Barry Hertz

So, if you must celebrate Bill Murray Day this year, pour yourself a Suntory Whisky and watch "Lost in Translation" instead. And make that drink neat.

This is a picture as severe as the real-life generational abuse that its director is chronicling, even if a few false steps mean that The Iron Claw ultimately lands as a technical knock-out.

The film is neither a stern lecture nor cheap entertainment, with Domont instead threading the needle somewhere in-between to create a tense guessing game of just how far she will push her characters.

This is a raw, intense movie circling on despair, hopelessness and inevitable dead ends. It is about the dark. But in plumbing the pitch black, Werewolf offers the distinct hope of a brighter future – at least, a brighter future for Canadian cinema.

Perhaps now more than ever, the Pixar folks seem to be stuck inside their corporate heads instead of listening to their beating hearts.

The film’s most egregious misstep, though, is sabotaging its own best stunt: the high-wire chemistry between Gosling and Blunt.

The actor is as engaging and captivating as ever on-screen as Adonis, yet he’s just as present and committed behind the camera, delivering a stirring string of heartwarming and jaw-breaking moments that add up to something if not exactly unique, than certainly rousing, effective and entertaining.

The film’s harmless pro-nature message is replaced with a drippy sense of self-congratulatory idealism, turning the film into a home movie by way of humble-brag. And then, by the hour mark, it’s merely a giant commercial for the couple’s 200-acre Apricot Lane Farm in Moorpark, Calif.

A documentary as inspiring as it is flat-out bizarre.

Sheridan knows how to craft a tidy whodunit – and a late-act switch in perspective works better than it should – but he eventually leans toward sermonizing instead of storytelling, a well-intentioned move that edges the story just this close to melodrama.

The movie is so across-the-board charming that even the most hardcore of socialists will find themselves rooting for Nike – that bastion of global corporate responsibility – to make gobs and gobs of money off the hard work of a young Black athlete.

All right, there are bits and pieces of new material in Chapter 3, but they come in the form of gobbledygook world-building. What’s worse is that all this blather about the underground assassin economy arrives gussied up with characters uttering needlessly intimidating Latin phrases.

Supernova feels less like a film to cherish and more a tweet to favourite.

The Public is writer-director Emilio Estevez’s grand, well-meaning and extremely dumb vanity project/tribute to the public-library system.

Extraordinarily gross, metaphorically blunt, but also perversely and wildly entertaining, the new Spanish splatter satire The Platform is the perfect movie to watch while the world seemingly teeters on the edge of existence.

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.

As far as movies-as-line-items go, Homecoming is better than it has any right to be. The story is slight but spry, thanks partly to the jettisoning of origin story but also due to its blessedly small stakes.

For those entering grade school, there is likely no better and more concise primer on the scandal. For everyone else, well, you know the story.

Jamie M. Dagg's new film, Sweet Virginia, is a lot to take in – too much, really. It's a revenge movie, a crime thriller, a gentle and low-key romance, and a dusty drama about the pains of leaving the past behind. It doesn't succeed at being any one of those things, too muddled is the script and too unsteady is the direction.

The most disappointing part is that the film is peppered with so many brief moments of comic flair and clear-eyed truths that they are collectively almost enough to convince you that it doesn’t matter what Baumbach’s intentions might’ve been. Unfortunately, those sharper-edged bits and pieces eventually become subsumed by a drippy sentimentality that sticks to you like the crisp white suit that Clooney is often wrapped inside of.

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

Guts will be busted, and sides will be split. Heck, moviegoers might even learn to kiss and make up with comedies for good.

A fascinating, frequently angry and occasionally darkly funny documentary.

Mourning her only child, her marriage, and very likely her fortune as the betrayed and sidelined Laura, Cruz goes scorched-earth, incinerating any performer sharing her space.

Hanks is sturdy as ever, grounding the proceedings in a warm sense of familiar, fatherly comfort. But the rest of the film feels weightless, and at parts unbelievably dumb. One mid-film shoot-out in particular is executed with such listlessness that it’s a wonder Greengrass was able to stay awake while filming it.

The Square turns from a sharp art-world satire into something egregiously bonkers, a collision of blunt comic beats and heavy-handed social commentary that's more messy than profound.

Ma’s film isn’t solely set on establishing The Peg’s winter bona fides, but rather exposing the city’s throbbing romantic heart, which might be able to melt the coldest of days.

It will make you mad as hell. So angry, even, that you might wonder why no one has given this opportunity to Todd Haynes before.