Brad Wheeler

A film that is touching in a clumsy, boyish way that adults will understand and may even applaud.

His story here is well-woven, with the kind-hearted voices of psychiatrists, playwrights, family members, lawyers and the gregarious McCollum himself failing to come up with a solution on how to handle an autistic, obsessive and irresponsible rail rider.

Cross’s light-handed (but too long) film doesn’t romanticize or overcomprehend, choosing instead to concentrate on life’s non-choices.

The message of the film is that life throws surprises. While that is true, this predictable film itself is not one of them.

A modest, winning comedy that overtly sneaks in its wisdom about life, worries and what really matters.

It is still by no means a great film, even compared against the standards of contemporary superhero cinema, which is bleeding any sense of individual artistry and purpose each passing year. But it is a wild, invigorating experiment to experience.

In a smartly written, evenly wrought drama, the newly discovered wunderkind Rod Paradot stunningly portrays a troubled youth who makes Eminem’s 8 Mile protagonist look like a boy scout in comparison.

I like the way McLeod handles the genre. The easiest thing to do would be for her to write Feore’s Elon Musk-y space-or-bust character as a villain, thus making it impossible not to root for her protagonist (who warns of a potential load-bearing problem with the space-plane’s runway). McLeod resists that urge though.

The racer turns out to be a contender, but the small-time syndicate is the real story, an inspiring tale heard, as it were, straight from the horse’s mouth.

Comparisons of Janis: Little Girl Blue have been made to Asif Kapadia’s touching 2015 documentary on singer Amy Winehouse, but in Amy we don’t see a subject as remorseful as the Joplin presented by Berg.

Abominable has charms to soothe the savage child.

The intrigue is high and the action is furious, but a sort of meta subplot is also at work: Sextagenerian action-film hero Chan against onetime 007er Brosnan.

It’s a tough watch, but inspiring.

Fiennes really shines here, with an electric-cocaine vigour and lust for life.

Budreau constructs with imagination and pleasing fluidity, painting a portrait with a soft, sympathetic focus while steering clear of worship.

Glassland is a small film with an emotional punch that wallops above its weight class.

As for the winner and new champion, it has to be Kuosmanen, who never met a boxing-film cliché he couldn’t discreetly avoid.

[A] tender but untimid drama.

Fittingly, given that the film from Broomfield (who was also a former lover of Marianne’s) is nothing if not a love letter itself. So long, Marianne. So long, Leonard.

A serene, existential experience from the Canadian filmmaker Alison McAlpine, who takes to Chile’s Atacama Desert to look both skyward and inward.

In a franchise rife with missteps, this sequel does not dishonour its source. Hats off (and heads off) to the film’s creators.

Cleverly structured and popping with realistic dialogue, The Climb is a bromance comedy of uncommonly high aspirations.

While The Wave doesn’t quite match the saga of, say, The Impossible from 2012, it’s a film absolutely worth catching.

The film's brisk pace is a bit wearing once the one-hour mark is passed, but the high energy and intelligence is quite charismatic over all.

Educating young audiences as it entertains just about anyone, Penguins features the droll narration of Ed Helms and some great Antarctic cinematography.

With his elegant bio-doc Oscar Peterson: Black + White, director Barry Avrich discreetly (perhaps too discreetly) sniffs around the question of Peterson’s legacy and whether he truly received the respect he deserved in his lifetime.

Sure, the film’s a bit of a hit job. But hey, as Bannon himself tells us, “There’s no bad media.” Sadly, he’s probably right.

An immersive, compact and unpolished documentary from the Kurdish-born, Oslo-based filmmaker Zaradasht Ahmed.

After 107 well-packed minutes, Dotan’s film (which curiously fails to mention current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) arrives at a pessimistic outlook. A settlement on the settlements is nowhere in sight.

It is a rare song that deserves its own book, but Hallelujah is one of them. The story is a doozy.

[A] soulful, fluently told, low-key comedy.

The film is as much about Hokusai as it is about the titular protagonist, and so she defers to her father here as she apparently did in real life.

The film’s own unhurried pace might frustrate the popcorn crowd, but it is the blasé, blank-faced unconcern for expediency from judges, prosecutors and bailiffs that should prove much more infuriating.

Like Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven," the underlying tension involves the protagonist's journey to regain his humanity. Hostiles, a hotbed of hostility.

A fascinating and compelling dive into an artist’s uniquely ticking parts, gives voice to a complex dude and broadens the picture.

A bittersweet salute, appraisal and explanation of the early-nineties Saturday Night Live troupe mainstay.

Jarecki picks up all sorts of celebrated people and thinkers – probably too many. I would have liked to hear more from Elvis’s Graceland cook and less from Alec Baldwin.

The political buck-passing from all entertains and creates the film’s time-sensitive tension.

The script is loose; the acting is natural and nuanced. Over the credits plays an acoustic song about lives in the how-did-we-get-here stage. If you do not leave this Netflix movie asking questions about your own paths, the failing is yours, not Duplass’s.

A supernatural winner.

A subtext of the film is a focus on classical music, as if to ask how humans can be capable of both intense beauty and ruthless inhumanity.

A butterfly metaphor is employed by the time-flipping Takahata, a filmmaker whose delightful Only Yesterday took 25 years to arrive right on time.

Handsome, profoundly austere and vaguely traumatizing, Black Hollow Cage has no fun at all with the time-travel trope. But, then, one man's kitchen knife to the neck is another man's hot tub or Michael J. Fox.

Making his directorial debut is actor John Carroll Lynch (no relation to David Lynch). This first-timer quirks things up occasionally with surreal scenes of a nightmare and an on-the-nose allegory (Lucky walking toward an exit sign and standing at an abyss).

The film is a technical wonder, especially the sound design. There's also an excellent incongruity at work: Happy faces drawn in blood, viscous killers in playful masks and cheesy eighties music as the soundtrack to savagery.

A lively, dashing and amusing motion picture that smartly spoofs and slyly celebrates the James Bond spy-film franchise.

Trueba, 62, has reassembled a lot of the old cast, most of whom play characters trying to recapture old magic. Make of that what you will. It's fun.

Tension is built deftly. A dreamy dance scene uses Gowan’s hit song Moonlight Desires to magical effect. Filmmaker Dorsey keeps viewers guessing with her promising debut.

This film is about giving credit where previously neglected credit is due. “You wouldn’t let us talk about it before,” Robertson says at the end of the doc. “But now I’m going to talk about it real loud.” No volume is too much at this point.

It is a heartfelt mediation on the creative process, with elegantly presented ideas on nature, music, mortality and things out of tune.

The problem with Shyamalan’s spin on dissociative identity disorder is that for all the dissociation, why are all 23 identities cool with locking terrified girls in a basement?

An oddball charmer of a motion picture about nostalgia, the pursuit of artistic passion and a coming of age bizarrely delayed and uniquely fulfilled. The bear itself is but a bit player.

Dad’s suspected infidelity is the tension in a film that hammers its nineties setting so relentlessly it could be called Sex, Lies and Videotape (and Floppy Disks and Payphones).

It’s a fantastically bonkers story told excitedly in The Lovers and the Despot, a stranger-than-fiction yarn that would make a hell of an opera.

Instead of captivating us with swagger, McConaughey chooses to go grim and dogged. Director Ross does the same.

Well conceived, deftly comic and finely acted (particularly Evelin Hagoel as the gutsy wives’ ringleader), The Women’s Balcony overlooks nothing when it comes to addressing faith, segregation and sexism in a peppery, entertaining way.

So, is Yesterday a one-trick Dig a Pony or did renowned British screenwriter Richard Curtis and the great British filmmaker Danny Boyle turn a cute hook into something meaningful? The answer is that the duo tries for the latter, but doesn’t quite nail it.

Writer-director Zandvliet has crafted a handsome, affecting and questioning film about post-war revenge and forgiveness. On a tough field to navigate, he makes it to the other side, commendably.

The colourful film of course is allegorical: Peace is tough and tedious; war is an easy solution. And while the kids’ enthusiasm for battle wanes, pint-sized audiences will likely remain engaged.

It’s a genuinely fun affair – let’s not write it off as a cult classic just yet – with the smirking air of a confidant and mischievous filmmaker.

An interrogation session involving a psychotropic drug is just too weird for words and some will find the film sentimental and too naked in its Academy baiting. That said, 13 Minutes works like clockwork as an artful (if not terribly ambitious) take on a grotesque era.

With a fine balance of winking absurdity and wry humour – Cohen would tip his fedora to the born-and-raised Montrealer Bissonnette on that score – Death of a Ladies’ Man is a charming study of a man in crisis. It’s serious here and funny there.

Despite the film’s laudatory tone, a portrait of Foster is competently painted by the veteran documentarian Avrich.

Knuckleball does not flutter; its pace and tone is lean, mean and eerie. Luca Villacis plays the home-alone little hero, a Rambo MacGyver Jr. in the making. Not all the kid’s ingenuity and wits are plausible, though, and a late-plot throw-in is a bit much. Still, there’s Ironside and enough cold-weather tension to make Knuckleball a swing-and-hit deal.

What it is, is a delicious black-widow mystery, in which the deep-gazing actress Rachel Weisz rocks the veil.

The low-budget effort from Vancouver writer-director Scooter Corkle is earnest and methodical, with a tone-setting murkiness to it.

The victory of The Accountant is in the tone. The title character isn’t presented as a superfreak – this isn’t "Rain Man," in which autistic gifts are presented as powers for parlour tricks – but as a prototype and a beautiful mutant, maybe even a superhero.

The film is poetically structured and Lear is a spry, emotionally involved participant in a lively bio-doc that succeeds eulogistically and contextually.

Aquarela’s soundtrack shifts from ambient post-rock to gnarly speed-metal to widescreen strings. The effect is a serenely apocalyptic warning: Climate change is a killer, with water as its indiscriminately lethal weapon.

Adults should get a kick out of Phantom Boy’s sly humour but the story and the action is for the kids.

It’s a fine yarn spiced up with moments of hip hop, animation and pop culture references, all packaged nicely in something like the hot-pink doughnut boxes that the cruller maestro Ngoy supposedly invented.

Best of all, it’s tight at 81 minutes, which means a 7 p.m. screening gets you out of the theatre while it’s still light out, thank God.

The film is a level-headed look at artists who promoted joy but lost their own.

The elegant, condensed saga covers a dozen years, starting in 1933. You don't need to be an Einstein to guess where the story is heading. An evocative, slow-blooming feature is a study on the flash horrors of war and the gradual death of dreams.

From the cult Oklahoma director Mickey Reece, the horror film Agnes is funny – both funny ha-ha (in sly ways) and funny-peculiar all around.

It’s lovely film to look at, Springsteen confronting his past and demons in the prettiest, gently tuneful barn-and-big-sky way imaginable.

Nothing much happens in this pleasantly casual 80-minute conversation of a documentary. It doesn’t come to you; you must come to it – like a Jim Jarmusch film, particularly his "Coffee and Cigarettes" from 2003.

A well-layered film makes a fascinating case for forgiveness and a sharp rebuke of Bible-taught eye-for-an-eye revenge.

It’s a long film, and the payoff might not be enough for some. But as a moody story about moral dilemmas and moving beyond the past, The Survivor outlasts its 129 minutes.

A satisfying adventure story with allegorical manifest-destiny allusions, The Hidden World reminds us that if butterflies were the size of horses, humans would surely ride them. And wouldn’t that be an awful thing? ​

What we learn from the enjoyable punditry of siblings, art-world associates and former lovers is that the gorgeous provocateur was consumed with fame, and that everything and everybody was a means to that end.

The ironic twist at the movie’s end is a nice touch. The Invisibles, about humans as living ghosts, needs to be seen, and believed.

Jason Clarke is excellent as the complicated Kennedy, an unsure, insecure and not entirely decent man daunted by his brothers’ shadows and eager to earn a father’s respect that is not forthcoming. The supporting cast is top-notch, particularly Kate Mara, who portrays the doomed Kennedy loyalist Kopechne with a warm humanity.

What follows is excellent, uncomplicated and well-wrought house-of-horrors fun, complete with a message about self-blame and the real things that haunt us. Gary Dauberman is a first-time director, but don’t worry, Mom and Dad, your kids (and everyone else) are in good hands with him.

While Rhys Ifans chews scenery as a scruff-faced foreign correspondent, Knightley plays it taut and believable, and, as we know, nobody walks on cobblestones better than she. The end result is a professionally made film that is whistle-blowingly relevant, starring an excellent actress who successfully comes in from her Pride & Prejudice past.

The result is a stylish, watchable film, but one with a slow pulse. Game, set and almost a great movie.

The Mumbai-set Photograph is a gentle romance cleverly told, and not without humour.

Director Morgen is a bit messy with his timeline and his relentless insect photography really bugged me. But the biggest nit to pick is with Philip Glass's intrusive, crazily grandiose score.

Stewart believed people would rally to the shark cause if only they knew the gravity of the situation. The film is now made, the word is out and Stewart more than did his part.

Director Barbosa's love letter to his late friend is emotionally satisfying and cinematically splendid, with social commentary shoe-horned in for better or worse.

Played adroitly by Patrick Sabongui, this guy wouldn’t hurt a fly. Or would he? A couple of nice plot twists overshadow the predictable sound-of-sorrow ethnic wail that closes the film.

The film’s director, who would make an excellent character witness for the defence, raises the questions but frustratingly doesn’t answer them in an otherwise compelling documentary.

An excellent cast (including Michael Shannon and Hillary Swank) hit the right notes in an evenly wrought family drama that rings true.

The soundtrack is effective and overt – from the badass rock blare of Billy Squire, Bad Company and AC/DC to the atmosphere compositions of the indie musician Julia Holter to the riveting nu-blues of Willis Earl Beal. The camera work is slick, too; tricky sound-editing notions are pulled off with aplomb.

This is a small, sentimental and straightforward film that offers little in the way of surprises. Instead, it wins on heart and a simple message about the value in fighting to keep one’s dreams alive.

Originally titled Eight for Silver, the film from British writer-director Sean Ellis is brooding, uneasy and fog-filled, with an apprehensive soundscape. Werewolf mythology mixes with biblical allusions and ideas on payments for the sins of elders.

It is a fun, serviceable, family-oriented exercise in reprise that counts on nostalgia as it brings history and present day together.

At its worst, the film is an homage to Dion’s presented indomitability. At its best, it serves as a compelling portrait of a powerhouse performer’s lifeblood love of stage and audience.