Jordan Hoffman

It’s all about the performances. McConaughey and Leto don’t just give voice to the disenfranchised of the 1980s, but all people suddenly faced with impossible challenges.

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

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

At 76 minutes, Caesar Must Die is more of an art piece than a thick steak of a feature film, but it maintains a fascinating hum from start to finish.

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

While formally quite different from his more universally-respected early work, Chi-Raq has the exuberance and wit you’ll find in Do The Right Thing and Crooklyn. It’s the best film he’s made in a very long time.

Even though The Wave is fiction, there comes a point where it ceases to be nail-biting fun and just an exercise in voyeuristic cruelty.

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

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

This movie will spark debate, even with an end title card that reminds audiences of the concept of dramatic license. But as a movie, and not a court document, it is extraordinary.

Prepare for more gruesome kills, more gross-outs, more insight into how a society might actually look a generation after an unfathomable event. These movies are clearly infectious.

What's unfortunate is that Toothless is starring in a toothless story.

[A] blend of classic sci-fi fare and current pop-culture irony is what rockets “Guardians” into the stratosphere.

Lore is a rare, wonderful film that works not just as surface entertainment, but has deeper historical meaning, as well as an even grander, more universal statement.

Listen Up Philip is big, sprawling and tortured, if a little lacking in focus – while funny in parts, it isn’t really a comedy.

The look (and sound) of Murina are mesmerizing.

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

A fantastic, sleek and fun satire.

Prince-Bythewood, whose Beyond The Lights is one of the most overlooked movies of the last decade, has created a vision of historical Africa that has truly never been seen in a mainstream American movie. For that alone, she deserves a crown.

Nothing Compares is simply more about the Sinéad you already know. But a critic’s original sin is to review the movie you want to see, not the movie that exists. To that end, with expectations managed, Nothing Compares is a quite engaging document.

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.

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 Kindergarten Teacher is probably the only movie about poetry with an ending as tense as any thriller.

Clearly there is entertainment value in this documentary, but it’s very much of a “behind the music” calibre.

It’s hard to find compliments for Jamie Dornan beyond “very athletic”—but from start to finish, one can’t give Johnson enough credit for making these asinine movies work as well as they do.

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

The three leads draw you in. The pace gives these actors time to breathe, show nuance and make their characters human.

He’s taken what, on paper, boils down to an extra ridiculous episode of “Law and Order: Criminal Intent” and passes it off as high cinematic art.

Not since Grey Gardens has a film invited us into such a strange, barely-functioning home and allowed us to gawk without reservation. This is a nosy movie, but it is altogether fascinating.

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.

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.

The movie on its own is great, but with this music it's sublime.

Yellow Birds goes heavy on the brooding, and even though a lot of it looks gorgeous and carries the whiff of great importance it is ultimately stunted by a central event that isn’t worth the mystery that surrounds it.

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

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

Southside With You uses our affection for the Obamas to add urgency in the otherwise simple script.

The Measure of a Man’s decision to keep its conflicts so microscopic in the service of realism is a real problem. Put bluntly, Brize’s touch is so light that it’s immeasurable.

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

While some viewers may complain that the action is too heavily weighted toward the ending, I’d argue that this is a strong example of destination-not-the-journey film-making.

It asks more questions than it answers, and doesn’t let anybody off the hook. It’s also a great movie for anyone who grew up in New York City area in 1980, with the right needle drops and art direction. This is James Gray’s eighth feature and, in the end, his simplest. It may also be his best.

Thelma is an example of a wonderful type of fantasy/sci-fi film, the sort of movie that both clearly deals in allegory and is still effective on its surface. But as the stranger aspects of its story tease out, the film manages not to get lost in the reeds of its own mythos. It finds strength in ellipses.

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

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

The varied ingredients blend together well.

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.

Lengthy passages are unrelated to any discernible narrative, and seem to exist in that interzone your mind travels through just before it goes to sleep.

Cage, not one known for subtlety of late, is truly great in this sad, funny and tender role.

What I like about Among the Believers, a portrait of radical Islam in Pakistan, is how the first two-thirds of the movie strives to remain as balanced as possible.

It’s the film’s mercurial nature, its hazy dreamlike logic, that makes it so extraordinary.

The world needs people like Foley, and this film argues that cameras are every bit as important as firearms in the current struggle. This movie, despite its somewhat simplistic form, acts as a fine tribute to the man, his work and the bravery of others who are called to his field.

Form and content collide in inspiring ways in this documentary about Milford Graves — avant-garde jazz percussionist, educator, gardener, martial artist, and cardiovascular researcher. Milford Graves Full Mantis is a jazz movie in every sense of the word.

The first feature from Owen Kline, Funny Pages is not a dramatic masterpiece, but its setting, tone, look, feel, and casting would send real comic book geeks off doing cartwheels—if only we possessed the coordination. Instead, it will have to suffice to sit there, mouths open with the typical drool, thinking “I feel seen.”

While this is hardly Exhibit A in any catalogue of feminist films, it is very much told through the young woman exploring romantic possibility, rather than spotlighting her.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny isn’t so much a continuation as a Xerox copy with cheap toner.

This movie is not particularly good. One seizes upon highlights from the sideline when what’s happening front and center is just so dull.

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

The first half of Straight Outta Compton, F Gary Gray’s two-and-a-half hour opus about the birth of west coast gangsta rap, is bursting with energy, exuberance and inspiration. The second half is immobilised by bloat and sanctification.

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.

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.

The kid performances are impressive and the subtext of a region still shaking off the effects of a long-ended war gives seed to some much needed discussion.

There is a sincere effort to get beneath the facade of what an extremely fit twentysomething firefighter’s life is like. There’s even a possibility that the film’s first act is intentionally distancing so that the later scenes will have a bigger payoff.

Pussy Riot: A Punk’s Prayer is about an interesting topic, but the film itself is not quite up to snuff.

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

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.

The entire picture exudes the wide-eyed (some might say immature) wonderment found around slobbering beasts and magic spells. No, you absolutely do not need to know a thing about D&D to like this. But if you have a familiarity with the Forgotten Realms, the 1980s D&D cartoon show, or if you’re just a Led Zeppelin fan, there’s something here for you. Otherwise, there’s too much going on to ever feel left out.

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.

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.

This is a case of good acting saving a movie from its own poor choices.

This is a fast and lean film, an absolute workout for its outstanding cast and a devilish roller coaster ride for audiences. It’s funny, disturbing, cringeworthy, nerve-wracking and, for some, will feel a little too realistic.

This melancholy documentary shows how championship dreams can turn into a nightmare.

By keeping its characters at such a far remove, the film doesn’t condemn them nor cheer them on. At least, not on paper. In actuality, with all the crafty editing moves, slick music cues and stylish production design, Nocturama does the one thing it shouldn’t: it makes domestic terrorism look cool.

22 Jump Street is a success, as there is a little good ol’ fashioned “heart” beneath its post-modern veneer.

While ultimately gory — and a little dopey — this is no rowdy, exploitation-y, gross-out picture. This is a film where ambience, glossy imagery and performance are more effective than the splatter.

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.

For family entertainment, you could do a lot worse.

What this by-the-numbers approach lacks in artistry it makes up for in an avalanche of facts.

Movies like Resurrection are terrific because they blur the line between how you’d act in reality and what’s appropriate for a film.

The first act of the film wins some laughs on surrealist shock humour, but at the expense of ever accepting this character and her world as real.

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.

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.

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

Jarecki uses Elvis Presley’s career and influence to help us make sense of fame, power, corruption, self-destructive behaviour and pretty much all the other ills of the world.

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

You don’t need to be a fan of the accordion-toting Yankovic to get some enjoyment and laughs out of the gleefully absurd Weird, but it sure wouldn’t hurt either.

To put it in a way the kids do: Men is vibes.

This is a gripping and sad drama that puts a tremendous amount of faith in its performers and audience, and for all the emotion and tenderness in the rest of this year’s Sundance crop, this is the first film that left me a complete broken-down mess by the end.

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.

Despite being very much a “filmed play” it doesn’t come across as too theatrical. Polanski uses plenty of close-ups and keeps the action moving.

This isn’t a particularly chancy film, unless the decision to go old school is considered such. It is still, however, quite good.

The landscape is a definitive presence throughout the film, which has almost no music and very little dialogue. The film is short (approximately 80 minutes) and maintains a good sense of dread throughout.

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 location photography does much of the film’s heavy lifting, especially visits to Mount Kilimanjaro and Mulanje’s Sapitwa Peak. (The rumor is that a young J.R.R. Tolkien visited there, and Barbosa leans into this a bit for the big finish.) The star of the show, however, is the dialogue between cultures.

Bagaria’s personal journey has none of the gravitas on screen that the director wants it to have, especially when set against the backdrop of actual human rights crises in Damascus.

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

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

The Homesman certainly wins a few points for trying a different type of Western. There are no greedy land barons and no gunslingers drawin’ at high noon. But being unique isn’t enough if the story remains uneven and the characters don’t feel real.

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.

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.