Chris Knight

Expect deep conversations to follow your screening.

Writer-director Genki Kawamura keeps his camera angles tight, the better to maintain tension at a boil, and makes the most of his minimal and repetitive set. Fans of the Canadian horror classic Cube should enjoy.

What National Anthem lacks in spectacle it more than makes up for in quiet moments of beauty, tenderness and heartache.

Companion ultimately delivers on three levels. It’s a creepy (and occasionally bloody, and also funny) thriller. It’s a whodunit, or maybe a whatdunit. And it’s a philosophical door-opener into questions to ask of ourselves when it comes to our computational creations — what to make of them, whether and how much to feel for them, whether we owe them anything.

There’s violence aplenty, which is another reason the John Wick reference has proven so sticky.

Only the River Flows — based on the novel Mistakes by the River by Yu Hua — runs a tight 102 minutes but crams a lot of atmosphere into that time, moments of high drama interspersed with bizarre humour.

However you define it, it’s globally good fun.

If The Old Oak is indeed the last film of the master, it’s a fitting sendoff for a director whose work will continue to echo for at least as long as Durham Cathedral has been standing.

Sacramento is a well-made, well-acted comedy drama that does just about everything right and almost nothing unexpected.

Out Come the Wolves director/co-writer Adam MacDonald keeps us guessing until practically the final frame as to how it’s all going to play out in this finely crafted sylvan thriller.

Just strap in and let Skarsgard’s chain-smoking, proudly sober, pushed-too-far little guy take you on a helluva ride.

You’ll have a great time following along in French director and co-writer Rebecca Zlotowski’s latest, which had its world premiere last May at the Cannes film festival. Sit back and enjoy or, as they like to say in Cannes: “Bonne séance!”

Clapin uses animated interludes to flesh out his human characters — his previous feature was 2019’s Oscar-nominated animated film J’ai Perdu Mon Corps (I Lost My Body). It’s an effective and beautiful way of turning emotions into visuals.

It’s energetic, bonkers, and very funny. It’s also two-and-a-quarter hours long, and I didn’t begrudge it a single minute.

This newest concoction gets a lift from its cast but falls to Earth thanks to a leaden script. It’s more exploding chocolate than everlasting gobstopper and, I’m sorry to say, more bitter than sweet.

I’ll admit it: It wasn’t easy to say goodbye to the Seventh Earl of Grantham, his extended family and friends, and his retinue of below-stairs staff. But fortunately, the two-plus hours that is Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale provides many an opportunity for them to say goodbye to us, and to remind each other — and viewers — that history continues to march forward, and things must change.

Atmosphere will only take you so far, and it soon becomes apparent that Starve Acre is 10 liters of helium in a 20-liter balloon. The result is limp and never fully takes flight.

It’s a fast-paced joyride, enlivened by great talent in even the smaller roles.

The AI Doc is visually pretty standard — lots of talking heads, B-roll of robots, and cutesy animation to make it more personal — but it’s also a grand primer on the topic, skipping the standard news headlines of Will It Take My Job? (maybe) and Does it Espouse Suicide (tragically, sometimes yes) in favour of a kind of point-counterpoint-synthesis setup.

The End may literally be a little tone deaf, but it is not morally senseless.

In short, there is much to enjoy in Bonjour Tristesse, but the film as a whole never quite rises to the level of its best parts. And that’s a little sad.

The film is long, a shade under two and a half hours, but Scott knows how to pace things so they don’t drag.

Kiss of the Spider Woman remains an engrossing tale in this new century, and a lovely paean to old movies and the thrills of getting lost in them.

The film, alas, feels far more emotionally conniving than its title character.

I was ultimately less enthralled with the final film than I was with some of the performances in Cuckoo. Stevens and Schafer are amazing, and Bluthardt makes an excellent oddity, a convenient ally with his own mysterious agenda. But Cuckoo can’t quite bring all its disparate elements together into something cohesive and coherent.

What shines through in all these performances — and in recollections by Wilder himself and others — was a man dedicated to his craft and excited about the creative process.

Two Women, for all its entertainment value, is silly and shallow, though deeper than porn, it must be said.

Director Michael Mohan, who also directed Sweeney in 2021’s The Voyeurs, creates a wildly uneven tone here, with a film that starts out promising to be a supernatural horror before segueing into something far more prosaic.