exclusively from its upper echelons, and we are in the company of the jaded Jep (Toni Servillo), a writer celebrating his 65th birthday at the film's opening party. Jep watches, observes, floats from party to encounter to event. He's a journalist and a man about town; having failed to follow up the success of his first novel, he's become a bystander, watching the parade, keeping his distance. The Great Beauty is unmistakably in debt to Fellini and La Dolce Vita, embracing its model with assurance, gesturing towards other films and influences. Its depictions - of contemporary art, contemporary religion, the contemporary world - are often unsparing, yet feel oddly graceful. Even its most severe moments have a lush, sensory charge. PH
Selected release

HER
(126 minutes) MA
★★★★

Writer-director Spike Jonze sets his movie in a not-too-distant future, a retro-inflected world that feels like a mixture of hipster dreamscape and hipster anxiety attack. Joaquin Phoenix plays Ted, who works for beautifulhandwrittenletters.com, crafting other people's correspondence for them. He is separated from his wife and leads a solitary existence. Then he acquires a new operating system, advanced and personalised, that leads him into an unprecedented experience of intimacy.

He opts for a female voice, and ends up with Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) who soon becomes an essential part of his life. What develops between them feels like the relationship he has been looking for. What's more, it becomes apparent, this is not an unusual development. Jonze does not labour the point, but others around Ted are finding the same thing. The future-present that Jonze imagines is subtly yet elaborately constructed with wit and wryness, even whimsy, but Her also comes face to face with loss, sadness and pain. There's an unexpected amount of emotional depth and complexity in Ted's search for and flight from connection. PH
Selected release

INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS
(105 minutes) MA
★★★★

Joel and Ethan Coen's Inside Llewyn Davis is the portrait of the artist as a young man - a cantankerous, unfortunate, self-sabotaging young man with a guitar and a folk repertoire whose career seems doomed to oblivion. So what do we make of these qualities and what do they say about his art? Such questions haunt this dark comedy of aspiration and frustration right to the very end. We begin in New York in 1961, in a circular narrative that explores a week in the life of the title character, Llewyn Davis (a terrific performance by Oscar Isaac) as he searches for a gig, a place to stay, a future. We're not sure where the Coens are taking us - not towards redemption, justification or a vision of popular success, but towards something more problematic and unresolved. This is a film about the strange, tormented nature of creative endeavour, and it's rooted in ambivalence. Music punctuates and illuminates the film, with several extended performances that serve a range of functions. It also contains one of the great feline roles. There's a ginger cat whose presence seems to define, in different ways, the choices and fortunes of the title character. PH
Selected release

LE WEEK-END
(89 minutes) M
★★★

English couple Nick and Meg (Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan) are heading to Paris to relive their honeymoon of 30 years earlier. It looks set for disaster, even before the Eurostar pulls into the station. There's so much irritation and discontent between them - nothing is in sync, most of all sexual desire. Broadbent's passive-aggressive philosophy lecturer is a more developed character, but Duncan brings a sense of depth to Meg's simmering discontent. Relief of sorts is at hand in the shape of Morgan (Jeff Goldblum), Nick's former colleague, who's living in Paris - he's wealthy, successful, with a young French wife and a dinner invitation to extend to the couple. His presence leads to an epiphany of sorts, although Nick's moment of self-revelation is probably the weakest part of the film. Visually, the film treads a fine line of the Paris cliche, and the Godard reference is risky; but overall it's a bracingly bleak work with a saving element in the final stages. PH
Selected release

MR PEABODY AND SHERMAN
(97 minutes) PG
★☆

There is nothing wrong with children's entertainment having an agenda, but big-screen Hollywood animation seems to be getting too sophisticated in the worst ways. Take Mr Peabody and Sherman, directed by Rob Minkoff from a script by Craig Wright, known for middlebrow soap operas such as Six Feet Under. Wright has been encouraged to stay true to himself as an artist, with tiresome results: there are jokes about Philip Glass and the Oedipus myth, dialogues sodden with subtext, and a story that serves as a barely veiled allegory about the struggle of non-traditional families to win acceptance. The film appears to be marketed mostly at parents, for few children are likely to recognise the central characters, who first appeared half a century ago in sketches on The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Peabody, voiced by Ty Burrell from Modern Family, is a gifted dog whose inventions include a time machine that allows him to tour the hot spots of history with his young protege, Sherman (Max Charles). Good intentions aside, Mr Peabody and Sherman is a chore to sit through. The jokes are bad, whether or not they are supposed to be, and the time-travel plot has a pointless intricacy that recalls Disney's forgettable Meet The Robinsons. JW
General release

NEBRASKA
(115 minutes) M
★★★☆

Director Alexander Payne has sent his male characters on the road before, on roundabout voyages of failure and frustration with a half shot at redemption. In Nebraska, a father and son drive from Montana to Nebraska - a journey that's meant to combine filial duty and an end to delusion. Bruce Dern plays Woody, an elderly, frail, fixated man with wild hair and a bowed gait. He's received a letter that he's convinced is the notification of a million-dollar lottery win. His younger son, David (Will Forte), decides that there's only one solution: take the trip to to Lincoln, Nebraska, with his father to set him straight. Things don't turn out the way he planned; human nature, greed, misunderstanding and chance all have their part to play. Nebraska, shot in widescreen black and white, is not really a road movie: it's an act of observation, carefully composed and austere. Dern, an actor with a volatile, erratic presence, portrays a character who seems walled in and unreachable. He's so muffled he's barely in a position to articulate his feelings, and Dern makes this utterly convincing. There is a sentimental aspect to the concluding stages - it's not as astringent as Payne's work can be - but there's also something intriguingly dreamlike about its vision for Woody. PH
Selected release

NEED FOR SPEED
(131 minutes) M
★★☆

Usually these kinds of films centre on hard-boiled guys sitting stony-faced behind the wheel, but Tobey Marshall (Aaron Paul) lets itall hang out: when he's angry he scowls, when he's abashed, he looks at the ground, and when he's happy, he breaks into a huge grin.  When he hits rock bottom, he clearly finds driving like a maniac a  lot of fun. Thestunts are mostly not computer generated and manage to be suitably jaw-dropping without ever quite breaking the laws of physics. JW
General release

NOAH
(138 MINUTES)
★★★☆

Even by Hollywood standards, Noah is big - no less than the destruction of all mankind, save for one man and his family.  The film's director, Darren Aronofsky, became fascinated with the story  when he was 13, which may explain why the movie is pitched at a younger audience than his other works (Black Swan, The Fountain, The Wrestler). The animals arrive unbidden, then Noah's wife  (Jennifer Connelly) puts them  to sleep with a wave of her special narcotic incense.  Noah's eldest boy, Shem (Douglas Booth), is sweet on Ila (Emma Watson), an orphan they rescued 10 years earlier. With the sky clouding over, King Tubal-Cain (Ray Winstone) threatens to storm the ark with his hordes. Noah has big ideas and big melodrama, and it is gorgeous to the eye. The Icelandic landscapes alone are breathtaking. Russell Crowe gives his best,  but it still feels  as if the film  loses its way. Falling short of greatness, it  falls back on warfare, spectacle and sermon. PB
General release

NON-STOP
(106 minutes) M
★★☆

Liam Neeson, fierce, ragged and embattled, makes a fine action hero under pressure, and his presence is the chief strength of Non-Stop. He plays Bill Marks, an air marshal on a transatlantic flight who's not in good shape for the job, physically or mentally. He has a sympathetic flight attendant (Michelle Dockery) and an interested if enigmatic fellow passenger (Julianne Moore), who seem to offer him support. But apart from that, things start to spiral out of control quickly.

In mid-air he is sent a message telling him that unless $150 million is deposited in a specified bank account, one passenger will be killed every 20 minutes. This starts to play out, in quite an ingenious fashion, leaving him scrambling to make sense of what's going on, and increasingly isolated. Who is responsible for this scheme and what is the plan? Director Jaume Collet-Serra (House Of Wax, Orphan) worked with Neeson on Unknown, a movie that has a couple of elements in common with this one. In Unknown, Neeson played a man who comes out of a coma to discover that someone else had assumed his identity. Here, he's an already vulnerable man who tries to do his job, only to discover - as the plot thickens - that he's being set up to appear to be the villain. And there are echoes, too, of his unexpected action hit Taken.

Yet, after a tense and promising start, Non-Stop falls away: there are a few too many implausibilities, loose ends and the interactions with passengers are hard to credit. Concealing the identity of the perpetrator is all very well, but the final reveal is rushed and clumsy. Entertaining tension subsides into frustration - Non-Stop feels as if it has the ingredients for a much better film. PH
Selected release

POMPEII
(104 minutes) M
★★

In Paul W S Anderson's Pompeii, we are offered both ancient and modern spectacle. Much of the film is about gladiators slugging it out in Pompeii's arena for our enjoyment. Then Mount Vesuvius goes bang and everyone gets punished for the sin of watching slaves kill each other for entertainment. The film is its own self-criticism, a meta-disaster movie. When you find yourself wishing the lava would hurry up and engulf the city sooner, the movie is in trouble. Kit Harington plays Milo, a young gladiator groomed to a life of savagery after the Romans killed his family. He's too good for the provinces, so his owner drags him to Pompeii. Milo shares a cell with Atticus, an African gladiator played by the impressively named Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje.

Pompeii is also a romance, with Australian actress Emily Browning as headstrong beauty Cassia, in love with Milo but battling the attentions of the senator. Vesuvius glowers over this soap opera, awaiting its cue.

There is nothing memorable about Pompeii, except the gladiatorial scenes in the big arena, when Milo and Atticus stage a spirited defence against all-comers. It's an average modern actioner: driven by technology, careless of the past, casually insulting to the audience, mindless in its violence. PB
General release

THE RAID 2
(148 minutes) R
★★★☆

In plot terms The Raid 2 has little more than a nominal connection to its predecessor, but the fight choreographer Iko Uwais makes a return appearance as the hero Rama, an unassuming yet exceedingly agile Jakarta cop. This time he goes undercover in jail, where he befriends Ucok (Arifin Putra), the son of the mob boss Bangun (Tio Pakusadewo). After his release, Rama starts working for Bangun, while striving to keep a rein on Ucok, a hothead keen to stir up trouble with the gang's Japanese competition. The dialogue scenes have an exaggerated stillness and stiffness, with lots of symmetrical head-on shots; when chaotic violence breaks out, the camera too goes crazy, flailing to keep up. For some viewers, it will all be too much. There are times when the phrase ''the pornography of violence'' applies rather too literally, such as the bloodcurdling scene in which Ucok casually slaughters a row of bound prisoners. Yet even these sadistic touches are mandated by genre convention: it is doubtful that Evans himself has anything whatever to say. At most, he seems to comment on his own blankness. JW
Selected release

RIDE ALONG
(100 MINUTES) M
★★★

Ride Along, directed by Tim Story, makes good on the promise of its friendly title: don't expect too much, and you'll be in for a pleasant couple of hours. The premise has a retro appeal, fusing two genres - the buddy cop movie and the slacker comedy. There's also an element of novelty in the person of Kevin Hart, a pint-sized motormouth who seems poised for mega-stardom. Here, Hart plays Ben Barber, a high school security guard with two things on his mind: joining the police force and getting married to his girlfriend Angela (Tika Sumpter). Unfortunately, neither of these schemes meets with the approval of James (Ice Cube), Angela's cop brother. The key scene comes early, when Ben warns a teenage boy that drinking with his mates will lead to dropping out of school, being forced into the army, and getting his legs blown off in Afghanistan. It's a typically absurd, exaggerated spiel but with a grim undertone that resonates later. JW
General release

ROMEO AND JULIET
(113 minutes) M
★

This new Romeo and Juliet is supposedly a traditional adaptation, but something feels amiss right from the opening, set at a jousting tournament found nowhere in Shakespeare. Shooting on location in Verona and elsewhere, Italian director Carlo Carlei supplies swaggering youths, candlelit revelry, and a gloppy score (by Abel Korzeniowski) ladelled indiscriminately over the images. Douglas Booth as Romeo is bland, and Hailee Steinfeld as Juliet, who was so effective in the Coen brothers' True Grit, strikes moony poses and rattles off her speeches as if she is afraid that slowing down might make her forget them. Of local interest is the fact that Romeo's sidekick, Benvolio, is played by Australian Kodi Smit-McPhee, who has grown up considerably since his child-star period, but not even he can do anything to redeem the embarrassing ending. Never was there a tale of more woe. JW
Selected release

TRACKS
(113 minutes) M
★★☆

One day in the mid-1970s, a young woman named Robyn Davidson arrived in Alice Springs with an unlikely plan: to acquire some wild camels, train them to serve as beasts of burden, and head out on foot across the Central Australian Desert, towards the Indian Ocean more than 3000 kilometres away. The story of that journey is told in Davidson's bestselling 1980 book Tracks, which has never gone out of print. A film adaptation has been talked about for many years, but it's taken till now for director John Curran (Praise) to realise the dream, with Mia Wasikowska as star. The limitation of the film stems from Curran's conventional, nudging technique: there are too many close-ups, too many montages, and far too much of Garth Stevenson's ''meditative'' score. The sense of solitude, emptiness and vastness is never as overpowering as it might have been with a little more restraint. JW
Selected release

WADJDA
(97 MINUTES) PG
★★★

Parents weary of the sexism of many Hollywood family movies should consider taking their kids to see Haifaa al-Mansour's Wadjda, a straightforward but pointed feminist parable about a little girl who challenges the system. The system in question is an unusually though not uniquely oppressive one: reportedly, this is the first film to be shot entirely in Saudi Arabia.

Played by Waad Mohammad, Wadjda is a lively 11-year-old from the suburbs of Riyadh who wears Converse sneakers instead of her regulation school shoes, listens to pop music on bootleg cassettes, and dreams of owning a bike so she can race her friend Abdullah (Abdullrahman Al Gohani). Since this dream is prohibited by law, she finds herself in conflict with the authority figures around her, for reasons she barely understands.

There are moments when the film could be accused of catering to the prejudices of Western viewers. Elsewhere, al-Mansour finds subtler ways to make similar points: the costumes tell a story of their own. JW
Selected release

THE WIND RISES
(126 minutes)
PG ★★★★☆

Announced as the final film by the great Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, The Wind Rises is a curious kind of artistic testament. Minus any overt element of fantasy, it's a fictionalised account of the life of Jiro Horikoshi, who designed many of the fighter planes used by Japan during World War II. Miyazaki's version of Jiro (voiced by Hideaki Anno) could be taken as an idealised self-portrait: he's a gentle visionary who spends his time drawing up sketches, just like an animator. More significantly, he represents the ''apolitical'' artist in general: rather than being a bellicose patriot, he simply wants to create beautiful objects that take flight. Visually, the film suggests that Miyazaki has set out to demonstrate, once and for all, what the craft of animation is all about - and viewers will be grappling for a long time with the profound, troubling questions it raises. JW
Selected release