Kim Hughes

American drama Jockey is superb, the perfect confluence of a great story expertly directed, with outstanding performances, stunning cinematography, and a dazzling score.

Fuze’s denouement is terrific, completely unpredictable and surprisingly funny. It’s as if summer blockbuster season came early. Fuze is… wait for it… a must-see blast.

The title is titillating enough to grab young ears. Yet the story at its core — about three college-age British women looking for thrills on holiday in Crete but instead finding some hard truths — would surely prompt discussion about consent, optics, and forethought that should be happening everywhere all the time and not just among women.

McDonagh’s sumptuous version of the novel —which premiered at TIFF last year — is utterly faithful and thus note perfect, capturing its resonant ruminations on social inequity, racism, and cultural tourism in a sweeping Moroccan desert Sheltering Sky novelist Paul Bowles would recognize.

Squaring the Circle is a gripping true story told with towering visual panache.

It’s fascinating stuff, and it rests both on its leads and on the universal truth that unburdening to strangers is often easier than unburdening to intimates, as any real-life cab driver or bartender can attest. And yet, as Daddio shows, that very spontaneous act fosters an intimacy all its own.

It’s an exceedingly black comedy threaded through with intense drama that completely deconstructs the rom-com, casting it as both a shiny and sinister thing… and one frequently inducing vomiting.

It is at times a terrifically uncomfortable movie to watch. But director Michel Franco's New Order, a searing and relentlessly grim indictment of class division and government corruption, scans not only as possible but entirely likely given our current world. Heavy doesn’t begin to describe it.

Legacies don’t come more dazzling. Sidney is a fitting tribute.

Sorry, Baby, the feature debut of American writer-director Eva Victor, who also stars, is a clear announcement of an original new talent able to create highly inventive visuals with a limited budget. It is also a terrific — and sad and funny and contemplative — testimony about how trauma profoundly stains people’s lives, with far-reaching and unpredictable outcomes.

Quiet, understated and unforgettable, The Mustang is a winner by five lengths.

Rosaline is a delight from start to finish, a brisk, bright-eyed, and inventive romantic comedy with constituent parts that probably shouldn’t work this well together but do.

Given the devotion Ball continues to inspire in fans, it was perhaps too great a challenge for anyone to live up to casting expectations. Still, Being the Ricardos hits all the right notes, making these larger-than-life people seem at once pointedly human and even more ground-breaking than ever.

Joyride is terrific, a storytelling and acting gem bursting with heart yet never saccharine.

The Cave may be the saddest, most infuriating chronicle of the ghastly ravages of war on a country’s most vulnerable citizens —children — ever made.

Where New Order broadly surveyed and compartmentalized Mexico’s upper and lower classes, Sundown pretty much rests its entire narrative on one man, wealthy British business owner Neil Bennett — played with few words but (oxymoron alert) riveting impassivity by Tim Roth.

Semi-comic tales don’t come blacker or more twisted than writer/director Mirrah Foulkes’ quietly electrifying Judy & Punch, which might be subtitled “When Scumbags Get Bigtime Comeuppance.”

There is a bristling, neon energy to Zola which, given its provenance as a series of real-life tweets from waitress and exotic dancer (and now executive producer) A’ziah “Zola” King, seems about right. This is a road trip movie straight outta weirdsville.

For a film where relatively little happens plot-wise, Gloria Bell is oddly beguiling thanks to its leads: Moore (reliably great) embracing every square-peg aspect of her character and Turturro, whose resting look — itchy, perplexed, possibly lost — is deployed with precision in a character meant to be wildly uncomfortable in his own skin.

For a film where every single scene is rigidly contained within a screen — framed by an iPhone FaceTime chat, a laptop exchange, TV image, home movie or security camera surveillance — Searching has a surprising sense of momentum.

While H is for Hawk is a genuinely lovely film — often visually beguiling, beautifully acted, and tender-hearted — it lacks dramatic punch, which may be the inevitable byproduct of a cinematic interpretation of a deeply introspective book that rooted the reader deep in the author’s psyche.

Its warm-heartedness, positivity, and consistently striking visuals are a pleasant counter to ugly January days and nights, and a reminder that a compelling story well told is… wait for it… a can’t-miss recipe for success.

Let’s just say the film — scripted by Bader’s nephew Daniel Stiepelman with the Justice’s blessing — successfully splits the difference between capturing Ginsburg as a contemporary folk hero and as a fiercely ambitious intellectual competing for footing in an era when mixing a killer martini was the very height of wifely prestige. No one will mistake it for a documentary.

Blind Ambition doesn’t rewrite any rules about documentary filmmaking, and it stumbles into the hokey at the very end. But if one subscribes to the adage that the story is the thing, then it’s hard to beat.

A sad, poignant, dialogue-driven film destined for successful post-film life as a theatre production, writer/director Fran Kranz’s debut about two sets of parents on opposing sides of a tragedy locates the humanity in the seemingly endless, peculiarly American saga of school shootings. It also celebrates forgiveness.

A shamelessly feel-good movie buoyed by dynamic, lived-in performances, Suze offers emotional rewards far grander than its simple story might suggest. And it’s an honest pleasure to watch.

If themes about the importance of friendship, hope, and love land a bit on the nose, there’s no denying Brian and Charles takes an innovative approach to delivering them, even if — see above — the tack is brazenly metaphorical. Yet its distinctive charms are resonant enough to offset a slender story in what nevertheless amounts to a sweet and earnest, modern-day fable.