Liam Lacey

While the characters and events are real, the artful design of this film and its allegorical resonances seem to put Honeyland in its own genre – that of a real-life fable.

Occupied City is designed not so much to provoke emotions as to challenge our capacity for paying attention (“It’s okay to drift in and out,” recommends McQueen in the film’s production notes.) When we focus, we’re compelled to connect the double strand of the narrated past history and contemporary images in front of our eyes.

If the word masterpiece has any use these days, it must apply to the film Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, a mature, philosophically resonant work from Turkey's leading director, 53-year-old Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Climates, Distance, Three Monkeys).

The best Canadian beer movie since "Strange Brew," and the best 1930s musical of the year, The Saddest Music in the World is the kind of exhaustingly delirious film that only Winnipeg director Guy Maddin could make.

Certainly, it’s a welcome call-back to grownup movies of 1960s and 70s, about adult intimacy and meaning-of-life concerns. Shot with crisp, unfussy clarity inside a car or in boardroom offices and the streets of the modern urban Japan, it’s a drama about the intricate ways love, performance, and work merge into each other.

Eyes Wide Shut still towers above most of the movies out there, immersing the viewer in a web of emotional complexity, at once raw and personal and, at times, theatrically overcooked.

This outing not only doesn't disappoint; it surpasses high expectations. This is a terrific, smartly designed adolescent adventure, visually rich, narratively satisfying, and bound to resonate for years to come.

At times, No Bears can come across as frustratingly convoluted, but Panahi is an artful filmmaker, who surprises us by breaking the rhythms of the film with disruptions, confrontations, and plot twists.

This is some of De Niro’s most moving work in years. His performance full of anxious misfit energy, where his often-parodied grimaces, tics and haunted gaze feel entirely correct.

In I’m Still Here, Walter Salles’ first feature film in a dozen years, the Brazilian director manages an impressive feat of teleporting, placing the viewer inside the cheerful chaos of a large Brazilian family.

To a Land Unknown is unquestionably topical. It’s also rooted in a well-known movie tradition, films that are empathetic portraits of low-level urban criminals struggling for survival and dignity.

Ernaux’s precise and thoughtful commentary connects the images to memories, discovering yet another harvest from the well-cultivated field of her autobiography.

Weeraskathul also explores how identities emerge, dissolve, and connect but he steps onto that shifting ground of memory and experience through a poetic, reverent portal.

We can see Cold War as a look back on recent history, not through the lens of realism, but as a Hollywood fantasy, a kind of romantic protest against a political nightmare.

Hale County, in the best sense, is the kind of film that asks more questions than it provides answers for.

What draws us in is the inventive and luminous cinematography from Michal Dymek (with additional footage by Pawel Edelman and Michal Englert), using drone shots, fish-eye lenses and red and blue filters. Accompanied by an unsettling electronic score, the donkey-in-a-disco effect is trippy, a hallucinogenic projection of what it might be like to live in an animal’s consciousness, including its dreams and flashbacks.

Pointed, wryly funny, and well-cast, American Fiction is easy to recommend for its humour and timely commentary.

Starring two grande dames of French cinema, Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche, The Truth is a mistress-class in the art of French close-up acting, from the twitch of a dismissive eyebrow to a pout of disappointment.

Queer Japan serves as a series of lively snapshots of a multifaceted and shifting subject and comes up a little short on the issues of day-to-day experience of Japanese gay life.

If the film’s execution doesn’t always rise to the level of its elusive ambitions, the fault is not a lack of sincerity.

Ruizpalacio’s purpose is to present the harried workplace as a microcosm of American capitalism, its obsession with abused undocumented immigrants, anger at women’s reproduction rights and devotion to the churning machinery of consumption. The message isn’t new but, in the present moment, the sheer bluntness of the critique feels liberating.

Kokomo City is a vibrant, original work, shot in black and white, in a kaleidoscopic blend of monologues, conversations, and re-enactments. At a moment when the American right are obsessed with criminalizing health care for transgender people and erasing Black history, it’s also timely.

By the end, we have the sense of witnessing a blackly funny social encounter, but watched a heroic fable in reverse, in which the clueless Donghwa, instead of a hero-conquering the dragon and saving the princess, has been politely demolished, chewed up and spit back out.

There’s nothing new in noting that crime and dirty politics are fast tracks to success. (“Is it the same in your country?” Balram asks the viewer). What’s more interesting here is how The White Tiger explores the paradoxes of the master-servant dynamic. Singer-actor Gourav is marvelous in capturing the duality.

Within the back and forth of family squabbles and warm moments, there are also sprinkles of magic realist beauty.

Frothy, but deceptively dense, Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story focuses on Liza’s psychology and her friendships and teachers through the 1960s and 1970s.

Narratively, the film’s last two thirds feel somewhat scattered, or perhaps “shattered” is a better word to reflect the catastrophe at the center of the story. The key to holding these fragments together, and avoiding making the movie’s grim turn unbearable, is the deeply fascinating performance of Vicky Krieps as Clarisse.

At three hours without much obvious plot, the movie is, no doubt, a bit of a butt-number, though there’s enough wry humour, visual delight, and psychological insight here to more than reward an open-minded viewer.

In the current moment, with our wary physical distancing and awkward artificial socializing, Family Romance LLC’s gaze into the uncanny valley absolutely chimes with the times.

It’s an affectionate, meticulously constructed look back on a moment in cinema history that takes nothing away from the original masterpiece and may even lead a few souls to it.

In a sense, Dahomey, which runs just over an hour, is also a ghost story as well as a creative conversation between the past and present.

Though the subject of immigrants from persecuted minorities fleeing their homelands is topical, what elevates I Carry You With Me above most social dramas is its finespun, artisanal quality.

A chamber-sized display of cinematic razzle-dazzle, and convoluted political allegory filled with gallows humour and broad polemics, Pablo Larraín’s El Conde re-imagines the Chilean dictator as the 250-year-old vampire star of a 1930s horror movie.

Fans of action films as Top Gun, American Sniper or Hobo with a Shotgun may be disappointed by the absence of splatter, though The Monk and the Gun achieves is own kind of sardonic catharsis.

The Testament of Ann Lee can be seen as a feminist companion piece to the much-awarded 2024 film The Brutalist, which Corbet directed and Fastvold co-wrote, starring Adrian Brody as a fictional Holocaust survivor and brilliant architect.

Led by Reisman’s deadpan, uningratiating performance, Retrograde is a funny, uncomfortable portrait of young millennial, struggling with her loss of status and clinging to the wreckage of her past aspirations.

Terrence Malick’s latest, A Hidden Life, is one of the year’s most ambitious films and an arguable masterpiece, though, admittedly, your receptivity to it depends on your capacity to experience three solemn hours of waving fields of wheat, theology and Nazi cruelty. c

A warm-hearted look back at one of professional sport’s most colourful folk heroes, the late Yogi Berra, the documentary, It Ain’ Over, is also a film with a score to settle.

Anyone looking for an uplifting story in the mode of Spotlight or Erin Brockovich won’t find gratification in Ross’s sombre film. Nickel Boys, a film that impresses and occasionally perplexes, is not a story of delayed justice achieved, or the suffering of others appreciated from a safe historical distance.

Unquestionably, it’s a beautiful film, shot in 16 mm, with grainy, almost tactile, images and sounds. There is an inky sky, strewn with stars; the silhouette of a horse, mane blowing in the wind, water droplets and scampering bugs, the rustling of the wind and the rumble of waves. It weaves together themes of women’s life choices, our fraught relationship to nature, the art of archiving and the power of awe.

While the thematic scheme may be ancient and remote, Zhang’s poetic compression and technical pizazz feel as fresh as a splash in a mountain stream.

The mostly non-professional cast do a credible job of depicting a family growing progressively more anxious under increasing pressure.

Odd but meaningful, Secret Mall Apartment, is an entertaining documentary about how a group of eight young artists secretly maintained an apartment — from 2003 to 2007 — in a hidden nook in the Providence Place, Rhode Island, shopping center.

Peck’s fleet approach briskly compresses a great deal of information without clumsy interview setups and joins the dots between Black political and artistic freedom then and now while literally gives an important activist-artist a voice again.

Like a rash of contemporary films — The Trial of the Chicago 7, Judas and the Black Messiah and Da Five Bloods — F.T.A. reminds us how much the anti-war and civil rights battles of the past are currently resonant, even when we have our history slightly wrong.

In this nuanced and often joyful film, the only violence involves the recurrent crash of bulldozers through stucco and timber walls as the neighbourhood transforms and some dreams get crushed as well.

A magic realist fantasy, a ghost story, a love story and political allegory, Atlantics packs a deceptive amount of complexity in a gauzy, slender film.

All this is big, busy fun and while one might wish for some a bit more grit in the charm offensive, the catchwords here are feel-good and broad appeal.

In both its light and dark phases, Three Identical Strangers comes across as almost too calculatedly entertaining, as Wardle carefully deals out the critical information, with the odd red herring, for maximum effect. In its defense, the film is consistently compassionate and fair-minded. Ultimately, the film confirms its investigative legitimacy by refusing to offer easy answers.

A film rich in paradoxes. Much of the film's style is dreamy, from the snow-covered Ontario landscapes suggestive of a blanket of forgetfulness, to Julie Christie's pale, intoxicating beauty, to the ambient musical score.

Though not as instantly charming as The Little Mermaid, nor as cheerfully revisionist as Beauty and the Beast, Hunchback rates as one of the best animated Disney features of the past rich decade. [21 June 1996, p.C1]

Ghoulishness and innocence walk hand-in-hand in Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, a movie that digs into Hollywood's past to resurrect the antique art of stop-motion animation and create a fabulous bauble of a movie.

Polanski's view of life is like that of Greek tragedy, with the same cold comfort that tragedy implies; from the larger perspective which art gives us, we know even horrors eventually pass.

At its heights, James and the Giant Peach is a shock of pleasure, a juicy immersion into a world both intriguingly weird and consistently magical. [12 Apr 1996]

Only Lovers is so fluidly edited and thinly plotted that it feels almost off-hand; yet, it’s also made with great care, beautifully lit and set-designed to an eyelash.

In the entrancing frames of Career Girls, nothing extraordinary happens and everything is revealed. [26 Sep.1997, p.E8]

Death, torture, humour and even budding eroticism -- now this is more like it.

Captain Phillips manages to expose us to a few things that are unusual in a thriller, including sympathy for the enemy and, in Hanks’s performance, the frailty that is the other side of heroism.

As in "Taxi Driver," the protagonist is a damaged war veteran, an invisible man who travels about the city and internalizes its contradictions until he explodes.

Iraq in Fragments already stands up as a classic war documentary, in its unusual poetic form and by its extraordinary access to the lives of ordinary Iraqis.

Compelling, disturbing.

Hackman is unexpectedly hilarious. With protruding top teeth and a professorial beard, he's a motormouth, badgering and abusing one minute, wheedling and fawning the next.

Tense car chases, action scenes handled with crisp panache and Canadian actor Ryan Gosling channelling Steve McQueen as an existential wheel man add up to make Drive one of the best arty-action films since Steven Soderbergh's "The Limey."

A beautiful, probing art documentary.

The character of Rosalyn – a mash-up of Carole Lombard, Lady Macbeth and maybe even Regan from The Exorcist – is by far the most hair-raising phenomenon in a movie bristling with high hair.

Much of what happens in Silent Light can feel painstakingly mundane: milking cows, harvesting wheat, a long drive at night in and out of shadows. Yet throughout, there's a sense of something ominous impending, and while it remains gentle, the ending is genuinely startling.

Skip work to see it at the first opportunity.

Working "lobbed" and "scimitar" into that same sentence hovers near the empyrean of genius.

May not have the most sophisticated narrative, but it is one of the most spectacular and masterly demonstrations of animation in screen history.

A little like speeding through the digestive tract of some voracious beast. There's bite, acid, digestive churning and an expulsive conclusion. If the metaphor seems unsavoury, well, wait until you see the film.

The movie isn't just about Schmidt as a personality, it's a portrait of his world, and Payne and co-writer Taylor show a rare compassion for the superficially comfortable.

The first 20 minutes of the South Korean film The Host represents one of the most entertaining movie openings in memory. It's the same kind of pop-culture thrill provided by Steven Spielberg's "Jaws," with the same sense of astonishment, fear and pleasure at something genuinely new.

Pure cinematic intoxication, a wildly inventive mixture of comedy and melodrama, tastelessness and swooning elegance, bodies with the texture of fresh peaches, and angular faces Picasso would have loved.

No film this year has offered quite the cerebral tickle, weird invention and slaphappy gusto.

One of the most original, and certainly among the best-acted films this year, 21 Grams focuses on people on the verge of dying, having survived death or grasping at the slender threads of new lives.

The feeling is like a warm homecoming.

Phoenix, for long scenes, is onscreen by himself, lost in his thoughts and those of the operating system moulded to fit his psyche. With his wounded awkwardness and boyish giggles, he seems authentically vulnerable, but the character’s emotionally arrested development also begins to weigh the film down.

Sensual and scary, the movie is so visually textured you feel as though you're brushing against the screen.

Here’s another word for Gone Girl: “meta.” It’s a word Flynn uses, which means it’s a thriller about thrillers, and a narrative about narratives, especially the form of domestic violence relished by current-affairs television shows.

Though Burton's version is faithful, the filter of his sensibility has turned it into another of his necrophilic creepshows.

Ultimately, Potter's fable is about how a catastrophe forces us to ask what we believe and why.

"You're so lucky to live in Mexico," Luisa says. "Look at it -- it breathes with life." So does Y Tu Mama Tambien, both the pant of passion and shuddering sigh of regret.

Both the most bewildering of the three movies and also the most brutally compelling.

Forman's treatment is another matter entirely - infinitely more subtle and, using the intrinsic bias of film, far more naturalistic. [18 Nov 1989]

From the start, it’s clear Anderson is working with a new sophistication both in the vocabulary and structure of the film’s voiceover narrations.

One of the most original, good-hearted comedies in a long time, Rushmore is the sort of movie where the strangest sequences of discords somehow keep managing to reach giddily improbable resolutions.

Giddily impudent in its execution, pummelling in its message, To Die For is finally a comedy black enough for the tabloid television age.

A movie that gets wonderfully under your skin.

Can a little-read 18th-century literary masterpiece be food-spittingly funny? Can it also include contemporary English actors riffing about their bad teeth, getting drunk and kissing their personal assistants? The answer is yes, as long as you agree that the best way to adapt an original book is with a correspondingly original film.

Jonathan Demme's potent adaptation of Morrison's novel may be substantial, but it is also engrossing, a movie that plays at times like a combination of “Gone With The Wind” and “The Exorcist.”

The best American movie so far this year.

Call it what you like – a modern Russian epic, a crime drama, a black comedy or a scream in the dark – Leviathan is a shaggy masterpiece.

That's not to say that There Will Be Blood isn't something exceptional; it's just that the movie is jarringly erratic, ranging from moments of delicacy to majesty to over-the-top bombast.

Serves to champion human irrepressibility and unpredictability. It's the flip side to the defeatism of "Distant," but with parallels, both in the very deliberate pacing and moments of visual wit.

Though Brooks is tasteless as usual in To Be Or Not To Be, his remake of Ernest Lubitsch's 1942 comedy of the same name may be his best work since his debut film, The Producers. [19 Dec 1983]

The winner of Cannes’s top prize, the Palme d’Or, and the international critics prize at the same festival, the film was hailed as a breakthrough, a graphic and emotional love story, the first same-sex feature ever to win the Palme, in the week after France legalized same-sex marriage.

John Frankenheimer created this eccentrically brilliant thriller, an exercise in mid-sixties paranoia. [12 Jan 2002, p.R25]

Relentlessly dark but expertly rendered, it shares its cinematographer and quality of aggrieved compassion with another recent Romanian art house hit, "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu."