Trevor Johnston

Jazz mavens awed by the Evans mystique will be invested from the get-go, though Gee bravely trusts the wider audience to follow the film’s trail of nuance and completes the full picture with a note-perfect ending.

With its intensely-felt performances, haunting winter lighting, and seemingly inescapable claustrophobia, it leaves a mark.

It’s refreshing to see a first feature which isn’t just a calling card, but driven by an authentic need to find a fresh angle on representing an undervalued cultural heritage.

A film of haunting unease, but not perhaps the complete package.

This is another subtle jewel, wise and charming, insouciant yet measured, and somehow squaring the circle between the overwhelming sadness of lost time and the glint of eternity in a passing instant.

Occasionally flummoxed by the scale of the period canvas, [Dunham] slathers too many somewhat shapeless scenes in Carter Burwell’s incessantly cheery a capella score, and gets stuck in a plodding pace that makes the movie seem longer than it actually is. The flaws though, don’t stop us getting caught up in Catherine’s world, and it’s refreshing to encounter a medieval story which eschews savagery for a humane generosity sure to spur many useful parent-child conversations.

The Forgiven takes the harder road, and actually proves more engrossing and haunting in retrospect than when you’re actually watching it. In an era of instant gratification, that, for all the film’s evident flaws, is still worth chin-stroking respect.

You can appreciate the effort, but this falls just short of doing justice to the emotional stakes and claustrophobic terror of the traumatic events themselves.

Too often here it’s the mouthy ones who get to hold court, which is to be expected, yet the Genoa sequence shows the dramatic dividends from a more focused approach.

Tigers is a vivid, chastening look inside the ruthless promised land that is top-level sport.