Barry Hertz

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.

The White Fortress is a startling, hypnotizing, but above all haunting work destined to linger.

The Secret Agent is not only mining the director’s own personal cinematic education – it is rich in homages to everything from The Parallax View and McCabe & Mrs. Miller to Shivers and, of course, Jaws – but also excavating an entire nation’s past.

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.

Linklater knows exactly the power that his leading man commands, but instead of lazily exploiting it off the top, the director reverse-engineers a charm offensive so earth-shaking that it registers on the Richter scale.

Audrey is the best kind of inscrutable hero, as precise in her obsession as she is enigmatic in every other aspect of her life. For moviegoers starving for something new who, like Audrey, have nearly given up the ghost, Measures for a Funeral is a symphony, full and rich.

If you can appreciate the simple concept of nourishment – of the stomach, and of the soul – then you will walk away delightfully stuffed.

Sensitive and intimate might be the obvious adjectives for such a film, but Bourges is also intent on making Concrete Valley quite funny in parts, the humane humour balancing the ever-present anxiety that exists in many of Thorncliffe Park’s hallways and crowded elevators.

While delicate in its tone and thoughtful in its aesthetics, there is a nerve-rattling sense of desperation driving the entire endeavour, the anxiety slowly but surely seeping off the screen until it courses through the audience, head to toe.

In just her second feature, Schilinski creates a true art-house epic, haunting and lyrical.

The evolution of Colin and Ray’s relationship is traced with a steamy kind of sensitivity. Lighton, in his feature directorial debut, never treats the BDSM scene as an object of fetishistic curiosity, but rather a culture rich with yearning, compassion, jealousy – the entire gamut of romantic life.

Pantera mixes its many influences into a smooth spectacle so confident and patient in its assemblage that it instantly wins you over.

Every detail and narrative swerve are stacked on top of the other to build a monumental story of compromises and consequences. This is a brave film, bracing and thoughtful. It is also, at times, painfully funny.

Incendiary and furious, confident and courageous, the new thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline boasts not only the best title of the year so far but also the best score, cast and itchy, charged, electric directorial vision – all of it only ever-so-slightly goosed by a political softening that perhaps says more about contemporary American filmmaking than the storytellers working within it.

It is at times brash and thick-headed in its characters and politics, but it is engineered with such an electric ferocity – a beautiful marriage of high-performance technical expertise and gonzo aesthetic imagination – that it cannot help but knock you out.

This is the chef’s-kiss premise of the new dark comedy Dream Scenario, a thoroughly imaginative and mostly brilliant movie from Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli that is easily the best thing – real or otherwise – that Cage has starred in for ages.

Together is such a sharp blend of the hilarious and the terrifying that it busts your gut at the same time it has you gritting your teeth.

This is an energetic, heartfelt, poignant and often delightfully subversive story of one young girl’s path into adulthood, and embrace of her cultural heritage.

In terms of understanding and confronting the harsh reality that so many Canadians endure today, Attila is remarkable, verging on essential, filmmaking.

A wonderfully uncomfortable, deeply hilarious coming-of-age movie, the new film Didi plays like an extended and surprisingly welcome visit to the filmmaker’s childhood bedroom.

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