Liam Lacey

One can see clear linkages between Undine to the nightmare weirdness of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, though it’s as if this similar story were drained of its passionate momentum and rendered abstract.

Dogman is essentially one long, twisted fuse burning toward an inevitable explosion. If the results are too conspicuously manipulated to feel cathartic, there’s no denying a certain dark poetry to this old-fashioned film with its whiplash of modern violence and bitter futility.

3 ½ Minutes, 10 Bullets, as well as being a compelling real-life courtroom drama, offers some clarity about race and injustice in the pre-Trump era.

As the movie travels from country to country over Fisk's career, it's not always easy to follow the chronology. But overall, Mike Munn's editing is astute, covering decades of work and complex multi-party conflicts with as much clarity as could be reasonably hoped for.

Ukrainian director Roman Liubyi’s Iron Butterflies is an experimental film, a memorial scrapbook and a forensic documentary that revisits the 2014 downing of the Malaysian passenger plane, Flight 17.

Most of the participants who knew Armstrong are dead and there’s something melancholy about realizing that the human being behind that voice is silent. What remains is a quality that Marsalis identifies as essential in Armstrong’s music, a gift which he was fully conscious of, conveying a “transcendent joy” through sound.

The triumph of a film like Upgrade, an unapologetic B-movie, is that it aims low and exceeds expectations.

On Swift Horses is best admired as a visual tone poem to the era, not so much a realistic story. The conceit of casting characters who seem too splendid for their surroundings evokes the movie melodramas of the fifties, the time of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift.

The craft of the re-enactment is more impressive than the script, which defaults to hackneyed dramatic moments, reminiscent of a generic disaster film, with its stock upstairs-downstairs tropes, young lovers, the cynic-turned-hero, and the dutiful subalterns showing courage above their pay grade.

Therapy Dogs is fuelled by adolescent angst, fears of mortality, unruly energy, and frustration.

Some scenes in The Painter and the Thief feel stagey, including a couple of delayed dramatic reveals. And the characters certainly seem aware of the camera’s presence. Seen in its best light though, The Painter and the Thief is a kind of Rorschach test: Do you see a tale of improbable friendship and compassion, or a story of trespassed boundaries and compulsion? Or, is this one of those “bistable” optical illusions, like the vase and the face, where different things are true, moment to moment?

Though most of the content here is too familiar for the film to qualify as an exposé, Totally Under Control adds background context and highlights some of the voices who raised early alarms about the dangers of the disease and the impending social disruption.

Both rudely funny and soppy in a terribly English way, Pillion is a rough-sex romance that will be relatable to anyone who has fallen hard for an emotionally distant lover.

Well-observed and gently amusing.

Nicchiarelli’s film makes a case that Nico’s instability and bleakness was no pose.

In juggling the beforementioned autobiographical, experimental, and historical elements, I Didn’t See You There can feel scattered and somewhat distant, no doubt due to Davenport’s disinclination toward treating his disability as a commodity.

Cow never makes any case for veganism or any other cause. Rather, the film is a product of the increasing scrutiny of our destructive hierarchical categories, including the unnecessary cruelty of factory farming, the growth in the legal studies of animal rights, and scientific interest in animal consciousness.

In its corner, Baron offers the often-entertaining prospect of watching extremely large men beat each other up in acrobatic ways. The recent winner of the dramatic feature award at Toronto-based imagiNative Film and Media Arts Festival, it has a crowd appeal familiar to WWE fans, but some snappy dialogue from screenwriter John Argall and a family-friendly message to accompany the cracking bones.

In the wonderfully weird and atmospheric Fever Dream, Peruvian director Claudia Llosa (The Milk of Sorrow) explores a mother’s guilt and fear in a fable of physical and supernatural contamination.

At under 90 minutes, Make Up doesn’t include much action but the skin-crawling effect of the film reverberates until after the credits roll. The entire technical package — the menacing visuals, the rumbling soundscape, the brief disorienting sequences of flashbacks and dreams — are anchored in naturalistic, understated performances.

It’s a neo-Western, a sensitively acted, heartfelt and ambitious drama which stumbles when it resembles an illustrated thesis about the legacy of the West.

In a less careful movie, with a less relatable performance, this kind of narrative clumsiness would be ruinous. Here, it’s more like a permissible flaw in someone you care for too much to give up on.

Kimi is executed with a brisk sketch-like lightness, propelled by a jittery score from Cliff Martinez and pulse-jumping blasts of music from Billy Eilish to The Beastie Boys.

Paul Schrader’s latest film Oh, Canada, based on Russell Banks’ final novel Foregone, is a confined affair, suggesting the art of constructing complicated toy sailing ships in small bottles. Confined, but complicated.

It’s extremely watchable, packed with curios and contrasts and narrative twists, filled with the sincere and the ersatz, the stupid and the clever, the grotesque and the goofy.

Though it’s impossible not to see the documentary as a kind of prequel to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, on its own, Navalny is a lively, absorbing mix of original and archival footage with elements of real-life thriller set against the backdrop of the current disinformation wars.

Solo largely succeeds, thanks to Dupuis’ confident handling of the tonal shifts between off- and onstage scenes in a series of stylishly lit interiors. The performances feel grounded and credible, with Pellerin especially good in revealing Simon’s contradictions, between anxious vulnerability and resilience.

Neither exactly a horror movie nor a costume drama, Mārama stakes out its original narrative ground as a kind of cathartic pageant or imaginary exorcism of history’s ghosts.

Rustin is not about the man who had a dream in front of the roaring throngs, but the man standing behind him who gave King the stage. It’s a pleasure to get to know him.

The reward of the film is watching these two consummate performers playing off each other. Moore is characteristically empathetic and sincere. Swinton, by contrast, is enigmatic and controlling as they wrestle with their different agendas and find mutual consolation in their friendship.

What the film communicates, along with the platonic love story, is how exhausting - morally, mentally and physically - the experience of being in a rock band can be.

Thomas von Steinaecker’s documentary, Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer, offers an enjoyable, if fairly light portrait of the German filmmaker and survey of his 60-plus year career.

Animation director Jane Samborski’s richly eclectic miscellany of visual styles depict a bestiary of mythic creatures and outré scenes of sex and violence that are matched to director/writer Dash Shaw’s allegorical narrative.

Ozon’s film evolves less as a procedural story than a character study.

Mank is not, ultimately, a movie to embrace or believe but to study with a certain uneasy fascination.

Billed misleadingly as a “romantic thriller,” the film is neither romantic nor especially thrilling. The characters are enigmatic to the point of superficiality, the relationships largely transactional, and the action toggles between languid and frazzled over two-and-a-quarter-hours. But with some reflective distance, away from the snap judgment of festivals, Stars at Noon proves a pretty interesting film, if a sometimes confusing one.

Neptune Frost’s real triumph is the deployment of striking imagery, led by the production and costume design of Rwanda fashion designer, Cedric Mizero, mixing traditional and fashion-forward adornment with technological bric-a-brac (fairy lights on bicycle wheels, circuit boards as jewelry).

For the power of the performances and what they capture about guilt and family manipulation, Flag Day has a cathartic accuracy in many of its scenes.

The film is both a love story and a lament for the city where the director grew up.

Boys Go to Jupiter, the debut feature film from American 3-D animator, video game designer, and illustrator Julian Glander, is both jaded and fresh, a Gen-Z version of Richard Linklater’s early slacker comedies with a sprinkling of Studio Ghibli’s childlike fantasy.

Watching The Souvenir: Part II is a wonderful tonic for those feelings of ciné cynicism, a reminder of film as a means of discovery.

Although it’s not a life-affirming or audience-flattering parable, the drama feels refreshingly raw and adult.

The topical issue of gender indeterminacy is examined, not through the lens of moralizing or academic theory, but from one person’s vulnerable experience.

Carlos López Estrada, who directed 2018’s Oakland-set Blindspotting, developed this original “spoken word musical” from the work of young Los Angelean poets into a sort of contemporary version of Fame.

A stylish melodrama and feminist lament.

These questionable narrative kinks aside, Lee still features one of the year-to-date’s best performances, honouring a woman who needs to be remembered, along with a sober consideration of the roles of women in wartime.

Clennon, does a great job conveying Benjamin’s anxious reserve, and internal struggle to beg for help without having to offer lengthy explanations.

The filmmaking is taut and skillful and Petzold largely succeeds with his double-track gambit: As a nightmarish but somehow comfortingly familiar thriller about fear, persecution, and mistaken identity. It also disturbs as a prophecy of the consequences of Europe's resurgent neo-fascist politics and anti-immigrant politics.

Along with Schygulla’s warm performance, Yunan is elevated by the choices of Canadian director of photography, Ronald Plante, who captures the melancholic beauty of the island with its slate and blue skies, black sea and white-capped waves, and pale green fields.

In another era, in a more dramatic coming-of-age story, we would expect something life-changing, possibly terrible to happen. But Gasoline Rainbow remains gentle, optimistic and free-flowing. It’s a vision of America that is almost banal in its lack of menace, an alternative kind of docu-fiction that belies the angry drama of the daily news.

More care for pacing and character development, and less focus on moment-by-moment wow-factor, would have made a less strenuous film. Still, the sheer exuberance and skill of the visual design and performances are uplifting.

Though it occasionally gets a little repetitive in its use of archival devil movie and tabloid television clips, Lane’s film is mordantly funny and certainly persuasive in making the case that religion should be kept out of politicians’ dirty hands.

Though Who Killed The Expos? isn’t much of a mystery, it’s a good baseball story in the cry-in-your-beer tradition, of what has often been described as a “game of failure.”

We’re gripped by the tension of Greene’s tautly calibrated performance, as a mother performing a daily high-wire act, trying to keep her family together and her children from harm.

Coherence was hard to establish but the memory prompts, the lurid colourization and off-beat editing held the attention.

The complicated part of Huda’s Salon, and the riskiest in terms of holding the audience, is that this is actually the story of two women: Not just Reem, but that of the salon keeper, Huda.

The set-ups and sight gags are deftly handled, though the after-effect is more dispiriting than cathartic. Like Bong-Joon Ho’s Parasite, it’s a film that feels of the moment, that leaves us with the question. And after all this is through, then what?

While there are a few credibility hurdles here (including a lot of butter-fingered gunplay) Patton’s authoritative performance keeps things honest.

Though The Apprentice does not really explain Donald Trump as a psychiatric or political phenomenon, it justifies its existence as pitch dark comedy with some terrific performances and a reminder that even the Orange Menace was once someone’s darling boy.

Beneath the soft storybook ending, there’s a hard emotional knot here in an exploration of how the scars of poverty, abuse and neglect are bound up with family love and interdependence, and how those contradictions are what prime the springs of imaginative creativity.

Fans of cynically funny children's entertainment in the vein of Roald Dahl or Lemony Snicket’s Daniel Handler should glean some fun out of the new Netflix animated movie, The Willoughbys, an energetic and semi-imaginative comedy about an appalling family.

Bolivia’s 2019 Oscar submission for best international picture, adapted by writer-director Rodrigo Bellott, the film floats freely through different chronologies, creating a level of intellectual play that prevents the drama from sliding into earnest messaging.

Wryly funny, and just a little more complicated than its familiar indie film tropes suggest, the dramedy Shortcomings marks the directorial debut of comic actor Randall Park (Fresh of the Boat, Blockbuster, The Interview).

Blindspotting is a first film, a busy jumble of thoughts and urgent feelings: The humour is sometimes corny, the surreal fantasies strained and the dramatization of racial privilege unsubtle. Yet the level of ambition here, the commitment to try to say so much, is fresh and exciting.

Possibly, no sane person could truly explain Dalí — who could account for the painter of Atmospheric Skull Sodomizing a Grand Piano? — but Harron’s film maintains a wry compassion for these mad love birds, who have spent their lives defying convention and perhaps reality itself.

Though not a deep musical dive and offering little new to Wilson’s well-documented and extreme biography, Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road is an welcome chance to spend time in the company of pop music genius. And it’s a reminder how surprisingly simple geniuses can be.

There is much to admire and contemplate in Martin Eden, including Marinelli’s performance, the marvelous range of faces that appear onscreen, the disorienting time shifts and melancholic seascapes that form many backdrops. While the tension between Martin’s right-wing superman fantasies and working-class status is a rich field, it’s not obvious that there’s a coherent intellectual framework behind the collage of beautiful moments.

The archival clips are an enjoyable reminder of Fox’s ‘80s onscreen persona, as a 5’4’’whirlwind of mental and physical energy, with dazzling comic timing.

In contrast to the complex psychodrama of Nolan’s opus, A Compassionate Spy is a gentle and intimate film, largely narrated by Hall’s wife, Joan, who was 90 at the time of filming. She tells a love story.

Gossamer thin in the plotting but playful and gorgeous to look at, it’s a warm message of midlife liberation.

This visual memoir paints a picture of a woman who, while leading a rich professional life, was plagued by personal demons.