Kate Taylor

The rare biopic of a visual artist that considers the dilemma of the art more seriously than it considers the drama of the life.

The drama is memorable but often feels grimly unpleasant rather than moving. And, as always, it’s frustrating to see Montreal cast as some anonymous and unilingual North American city.

The story is both fresh and archetypal; the landscape both hard and delicate – and beautifully observed. Memories and premonitions are intriguingly inserted into the action and the performances...are note perfect.

The heavy-handed score, narrow performances (Nicole Munoz as the repeatedly terrified daughter; Laurie Holden as the dense mum) and weak dialogue all fail to justify a provocative ending that overturns the exorcising conventions of the genre.

Anderson once again creates a uniquely whimsical visual environment; this time, it’s inspired by the classic Samurai movies of Akira Kurosawa and the stop-motion Christmas specials of Anderson’s childhood.

Foxtrot is an admirably precise yet dreamlike film, probing the trap in which contemporary Israel finds itself. It is deliberately designed, superbly filmed and affectingly acted by Lior Ashkenazi and Sarah Adler as the stricken Feldmanns.

This pretty movie feels convenient rather than meaningful.

With its claustrophobic unity of time and place, the disintegrating party feels highly theatrical and, of various classic screen adaptations from the stage, this wonderfully performed black-and-white film recalls in particular Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf." Yet also, Potter's comic dissection of the London intelligentsia's personal and political angst is completely of the moment.

The overall results are unusually wholesome – and satisfyingly funny. Game Night is the kind of harmless comedy you rarely see these days, as happily entertaining as a good game of Pictionary.

Yet for all that the director's unflinching vision, the cast's excellent performances and Mikhail Krichman's unerring cinematography impress themselves upon the viewer, there is something out of balance in Loveless.

The cast of aliens, led by Matsuda, has great fun playing the humans-in-training, but it's Nagasawa's defeated young wife who really stands out as the performance that elevates the film.

So, romance-novel boilerplate that sounded clichéd on the page becomes outright laughable as it's transferred to the screen.

In the script Lelio co-wrote with Gonzalo Maza, the lover's family may be conveniently ghastly and the authorities who investigate the death puzzlingly erratic (as the film flirts unsuccessfully with mystery), but a quietly honest centre never wavers.

It's a decidedly odd, down-beat story and yet, if the sexes were reversed, we would think nothing of a young woman swapping the role of lover for that of nurse when her much-older partner fell ill.

Even Clarkson's work on the intriguingly ambiguous Paige is starting to wear thin this time out; the combination of flat characters, a young cast and a director whose strengths lie elsewhere means that the overall level of performance is painfully low.

Mainly the film is a tightly focused and tightly filmed neo-noir, as the script, which Akin co-wrote with Hark Bohm, neatly picks off parents and friends to leave Katja isolated enough to make her desperate actions believable.

That is what makes the movie highly watchable – along with Hemsworth's affable presence, backed by the always reliable Shannon and with Michael Pena and Trevante Rhodes as two of the soldiers, providing wry commentary from the sidelines.

This Paddington, so sweetly voiced by Ben Whishaw, is just ursine enough on the one hand and just teddy enough on the other to reproduce the charm of the original.

Haneke's ensemble is uniformly excellent – the film is packed with intriguing and provocative encounters between its various oppositional characters – and the actors succeed in the difficult task of making these unpleasant people engaging enough that we stick with them throughout a film that the director successfully balances on a knife edge between satire and drama until its final (hilarious) conclusion.

After successfully telling a complex story, Spielberg inevitably overdramatizes its [spoiler omitted] ending.

Ridley, full of charming spunk playing a skeptical rebel recruit in The Force Awakens, is the biggest disappointment here. She is less engaging now that she is committed to the fight and plays most of the later action on a single note of earnest desperation; Johnson's script leaves her little else.

Although Wonder Wheel begins with a few of the witty ruptures of the fourth wall that have often enlivened Allen's work, it soon descends into a bleak melodrama that is little more than warmed-over Tennessee Williams.

Wright's Darkest Hour is filled with many lush examples of the pathetic fallacy, which doesn't totally disguise the awkward truth that this is a film mainly about meetings.

It simultaneously operates as a symbol of the tension between private life and patriotic duty that is at the core of the man's disagreement with the military.

Director Bharat Nalluri sets a pace as punishing as the title character's – the film is mainly a quick romp – even if he does indulge in some unnecessarily Dickensian melodrama along the way.

As Miguel unravels the secret behind his family's ban on music and its relationship with de la Cruz, a story emerges that is both newly inventive in the way it deploys the skeletons and absolutely classic in the way it connects remembrance with immortality. Turns out these talking skeletons have a lot to say.

Perhaps this multilingual, almost-pre-AIDS idyll does not stretch credulity – the family is surely based on Aciman’s own internationalist clan – but it can try the patience.

No, there's no shortage of interesting characters with intriguing powers on display here, but there's frustratingly little space to tell their individual stories and, biggest problem of all, they lack a worthy opponent.

Branagh finally concludes that business with another determined tapping on Poirot's own moral compass but, as his suspects face him, lined up at a trestle table across the entrance to a railway tunnel, the situation, his revelations and theirs, all feel flat and forced. Both suspense and emotion are curiously absent.

On shifting ground, it is McDormand's fine performance that holds steady here, her wit and her fury eliciting more admiration than pity for the unrelenting Mildred. McDonagh does not always conquer this heartland, but McDormand already owns it.

The dialogue is often mundane...and the actors' lurching delivery of these lines, often flattened, sometimes speechifying, sometimes rushed, but never naturalistic, forces the viewer to question the point of the action as Lanthimos crafts a dark satire about responsibility, justice and retribution.

Yes, it's up to the older generation to provide the comedy here, and they do it fairly consistently, with the delicious Christine Baranski carrying most of the movie as Amy's mom.

Serkis achieves a careful balance with a film that tastefully covers some delicate territory (their sex life; his right to die), avoids the maudlin and injects some surprising if not entirely successful comedy into the mix.

It's a movie intent on telling us the hotshots were heroes, without sufficiently dramatizing either their professional decisions or their private lives.

We all love Winnie the Pooh; that is why we are interested in the story of the real Christopher Robin. To learn that public affection all but destroyed his childhood makes an audience uncomfortably complicit in this cuddle-free origin story of the world's most famous teddy bear.

Human Flow ventures further into pure documentary than Ai's previous work in that field but it's still an art film, with a circular rhythm to its scenes, lingering imagery and a prolonged running time of 140 minutes.

The new film is the rare sequel that truly merits its existence, updating and expanding the themes of the 1982 original to bring them from the 20th century into the 21st. Yes, Blade Runner 2049 is one hard-working and deep-thinking replicant.

Frears has attempted to fashion a contemporary message of diversity and inclusion delivered by a tolerant and culturally inquisitive Queen in opposition to her hide-bound and racist courtiers, but in the end that theme is undercut by the film's own Eurocentric realities.

In the film's finest moments, as a generous Iranian host explains traditional Farsi poetry, the animation and the themes mingle and explode in a riot of cross-cultural colour as the stringy Canadian cartoon meets gorgeously rendered illustrations – and personifications – of Persian traditions.

Realism will only take you so far, and Stronger eventually opts for a conventional tale of rekindled romance and resurgent resilience.

This movie is not just badly executed, it's also stupid.

Of course, this is social satire and some bits are very funny...but the message is too obvious and the humour too gentle for the whole affair not to feel like so much white male whining.

The formula is a bit too neat and the dialogue is often painfully expository, but there are some fine performances – especially from Gillian Anderson as the earnest Lady Mountbatten – and plenty of compelling drama.

Much to an audience's discomfort, Ingrid's desperation to bond with the phony Taylor soon breaks the bounds of sanity – until the film rebukes her warped world view with a highly moral ending. The critique is clever but the limit is the one so common in satire: it's hard to care about the fate of a character this exaggerated.

This is Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote territory. How are we to reconcile such images with righteous vengeance wreaked on a genocidal war criminal? Not even a busload of popes could make moral sense of this one.

The fault in the film lies as much with Cretton’s script, which he co-wrote with Andrew Lanham, as it does with his direction.

The brazenness of her actions and opacity of her emotions suggest a tragic heroine in the grand tradition – the novel is the basis for the Shostakovich opera of the same title – but the film lacks the propulsive drive to make her fate moving.

Technically awe-inspiring, narratively inventive and thematically complex, Dunkirk reinvigorates its genre with a war movie that is both harrowing and smart.

A splashy ending does something to redeem the action before setting up the characters for a potential sequel but who needs more Dru?

The doc, similar to the Oscar-winning The White Helmets but a subtler portrait of heroism, reveals accurate information as the first weapon of resistance.

If this doc is sometimes elegiac in tone, there is nothing mournful about it. Dorfman is too much the odd-ball optimist, telling funny anecdotes – a lifelong friendship with poet Allen Ginsberg began when she was a young publishing-house secretary and he asked for some mysterious thing called “the can” – and tossing off provocative insights into the nature of photography and life.

The car-as-human idea was never Pixar’s biggest brain wave and as Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) hits the track for a third outing, the Disney animated franchise is running on fumes.

This story soon turns excessively maudlin.

The script, written by neophyte Alex von Tunzelmann, is appalling, its plot simplistic and its dialogue alternating between misplaced bits of contemporary psycho-babble and improbable grandiloquence.

And the living are pretty lifeless themselves. As led by the often wooden Tom Cruise playing the U.S. soldier who inadvertently wakes the dead, and directed by an indecisive Alex Kurtzman, the cast is offered some passable action sequences but struggles with weak dialogue and uneven comedy.

The plot depends on an improbably interdependent set of acquaintances and events, but the cinematography, the dialogue and the performances, especially Adrian Titieni’s as an earnest and anxious Mr. Fix-It, are impressively naturalistic.

Wonder Woman may not qualify as a particularly suspenseful First World War movie and it may not feature enough globe-spinning special effects to satisfy hard-core superhero fans, but it certainly is an intriguing combination of the two genres.

Stewart does an intriguing job creating a paradoxical character who explains herself without giving of herself, her very persona exposing the false promise of personal exposition.

The most engaging performance is Javier Bardem’s solidly nasty Captain Salazar, the undead commander of a ghost ship. His disintegrating skin and holey crew are fabulously rendered as evaporating digitizations: It’s the special effects and swelling action sequences that make the movie palatable.

As it giggles away at its campy self, at least you can groan along with it.

Snatched piles bad ideas on good ideas and lame bits of gross-out humour on genuinely funny bits of character work, without ever building enough dramatic force or comic energy to craft a full movie from the results.

Ultimately this political film’s sentimentality and transparency detract from its power.

Besides psychological drama, besides thriller, social satire is another significant element in this sometimes erratic film and it’s one that, surprisingly and belatedly, rises to the top: Anyone who started out thinking The Dinner was a thriller will probably be disappointed when the evening wraps up with an ending that is more farce than denouement.

There is something of the charming first novel to Victoria Day: It's a small film focused on a teenage passage. It is intensely well observed, but somewhat lacking in drama. It is lightly nostalgic about its moment in history. It's probably autobiographical. And it doesn't have much of an ending.

Natasha is, in fact, a deceptive and delicate coming-of-age piece – deceptive because it exposes a troubling underside, delicate because it does so with a measured and quiet intelligence.

The heart and mind of Maudie are always in the right place.

A fine bilingual cast, haunting period detail and a provocative approach to a twisting story carry the day.

The script by Stephanie Fabrizi is full of oddly terse interchanges that Krill and Linder deliver with a lifeless cool that feels more under-rehearsed than erotic.

As her oddly unengaged zoologist husband, the Belgian actor Johan Heldenbergh appears to be working in a different movie altogether.

The lads from Edinburgh thrive in chaos and, for all their new-found maturity, they are still at their best when in full flight from both responsibility and time.

Batra has drawn delicate performances from his ensemble in this adaptation of what was always an elliptical novel, but as a film, The Sense of an Ending leaves you hungry for something more than just the sense of an ending.

Disney’s live-action revival of the Beauty and the Beast franchise is nothing if not lively, albeit occasionally overwrought: The dinnerware’s number, Be Our Guest, turns into a hallucinogenic sequence worthy of Busby Berkeley.

Zhang’s apocalyptic view of the beasts from above as they swarm over the palace like rats may be a chilling metaphor for what awaits us all if we don’t achieve effective international co-operation – but it is also the too-hasty climax to an underdeveloped martial-arts/monster-movie mashup. East and West are going to have to do better than this.

One of the most compelling aspects about Paterson as a film about art is the effortless way in which it declines to ask its audience to judge whether Paterson’s poems are any good: their quality seems immaterial to Jarmusch’s point. It is the act of writing them, both expressing and amplifying Paterson’s sensitivity to his world, that seems important.

What makes it downright offensive are all the romance-novel flourishes that Leonard and the melodramatically inclined director James Foley, also new to the franchise, bring to glittering three-dimensional life in Fifty Shades Darker.

With The Salesman, Farhadi opens a window into his own society that offers a universal view of the emotional rivalries within the human heart. Neither America nor Iran could ask any more of an artist.

As director Maren Ade builds one extended set piece after another, you will gradually spy her brilliant fusion of form and function: the languid pacing reproduces in the audience the feeling of Ines’s excruciating discomfort and desire to see her father shuffle out of the scene.

The ensuing story about life and love is made visually compelling by exquisitely crafted animation, much of it drawn in the bold and refreshing ligne claire style pioneered by the Belgian cartoonist (and Tintin creator) Hergé. That counterintuitive contrast with the mysterious, unspoken tale only makes this unusual film all the more intriguing.

With this complex characterization, Bening looks like a shoo-in for a best-actress nomination come Oscar time, but she is also amply supported here with two performances that nicely capture the insecurities of earlier stages of womanhood.

Centred on an uxorious guy who is building a gambling palace, Live by Night invites unfortunate comparisons with Martin Scorsese’s 1995 classic "Casino," in which the hero is tortured by his dishonest business and his unstable wife. Of course, Affleck isn’t Robert De Niro – delivering what was probably the last great dramatic role of his career – and Chris Messina as Coughlin’s rather bland sidekick most definitely isn’t Joe Pesci.

For all that Silence is a gorgeous film filled with imagery that is sometimes startling and often compelling, the director sadly fails in a passion project decades in the making: This is a long and dull costume drama that seems to think a contemporary audience can picture faith as easily as it does a cassock, cross or kimono.

It is a busy narrative machine that raises expectations of a tidy ending; instead Almodóvar offers an artfully mysterious conclusion that seems unearned by the movie that preceded it – except, of course, for that lonely stag.

For all that it tells a highly unusual story, Hidden Figures is a classic Hollywood feel-good movie. This has been a year of notable achievement for African-American performers and stories, from the surprising observations about masculinity in Moonlight to the gently told civil-rights saga of Loving. In that sober-sided company, Hidden Figures is a face-licking puppy dog of a film.

The main attraction here are the characters: well-observed animals of the zoo or the barnyard.

Only Tudyk’s dry humour in the role of the tactless droid K-2S0 makes Edwards’s darkly reductivist approach occasionally seem smarter rather than lesser. In the end, this hardening of the franchise seems likely to alienate both the fans and the uninitiated.

Miss Sloane is a powerfully conceived thriller with something dead at its centre: there is no reason a female protagonist must be good or well-behaved, but she must at least be interesting.

In the hands of director Mia Hansen-Love and the heart-stopping Huppert, Things to Come (L’Avenir) examines the inevitable losses and possible liberation of late middle age with impressive sensitivity and restraint.

One of the things that is admirable about Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea – and there are many admirable things about this quietly moving drama – is the way its initial enigma seems to need no explanation; yet, once deciphered, the film does not falter but moves only deeper into the emotional territory it charts.

Underneath all this mess there is some idea about the conflict between private love and public duty, between personal interests and those of the state, but the characters are so marginally observed by both the actors and the script there is no tension in the themes.

For all its cleverness, Elle suffers, like many a thriller, from an unmasking that proves less intriguing than the original mystery and, in its misogyny and its misanthropy, the film ultimately proves less interesting than it believes itself to be. Mainly, it leaves a bitter taste in the mouth long after the credits roll. Like Michèle herself, Elle is a nasty piece of work.

As a 21st-century account of the soldier’s enduring alienation from the home front, Billy Lynn is highly effective. It’s what surrounds that account that doesn’t work.

Mainly the director’s decision to eschew the pulpit in favour of the parishioners pays off handsomely, creating an unaffected yet touching account of this civil-rights victory.

This carefully massaged doc, with its spectacular aerial views of the landscape and the hunt, is a heartwarming story about perseverance and talent – if you believe it.

Some of these passages, especially a visit to North Korea, are fascinating in their own right but the film does risk getting sidetracked by tangential stories. Nonetheless, this intersection of nature and culture is filled with insight.

Happily, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has in Moonlight exactly the kind of small, smart film that the Awards should be recognizing more often. Whether it will actually win is another matter: Jenkins’s script and his direction are bracingly free of the sentimentality Oscar so loves.

Park’s Handmaiden is a great big chocolate box of a movie in which a rich and satisfying narrative is enlivened by some piquant erotica and the sharp tang of politics.

By the time we make it to the present, oddly represented by a towering digitized city and a handful of white children playing in an idyllic American setting, it becomes clear Mallick has little space for the multifaceted human race in his gorgeous cosmos.