Kate Taylor

Avrich was probably wise to avoid lengthy digressions into Middle East politics, but if a great film takes the particular and makes it universal, this is not a great film. Given the war that has followed, this individual story must remain only that, circumscribed by the larger context that perforce it can barely acknowledge.

Coogan brings a delightfully sardonic deadpan to the role of the bemused bystander observing the antics of penguins, adolescents and … military dictatorships.

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.

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.

The Son is a film that is very cruel to its characters, and by extension to its long-suffering audience.

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.

Along the way, the narrative does drag at times, but mainly the film slowly and steadily impresses as two excellent reporters – and two excellent actresses, Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan – go about their work.

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.

The film's bitter exposé of life under a theocracy is unforgettable

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.

With a plethora of archival material and strong interviews, this documentary argues that the exuberant Julia Child was a protofeminist who invented the profession of TV chef as she introduced the notion that food should taste good to the land of the Jell-O salad.

Leong’s documentary realism is powerful – if tough on an audience – but his fiction skills are erratic in a film that relies too heavily on Sister Tse’s narration, much repeated flashbacks and heavy exposition of the characters’ motivations.

If you can ignore an ending ripped straight from the AA playbook, there’s minor fun to be had along the way.

A melodrama split, then cross-connecting, into three separate parts, Drunken Birds is a startling thing that just narrowly avoids whiffing the landing.

Sometimes, the animators find an expressive style to match difficult content – a suicide, a mercy killing and several sex scenes – and sometimes they just make the images of Salomon and the refugee with whom she falls in love seem leaden in comparison to the artist’s sprightly line.

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.

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.

An icy Sarah Gadon can’t plumb it, offering a quietly mannered performance where a beautifully furrowed brow and occasional tear suggest the character cares more about looking elegant than dying. Thankfully, in the warmer roles of Yoli and her resilient Mennonite mother, Alison Pill and Mare Winningham do find the big broken heart at the core of this story.

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

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.

Cumberbatch excels once again at breathing life into a sorrowful genius.

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

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

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.

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

Whatever the experts say, any viewer can observe the large gap between the damaged original and the perfect restoration. Perhaps the only definitive thing one can say about the most expensive painting in the world is that, regardless of who painted it in the 16th century, it is a creature of the 21st.

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.

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.

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

The concept and the laughs hold strong amid all the craziness because Seligman has such affectionate sympathy for her mendacious protagonist.

It’s a film that considers young heartbreak so earnestly, it risks taking itself too seriously, too.

Today, homophobia may still blight many a queen’s family relations, but Stage Mother feels dated and formulaic.

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.

Mainly, this movie chatters when it should sing.

Ambivalent and tepid as it attempts to fashion a tick-tock thriller from Ailes’s downfall.

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.

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.

The culminative effect of the cinematography is inconclusive as the character remains trapped in grief.

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

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.

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.

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.

The problem is not so much Satrapi’s theatrical approach to the subject, which veers wildly from the overwrought to the dramatically compelling, as it is Jack Thorne’s abysmal script, full of clunky exposition about isolating elements, curing cancer and refusing sexism.

The meta-fiction may be overdone, but that and the director’s feeling for tone create the expansive atmosphere in which a talented multiracial cast lead by Dev Patel can master everything from pure melodrama to high comedy.

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

It is not simply that this film is utterly unrealistic – perhaps that can be overlooked; it’s a fable of sorts, set in a scrupulously neutral pan-European setting. What is unforgiveable is that Langseth’s approach to complex emotional issues is unsubtle at best and untruthful at worst.

This film, about a French war correspondent and the Kurdish Amazon with whom she is embedded, has the worthy intention of telling the story of the women’s battalions in Kurdistan, but it’s formulaic and melodramatic.

Ruben’s story may be as oddly illogical as any of his nightmares, but the animation here is a dreamy delight.

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.

Perhaps you can accuse all historical fiction of presentism, the sin of applying contemporary values to historical events. Why does the past interest us if not for the comparisons it provides with the present? But with the example of "The Favourite’s" wittily anachronistic romp through the 18th-century court of Queen Anne so fresh at hand, it is hard not to judge the earnest Mary Queen of Scots for its ignorance of the problem.

As Kurt finds his true art in the West, thanks to the help of a fictional version of Joseph Beuys, the film turns gripping, but it ultimately reduces art appreciation to the autobiographical.

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.

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

A critic needs only two words to dispense with The Grinch; the first one is bah.

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

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.

There are only two erotic scenes between the two women, and Macneill, Sevigny and Stewart handle them with conviction: For all the horror of her situation, Lizzie needed some larger motivation to wield her axe. Lizzie dramatically provides it.

Love, Gilda reveals this but does not probe it. With various soft and admiring interviews, it relies mainly on Radner’s own words to hint at how dark things got.

Hansen-Love’s ability to evoke the unspoken remains in full play as she returns to themes of young love and emotional crisis, but much of the film is in English and both dialogue and delivery feel stilted. Meanwhile, it’s never clear why being the object of a youthful crush might be a good cure for PTSD.

The core trio are smooth and amusing in their roles, but the larger plot is filled with painful stereotypes, from a tough female cop to various black gangsters. Meanwhile, as the sympathetic criminals try to outwit police, the social theme remains unfocused – despite heartfelt pleas for street people, especially the homeless Inuit of Montreal.

Part police procedural, part supernatural thriller, part lesson in metaphysics and all neo-noir, Carol Morley’s Out of Blue never gels into a convincing whole.

The apocalyptic vision of the heartland created by Sutton and his cast (based on the novel by Frank Bill) is impressively convincing, even if the themes are often overstated and the film itself is very hard to watch.

[A] bafflingly unbalanced film by American auteur director Alex Ross Perry.

Perhaps explanations for all these improbable scenarios were lost on the cutting-room floor during Dolan’s notoriously prolonged editing process.

Colette is a satisfyingly conventional biopic about a highly unconventional woman.

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

The naively amenable character is wonderfully observed by Fonte, and early scenes show delicious whimsy and black comedy...but as the film’s numbing brutality takes hold the character’s passivity makes the action drag in places.

Form and content seem oddly divorced, but music – the Polish folk tunes, communist-propaganda anthems and Parisian torch songs – sets the mood and saves the day.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

As director Michael Noer struggles to tease a theme out of a string of exploits, Papillon remains as entertaining as ever.

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.

As the obscenities of wealth accumulate while a large cast of Asian and Eurasian actors render their many silly characters, the source of the laughter becomes troubling.

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.

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

No, Christopher Robin is not a naked cash grab, just a prettily clothed one.

The difficulty is that Fogel hasn’t got enough plot here to keep things going at this smart pace. Even by the standards of a spy comedy, The Spy Who Dumped Me’s wafer-thin storyline makes precious little sense.

The storytelling is bald and the logistics remain vague. The adult characters, especially a sadistic prison guard, are laughably overblown and the simplistic dialogue betrays the script’s YA roots.

Greenfield tells us she charts the extremes to understand the mainstream, but glimpses of an explanation for the insanities and obscenities depicted in Generation Wealth are frustratingly few.

This sadly derivative film has one too many screenings of "All the President’s Men" written all over it.

The key to the franchise is that Mamma Mia! never takes itself seriously: This time out, the joy is giddy but the sentiments are cloying; the musical scenes are mainly delightful, but quieter moments often fall flat.

Filled with lovable eccentrics, Boundaries tries too hard to avoid the commonplace as its jolts erratically down the well-travelled, heavily signposted route that is the big-hearted road-movie.

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.

This is a much more conventional film with fewer pretensions to high art. Violence exploited for mere entertainment is so commonplace it hardly seems worth noting.

The charming Johnny Flynn ultimately struggles to find the right tone for the boyfriend, not helped by a director who hasn’t quite mastered the rhythm required for his surprise ending.

Foodies will enjoy the window into fancy restaurants but, without any interviews other than Ducasse, the documentary never questions the evolution of the chef into a peripatetic artistic director rather than an actual cook, nor the realism of professing environmental frugality in a three-star setting.

Bullock is firm as the preternaturally self-assured Debbie but little more than that; her performance as the con artist is reined in so tightly that she only finally appears to be having some fun when she gets to don a blond updo and German accent on the night of the ball.

Mozhdah empathetically charts Nisha’s despairing acquiescence and fitful rebellions, but it’s Adil Hussain’s work making her father not entirely unsympathetic that really stands out.

If it weren’t for Binoche’s warmth, the film might easily sink beneath the stereotype of French culture as overly talky and sex obsessed.

Like "Everest," Adrift is a movie throbbing with an audience’s anxiety – and yet it is not particularly dramatic.

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

In RBG, a lionizing biography of the U.S. Supreme Court judge, Ginsburg emerges as a woman of remarkable intelligence and fortitude – who can get by on very little sleep.

The whole thing feels like a late-night, dorm-room gab fest, except that the four women in question are well over 60, which is the gag.

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.

I Feel Pretty paints the most garish and unflattering portrait of contemporary female culture.