Barry Hertz

To watch Portman’s every move is to not only watch history being recreated, but to also witness history being made. No one will ever be able to touch this role again. Or, at least, no one should.

Whatever praise heads toward Sandler should be tripled in the direction of the Safdies.

De Palma is a true visionary, even if you might not quite agree with what that vision is. Either way, a trip through his wild and hugely influential filmography is mandatory for any film fan, and that’s just what directors Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow offer in their new documentary.

The new film is easily’s Gray’s most ambitious, bare-your-soul work, and one of the finest films of the year, too.

Like Wheatley’s 2011 film "Kill List," High-Rise switches genres effortlessly – black humour one moment, dystopic parable the next – until it becomes its own singular, horrifying, immensely captivating thing.

This is hilarious, heartbreaking cinema – a work that will make you burst out laughing one moment, and leave you tearing your hair out the next.

Anne is such a startling and overwhelming work that the act of discussing it can feel unapproachable and crippling.

Sharply subverting the male gaze at every turn, Sciamma has created an unforgettable treatise on thwarted desire. It is so very easy to label a film incendiary, but Portrait of a Lady on Fire deserves the scalding honour. It will ignite every flame you might have.

Reeves keeps the action moving steadily, never letting the film’s 140 minutes feel even slightly bloated, and surrounds Caesar with a visually stunning, compassionately conceived group of side characters.

An exhilarating and furious indictment of class struggle, Parasite might be the masterpiece South Korea's Bong Joon-ho has been working toward his entire career.

Mother! is an unparalleled achievement, entirely unprecedented and unexpected in this era of studio filmmaking.

It is glorious.

Room is a film of tiny little miracles.

It is immersive, engaging and dizzying filmmaking.

Led by a magnificent Viola Davis, the cast is ridiculously stacked. The action is tremendous. And the ultimate message – that nothing comes for free in America – is devastating in its swift brutality.

The drama is an intricately constructed and intensely felt work that transcends the easy “coming-of-age” genre label that is so tempting to slap onto it.

It’s a delightfully cruel work of high tension, perfect in just how quickly and easily it gets under your skin.

The Zone of Interest is a knockout in all senses. It will pummel your heart, and flatten your soul. It cannot, must not, be missed.

Firecrackers is not as casually joyful as its title suggests – but it is absolutely as incendiary.

By twisting around preconceptions of what an outer-space epic should be, French auteur Claire Denis returns to the fertile ground of her Trouble Every Day era, using genre to dig beneath themes that others would only treat as skin-deep.

This is a master artist putting a stamp on not only his own career, but also the entirety of American cinema and, why not, American history, too.

Quiet and reverent, as if filmed entirely in hushed tones, Sciamma’s film is supremely confident in its every element.

It’s bold, captivating cinema, with a soundtrack that threatens to never leave your head.

A portrait of America that is devastating and freeing, bursting with sorrow and empathy.

A majestic feat of filmmaking, an intimate portrait of a family that also serves as a broad portrait of a changing nation.

Set against the high-tension strings and jarringly funky synthesizers of Greenwood’s score, the film is transformative and transfixing.

There is no rookie-film handicap required in grading the excellence on display. There are no fireworks or twists or unnecessary frills here, nor should there be – this is simply perfect filmmaking from a voice that demands to be heard. The fall movie season is saved. Thank you, Greta Gerwig.

Utterly magnificent and intoxicating.

Unlike many of his action-cinema contemporaries, McQuarrie excels at creating clear lines of sight for his set pieces, and cutting them together to ensure maximum tension.

Safdie and Bronstein know they’re playing with fire in every frame, and it’s a miracle of Maccabean proportions they’re able to keep the entire thing from self-combusting.

Bronstein infuses every moment of If I Had Legs... with a jagged kind of intensity, stringing together scenes with an adrenalized propulsion that makes a story of a mother struggling against a world pitted against her feel both singular and universal.

BlackBerry is funny, fast and nerve-rattling. And it is always – always – intensely entertaining.

With The Shrouds, the filmmaker – not only one of Canada’s greatest creations, but cinema’s, too – has delivered what might be his career-defining masterpiece.

The film is simply operating at a speed constantly one click ahead of expectations, never satisfied that any one viewer could know where it might all be heading.

More than anything, NTBTSTM is simply hilarious – a furiously funny roller coaster of a film whose energy never, ever dips. It is difficult to imagine a better, sharper comedy coming along this year. Or the next.

Thoughtful yet incendiary, romantic yet skeptical, patently absurd yet at the same time brandishing a mirror that so clearly and unforgivingly reflects our own cracked reality, Anderson’s film arrives with the kind of casual, confident brilliance that feels deceptively effortless.

The more queasy the film becomes – in both story and style, with the director preferring unusually moody natural light and nerve-rattling zooms – the funnier it gets.

Aftersun cuts you in two with such emotional intensity, such impressive dramatic force, that I could only sit and fight back the inevitable tears.

In so many ways, The Whole Bloody Affair is the movie-est movie to ever be movie’d, with Tarantino generously trepanning his skull wide open in order to provide everyone a direct portal inside his cinema-addled brain.

A comedy, a drama, a romance, a memory, Licorice Pizza is the director’s warmest and fuzziest creation.

Split into two parts and narrated by Koberidze himself, What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? is a true magic act, intimate and massive at the same time.

Crimes of the Future is a dirty little thing because it dives deep into the muck of humanity, where Cronenberg finds a perverted pleasure in the absence of pain. Every millimetre of this film is filthy, decayed, polluted. And thank god for that.

Once it clicks – and it will – the film burns hard, fast and blindingly bright.

An engrossing and stylistically exacting work of cinema, Tár teases our political (as in: identity) sentiments with such a ferocious artistic confidence that you will leave the theatre with questions, arguments, demands – but most of all a supremely fulfilling sense of satisfaction. Here is a film that not only starts a debate but almost ends it, too.

Heartbreaking without being manipulative, compassionate without being overbearing and authentic without being sentimental, Scarborough stands as a shining example of how, when everything lines up just so, our country’s film industry can produce truly powerful works of art that can transform the way that you see the world.

If enough people end up watching the masterful and soul-shaking Green Border – and absolutely everyone should, as soon as possible – the collective conscience of the world could very well shift, even just a bit. And sometimes a little bit is all we need to effect urgent change.

Just when you think that you have figured out which rug will next be pulled out from under you, Johnson reveals that there are rugs woven inside rugs woven inside even tinier rugs – and that the floor beneath those many carpets isn’t actually a floor at all, but a ceiling.

Its visual imagination is wonderfully unrestrained, compelling in its extremes even when it is so clearly indebted to every movie that Aster hoovered up to get here. Its tone is impressively steadfast in its desire to repel one moment, entrance the next. And its performances are across-the-board astounding in their commitment.

The Brutalist is a movie of big ideas constructed inside the transformative majesty of epic-scaled cinema. You can try to describe it, but nothing can match the power of simply opening your eyes.

Maverick works its wonders thanks to the perfect match of star power, source material ripe for retrofitting, and a director who knows how to wring the best out of his leading man and, more importantly, when to get the heck out of his way.

Return to Seoul is not a dour, sombre thing – it is intense, electric and confrontational.

While the split-POV conceit initially begs comparisons to Rashomon, Monster’s three perspectives are not so much in argument with one another as they are pieces of the same puzzle. And once they are locked together, the final portrait is staggeringly heartbreaking.

This is David Fincher’s version of a sitcom: as violently funny as it is hilariously violent.

From beat to beat, it is impossible to predict where Park is going with this film. Best to just turn up the volume, and trust in the rhythm that Park has set for himself. Let him lead the dance.

However you choose to interpret it, Evil Does Not Exist lingers, magnificently and furiously.

Universal Language is a film flooded with sorrow and spirit, discombobulating surrealism and comforting sentimentality.

There is an intensity and commitment in Campbell’s work that mesmerizes, even frightens, with its sheer boldness.

Seyfried, who has already cemented her status as one of today’s most beguiling and unpredictable performers – any other actress would get whiplash going from playing tech-schemer Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout to a betrayed opera virtuoso in Atom Egoyan’s Seven Veils to the sudsy theatrics of last week’s The Housemaid to this – is simply phenomenal.

At nearly every turn, Dead Reckoning aims for something more than the sum of its Evel Knievel parts. In an already strong year for breakneck, throat-kick, punch-out cinema, this adrenaline-pumped fever dream from Cruise and his regular enabler-slash-director Christopher McQuarrie represents a brutally thrilling action-film apotheosis.

Madison never loses grip on the character for a second. Together with Baker, the pair craft a whirlwind of a character, provocative and powerful and so very easy to imagine as the object of anyone’s obsession.

This is a juicy, outré exercise that gets its kicks from booting its audience into deliberately uncomfortable corners and then leaving them there to stew.

Each of the three short stories making up Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s new omnibus film Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy could stand on its own as a work of top-tier drama. Yet when stitched together, with the themes of coincidence and kindness being the only real connective tissue, the narratives spin themselves into something just shy of cinematic profundity.

Here is a glorious and genuine movie-movie: a vivid, sweeping, beautiful piece of top-tier pop-art. You will leave the theatre swooning, in love with the biggest kind of big picture.

For Napoleon, Scott gives every last little slice of himself – the dramatist, the set-piece strategist, even, and especially, the comedian – to deliver what just might be his late-career masterpiece.

Edgerton doesn’t allow pity or easy sympathy to seep in. Things are hard, things fall apart. And sometimes it all comes together. It’s a living.

Ultimately, Blue Heron is an epic exploring the power and fissures of memory. But there is no chance that audiences will ever forget what Romvari has accomplished here.

Asteroid City proves, once again, that there is so much more to the filmmaker than casual detractors assume.

As much a deeply affectionate love letter to eighties-era horror-comedies as it is a synapse-stretching exercise in defiant maximalism, Joseph Kahn’s new film, Ick, is a true ride designed to hold, thrill, kiss and kill you.

Weaving in footage from Lucian Bratu’s 1981 film Angela Moves On (a melodrama following a female taxi driver and set during the heart of Nicolae Ceausescu’s crushing reign in Romania), and capped off by an extended movie-within-a-movie contained in one static shot, Jude’s film is an ambitious experiment of the mad-science variety.

Ambulance is here to remind you of the head-spinning delights of watching a genuine cinematic madman at work. This is eye-popping, ear-splitting, guffaw-inducing stuff that makes Red Notice look like the dumpster juice it truly is.

There is a sincerity here that sticks.

Farhadi wrings two magnificently raw performances from both actors, providing A Hero with its one and only honest truth.

Structured like a quietly grand novel, subtle and elliptical, Ceylan’s film unfolds with Chekhovian grace and a cutting understanding of character.

Parallel Mothers’ twin purposes merge into something just shy of profound. It is a moment, and movie, that just might save your soul, too.

This is action cinema filtered through the thousand pile-on details of a serialized Dickens novel, grand and seismic. And when the action sequences do arrive, they are glorious.

Classical and ultramodern – Bonello closes things off with a QR code, of all things – The Beast is an experience both bold and rich.

If watching a Jafar Panahi film is something of a political act, then it is also a soul-nourishing one.

The power of Lowery’s work here is to filter his many influences into a singular vision that feels entirely in his sole possession.

Saulnier has returned with a tremendous, high-impact blast of a movie, making any delayed gratification all the more satisfying.

The new Chip ‘N Dale: Rescue Rangers movie is a delightful, zippy and genuinely fun thing

In terms of pure spectacle and shock-and-awe achievement, Villeneuve has produced an adaptation of mad glory and power.

The kind of full-throated, barrel-chested, more-more-more exercise in gusto and ambition that comes around once a decade, Babylon might either take Chazelle’s impressive career to new heights, or sink it to the bottom of the La Brea Tar Pits. Either way, the filmmaker deserves attention for throwing his entire self into making a delirious, lurid and sprawling concoction whose magnificent reach just about meets its grasp.

This is a startlingly entertaining, erotically charged movie that hits its many targets with a kind of ferocious and crazed accuracy that’ll knock the wind, among other things, right out of you.

While Benedetta the woman may have been touched by Heaven or cursed from Hell or neither, Benedetta the film is undoubtedly a miracle.

Nothing is exactly new in F1, yet at the same time it is all immensely, rewardingly renewable – a true blue box of recycled cinematic trash, compacted into something irresistibly bright and shiny.

As is the case with much of Reichardt’s work, The Mastermind is a genre movie that zeroes in on a formula only to meticulously scrawl over it in jet-black ink.

This is an ambitious, methodical, immersive, and admirably devious experiment in conjuring atmosphere and testing gag reflexes. It will quicken your pulse, tighten your throat and – for those on its extremely particular wavelength – bust your gut.

The entire spectacle is so unabashedly outrageous that you cannot help but side with its many excesses.

A weird, hilarious, romantic, messy, violent and upsetting manic spectacle, Lana Wachowski’s sequel-reboot-remake encapsulates every emotion of this supremely messed up year.

Some moviegoers will be repelled – there was only a smattering of light applause during the film’s Toronto premiere, which was filled with audiences who likely leapt to their feet at the end of The Shape of Water – but it is as effective a nightmare as Del Toro has ever conjured.

There is almost zero chance that this film escapes the festival or art-house circuit to become a mainstream cultural artifact – its sexually explicit material all but guarantees it – but Jude’s work is an almost profound act of high-wire lampoonery that deserves to be seen and debated far and wide.

By the film’s haunting finale – a gut-punch moment of reckoning that follows nearly half an hour of entertainingly amateurish gunplay – Kurosawa’s sentiments on the current state of e-commerce are clear. Whether emptor or venditor, capitalism is full of caveats.

After Yang is a tightly controlled yet tremendously alive film, powered by the beating heart that is Farrell’s performance.

A nervy, eye-popping reimagining of the AIDS crisis as filtered through the lens of a frenzied domestic drama, Julia Ducournau’s new film is, like the very best Cave song, a profoundly upsetting creation to sink into, equal parts blood-pumping passion and skin-crawling menace.

It is at once a singular piece of pop-cult art, delivered with the brash confidence of a filmmaker who has either been told “no” too many times or not enough, and a film that could not exist without the contributions of Cronenberg and a dozen of his contemporaries and acolytes (including Donnie Darko’s Richard Kelly), their midnight visions co-opted by Schoenbrun into one slickly nostalgic neon-lit nightmare.

A miracle of a movie that could only exist due to everything going so very wrong.

This isn’t a movie of easy cynicism or a snide middle finger to horror-movie tradition – it is a finely calibrated shock to a system that Barker obviously grew up worshipping.

There are great things to be found in little packages, and Islands offers tremendous evidence that, if Edralin might ever be given more than the bare minimum of resources, the director will create something gigantic.