Jim Slotek

Oppenheimer is three hours of testimony played out as drama. There are no action scenes as such, besides pyro played on the quantum and city-destroying level. It is the opposite of escapism, but it’s real history worth telling.

Apollo 11 is ultimately the finest look back to the anniversary of this historic event you’ll see this year.

If Lorne really is “the most boring” doc of the Oscar-winning Neville’s career, it’s only because his career bar is high. As it is, Lorne is a terrific backgrounder for devout fans of Saturday Night Live. Fairweather fans, on the other hand, might find it like an overlong sketch.

In evocative and understatedly emotional scenes, carried out with a mature grace by Banderas, we come to a connection of how we get where we are, and what holds us back from what we dream of becoming.

[A] crazily imaginative, hilarious and frenetic animated feature that’s practically a palate-cleanser for comic book earnestness.

Well shot, well acted and with locations that vary from brutalist factory sites to beautiful nearby forests, No Other Choice is both believable and absurd as it unfolds. But its social relevance remains spot-on.

It’s hard to imagine a lovelier fly-on-the-wall experience than Nothing Like A Dame – a documentary that basically intrudes on a regular, wickedly-funny get-together of four octogenarians who’ve been friends since they were barely more than precocious schoolgirls.

This West Side Story retains its ‘50s feel, while polishing this venerable gem of a musical to a greater gleam.

There’s a little more room for characters to breathe. This is not to last, however. The whole thing must ignite into a final act of fights, car chases and general destruction (and Snake Eyes’ discovery of honour). The battle scenes are often darkly lit and confusing (though it is a change of pace to see so much swordplay as opposed to gunplay), and the attempt to fuse the Joes and Cobra into the plot in the last act is not exactly smooth.

There are not many films on the release schedule with good writing and plotting, wit and solid acting. That’s an exceptional combination in a quick bite of the spy movie genre.

Despite the participation of the traveler’s wife and biographer, Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin is as much about Herzog as it is about his subject. You can be a fan of either and enjoy the film and its voice, so seamlessly did they apparently share a vision of the world.

If Decision to Leave is indeed intended as an homage to a genre, mission accomplished.

I get why people want to make movies about comedy that make you cry. But making you laugh first – I mean, really laugh – would make for a potent combination indeed.

Hamnet is a sensitively told, beautifully realized pastoral tale, driven by Buckley’s magnetism, and a well-placed cast.

A day in the life of Zeytin is, for the most part, an agreeable experience that doubles as a dog’s-eye-view of humans.

A film that wants to be a metaphor for something, the French film The Animal Kingdom is like an edgeless, absurdist high school version of The Island of Doctor Moreau.

It’s an inspiring chapter in history, beautifully conveyed on the screen.

What gives Hearts Beat Loud its life is the father-daughter interaction and chemistry between Offerman and Clemons. Their original jam session makes the audience sit up and take notice.

A masterpiece of squeamishly uneasy, nightmarish mood-making, the demonic-possession film, Sator is partly in the vein of The Blair Witch Project – though much more sure-handed and stylistically sophisticated.

If this seems like a bit of a deep dive when the subject is trendy restaurants in Portland, Pig is a serious movie with heady themes that just happens to come at you from oblique and unexpected angles.

Add a bit of road movie misadventure, a la Payne’s Sideways, and you have a Christmas movie with spirit and wit, with a minimum of mawkish sentiment.

Oscar-nominated Iranian director Asghar Farhadi (A Separation), with his powerful and perceptive tale A Hero, shows us universalities, from the complexities of human nature to the modernized way we’ve manipulated right and wrong.

Far from being mysterious and confounding, it rings utterly true as it captures both the beauty and fragility of young boys’ friendships, amid the storm of growth and social pressure.

His choice of shots is remarkable, from the mirror house to an institutional hallway chase that goes on forever, to static shots of possible entry points that double down on the suspense. Us is a well shot, artfully chilling movie, one awash in mood but which doesn’t fail to deliver the story.

Nighy performs a considerable character arc with only the smallest of emotional reveals, as if tentatively exercising unused muscles of humanity and even joy.

Though the quirk is ladled on a little thick at times, Woman at War is a surprisingly crowd-pleasing film experience considering its subject matter. In style, Erlingsson evokes the playfulness of Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki, and it seems impossible to film anything in Iceland without being hypnotized by the landscape.

It’s on the track where it finds traction. The events of the various races, reflected on the faces of characters whose lives revolve around the outcome, tell a story all by themselves.

It’s a new apocalyptic pallet to paint upon, and I look forward to where it goes next.

On the sliding scale of war movies, Emmerich’s Midway is obviously no prestige film like The Hurt Locker or Saving Private Ryan. It belongs more to the school of the original Midway, with Tora! Tora! Tora! as its exemplar. Tell the story of a battle, offer up some sketched-out characters, played with aplomb, add a dash of soap opera and fire when ready. On that scale, for what it’s worth, Midway is a much more solid piece of entertainment than the Pearl Harbor directed by Emmerich’s fellow master-of-disaster Michael Bay.

Incredibles 2 is a movie that could have been made redundant by time. Instead, it lightens the mood in a world gone super-serious.

Technically, Supercell is not a bad movie. But it’s dragged down by the economics that insist a low-budget movie needs some minor celebrity voltage. It’s at its best when people aren’t talking.

There are some very funny lines in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, much of it predicated on the outwardly ludicrous meeting of profound cynicism and hope. Lloyd’s character arc is well handled by Rhys (The Americans), and the denouement is one only a Scrooge could call humbug.

A sweet and uplifting documentary twist on the horror genre, Silver Screamers is, as they say in Yiddish, a “mitzvah” on the part of director Sean Cisterna, and a gift that keeps on giving.

I’d almost recommend seeing the first act of Song Sung Blue and then heading home in high spirits. But it would be wrong to whitewash real life (rewrite it a bit, sure).

Amanda Kim’s admiring documentary Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV, makes a case that Paik may not have merely been one of the most influential of the avant garde, he may have been one of the most influential artists of the 20th Century - period, one who invented a new visual canvas.

If it’s not exactly a documentary, Dumb Money offers up enjoyably anarchic glee as the little guy wins for a minute.

Deeper, darker, mordant, with a definite horror movie vibe, it is what you might expect from del Toro, a filmmaker who gave us Pan’s Labyrinth – essentially a dark fairy-tale wrapped in real-world fascism, as this is as well.

In real life, what happens in the Vatican generally stays in the Vatican. But as cinematic guesswork goes, Conclave is as good as it gets.

Mikkelsen’s affecting performance is backed by an exceptional ensemble cast, who bring to life the fears and emotional scars that come with age, and the part alcohol can play in it, for better or worse.

Intriguingly weird, and only loosely tethered to its own reality, Lawrence Michael Levine’s Black Bear is two movies in one - both on the theme of creativity-squeezed-from-pain, and both offering Aubrey Plaza the acting turn of her career.

Clocking in at under two hours, virtually every word of prosaic bro dialogue, every dramatic exchange, every turn of events, is designed to do one thing: get us back in the sky twisting and turning at several times the speed of sound, narrowly avoiding crashes with other planes and with the ground.

Monos is an immersive, sweaty, almost hallucinatory experience of hormone-driven anarchy.

A circus of violence, it’s a noisy, non-stop combination of dance and Loony Tunes-worthy manic cartoonishness.

A tale of trauma told, fittingly, with a poker face, Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter is a sure-handed rumination on redemption and finding peace of mind.

The Belarus-born Loznitsa, now a Ukrainian citizen, is not a follower of the “brevity is the soul of wit” school of dark humour. Each vignette is almost too long to earn that descriptor, almost as if he doesn’t want to let go of a scene until the viewer is utterly uncomfortable. But that churn builds on itself, taking us by the last act to a dark and cynical place.

I’m Your Man is certainly a metaphor for our increasingly intimate relationship with our own technology. Some have seen it as a direct reference to our intimacy with personae on social media, virtual relationships that exist at the expense of our connections with people in the real world. Whatever it is supposed to be, it is a smart and often witty take on a not exactly new sci-fi premise.

In the end, del Toro has created an impressive piece of entertainment that manages to retain the existential thoughts that inspired Frankenstein in the first place. Ultimately, it’s one of his best films.

The Personal History of David Copperfield is a comedy that washes over you with its warmth. Iannucci’s fans should be prepared to encounter the director in an unusual and infestious good mood.

Nope is an eccentric vehicle for some of Peele’s favourite themes – the movie business, Black social history, and character-over-plot.

The interesting thing about the remarkably intense, violent police-procedural/occult-drama Longlegs is that it doesn’t overplay the Cage card.

It occurs at a certain point that Ronstadt was kind of the Meryl Streep of pop music, capable of taking on any vocal role and making it sound like she was born to it.

A hero from an era when we still had heroes, the diminutive Romanian-born, activist and lawyer fairly burns through the screen with passion born of witnessing the worst that humanity can do. And he still tours the world with the impossible dream of ending inhumanity.

Director Martin Campbell (Casino Royale) seems to be directing by template, never stopping to let us get to know anybody – least of all Neeson’s Alex, who for the most part is only there to kill people. Some things never change.

The Scottish green hills and forests make for an intriguing change of scenery for the series, with nighttime given that added edge of dread that comes with unseen menace and glowing eyes.

Awash in colour and sunlight, the doc The Last Resort is both a modern cultural history of the confounding should-be-paradise that is Miami Beach, and a loving bio of a young, short-lived photographer who froze one of its moments in time.

All Quiet on the Western Front exists to make the viewer uncomfortable – infinitely preferable to what the characters endure.

Given The Trial of the Chicago 7’s snapshot of an era of an almost hopelessly divided America, and Kafka-esque and monstrous misuse of power by a bullying President, the timing for its release couldn’t be better.

Jay Sebring… Cutting to the Truth works on a level beyond simply the director giving props to his all-but-forgotten uncle. Its more visceral message is that, “the dead have no rights.”

By comparison with Red Army, Red Penguins is a less-polished, seat-of-the-pants effort that involved Polsky sitting and waiting in a Moscow hotel room for opportunities to do quickie interviews (with many still reluctant to talk about those days pre-Putin). But there is some evocative archival footage, including shots of the game’s between-period “entertainment,” which involved dancers from the strip club that operated within the arena.

The largely interior cinematography by Claire Mathon is stark, cold and beautiful, backed by a soundtrack that ranges from funereal chamber music to discordant jazz-noise meant to inspire dread. If that sounds uncomfortable, well, that’s the point of being her.

As an impressionistic portrait of the man, it works, mainly because of the intense vulnerability Dafoe brings to the role.

I was worried King Richard would come to resemble the platitudinous The Pursuit of Happyness, which earned Smith an Oscar nomination, but is not one of my favourites of his films. I was pleasantly surprised thereafter.

An emotionally moving thriller that smoothly negotiates the horrors of the supernatural and real world evil with haunting imagery and tension.

In Sharkwater Extinction, we also get a glimpse of the sanguine approach Stewart brought to coming face-to-face with the extermination of the creatures he loves.

Complications of history aside, The Woman King is Black Panther minus the vibranium and with more women warriors, an empowerment tale fueled by kickassery, with battle scenes, ear-splitting ululated war cries and sword fights.

At more than two hours, Blaze is a meandering tale of genius and futility, tender, but overlong and wallowing, given that we know how it ends.

Capernaum is a movie with a lot of dramatic ideas and plot-points, worthy of a miniseries at least, squeezed into a two-hour sausage of misery.

People expecting plenty of Laurel & Hardy style laughs will be disappointed, obviously, given the movie’s comedy-lions-in-winter theme. But this thoughtful portrait of a long-lasting professional marriage rings touchingly true.

Though Under the Tree falls firmly into satire, it is not a comedy with a lot of laughs. It is more an absurdist tragedy, with cringe-worthy moments.

An audacious and demented film, tailor-made for its recent Midnight Madness slot at the Toronto International Film Festival, Julia Ducournau’s Titane also has intimations of profundity - quite a claim for a film about a woman who is impregnated by a car.

A preposterous mess of romance-with-secrets, generations-old closet skeletons and revenge, The Good Liar is the kind of fragrant dramatic cheese that Sidney Sheldon would have squeezed an ‘80s network mini-series out of. But the never-before-paired screen couple of Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren consume this cheese like so much scenery. There’s nothing like actors with gravitas slumming, all bemused smiles and droll delivery, even as the material descends clunkily into unintentional comedy.

Still, as a premise it’s irresistible. And Megan Park’s funny and touching My Old Ass brings a fresh twist to a mystically-assisted two-way generational life lesson that, in the movies, has usually involved switching bodies.

You don’t have to travel very far anywhere in Canada these days to see towns whose economic and social life-signs are so weak, you practically see ghosts yourself. Ghost Town Anthology merely brings that feeling to life – or death.

This might be a Dune that could even be appreciated by someone unfamiliar with Dune.

Colette is ultimately a feminist tale, but never one that wallows in self-pity or seriousness. It is also carried along lightly by a script with a streak of wit.

Touch is a film that moves at its own Icelandic pace to savour its own tragic, but ultimately hopeful story.

She Said is about cracking the code of silence, and the flood that follows when it breaks.

However closely it does or doesn’t hew to reality (Durkin’s script is “inspired by” the Von Erichs, rather than “based on”), The Iron Claw is an emotionally resonant movie about a profoundly dysfunctional family with an unescapable gravity-well of connectedness, one that dates to when they all grew up in a house on wheels, going from bout to bout.

Their creative process in action is just one of the cool archival treats in Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie, a jam-packed two hours of pop cultural hindsight that is part extended sketch, part couples therapy, and part traditional documentary.

Creed III has the fights, it has a story, and it has a heart. For Jordan, it’s a feature directing debut with punch.

Air is enjoyable, engaging, sprinkled with some of the ‘80s sprightlier hits (including Sister Christian and Money for Nothing), and good for some laughs.

While Stahelski is unlikely ever to be called upon to make a rom-com or coming-of-age movie, he and Reeves have taken the fluid action of the John Wick series to a point of “how are they going to top that last insane thing they did?” And there’s an imagination at work that’s straight out of Looney Tunes.

The surprisingly conventional Tiny Tim – King For A Day mixes archival photos and film, and animation, to present an image of the man before and after he hit the pinnacle of pop culture by getting married to first wife Miss Vicki live on The Tonight Show.

In this feature debut, De Filippis paints an utterly believable picture of the kind of immigrant/children-of-immigrants family where emotions fly and can turn from rage to love on a dime.

You can’t come away from Love, Cecil without appreciating how much of Beaton's aesthetic outlived him.

A rom-com it is. A typical rom-com it isn’t.

Bugonia is not Lanthimos’s best, but it is likely off-kilter enough for fans, or maybe introductory-weird for newcomers to his genre.

There may be a lot of questions unanswered in Possessor, but there’s feverish imagination at work.

It’s, ironically enough, a terrific, serious performance by Will Arnett, arguably the best of his career.

The Suicide Squad, Gunn’s sequel to David Ayer’s poorly reviewed first try at the tale of a group of super-villains forced to be good guys, is a nihilistic orgy of brightly coloured gore and violence apparently envisioned while on mushrooms. If you’re sitting near the front of an IMAX theatre, it plays like being in the “splash-zone” of a GWAR concert.

For a movie that lazily spins its wheels, Fantasy Life is oddly amiable. The only wholly dislikable character is David, and he’s so great at being dislikable, you almost like him for it.

Batman as a straight-ahead film noir anti-hero – just psychos and murder, no end of the world scenarios - is an idea that’s overdue. It was the tone the original comic book set way back when. And for long stretches, The Batman gets it.

There is enough right and apparently painstakingly accurate about Prey – the Predator series prequel in which the now-familiar species of extraterrestrial hunters sets sights on a tribe of 18th Century Comanches – that hearing the characters speak an actual indigenous language would have taken it to a whole other level. Instead they speak jarringly modern English.

Spider-Man: No Way Home is a comfort-food present to long-time fans, like a cross-over episode of one or more beloved TV series, with winks, call-backs, trivia, cameos, super-villains and copious destruction.

Ralph Breaks the Internet is everything that made Wreck-It Ralph enjoyable, painted on a canvas as big as the Internet itself. The satire is sharp and the pace is relentless, a can’t miss combination for a kid outing.

With its dark palette and atmosphere, Honey Bunch could have been a simpler, more disturbing and pointed story. There’s enough there to suggest as much.

As standard a documentary as it is in presentation, Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes is cleverly assembled and edited, making the most of available archival material to flesh out the stories of Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bud Powell, Art Blakey, Horace Silver et al, and of Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, the two German-Jewish immigrants who escaped the war and redefined America’s music culture.

City-dwellers may go their entire lives without realizing that the greatest movie screen of all is above their heads, telling billions of stories.