Predictably and understandably, this film about one of the first known people to undergo a surgical sex change has been criticised for tweaking the historical record and, more sophisticatedly, for its heteronormative approach to a transgender story.

It's hardly surprising that stories of immigrants to the Land of the Free have such a proud cinematic history: the immigrant experience has everything - risk, longing, regret, hope, danger - that makes for great drama.

If you're looking for a sweet family film to entertain the younger kids these holidays, Oddball will do the trick.

The Big Short is equal parts goofy crime caper and cold-blooded rage against the machine that created the Global Financial Crisis.

Carey Mulligan stars in a riveting true story about the struggle for women's emancipation.

Despite a few hit-and-miss moments, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler prove yet again to be a dynamic duo, Francesca writes.

Well-matched actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy help deliver a savagely authentic Old West survival thriller

Quentin Tarantino has a new movie The Hateful Eight. As usual it doesn't adopt half measures.

The Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper and David O. Russell show rolls back into town with family drama Joy, an offbeat and quietly entertaining yarn about the rags-to-riches true story of Joy Mangano, the inventor of the Miracle Mop, and her crazy family.

Whether or not Bryan Cranston wins the Best Actor Oscar in February, this biopic will surely prompt a stream of sanctimonious recollection in Tinseltown about Dalton Trumbo.

The hero of The Good Dinosaur, the latest offering from Pixar animations, isn't the adorable apatosaurus, Arlo, his unlikely human companion, Spot, or the red neck T-Rex cowboy voiced by Western film actor Sam Elliott.

Surmounting the not considerable obstacle that French pop music makes John Denver sound like AC/DC, this Christmas crowdpleaser breathes new life into the girl-becomes-woman genre.

Charlie brown's return to the big screen, 25 years after the last Peanuts feature, is sure to charm and delight both newcomers and fans of Charles M. Schulz's iconic comic strip.

Victoria is a remarkable achievement, a visceral experience in which the technique never overwhelms substance. Highly recommended as one of the year's best.

I am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story plays like an extended promo, washed with a score of elevator-music strings, and composed of so many talking-head snatches that it often feels like a trailer for itself.

The latest in the Star Wars saga has been put to the George Lucas test - and it passed.

The night Before reunites director Jonathan Levine with his 50/50 crew, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Seth Rogen, in a chaotic and raunchy comedy that takes place over one Christmas Eve in New York City.

Two great veteran actors from either side of the Atlantic do their best with frustratingly uneven material in the new film by Sorrentino, whose The Great Beauty won last year's foreign-film Oscar.

The Guardian reported that in the UK, 87 per cent of cinemas showed the live screening, surely the biggest audience in history for a Shakespeare play.

Somehow, this next generation Rocky spin-off delivers a fresh, exciting boxing drama all its own.

When writer-director Leslye Headland presented her second feature film, Sleeping with Other People, at the Sundance Film Festival, she described it as "When Harry met Sally for assholes". Turns out, that's an apt description.

You don't have to like cycling to find yourself leaning into the corners on The Program.

A sharp portrait of the agony and ecstasy of becoming yourself.

After four years, three films and reportedly over US$2.2 billion in worldwide box-office takings, author Suzanne Collins' disturbing young adult book trilogy comes to a grim and exhausting conclusion with The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2.

A budding young writer in need of life experience finds the perfect muse on the streets of New York; a sophisticated, older French woman who suggests they have a "cinq-a-sept", an affair that takes place between the hours of 5am and 7pm.

More than once in Michael Almereyda's playfully imaginative telling of the famous Stanley Milgram experiment, the film's subject walks through the corridors of Yale University musing direct to camera as an elephant lumbers by in the background.

When the Argentinian thriller The Secret in Their Eyes walked away with the 2010 Oscar for best foreign film.

This is reportedly the most expensive Bond movie ever. It's also the longest Bond film ever. It isn't however the best Bond movie ever - or of the Craig era either.

A coffee-break conversation at a climate-change conference in Wellington in 2006 was the beginning of this small but accomplished doco.