Barry Hertz

Ultimately, We Forgot to Break Up’s broken social scene offers a lot of hum, but not enough rattle.

Blanchett, as always, is flawless as the seductive and secretive Kathryn, but it’s Fassbender who reveals a different side of himself.

Zoopocalypse’s bid to revel in the kiddie-macabre space is admirable.

More than anything, NTBTSTM is simply hilarious – a furiously funny roller coaster of a film whose energy never, ever dips. It is difficult to imagine a better, sharper comedy coming along this year. Or the next.

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

The underwater cinematography, orchestrated by Nick Remy Matthews, is often startling, destined to make the dark box of a movie theatre all that more engagingly claustrophobic. And the ultimate story behind Last Breath is incredible, verging on the unbelievable.

Perkins’s version of The Monkey is an annoying, snarky and slight endeavour that just about kills itself in its bid to satisfy all the many cinema-starved sickos out there.

The Gorge is half a smouldering romance, half a zombified venture into overkilled horror-movie tropes.

This is a movie of pussyfooting and sidestepping, unconcerned with race, history, heroism or really any idea at all beyond “Hulk smash.”

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.

A C-grade thriller that is further dumbed down to dunce-cap calibre, Flight Risk might have worked as an enjoyably grimy piece of genre trash had Gibson not made every single wrong directorial decision along the way.

Deeply playful while never falling for the more hoary tendencies of the genre – remarkably, Soderbergh seems to have invented a new way of filming a “jump scare” here – Presence keeps its audience close and tight, building to a finale that forces you to reconsider the entire experiment.

Universal Language is a film flooded with sorrow and spirit, discombobulating surrealism and comforting sentimentality.

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

Long underutilized and certainly undervalued, Canadian actress Pill is a pure delight here as Charlotte, anchoring and then elevating every single scene that she is in.

Ultimately, it all becomes too strained to take seriously.

The Brutalist is a movie of big ideas constructed inside the transformative majesty of epic-scaled cinema. You can try to describe it, but nothing can match the power of simply opening your eyes.

Where Mufasa distinguishes itself is Jenkins’s eye for balancing emotion with action.

Clearly, Oppenheimer is an ambitious and courageous filmmaker – his chilling documentaries alone are enough to ensure his place in the pantheon. But so much of The End prioritizes purpose over execution, with the result stretched out over interminable lengths.

Berger’s film is a sometimes zippy, frequently ridiculous drama.

Madison never loses grip on the character for a second. Together with Baker, the pair craft a whirlwind of a character, provocative and powerful and so very easy to imagine as the object of anyone’s obsession.

As the two women clash in the film’s final moments, Tjahjanto executes a truly glorious extravaganza of choreographed carnage, as impressive as it is overwhelming.

You will leave the film as hungry for Simpson’s food as you will be full from his emotional journey.

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.

There is an intensity and commitment in Campbell’s work that mesmerizes, even frightens, with its sheer boldness.

Frankie Freako is designed to melt your brain. The only question is whether you might welcome such cerebral liquefaction or not.

This is a movie that so badly wants to be as cool as its source material that it trips over itself, in backward Chevy Chase style, into something so old-fashioned and dully familiar that no amount of retro sheen can boost its cool bona fides.

Leave it to a robot to break our puny human hearts.