Brad Wheeler

The news behind the understated drama Menashe is that it’s a rare thing, a film performed in Yiddish, covertly shot in Brooklyn’s guarded Hasidic community.

Filmmaker Erlingsson has an eye for detail, a flair for the absurd – a sousaphone-based trio pops up here and there – and a deft touch with social commentary and political satire.

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

The film is too long for the non-enthusiast. And we don’t learn much about the brothers’ personal lives – it’s as if they exist for the band and nothing else. But even if the music isn’t your thing, it’s hard not to admire the duo’s commitment to their creative impulses.

Toes will tap, a tear or two might be shed – a complex story about a deceivingly complex musical is adoringly told and ultimately simplified. “As long as humankind continues to have struggles,” asserts one talking head, “Fiddler on the Roof will be there.” File under: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Tense, immersive and excellently assaulting, Good Time is hella time.

It’s a tough watch, but inspiring.

The comedy is clever; the study of family dynamics is sharper still. Sandler's performance is superb, his character limping through the movie psychically as well as physically.

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.

A magical and often bleak parable about societal clashes.

Douglas Tirola’s doc does the era and National Lampoon justice. The tone is sharp and freewheeling, the craziness is infectious and the pace is cocaine-quick.

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).

This could have been a thriller, but thrills are cheap and Moratto aims for something more documentative, sombre and meditative. It’s about paying debts and the illusionary concept of freedom.

Crosby, as we learn in the fascinating documentary David Crosby: Remember My Name, is no easy rider. He’s no easy anything. What he is is stunningly self-aware, relentlessly candid and highly interested in the subject at hand, which is himself.

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.

There's a certain nostalgia at work here, but where the film really clicks is on the subject of the creative process and as a meditation on the human-machine dynamic.

The pace is leisurely; this is no amped-up police procedural. I love what savvy director David Lowery does with the camera, panning here and there, picking up stray sights and happenings. Top-rate stuff.

With the zippy (if slightly confusing) animated feature Henchmen, the stooges and underlings of the world unite – literally, in the Union of Evil.

The nostalgia quotient might be indulgent overload for some, though catnip for others.

As he did with "Once," Carney with the somewhat autobiographical Sing Street mixes hardscrabble realism with highly charged romanticism, filmed on a low budget with mostly unknown talent.

Amir Bar-Lev’s excellent, definitive film on the Haight-Ashbury acid-testers is long – four fly-by hours – but there are very few wasted moments.

Scored intensely and photographed vividly, the electric film imagines a small slice of doomsday with horrific believability.

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

The picture sings and inspires.

The cinematography is evocative – rainy, rich, gritty and raw, for this inspiring but not always pretty story – and Curtis is 100-per-cent watchable as a puffy, mumbling shuffler whose chess lessons double as life strategies.

The film ends with a delicious question, an uncertainty that will linger long after the credits roll – no ribbon is tied on The Gift.

With no cutaways, the film’s story and the momentum of the unlikely robbers seems as unstoppable as the camera. The characters are confused, adrenalinized and breathless, as are you. Because the deal feels real.

What we have with Barry Avrich’s inspiring and eloquent documentary Prosecuting Evil: The Extraordinary World of Ben Ferencz is the American Dream meeting humankind’s nightmare.