Kim Hughes

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

It’s conceptually unsettling and bold, but there are some hiccups with the execution.

Encanto is just so lovely to look at that its story, while well-told, is almost secondary. You honestly just want to crawl inside the screen, wear Mirabel’s swooshing skirts, pet those donkeys, sniff those flowers, and chow down on that grilled corn. Wonder and imagination are in abundant supply.

Low-key and lovely if a bit short on dramatic umph, director Clio Barnard’s Ali & Ava is effectively a straight-up love story eyeballing bigger themes, perhaps to pad its slender story. Admirable for sure, but the result is a bit like fancy icing on a cupcake: nice, but still a cupcake.

It’s a good, fun film, the kind that likely scans differently with repeat viewings, and includes a savvy wink to the vegan word as per Silverstone’s noble and ongoing mission. But I had the killer — if not the labyrinthine impetus for the crime — pegged from the get-go.

The very opposite of kinetic, director Fernando Meirelles’ (City of God) The Two Popes is a slow-moving, ruminative, dialog-driven think piece set to film which might enjoy a successful second life as a stage production, and might actually be better served by that forum.

The stubborn ambiguity of Last Summer — with its genuinely could-be-this, could-be-that head-scratcher of an ending — will either be a dealbreaker for viewers or proof of bold, irreverent storytelling that refuses to be neatly packaged. To be sure, the film isn’t judging so much as presenting a fraught scenario for its audience to consider.

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.

The Rhythm Section is especially disappointing given its strong cast in front of and behind the scenes and its obvious ambition to rise above a paint-by-numbers action film with a somewhat relatable protagonist.

Crucially, Macdonald (see also The Last King of Scotland, Marley, State of Play) doesn’t stint on the train-wreck aspects of her career: the infamous Diane Sawyer interview, disastrous, flabby late-career performances, and yes, those tabloid images of a gaunt, wild-eyed, and clearly tripping Houston. Whether audiences feel greater insight into her dreams and demons as a result is somewhat less certain.

It’s hard to imagine anyone who enjoyed Radner’s performances in their lifetime not finding much to love about Love, Gilda… even as our hearts break a little at what might have been had she lived longer.

For film nerds and fans of classical and orchestral music, it’s absolutely gold.

Despite its virtues and intriguingly complicated morality, Queen & Slim never rises above its initial premise which is so not credible that it hoovers all ensuing tension from the rest of the film. Ridiculous can’t sustain a two hour–plus running time, and the stronger the filmmakers stick with their fire-breathing idea, the more frustrating Queen & Slim becomes, stomping out any connection to a reality most of us would recognize.

The Public, which played at TIFF last fall, is the kind of movie you want to like and that probably needs to get made and seen. But needing to see something and wanting to see it are different things.

Not funny enough to be a biting satire on the absurdity of Hollywood or absorbing enough to be a portrait of regrettable spiritual emptiness, Jay Kelly feels oddly flabby.

This lovely film with its unapologetically female gaze . . . kept me beguiled throughout.

Wharton’s film benefits from exceptional timing, which may not be accidental. Carter’s diplomacy and decency, his easy smile and comparatively youthful veneer contrast dramatically with the current American president and his secretive, self-aggrandizing, circled-wagons administration.

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.

Lorelei is a lovely story told with heart and without judgment.

The new documentary Billie is for music nerds what hieroglyphics on a cave wall are for anthropologists: not so much a revelation as clear confirmation of a more nuanced life than previously known. It also has one heck of a back story.

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.

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

Visually opulent as only a Guillermo del Toro movie can be with gorgeously detailed, period-perfect costumes and interiors and a marquee cast, the noir thriller Nightmare Alley checks all the grand boxes of the genre. Yet the film feels emotionally inert, stacked with unsympathetic, strangely uncharismatic characters that defy empathy. Or worse: defy abiding interest.

Filmmakers Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine, inspired by the Alan Light’s book The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley & the Unlikely Ascent of Hallelujah, leave almost no stone unturned in their quest to examine the enduring appeal of “Hallelujah” across the years and mediums.

Rocketman is as fabulously mercurial and debauched as its subject; anything less would have been futile and disappointing.

It is also astonishingly tender and very human despite its fantastical premise, which rivals any superhero film for boldness of imagination yet summons uncommon emotional heft.

It’s impossible to overstate the range of emotions, from heartbreak to delight to humility, conjured by the new documentary Blink, which is also visually dazzling thanks to its pedigree as a National Geographic Documentary.

An interesting if rote, talking head–style film about a woman for whom fame was a constant battle but whose shadow stretched longer than her slight frame, a point highlighted often (if not always convincingly) throughout Suzi Q.