The musical performances do more than enrich the movie; they complete it.

Pearl Harbor is strenuously respectful of contemporary sensitivities, sometimes at the cost of accuracy.

The musical performances do more than enrich the movie; they complete it.

Subtle, funny and touching, with a striking downbeat authenticity. Director Craig Zobel is the real thing.

Not just a timely movie, a great one...Timbuktu feels at once timely and permanent, immediate and essential.

The silliness-much of which is clearly intentional-is blended with some genuine grandeur. The Pixar touch is evident in the precision of the visual detail and in the wit and energy of Michael Giacchino's score, but the quality control that has been exercised over this project also has a curiously undermining effect. The movie eagerly sells itself as semitrashy, almost-campy fun, but it is so lavish and fussy that you can't help thinking that it wants to be taken seriously, and therefore you laugh at, rather than with, its mock sublimity.

The movie, like the book before it, is an expertly built machine for the mass production of tears. Directed by Josh Boone 'Stuck in Love', with scrupulous respect for John Green's best-selling young-adult novel, the film sets out to make you weep - not just sniffle or choke up a little, but sob until your nose runs and your face turns blotchy. It succeeds.