Leslie Felperin

Freyne draws out fizzy, gutsy performances from his two leads, who have a genuine, charming chemistry. The authenticity of their performances is perhaps slightly out of tune with the broad caricatures on display elsewhere, such as the mean classmates, but it's ultimately forgivable given how winning the film is overall.

For the most part it manages an adept balance between satire, sincerity and sheer silliness that’s ultimately winning.

It's a film awash in scrupulously researched vintage production design, costumes and above all music, all rendered in a Technicolor palette that will send grandparents and fans of Golden Age cinema swooning with nostalgia.

This densely packed, exquisitely executed and just a teensy bit batshit film is peak Pixar. It's a vintage mix of the company's intricate storytelling, complex emotional intelligence, technical prowess and cerebral whimsy on dexamethasone.

Given how much CGI has come along since 2010, you’d expect a more convincing presentation of moving animals’ lips and eye muscles mimicking human expressions, but clearly the budget didn’t reach much beyond the tea budget for Tenet.

This debut feature from writer-director Brian Duffield (best known for his screenplays for Underwater, The Babysitter and Jane Got a Gun) has plenty of gallows humour to leaven the gore and tragedy, and plenty of subtexts swimming under the surface like glittering, metaphorical koi.

Playing off intense, uncomfortably tight close-ups where the actors show off finely tuned displays of flickering emotions with long shots that emphasize the plush interiors and tidy suburban gardens that surround them, Sud ratchets up the tension expertly.

Creating a highly unusual and welcome look at schizophrenia that neither demonizes those with the condition nor patronizes them as suffering martyrs, the British drama Eternal Beauty pulls off a tricky feat.

The jocular, amiable tone helps deliver the more serious social history lesson throughout, even if sometimes it feels like it’s shouting just a little too loudly to wake up the dimmer students at the back of the lecture hall.

Slow paced and deploying minimal sound – apart from gentle bursts of voiceover and the sound of wings and planes taking off – this Swiss-set quasi-documentary about a bird sanctuary is relaxing to watch, like one of those machines that plays the sound of waves breaking to help you fall asleep.

There will be viewers out there who will recoil from these two crazy kids' wild, exhibitionistic carnality, their druggy hedonism and their cavalier attitude toward interior decoration. But anyone else who's ever been in a relationship like this — especially the kind of that starts to feel like a codependent bipolar disorder trapped on a rollercoaster by the end — will painfully relate to Monday's sensual, funny and above all honest look at amour fou.

For anyone not in the very specific demographic group depicted, the experience of watching this is like being trapped in a tiny downtown club, where the food isn't that good and the portions are tiny.

Miraculously, it manages to unpack this perplexing issue with precision and intelligence but without any moral panic-mongering, condescension or dumbing down the complexity of the science stuff.

The performances are terrific, especially from Bening who adds yet another deeply nuanced study to her gallery of complicated, smart women of a certain age.

Not a word is spoken throughout, which harkens back to an older era of cinematic storytelling. At the same time, the extreme frame-to-frame fluidity of the computer-assisted animation style, composed entirely of fields of subtly modulated colour, no outlines and minimal modelling, looks completely 21st century.

As in Scorsese’s rock docs, there are reams of archive footage and rare snapshots to swoon over (Dylan’s striped trousers from 1967 never get old), all seamlessly edited together by Roher and Eamonn O’Connor.

All In offers compelling visual history and civics lessons that will still serve an educational purpose long after the next presidential inauguration.

The film would have been more effective if its relentlessly uplifting score didn’t keep figuratively prodding the viewer in the chest, telling us to feel moved, dammit. Likewise, the editing is annoyingly frenetic at times, and you long for a more measured approach that would allow you to appreciate the athletes’ skills, instead of seeing their prowess chopped up into tiny snippets of footage.

Tenet makes you feel floaty, mesmerized and, to an extent, soothed by its spectacle — but also so cloudy in the head that the only option is to relax and let it blow your mind around like a balloon, buffeted by seaside breezes and hot air.

Sie elicits mostly spontaneous, credible performances from the younger cast, who deliver their wisecracks and banter with aplomb and only occasionally edge into annoying child-actor pertness.

In another filmmaker's hands, this might have become a message-heavy morass, but Sauper and his co-editor, veteran Yves Deschamps (Bruno Dumont's The Life of Jesus, the 2018 restoration of Orson Welles' The Other Side of the Wind) work the material with a remarkable fluidity and gracefulness that's consistently engaging and surprising.

It’s as inoffensive and pleasant as a primetime sitcom, although a bit more bite — and interest in food, given the heroine’s profession — might have added some plausibility and verisimilitude.

It plays like several plots, genres and mood boards all mashed together, which makes the end result interesting but not entirely successful.

Strong on lush cinematography, period knitwear and sincerity, but less effective in terms of historical plausibility, the mostly second world war-set drama Summerland is a mixed bag – a blend of fizzy sherbet lemons and humbug.

It brings into focus not just the painful losses of loved ones and homes, but the sheer daunting scale of logistical planning, fundraising and negotiation with bureaucracies needed to rebuild the community.

This effort is similarly infuriating and entertaining by turns, and features pretty good performances from a handful of up-and-coming young male actors, including Brenton Thwaites and Kyle Gallner, along with lovable old ham Billy Zane putting in a last-act cameo.

This is a fan-servicing but not necessarily hagiographic documentary.

Denise Ho — Becoming the Song presents a thoughtful, if surprisingly reserved portrait, of Hong Kong-born, Montreal-reared singer Denise Ho, the first Cantopop superstar to come out publicly as gay.