Karen Gordon

It’s a heartfelt film that seems to be aimed at the strength of familiar love in spite of difficulties. The elements are all there, but the film’s repetitive structures render it frustratingly flat.

A stately 20th Century period piece in the style of the best British dramas, The Dig is just what the anglophiles ordered.

Viola Davis is an actor apparently incapable of a false note. She’s a force of nature, playing a force of nature. She is perfection. And even though Ma is the center of the story, Boseman’s Levee goes through the most changes through the film, and covers the most emotional territory. It is a masterful and powerful performance - a beautiful take on a difficult and tragic character.

If you’ve seen enough of the studio’s movies, even something this full of imagination suffers from some predictability. There is a period in Soul, where, in spite of the lovely creativity and goofy story-telling, it lags and feels a bit listless, before bouncing back.

There’s a lot more going on than meets the eye in Steven Soderbergh’s wise and deceptively breezy new film Let Them All Talk.

Life, like love is messy. The beauty of the film is the way Miele, through the dilemma of Adrienne and Matteo, asks us to look at our own messy lives and see it through fresh eyes.

There is a terrific movie to be made about the trial of Han Van Meegeren, one of the most successful art forgers in history, who made millions selling his paintings to rich and prominent Nazis during the Second World War. Unfortunately, The Last Vermeer isn’t it.

On the surface it’s a solid and and absorbing character study. But thanks to Marder’s script and masterful direction, and Ahmed’s beautiful performance, there are increasingly deeper layers that take this movie to a deeper place.

The film has a wonderfully quiet, reflective, and intimate tone, but that lovely subtlety ultimately robs it of some of its impact.

If His House doesn’t quite achieve the deeply unsettling tone that makes a good horror movie hard to shake, it still succeeds as an exploration of trauma, and the way it can shape and challenge the human psyche.

I Am Greta is a wonderful, rich documentary and at points it moved me to tears.

On the Rocks is a delight.

Porter and Souza together, in this film, are using his images as a reminder that a true leader can bring more than just relief from a chaotic time, and that the best leaders have always had a deep and measured well of compassion.

What’s miraculous is that, through it all, Kaufman stays on course in a movie that is as intriguing as it is wonderfully odd.

Metaphors abound in The Secret Garden if you are so inclined. But the beauty of the story on its surface is enough.

Would his work, or any work that walks the line the way his does, be tolerated today? It’s not explicitly in this documentary, but perhaps something worth asking after watching a film about an artist who experienced fascism first-hand.

Bolstered by actors with serious chops, and a secondary cast of seriously talented singers — including some with Eurovision contest experience — the Netflix movie is sweetly affectionate. But your enjoyment will likely be directly proportional to how you feel about Ferrell and his familiar man-boy character.

While it has charm and an interesting twist or two, it lacks bite.

The film does a pretty good job of walking the tightrope between comedy and pathos. To that end, Apatow has pulled together a wonderful cast.

The film looks at so many things at once, that in some ways it lacks depth or resolution.

By not hammering on a hot-button issue, by avoiding turning this into a lecture, she has given us a movie about how some things in life come down to choices that are so intimate and personal that sometimes words won’t help you understand.

Some movies deal with the settling of the American West as mythic. And then there are films like writer/director Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow, which strips it down to its basics for a more human scale and poetic vision of the Western era.

It’s a rare thing to see a movie about failure that a) is plays like a gentle rom com, and b) is not about utter neurosis. But Standing Up, Falling Down is a small sweet, slightly flawed movie that is both of those things.

The Call of the Wild is aiming to be an old-fashioned adventure movie for family viewing, and it delivers the requisite big warm cinematic hug. And more than being the story of a dog finding his inner wolf and fulfilling his destiny, it’s also an homage to the natural world. And that, wrapped in the adventures of a dog, is a pretty wonderful thing.

This isn’t a film that suddenly bursts out at you. Sciamma, like her characters, works by restraining everything. She doesn’t rush the story or focus on a building sense of hunger or passion. The title notwithstanding, the movie is a slow burn, not a fire.

The movie looks pretty good, given that it’s small budget effort, and it achieves a sense of tension. But beyond that, the result is frustrating.

Les Miserables is an intense ride, a gripping action-filled police procedural that leaves you with grappling with social issues and youth when the movie ends.

Uncut Gems is a heart-pounding sprint of a movie, a two-hour anxiety attack, anchored by a tour de force performance by Adam Sandler.