Barry Hertz

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.

Simply but smoothly animated, and featuring no dialogue whatsoever, director Pablo Berger’s film is a charming fable that rides the line between sentimentality and schmaltz just right.

The entire production entertainingly coalesces into part concert doc, part cultural artifact, part “gotcha!” stunt, and part meditation on the fickle, fleeting nature of creativity.

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

Director Maria Sodahl tracks the couple’s story over the course of only one Christmas break, but the film is more a chronicle of one family’s entire existence. Skarsgard, by the way, is typically excellent – it’s just that he mostly, and graciously, cedes the screen to Hovig, who is given much more to do and handles it with aplomb.

A terrifying, pitch-black kind of horror movie that takes up residence in your mind for days, even weeks later – but it is also a family film.

Might be the best Spider-Man film ever made.

There is as much wit as there is wretchedness, the director having no trouble finding the human comedy scratching beneath the title tragedy.

As much as The Shape of Water's disparate parts shouldn't work – and as much as its "originality" is sourced from the thousands of other fables del Toro has consumed over his lifetime – it does, in the end.

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

The deeper that Resurrection goes, the more that Gan’s vision delicately, meticulously, and, of course, slowly envelopes you, no matter your level of comprehension.

The film is all the more frustrating an experience given that it inches so close to greatness.

The reason Diane (the film) exists is not to propose and then solve a mystery, but to engage with Diane (the person).

Room is a film of tiny little miracles.

Huller is asked to play a wonderful mess of contradictions – and the actress pulls off the job marvelously, all steel nerves and darting eyes.

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.

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.

Here’s a layered, nuanced film whose only goal is to tell a story of real people and real heartache, not to act as a crass marketing plank for a series of hopeful sequels and spinoffs (hi and bye, Baywatch and CHIPS).

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.

It is tidy, it is easy and it is, by the end, far too flinty.

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.

Baby Driver is fast and furious and fun as hell, but its cinema of cool may melt down in the coming years, another artifact of reckless, headstrong youth.

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.

A sensual and heady stew of romance, family drama, police procedural, political polemic and ghost story, Atlantics marks the debut of a ferocious talent in Diop.

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

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.

The impact of modern vice upon the Wayuu is a captivating tale never told before, and the final few minutes are brutal in the best possible way

Entire passages stretch along at a too-leisurely pace, allowing whatever anger Jia is surely carrying to too frequently cool off. Still, by the film’s New Year’s Eve-set finale, there’s little doubt Jia can create masterful cinematic moments when he so desires.