Barry Hertz

There is a semi-frustrating sense that Frias hasn’t quite made the movie that he wanted to – that either time was not on his side or that he fussed too much in the editing booth.

I can’t imagine that the filmmakers behind the new horror film Isabelle were thinking about anything other than cold, hard cash while producing this utterly disposable work.

While Lawrence keeps the momentum steady – just like his contest’s most able-bodied walkers – and ensures that every few minutes delivers some kind of violent jolt, there’s just not enough meat to this particular roadkill story to keep one cinematic foot in front of the other.

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

Ultimately, Weekes’s story, which pivots on a minor-key twist that doesn’t quite earn its intended gasps, falls just short of justifying its feature-film length. There is an excellent short film hiding in the corridors of His House – it just needs a slight renovation.

The film’s many tiny dramas add up to a thoughtful, though sometimes shaggy, study of hopes and regrets, aspirations and reality. It is not groundbreaking, but it is funny and sad and completely relatable.

There are so many elements that seduce and beguile – including the rusted-out Brutalism of the Li Tolqan prison where the cloning procedure takes place, and Goth’s supremely unhinged work as James’s seductress, a performance more Looney Tunes than human – that the entire thing swallows you whole. There is no more delightful way to drown.

More entertaining than a dozen Major League Baseball games stacked on top of one another.

The humour doesn’t go nearly as deep as the science of “looking eternity in the eye,” resulting in a neat-enough educational experience, if not a fulfilling work of documentary cinema.

“SEE THE MOVIE THAT NO AUDIENCE CAN OUTLAST!” – after actually taking in The Painted Bird, I can confirm that the horror more or less matches the headlines.

The Color Purple arrives as a confused byproduct of the industry’s best intentions and worst habits.

The result is hallucinatory and puzzling, but never anything less than captivating.

Whereas Jang’s original film was driven by a funky visual inventiveness that embraced wacky comedy over repellent and snide creepiness, Lanthimos’s version merely doubles down on the filmmakers’ most annoying tendencies: obvious observations about power dynamics, ostensibly outrageous acts of violence that underline a juvenile affinity for shock humour, and an overall contemptuous view of humanity that is played for easy, repetitive yuks.

Brought to life with a smooth and almost restrained kind of animation – all rounded edges and frames designed to breathe, rather than hyperactively cram in as much action as possible – and paced with a confident speed, Orion and the Dark will charm and entrance.

But like Tasya, Possessor succeeds in getting under your skin. If this is just a taste of what Brandon Cronenberg has in store for cinema, then long live the new flesh.

It is an entertainingly cheesy narrative, but overly comfortable for someone such as Miike, whose gonzo talents seem somehow muted here.

A bold, raw, bordering-on-manic mashup of Eyes Wide Shut, Ivans XTC and HBO’s Entourage, the new thriller-cum-satire The Beta Test is here to test your limits.

Through deft editing and a keen sense of detail, Baichwal manages to compress the case of Johnson vs. Monsanto Company into a superbly paced, tightly wound thriller.

In a more controlled and less punishing film, Lawrence’s deeply committed performance would be the discussion of the year. Yet she has tossed herself to the wolves here, the star provided no care or cover by her director. What is the point in going so raw, so feral, if the result is so scattered, so interminable, so irredeemably silly?

Arnett delivers something warm and genuine here, especially every time he’s paired against Dern, who perhaps knows this territory better.

If that wasn’t enough, there is something even more dispiriting about Doctor Strange beyond its halfhearted visual and narrative ambitions – an issue that made a brief blip on the cultural radar when the film was first announced but has distressingly gone unheard of since: This is a movie that revels in whitewashing.

The most derivative but finely tuned of superhero movies to come out in ages.

The performances nearly save the film from itself.

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.

Grimy, slick and genuinely frightening in true horror-movie fashion, Reeves’ new film reassembles the best elements of Batman lore into one overwhelming and epic-length package. Almost everything here works – not despite our current overload of Batman culture, but because of it.

The actor offers an incredibly committed and determined performance, but by the film’s end, you wish he’d be able to get back to doing what he does best: eating.

Once Rufus Norris’s film gets going, it quickly reveals itself as a vibrant, almost revolutionary work. Shame, though, that Tom Hardy is only onscreen for a single scene – though his intentionally nerve-racked warbles prove once and for all that he’s a master vocal manipulator.

There are a lot of words that come to mind when watching Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Suspiria: beautiful, gross, overwhelming, frustrating, disturbing, powerful, long, gross, audacious, baffling, explicit, extravagant and did I mention gross?

Prey is exactly the type of late-summer nastiness that deserves to be enjoyed with fellow hooters and hollerers. But by this point, Predator fans are used to playing the victim.

An eat-the-rich satire that would go rotten without its supremely overqualified cast, The Menu is as much fun as it is ephemeral.

A surprisingly effective work of family entertainment that hits all its marks, and then some.

What I can say, without angering (almost) anyone, is that Spider-Man: No Way Home is both a gigantic act of franchise-mad hubris, and a ridiculous amount of fun.

It’s a stew so thick with brand loyalty that you just might choke on all the intellectual property and consequential commerce.

Glowicki and Petrie are immensely committed and often fearless performers – so much so that you can see them frequently bouncing against the constraints of the story surrounding them, the actors seemingly confident that if they pushed themselves just past the brink, the movie’s half-untapped potential might burst wide open.

Chastain and Sarsgaard find all the pieces of Franco’s Memory worth saving, and proceed to connect with one another to build something that is new, remarkable, affecting. Hard to forget, even.

Haynes and Selznick do get a bit too, well, wonderstruck by their own project, which blinds them to one central narrative pivot that is more annoying than awe-inspiring.

It is almost as if Gibson is daring his audience to turn away from his opera of barbarity – but perversely, his violence is the only compelling element of Hacksaw Ridge. Perhaps ironically for a war film, the rest of it is mostly a draw.

The concept might work for especially patient gamers, but rendered cinematically by director Genki Kawamura, the result is a frustrating and ultimately boring exercise in audience endurance.

Although Von Trotta skips around Bergman’s filmography a bit haphazardly, and touches upon his romantic proclivities in a frustratingly brief manner, there’s little room to go wrong when a film is seemingly 50 per cent composed of Bergman’s own footage.

Given that his movie never gives us an opportunity to understand who these men are, it is hard to mourn them beyond a superficial fashion.

The lack of genuine slaughter in Badlands isn’t the film’s only problem. While it flips the franchise’s history by making the Yautja a hero instead of a villain . . . there is not nearly enough tension or world-building on display to become invested in this particular game of kill-or-be-killed.

There is too much dead weight to this particular game – and there's an extremely queasy undertone of Sorkin-penned daddy issues that lace Molly's motivations.

Part "Billy Elliot" and part Chadha’s own underdog hit "Bend It Like Beckham," Blinded by the Light is a feel-good coming-of-age movie that often feels way too good about itself.

The film is a slight but sweet ode to a particular flavour of Britannia that will leave its target audience in sentimental shambles.

Ultimately, it all becomes too strained to take seriously.

Regrettably, Theater Camp doesn’t have a wide enough scope to zoom out from its extremely specific landscape to turn its inside jokes outward, nor an ironic enough detachment from the material that it’s riffing on.

Roth (who reunites here with his Chronic director) manages to find a peculiar amount of pain in a man sleepwalking through life. It might be the best work of the actor’s long career – or at least the most carefully controlled.

A film in which every single character is despicable, but some are more despicable than others, could have run into a sympathy problem. Yet thanks to J. Blakeson’s zippy direction and a chillier-than-thou lead performance from Rosamund Pike, the movie is immensely watchable. Just not especially memorable.

It is an anthropological drama that never cracks its subjects open – an approach that might work on paper, but feels beset by engine troubles on-screen.

If watching mass-murdering maniacs get absolutely destroyed on-screen is your thing – and it very much is mine – then Sisu is a perfectly depraved night out.

The filmmaker is obviously toying with what horror films can be, with what audiences expect of both cheap thrills and high-priced performers. But I can’t admire, and don’t take much pleasure in, being tossed into Semans’s cinematic sandbox along with his well-compensated cast and crew.

It’s all delightfully fizzy, bloody fun – even if there’s the teeniest, tiniest hint of sequel ambitions.

The film is simply unlike anything else to play theatres this year – a feat it will likely keep for the foreseeable future.

Felt like it was missing something. Something fun. Something small.

It makes for intriguing and often gripping viewing, but delivers a more confounding experience than is necessary. Still, the director knows how to break those bones real good.

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

A Man Called Ove hits all of the genre’s sweet spots, without ever tipping into the saccharine. Most of the credit can be thrown Rolf Lassgard’s way, as the actor gives Ove a humanity, and humility, that is expertly crafted and genuine.

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.

The best thing about Late Night, a new comedy about modern office life, is that it could be set in almost any workplace and still feel mostly sharp and entirely necessary. The worst thing about Late Night is that it’s set in the world of late-night television.

Despite all these challenges, the performances that Mantello wrings make the 2020 effort worth everyone’s trouble.

With Men, the British filmmaker is stubbornly needling his audience with a never-ending barrage of pointy-ended questions that he has neither the inclination nor intention of vaguely addressing or even thinking through on his own terms. Men is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, all scrawled in crayon.

All About Nina is a compelling, honest and occasionally messy middle finger to the expectations placed on female entertainers – or just simply women at all.

There are a few scenes where Theron is an inch away from completely rewriting the proceedings – she just needs a slight jolt in the right direction from her director, a nudge toward chaos. But filmmaker Gina Prince-Bythewood never quite delivers the inspirational spark her star needs to unleash such fury, and the resulting antics rest somewhere between spectacle and shoulder-shrug.

All the magnificent little elements add up to a whole lot of not-enough this time around, resulting in a creaky and exhausting pastiche of Andersonia rather than the real deal.

As nice as it is to see New York play itself or watch Ahmed and Worthington run circles around each other, the entire caper is rendered unsolvable by one big, meatheaded twist that undermines everything that came before.

The dead-seriousness with which Sims-Fewer and Mancinelli approach their subject is admirable, as is the former’s unsettling lead performance. And you won’t find another film this year that subverts the male gaze in such a brutally naked manner.

As the young hero at the centre of the tale, Guillory displays astonishing depth and heart. To summarize: Run, don’t walk.

An unlikely Irish-Cuban co-production, Viva is, like its central subject, beautiful to look at but ultimately lacking depth.

The filmmaker assumes that aping the cheap aesthetics of the era are enough to establish style, and that making Enid a mystery amounts to layered characterization. It all leads to a climax that is nasty for all the wrong reasons.

No matter how obvious the set-up – what if men and women of the cloth were … rude and sexy??? – the cast gives every scene just enough of a deadpan spin to sell it, at least for the first hour. After the final 30 minutes come and go, including a frantic detour into witchcraft, you may seek out a convent of your own.

From its haunting opening in Derry's gently flooded streets to its nightmarish finale in the forsaken sewers underneath, this new version of It stands as a solid execution of King's modus operandi.

So much of its script is frustratingly trite, its perspective on grief never rising above grade-school emotions, with thin characters forced to carry its surface-level themes.

In writer-director Keith Thomas’s bid to add a layer of thematic novelty to a familiar genre, he has come up with a mish-mash that will satisfy only those with extremely acquired tastes.

The longer I Am Greta goes on, the more clear it becomes that Grossman is content to just tag along for the ride, adding little cinematic depth or insight to the environmentalist’s trajectory.

For those looking for a brash new entry in the cinematic landscape, Operation Avalanche is an almost otherworldly gift. The best part of all: No one had to die. I think.

Farrelly’s film is worth witnessing, especially given how it is now all but destined to dominate the awards conversation. But do yourself a favour: Each time your fellow moviegoers burst into applause, ask just who it is they’re clapping for.

Edgerton, who also plays the tightly wound chief of the conversion-therapy organization here, wrings devastating performances from his cast, including Lucas Hedges as Garrard, and Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman as his parents.

Beirut is as solid a film as Hamm is a performer. The movie is not a flashy affair, but it does hit in unexpected ways and uses its pretty faces (Hamm, but also Gone Girl’s Rosamund Pike, another performer who should be ruling the world) to deliver something you will likely expect, but nonetheless appreciate.

An energetic, cockeyed, bloody, and sometimes delightfully vicious skewering of Millennial culture – or, more accurately, what Instagram-less tsk-tsk’ers imagine millennial culture to be – director Halina Reijn’s new film exists not only to meet late-summer slasher expectations, but to ever so slightly subvert them.

An experiment in prestige quirk, Maddin and the Johnsons’ film isn’t as interested in satirizing the complex and frustrating nature of geopolitics as they are in using the material to unload a heaping load of gags ranging from the scatological to the philosophical.

Watching it all unfold in my sweatpants while shoving frozen pizza into my gullet, I found it deeply, unshakably depressing.

Tenet is not so much a decipherable thriller as it is an extreme exercise in reverse-engineered narrative incomprehensibility – the cinematic equivalent of a half-baked pretzel, its goopy symmetrical loops superficial yet delicious all the same.

Just as it seems that Noé will tip over into the truly extreme, he backs off. If this is the dawn of a new, slightly restrained Noé, we might need five more stages to process the pivot.

The director’s pedestrian tactics are most evident in his command, or lack thereof, over his cast. While Parker knows how to expertly play to the camera – he all but winks at the audience, so confident is he in his admittedly captivating lead performance – he abandons his fellow actors, allowing them to exploit their worst instincts: hammy accents, wild gesticulating, uneasy line readings.

By exploiting the raw physical power of the Indonesian martial art called silat and then emptying buckets and buckets of fake blood upon your cast for kicks, filmmaker Timo Tjahjanto has birthed a monster of a movie, as brutal as it is hypnotic.

In five years’ time, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Far from Home ranked near the bottom of everyone’s favourite MCU efforts – the film evaporates, Endgame-style, immediately after viewing.

Berg also creates one scene that should stand as an all-time classic: a residential street standoff between the Tsarnaevs and members of the Boston and neighbouring Watertown police departments.

But while first-timer mistakes abound – everyone except the three leads deliver performances so stiff I wondered if they were deliberate – Selah and the Spades is more than just a slick calling card. It’s impassioned, informed and sometimes furious work that could find Poe being name-checked herself not too long from now.

The film is not quite a medallist. But it’s certainly a spirited contender.

The jokes arrive fast and plentifully, knowing just what will tickle both younger viewers and adults.

Finally, a big and shiny studio-backed holiday movie targeted to queer audiences that is just as sappy, cheesy and predictable as the many groan-inducing films that have been chucked toward straight moviegoers all these years.

Doff has created a film that bursts off the screen more often than not, albeit in that ultra-extreme Joseph Kahn kind of way. Your mileage may vary, but it’s a good enough game to play these waning summer days.

While there is an early sense in Joynt’s film that it is simply fun to ape the environs of bygone television eras, the re-enactments ultimately work on a narrative level, too. There are intersecting layers to Joynt’s film whose thematic and contextual conversations with one another would be lost were he to simply line one conventional talking head up after another.

The Outfit is not, strictly speaking, a movie about magic. Yet the gangland thriller pulls off a number of nifty tricks, with first-time director Graham Moore playing his hand with equal parts sleight and might.

S#!%house genuinely engaged with the complexities of insecure, imbalanced romantic relationships, and the flawed men who pursued them. Cha Cha Real Smooth settles for a sickly sweet sitcom approach. As Andrew might sigh during a bar-mitzvah shift: oy vey.

While Atkinson’s intentions are good, his methods are shaky, resulting in a surface-skimming film that raises issues without ever approaching a solution. What’s worse is his shaky narrative framing and rookie pacing, all of which undermine what is a deadly serious issue deserving of a polished and powerful dissection.

Happily, Star Trek Beyond is much more than a mere refresh. Thanks to Lin’s steady directorial hand and knack for visualizing improbable set-pieces, the new film is bold, breathless and propulsive, a distillation of the action movie to its purest elements.

The characters aren’t compelling, the comedy isn’t energetic, and the narrative surprises that Rey throws at the screen will be obvious to anyone who has ever heard the word “Sundance.”