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An awfully good documentary about Amy Winehouse on several levels. It captured her art. It captured her tortured personal life. Other than her mother, it showed us all the important people around her, bad and good. It told her story, pretty much from beginning to end. Going in, I knew her name. Leaving, I felt I knew her. What made the documentary exceptional was the access the director had to intimate moments, home movies, family and friends as well as clips of the public persona, so we could see what was going on behind the scene. And then there was the paparazzi effect: as we watched, we scorned the ruthless cameramen who made her life hell while taking in their pictures ourselves. We are not as bad as Jay Leno, cracking jokes about Amy’s drug dependency, but the movie feeds us this story, and we eat it up.

Ridiculous to the max. A two-hour chase scene without the distraction of character, plot or dialogue.

This romcom was more romance than comedy, and once you got past the disappointment of its not being very funny you could see its sweetness, in a hip-hop way. Rosario Dawson was the center around which it swirled; if we didn’t know Chris Rock was a star in his own right he would have seem miscast. Then again, so is Woody Allen, and you could think of this as a black Annie Hall.

Tedious in the extreme, even when seen on a transocean airflight. The opening montage of actual Vermeer paintings made everything that followed pale in comparison. An analogy might be watching someone without much personality dissecting a Penn & Teller magic trick for 90 minutes, as opposed to watching the trick itself.

A charming passage through the growing-up years of one Mason Evans; our own youths may have been different, but we recognized the situations, with lots of nods and knowing smiles. Richard Linklater’s technique – filming the same actors over a 12-year period – gets all the attention, deservedly – but one shouldn’t overlook the performance of Patricia Arquette, the single mom who makes bad choices in men but holds her family together. The talkie nature is reminiscent of the Linklater’s series with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, but it’s astonishing how much better this movie was than his latest, Before Midnight.