Brad Wheeler

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.

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

Sublime documentary.

Whiplash is an intense, unmelodious, highly amped and probably unrealistic drama set in the fictionalized Schaefer Conservatory in New York.

Scenic, well-paced and rich in dialogue and character, the film is Coen brothers for the squares, and maybe the best middle-of-the-seat drama of the summer.

Todd Douglas Miller’s documentary about the first moon landing is dead brilliant, sure to enrage conspiracy theorists while thrilling most everyone else.

The film's police-procedural action is unimaginatively presented, but Oyelowo is compelling.

The racial context is incisive; the retelling is tense, tight and chilling. These kinds of stories are emotionally wrenching to watch but can’t be told too often.

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.

Listen to Me Marlon is an offer so intimate that no film fan should refuse.

The accurately titled EPiC is the greatest concert documentary ever made.

Zhao’s artful look into the American West is a lightly brooding winner. Clearly this isn’t her first time at the rodeo.

Apologies to Eugene Levy, but the award for best supporting actor in the role of an adorably well-meaning father goes to the superb Josh Hamilton.

Film critic Roger Ebert described movies as “empathy machines,” in that they allowed people to understand the lives and stories of others. Empathy was a big part of what Fred Rogers taught. In this film and with others, Neville, who grew up in the entertainer’s neighbourhood, has demonstrated himself to be an A-plus student.

The story is simply told: the rise, fall and comeback of a lesbian trailblazer and soul-crushed singer. Chavela the person is more fascinating than Chavela the film – a tequila-sunrise love letter to an unknown icon.

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.

The story is told cleverly with two overlapping parts. The acting by newcomer Reid Asselstine and theatre player Darrel Gamotin is easy and natural.

While the film is well meaning and the joshing crew at Calvin’s Barbershop is a hoot, the Malcolm D. Lee-directed comedy is plagued by relentless mawkishness, indifferent storytelling, willful naiveté and clunky seriousness.

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.

Age in Being 17 comes in awkward bursts, and yet the film moves sublimely. Director Téchiné, 73 years old, is wise beyond his years.

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

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

This story of personal redemption tacks drama by the nautical mile. "The ocean is always trying to kill you,” says Edwards, a woman like most who knows about facing high odds and salty conditions.

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.

The film hums to tepid indie-pop and is sentimental to a fault, but the cast is a soulful bunch (including Toni Collette and a wonderful Ted Danson) who breathes life into a film that is all heart.

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

This delightful stop-motion animated romp features no dialogue, which is as it should be – the beauty of animals is in their actions, not words, after all.

This dandy foreign feature from Anders Thomas Jensen is only posing as a revenge film – clickbait for the violence junkies and the popcorn crowd. Yes, leading man Mads Mikkelsen plays a brooding killing machine out to avenge the loss of a loved one. But Riders of Justice, in Danish with English subtitles, is actually a pitch-black comedy about questions, coincidences and ideas that pile up faster than the body count.