Jordan Hoffman

Adrift doesn’t have quite the existential gut-punch of JC Chandor’s similar All Is Lost or the recent Cannes debut , but what it lacks in the department of pure howling cinema, it makes up for with the emotion of its central relationship.

What The End of the Tour tries to sell, and sells well, is that Wallace’s big heart was just not made for these times.

You’ll laugh if you’re young, you’ll laugh if you’re old.

Despite the presence of grandfatherly Michael Caine, Kingsman’s tone is about as far from the Christopher Nolan-style superhero film as you can get. Verisimilitude is frequently traded in for a rich laugh. The action scenes delight with shock humour.

Much will be said about Gray’s cinematic craft (as is often the case when a director works with cinematographer Darius Khondji) but beneath the slow roll down the river pierced by arrows from unseen, defensive natives, there’s a fascinating, mercurial screenplay that offers just enough to keep you journeying for more insight.

Many a first-time film-maker thinks they are too good to follow any sort of rules, and blends genres by writing from a purely instinctual level. More often than not, the result is unpalatable. The Mend, somewhat miraculously, is here to buck the trend. Let’s just hope that not too many people decide to follow its lead.

There are issues of trust between the two men. It’s unclear who is exploiting whom—and impossible to know what is being recreated for the camera and what is being captured “live.” This is all to the betterment of Voyeur, which, it isn’t too much of a spoiler to say, ultimately concludes that Mr. Talese and Mr. Foos aren’t all that different from one another.

The Duke of Burgundy will have its detractors. But this is not just a filthy movie. It's a considerable work of art, and one that touches on a rarely discussed side of human sexuality completely free of judgement.

It is a bravura debut from a young film-maker, proving that one can still make a movie for no money at a family member’s house and come away with a work of art, not just a calling card.

About Elly is remarkable for both its universal observations about human nature and its specifics.

Out 1: Noli Me Tangere is confounding at every level.

This movie may be too slow and verbose to be the next breakout horror hit, but its focus on themes over plot is what elevates it to something near greatness.

Even if Aisholpan’s training – which includes hoodwinking, responding to calls, dragging dead foxes and other hallmarks of falconry – is for the camera, it doesn’t make it any less extraordinary. Especially in this remarkable environment, captured in breathtakingly crisp digital video.

Not all is explained in A Ghost Story, but enough is there for vibrant discussion to break out the minute the credits rolled.

Mistress America eventually travels down roads of broken trust and acceptance of reality, but please don’t let those heavy themes suggest this movie is anything other than pure delight. The primacy of the joke rules the day.

The ending doesn’t quite land the gut punch it’s hoping for, but this is more about fun than about exposing deep, nefarious truths. At least, I think it is.

Plaza has found her Ron Burgundy: the vessel of a true imbecile in which to pour her strange genius.

What Meadowland refuses to do, to its great credit, is conform to expectations.

Knock Down The House is far more effective when it is about the people and the process, not landing quips.

Most people will find Thru You Princess inspirational. A few will find it infuriating. But that’s frequently the case with a good documentary.

Split goes all-in on McAvoy slipping from persona to persona, and luckily he’s got the acting chops to sell it.

Carrie Pilby the film is 100% Carrie Pilby the character, a living quirk machine that in a lesser actor’s hands might be insufferable.

What’s most striking about Ixcanul is the elegant way in which it is shot. Scenes are given space, and the audience is allowed ample time to soak up the atmosphere.

In addition to its ability to take this odd premise and run with it, Nina Forever scores by being tremendously erotic. Granted, what’s sexy varies from taste to taste, but the exuberance in passion exhibited by young Abigail Hardingham is refreshing in a landscape of independent films that too frequently play nudity for a cheap laugh or just to tick a box off a potential distributor’s list of requirements.

There’s really not much going on with Roar storywise. But then you take a step back and think about what it is that you’re watching. My viewing of Roar was set to a soundtrack of “Oh my God!” and “Holy crap!”, all of my own making.

Jason Clarke is strong as the weak senator, and he wisely goes easy on replicating the unmistakable Massachusetts accent.

Burning Bush is a rare accomplishment. It’s a political film with clear heroes and villains, and true to its HBO roots, it works as a fleet-of-foot juicy plot-delivery system.

Did you like The Commitments? Did you like We Are the Best!!? Well, Sing Street isn’t as good as either of those two, but it’s still pretty terrific.

A gripping, fascinating and visually arresting memoir.

With Muppets Most Wanted, the vaudevillian pandaemonium is alive and well.

Macdonald grants us insight into the process and, as expected, it’s hardly as haphazard as sceptics might think.

This is an extremely watchable and enjoyable film, but its compression of historical events does become a tad silly.

It is one of the better dumbass sci-fi action movies to come down the pike in quite some time.

What could have been mere summertime chum is actually one of the more cleverly constructed B-movies in quite some time.

This light and predictable movie, with its overwhelming box office success, still offers tremendous insight into day-to-day Israeli society.

It's very funny at times, but it isn't a comedy. It is that very rare of beasts: a new and original motion picture.

All three actors are tremendous, and director Dan Trachtenberg, making his feature debut, must be commended for keeping things tightly focused.

Director Kyle Patrick Alvarez deserves all the praise in the world for the way he cranks up this pressure cooker script. The Stanford Prison Experiment begins with giggles but ends in full psychological break.

More frightening (yet strangely entertaining) than most of today’s narrative horror films.

It’s a minor work that knows its place in the margins, but is thought-provoking and surreptitiously insightful – and very funny.

Equity takes us inside modern Wall Street in a unique and gripping manner.

If a movie as rich and understanding as Mediterranea suddenly appeared every time we read about a difficult issue in the paper, maybe all of the world’s problems could be solved.

The movie is rich on its own as a character piece about the difficulties of being bi-racial, especially at the very specific location of Columbia University.

When something is this engaging (and funny, did I mention funny?) it ceases to merely be about ideas and becomes, even in this borderline sci-fi context, a thoughtful movie about people.

Laughs emerge from the recognisable micro-horrors found in modern living, which, if the world was run in the way we all agree it should be run, wouldn’t exist.

Ficara and Requa have an irreverent streak, one that even might strike some as a little flippant against the gravity of the war.

In the most reductive way, it is another mafia story. But as with their previous film, it is the specificity that counts, and while certain genre tendencies prevent the narrative from truly unmooring, hardly a scene goes by without something fundamentally familiar being rendered in a unique fashion.

Teerink’s reserved, spare form mirrors LeWitt’s work, which gives it tremendous impact.

Its final scenes and sublimely framed last, lingering shot are extraordinary.

The Brand New Testament is a peppy, original and (importantly) very sweet story.

These were two women who reached a state of balance thanks to an almost aggressive honesty.

Seth Rogen’s naughty food cartoon Sausage Party is, like much of his best work, deceptive packaging.

First with the telephone, then early cinema, the magic of wireless radio and, finally, television, Dreams Rewired bombards the senses with a thorough and clever montage of found footage from the 1890s to the pre-war era.

What makes this such a striking film is how the larger scope works perfectly in tandem with the very specific time and setting.

We get the playfulness of seeing quirky magic powers mixed with the familiarity of how a time loop plays out. Add in Burton’s authorial visual stamp and what we’ve got is an extremely pleasing formula. It gels as Tim Burton’s best (non-musical) live-action movie for 20 years.

This is a film that loves its subjects and only someone with a biological revulsion to catchy pop or grand rock theatrics will dislike the film.

It’s a quiet, deliberately paced film, but exquisitely shot, with nuanced performances and visual invention.

One of the most fascinating, if inscrutable films of the year.

It isn’t nearly as deep as it thinks it is, but it is marvellously entertaining.

A smart and beautiful meditation of fathers and sons (and the Father and Son) that is slow but never boring.

Either you are one of the devoted or you’re not. You won’t know what camp you’re in until you see it.

Song to Song is, once you root around for a story, the best of a recent trilogy.

What’s terrific about The Duff is that Casey and Jessica may not have intentionally befriended the less attractive Bianca as a way to make themselves look better, but they don’t exactly deny that she serves that purpose.

To make the movie work, the audience needs to put in a little effort, but a philosophy of connectedness is present.

Maddin’s zeal for old cameras and stocks is matched only by his revelry in evoking an entire genre with a single image. The film’s apogee literally opens up The Book of Climax in a sequence of pure, knowing cinematic joy. Film-lovers, this ludicrous movie is for you.

The Cakemaker is more of a petit four than a belly bomb, but it’s striking in its particularity.

Don’t Breathe is a master class in tension, and while its script could have been written on the back of an envelope, its editing and use of sound design is a triumph for film theorists.

[A] touching, insightful and, at the end of the day, extremely well-meaning film.

Zero Motivation is a shot of honesty, in which short-term goals are far more important than larger geo-political ones. Perhaps because they are the only ones over which we have any control.

The point of this film is the spell it weaves and, by and large, it is successful. It’s the music, it’s the cinematography, it’s the score, it’s Casey Affleck’s hollow speaking voice — they all add up to something that resembles a fever dream facsimile of an eventful movie.

If Burden has any fault, it’s that it is overly straight, but perhaps for a subject with which it is so difficult to relate, that is necessary.

Eat That Question does a good job of giving us just a taste of nearly every era in Zappa’s multifaceted career.

The Oslo Diaries is a striking document, mixing never-before-seen footage shot by the negotiators themselves and current reflections from participants, including the final interview of former Israeli president Shimon Peres.

A few small hiccups aside, 13th is very much not a Michael Moore film. It is organised, detailed and powerful.

So many documentaries about artists just want you to accept that their subject is an innovator. De Palma breaks it down and shows you why he is.

Borgman‘s crafty, trickster-ish screenplay, always two steps ahead of you, keeps you rooting for clues, enough to put your ethics on temporary hold.

In addition to being a funny, invigorating and inspirational ode to being the cleverest kid in the room, it’s a remarkable testament to the suspension of disbelief.

Finding Fela does an exemplary job of explaining, in musical terms, what made Fela standout, a simple enough step that most music documentaries ignore.

The varied ingredients blend together well.

Greene makes it clear early on that his interests lie less with a news report than with what Werner Herzog dubbed “ecstatic truth”. The dial swerves between “catching something” to “clearly rehearsed” and back again, and all to the betterment of the final project.

A Hijacking isn’t boring, but it is not an adventure film – it is a frustratingly realistic take on the unfortunate modern threat of piracy, and a bit of an emotional workout.

Wash Westmoreland’s Colette is exhilarating, funny, inspiring and (remember: corsets!) gorgeous, too.

This is a movie that proposes a genuine, intelligent solution, both for the main character and for us. It comes at you kinda quickly (and economically, in about three wordless shots), but it hit me like a bag of dumpster-dived apples to the gut.

Ultimately, Experimenter finds a glimmer of hope by simply revealing itself. Maybe if more people are educated about the dangers of obedience, they’ll put up more resistance. It can’t hurt to hope.

If you are going to see one outlandish and occasionally nauseating bloodbath samurai pic this year, this is the one.

Mixing droll animation, stock footage and a restrained number of talking head interviews, the director Penny Lane’s biography has all the whimsy of a tall tale, until a late change in tone surprises with genuine emotion. Nuts! is really a kick.

This spiral of self-imposed despair feels like part three of a trilogy of American financial darkness after Killing Them Softly and The Counsellor. The Gambler isn’t quite so audience-unfriendly, but those looking for a typical Wahlberg thriller might come away disappointed. Others looking for a less sure bet might reap the rewards.

There are a lot of twists and turns in the plot, but not all of them are satisfying. What does work are the performances, specifically Cooke and the richly sympathetic character she creates.

In the House is crafty and juicy and ought to delight anyone whose ever thumped their chest about being a storyteller. I must confess, however, that somewhere in the third act the air started to leak from the balloon.

Gambardella’s world-weary look back at his sweet life, eclipsed by his turning sixty-five, is a dizzying fantasia of flash and filigree, and what it lacks in direct narrative is well patched-over with frenetic and emotion-rich sequences. This movie is a sight and sound workout.

This tiny friends-and-family production has the vibe of a project done on weekends and after school. That’s no knock. It is vibrant and bubbly and just clever enough to engage people who wouldn’t normally watch a black-and-white micro-budget Shakespeare adaptation without any big movie stars.

A lot of what works in the movie does so due to the talent of the performers. There aren't a lot of jokes or killer lines in this, but little bits of business that Pugh and Russell, in particular, make work. Harbour's loud, boorish Russian bear is funny at first, but alas, gets tiresome in a short amount of time.

Far-fetched, absurd and hopelessly schticky, but if you can get past its boring initial set-up, it’s actually quite funny.

The actual plot of this movie is confusing and idiotic (I really had no idea what the main baddie was trying to accomplish), but luckily, this is not an obstacle to having fun.

Despite being clever and crafty it can’t break out of the curiosity shop. It’s the finest diorama in there, but something to admire, linger over then move past.

If you do not find yourself hootin’ and hollerin’ at Viola Davis — excuse me, President Viola Davis — packing automatic weapons, tossing grenades, and charging into a helicopter, well, your loyalty to good, idiotic fun might be questioned.

On the Record itself is a thorough and self-aware film.

For flash and rumble, F1 doesn't have an equal this summer. Roll down the windows and enjoy the ride.