Kate Taylor

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.

Unusual for a Holocaust drama, the film offers no false hope of rescue or resurrection, but does insist that our bearing witness matters.

DeGeneres goes much further, though, maintaining a delicate balance between Dory’s optimistic personality and the hovering anxieties created by her imperfect memory.

To watch German documentarian Thomas Heise’s marathon family memoir Heimat is a Space in Time, the viewer has to continually analyze the relationship between text and image.

This haunting Chilean documentary is more poetry than journalism as filmmaker Patricio Guzman compares the fate of the indigenous people of Patagonia with that of the disappeared of the Pinochet regime.

Tarantino is a masterful storyteller, painter of cinematic images and director of actors; the script, the cinematography and the cast of outlandish characters, created by a powerful ensemble dashingly led by Jackson, can’t be faulted in any way.

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.

With exuberant naturalism from its non-professional actors, and a standout performance from Kosar Ali as Rocks’s best friend, the film covers the highs and lows of female adolescence with compelling sensitivity.

It is extremely difficult to make something as invisible and ineffable as religious faith seem real, let alone touching, on film; doing that is only one of the achievements of Fernando Meirelles’ unusual look inside the papacy.

Director Jon Watts is smart enough never to deviate from a narrow vision that he executes superbly.

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.

Yes, The Father is a familiar story and a universal one. Yet Zeller has been uniquely inventive in the way he evokes the unreliability of memory and the subjectivity of experience in the senile – and the healthy.

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.

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 director’s larger point is deployed with such subtlety that it creeps up on the viewer with devastating force.

It rejoices in a classic structure in which one upward trajectory and one downward meet for a shining moment in the middle. Under Cooper’s direction – and thanks to his chemistry with his co-star – the movie throbs with the excitement of that meeting, while the downfall of his alcoholic rocker achieves an almost tragic catharsis.

It’s a film full of delicate metaphors and gentle humour – the locals have elaborate rules for giving a warning honk of the horn on their one-track road but refuse a simple suggestion to widen it – and meanders, sometimes a bit elliptically, to its conclusion.

Director Mouly Surya’s unwavering conviction in her material (co-written with Rama Adi and Garin Nugroho) and her star – Marsha Timothy plays Marlina as fearful and indignant but ever composed – create a film that is simultaneously charming and grisly.

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.

Both shocking and beautiful, the film impresses itself on the viewer with the awesome scale of the imagery – and with the urgency behind it. We have entered an epoch in which human activity is shaping the planet more than any natural force. Anthropocene bears witness that something’s got to give.

Both leads fit their performances seamlessly into this destabilizing scheme, providing a provocative timelessness to the characters.

There is exquisite dramatic tension here, built partly by Campion’s deft storytelling and partly by her powerful cast.

There is one thing that power can’t stand, and that is to be mocked: The social importance of this topical romp should not be underestimated.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Both Colm’s initial rejection of Padraic and Padraic’s final crazed reaction are not the stuff of realism or reason but of fairy tales and nightmares, yet Gleeson and Farrell make the film a delight.

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.

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.

Turtletaub has some difficulty ending the film, which resolves itself with one too many closeups of Macdonald gazing out at the world, whether from a lakeshore or a train window, as both the script and its director struggle to figure out what happens next.

This Spanish-language satire of the film industry, from the Argentinian duo Mariano Cohn and Gaston Duprat, is one big and delightful inside joke for the art-house aficionado.

Director Jon Favreau (Iron Man) is highly adept at having his cake and eating it, too, throughout the film, wowing audiences with effects and amusing them with talking animals, all the while insisting The Jungle Book is a difficult story about a human whose presence threatens to disrupt the jungle’s peace.

Billed by the director as his tribute to cinema, One Second is affectionate and sweet – perhaps a bit too sweet, considering this premiere was much delayed after the film was held back by the Chinese government for supposed technical reasons in 2019.

Coixet occasionally overplays her hand – a dropped headscarf, a sudden death – as does a constipated Bill Nighy in the role of the reclusive widower who is Florence’s one ally, but overall, the film is stealthily impressive.

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.

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.

Based on the 2015 book of the same title, The Hidden Life of Trees is a documentary both simple and startling.

In truth, as this film observes more and more of his compelling oeuvre, the viewer becomes more engrossed in the art than its cinematic presentation and the 3-D effect seems to fade into the background, necessary rather than impressive.

It is tempting to compare her to Princess Diana, a narcissistic media manipulator on the one hand and a sensitive woman deeper than the icon she has created on the other. But Corsage is a work of fiction, and its main character is, thankfully, far more complicated and interesting than the real thing.

The film is made watchable by a strong cast that renders the men’s vulnerability particularly sympathetic.

Qu’s symbolism, including a giant statue of Marilyn Monroe in her provocative Seven-Year-Itch pose presiding over an empty beachfront playground, is big, bold and impressively cinematic, thanks also to cinematographer Benoît Dervaux.

For all its successful debunking of the market, there isn’t enough of this prickly love in The Price of Everything.

The results are highly affecting – so much so, that viewers who suffer from motion sickness may find the film hard to watch. If the approach feels empathetic rather than pretentious, it’s thanks to a crucial anchor: Willem Dafoe’s subtle and humble performance conjures a pitiable van Gogh, shredded by doubt and estranged from people, yet urgently aware of his painterly vision.

The particularly imaginative handling of the shifts between the human and the more ethereal animal incarnations represent the film’s most rewarding aspect.

So, the safely scary and often amusing formula holds. Meanwhile, the movie’s conclusion includes enough plot about Stine’s fate to suggest Goosebumps 3 will feature more of the elusive Black and that can only be a good thing.

The dialogue is quietly scathing, and the production values are sumptuous. But Davies seems most interested in Sassoon as a symbol of hemmed-in Englishness. As a character, he remains poetically opaque.

The story is running a bit thin by the end, yet the almost comic character of the investigative detective is underused. Still, the unlikely presence of Guangzhou, steamy by day, gritty by night, and the shifting viewpoints on the accident add an engaging originality.

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

Jenkins creates many remarkable scenes, particularly as the male characters discuss the racist realities with which they live.

A Bond movie is all about delivering on expectations: to enjoy it you have to be pleased rather than frustrated by its predictability. In that regard, Spectre, Daniel Craig’s fourth outing as Bond and the second directed by Sam Mendes, can be deemed a solid success: not as darkly stylish as "Skyfall" but not as stupidly grim as "Quantum of Solace" either.

The trouble here is that neither Bryan Sipe, who wrote this highly original script, nor Vallée, remain true to the bitter whimsy with which they began.

The film will make highly informative viewing both for those who get it – and for those who don’t.

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.

There’s lots of wisdom here, but in the Icelandic barrens, good cheer has sometimes gone missing. Yes, there’s a price to pay for being stubborn.

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.

The ever-reliable Hanks sympathetically personifies all in America that is worth fighting for, while his British colleague’s surprisingly comic version of Rudolf Abel portrays the Russian spy as a man quietly steadfast in his loyalty to a different cause.

Foster, recovering nicely from her last directorial outing in the surprisingly unfunny "The Beaver," proves her smarts by managing to balance these different strands of humour while keeping the action ticking along.

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.

And, make no mistake, this is a movie that is supposed to be seen from the perspective of a small child.

The nerd’s coming-of-age is a well-established genre, as is humiliation comedy, yet Coky Giedroyc’s How to Build a Girl is different enough to stand out.

As Herzog spirals from the achievements and dangers of the Net to topics such as communication with space colonies or the likelihood that solar flares will reduce the world to flood and famine if they knock out all connectivity, it is hard to know how much of this futuristic stuff to believe.

As her adversary, the ghastly Irving, Timothy Spall is excellent, creating a man of great insecurities hidden behind blustering self-confidence. The actor is happily willing to manufacture a thoroughly oily and dislikeable figure as he and Jackson successfully balance their villain on the knife edge of caricature.

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

There’s nothing subtle about The Finest Hours, but much that is satisfying.

A bold, if sometimes preachy, film that is stylistically daring, improbably entertaining and politically supercharged.

Its war scenes are plenty thrilling, but the film’s real achievement is its quiet authenticity.

The restaurant story is wonderfully taut, with Egoyan in full control of his always extravagant imagery.

As film, the results are often fabulous. They begin with a deft use of flashback from the action’s dark conclusion; they continue with wonderfully detailed and lively camera work that catches the sparkle in Annette Bening’s eye as she plays the actress Irina dominating her many dependants, and follows the seduction of the ingénue Nina (Saoirse Ronan) as it moves out onto a rowboat in the middle of a lake.

[A] fascinating documentary.

The detective plot is shaggy and never fully resolves itself, but the implications of the story resonate like a distant drum.

Perhaps the bravest thing here is Banderas’ reserved performance: Selfish, hypochondriacal and sadly cocooned, his fictional film director is not a flattering portrait of an aging auteur.

Arabian Nights is a remarkable achievement, but also an erratic one.

Labelling his film as a response to the impoverishment of ordinary people caused by the government-imposed austerity of 2013-14, Gomes explains his dilemma brilliantly at the start of Volume 1. How is a well-meaning filmmaker to effectively render the pain of the Portuguese with a documentary set in a town where the shipyard has closed just as alien wasps are attacking local beehives?

Gomes believes we should all take responsibility for one another and sees austerity as a government abrogation of social duty that ultimately turns citizen against citizen.

With strong performances in a scheme of both sensible updates and clever revivals, Mary Poppins Returns is as impressive as the 1964 version it joyfully recalls – except in one key area.

Today’s YA generation is unlikely to appreciate the monosyllabic performances and stately pace, but Pilote delivers a beautiful film in the tradition of the Quebec canon.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the end, the family drama rolls on as the political metaphor wears thin so that the second half of the film is less striking and less interesting than the first.

The laughs and the wisdom creep up on you in this small and subtle comedy about male relationships.

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.

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.

The most remarkable element is surely the way Egoyan has seamlessly integrated footage from previous COC productions, that he shot himself at the time, into his new film to give it the breadth of a genuine stage performance.

The heavy Star Wars legacy sits lightly on Ehrenreich’s shoulders in a Disney-Lucasfilm movie that is finally having fun.

Mainly, it features dramatic footage of the protests, following the protestors’ logic as a leaderless movement coalesces on social media and crowd-sources strategies on the fly.

If children will be entertained by the unwilling roommates’ narrow escape from cats, dog catchers and the Flushed Pets, it is the mass of surrounding detail, from the glittering Manhattan skyline and Gidget’s sleek modernist pad to the animals’ remarkable mastery of domestic technology, that will impress the adults.

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.

Director Karyn Kusama shifts dexterously between the present and the past, unspooling a satisfyingly twisted piece of storytelling by writers Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, who succeed in making both plots gripping. Kudos to Kidman for taking on an ugly role (both physically and morally) and for giving both versions of the character a convincing hardness.

As he transfers his talents to a European setting and Spanish-speaking cast, Farhadi loses none of his remarkable ability to observe close relationships collapsing under stress.

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

The Lobster is a brilliant piece of satire, but largely fails in an attempt to build its wicked wit into a more conventional romance.

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.