Barry Hertz

While not a remotely pleasant viewing experience, the sensation of watching Pattinson and Dafoe drive each other to the brink is difficult to shake off.

Mandy is, if it’s not clear yet, not for everyone. But for those who think nothing of staying up past midnight to devour the strange and fantastic, it hits the sweetest of spots.

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

In keeping with Lucas’s general life philosophy, Mills’s film doesn’t attempt to paint a portrait of one woman, but rather a capturing of the land that woman calls home.

Russell, Plemons and especially the young Thomas excel at highlighting the emotional and spiritual fissures that can result from living in an easy-to-ignore, easier-to-disdain community. But there is a ultimately a hollow sickness to Antlers – a film intended to provoke gasps and gags, but at the same time so superficially produced that it chokes on its own ambitions.

I’ve come around to Glass’s singular, purpose-filled vision – one that is intent on pushing its audience so far outside their comfort zones that you’d need a map to find your way back to baseline existence. Clark is also a wonder as the title character, playing a deluded and dangerous antihero with an unnerving zeal.

While Barbakow and writer Andy Siara don’t exactly reinvent the ever-spinning wheel here, they do add enough of a winsome, layered charm that Palm Springs feels like a vacation you actually might want to extend forevermore.

City of God crossed with A Prophet by way of One Thousand and One Nights, Philippe Lacôte’s Night of the Kings is an ambitious thriller that constantly surprises.

Quotation forthcoming.

The Love Witch handily achieves its goals, employing Biller’s strong sense of retro style and Robinson’s wink-wink performance to deliver a subversive homage to a host of out-of-fashion genres.

It can be slow going, certainly, but it’s always rewarding. Pull up a chair, stay a while.

The strong cast keep their heads down and offer all the obligatory rhythms – if you hire Bruce Dern as a crabby horse-trainer, you are going to get exactly what you paid for – and the film eagerly embraces the purely filthy dullness of prison life.

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.

The dramedy of manners is as rich and rewarding an experience as any of Petzold’s more ambitious films. Afire arrives like a calm wind, and leaves with everything and everyone perfectly scorched.

Thanks to Lee’s smooth construction and her performers’ carefully calibrated performances – Beirne is particularly engaging in a role that doesn’t automatically earn sympathy – it all clicks together.

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.

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.

Focused on one cocky white student’s foray into the world of California battle rap, Bodied is at times vile in its content and bananas in its execution. But Kahn is not a mere shock artist, and as the film progresses and twists its perspective, it’s clear the director is playing a much deeper, more complicated and extremely messy game.

Come for Phoenix, stay for Phoenix and maybe also Norman and Hoffman, the latter of whom bounces off of both her co-stars with a nervy charm. But everything else? C’mon.

What follows is a dizzy, politically astute murder-mystery comedy that, while not reinventing the genre, certainly hits all the expected beats with flair.

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.

Director Michael Sarnoski’s feature debut is more like a Nicolas Cage supercut: alternately ridiculous, bare-bones, heartfelt, puzzling and what-in-god’s-name-y. And more often than not, it works.

There is a joy watching interesting people change for the better while in a carefully crafted environment . . . and Payne knows just how to balance the sour and sweet.

A movie perfectly engineered for home viewing. Particularly with the best set of headphones that you own.

It is messy, it is incendiary, and it is frustrating. It may not be what you wanted or were promised by the slick and smooth marketing materials provided by Netflix, the streaming giant that is partnering with Lee here for the first time. But Da 5 Bloods is what you need.

The drama is an endlessly inventive and devastating work, a lyrical ode to a city that has turned its back on its most devoted citizens.

There is no guts to Pain Hustlers’ try-hard gonzo-ness, resulting in a sub-Scorsese style that both underlines and loses its point.

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.