Critic consensus:Director Adrian Shergold doesn't shy away from the darker elements of the movie's subject, and Timothy Spall is mesmerizing as the title character.

Numbered reviews:1. Compelling, powerful filmmaking.
2. In the wrong hands this could have been capital punishment, but as a low key drama about one man's unique approach to life and other people's deaths, it's actually just, er, capital.
3. The filmmakers fall through their own trapdoor, using the hangman's story to fashion a preachy anti-capital punishment message movie that seems at odds with the man himself.
4. Effectively shows how an executioner kills over six hundred people before coming to end of his rope.
5. Avoiding the thornier issues around dabbling in a career choice as a kind of government sanctioned serial killer, hangman Pierrepoint instead boasts of his apparently unique talent for completing an execution in record seconds.
6. It's Timothy Spall who really carries the film.
7. You have to wonder just how true to life the melodramatic depiction of these events is.
8. Morbid Goths and reserved Anglophiles can at last find some common ground
9. [The film's] grittiness instantly adds to the historically and socio-economically convincing picture of working-class Yorkshire in the last century.
10. Very much a bookend to Vera Drake in its mixture of post war British reserve and ugly reality. [Actor] Spall makes it work, creating a little man with big and terrible secrets.


Critic consensus:This remake has been praised by some as an expertly made B-movie, and dismissed by others as formulaic.

Numbered reviews:1. Jean-François Ríchet, the director of the new Assault, is working from a script, by James DeMonaco, that creates a handful of zingy one-note lowlifes but that hasn't updated the isolated-precinct premise in a timely or thoughtful way.
2. The premise may be outlandish, the action unrealistic and sometimes silly and the characters formulaic. But the movie rips and roars.
3. For one thing, it's silly. For another, it's not always silly enough to be diverting.
4. Strong performances and a couple of new twists.
5. What starts out as a slightly above average action movie sinks to a merely mediocre one as the eye rolls and head shakes build.
6. Give Assault on Precinct 13 points for originality, if nothing else. It's the only thriller in which corrupt cops chase their victims through the woods of downtown Detroit.
7. Though Richet stretches believability near the end, action-movie fans should assault theaters for an entertaining stay at Precinct 13.
8. A movie whose greatest intent seems to be indulging in as much brutality as the MPAA will allow.
9. Jean-François Richet - by the way, could there possibly be a first name that's more French than "Jean-François?" - pounds out the tense tale with vigor and finesse.
10. ...[a] disjointed but jolting jailhouse shoot-'em-up showcase...a frenetic and formulaic action-drama guaranteed to get the adrenaline pumping.


Critic consensus:Rob Zombie doesn't bring many new ideas to the table in Halloween, making it another bloody disappointment for fans of the franchise.

Numbered reviews:
1. The set-up is tediously slow, while the later murders are packed so tightly it's like watching a blender on high speed.
2. Adeptly packaged in all facets of production, Halloween is nicely cast with a combination of Zombie regulars, familiar faces and compelling newcomers and satisfyingly constructed with camerawork that heightens the suspense on the page.
3. Rob Zombie's Halloween remake isn't scary, which is really all you need to know about it.
4. Revamping the influential 1978 shocker Halloween for a new generation of viewers, director Rob Zombie offers a film with more sex, more violence, no humor and zero scares.
5. Contains dialogue so nasty and stupid, you'd swear (right along with the characters) that the booker for Jerry Springer wrote it (Zombie did).
6. Trick or treat? Rob Zombie's "re-imagining" of John Carpenter's 1978 horror classic Halloween must sadly be consigned to the former category and it's not even a very interesting, suspenseful trick at that.
7. More of a Valentine to the original than a recycled cash-grab.
8. The most depressing thing of all is that Michael will likely survive even this dire endeavour.
9. The new Halloween has sympathy for the Devil, but not enough.
10. Rob Zombie's lousy remake of John Carpenter's 1978 slasher classic Halloween adds to the argument that horror movies are losing their box-office appeal because filmmakers no longer know how -- or have any desire -- to create genuine suspense.