Liam Lacey

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.

Good Night, and Good Luck may be simplified history, but it's almost consistently well-crafted.

The result is a film that is presented as a kind of a fable, and a microcosm of a country whose fortunes once depended on oil.

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.

Though Little Miss Sunshine is consistently contrived in its characters' too-cute misery, the conclusion, which is genuinely outrageous and uplifting, is almost worth the hype.

Too busy to be boring or deeply engaging, Tarzan is an efficient Disney treatment of a time-tested story. The results aren't bad, just not quite worth a chest-pounding victory yell.

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 a well-paced two and a half hours, Berg's film is an ambitious mixture of summary and fresh investigation.

Rocky Balboa scores a split decision: A familiar start, some flat-footed middle rounds and a solid, flailing finish. And since Stallone has promised to throw in the towel on the franchise, we'll add an extra half star in honour of his diligence in the gym.

The movie is often both smart and creepy, but it's still a novice effort. After an initially engrossing start, it stumbles through a series of implausible coincidences and murky events, barely held together by the magnetic performance of Javier Bardem.

At best, the film makes a more convincing case for the adventure of artificiality: Take Billy Crudup, add a little rouge to his cheeks and suddenly: Voilà, the guy can act.

Wife of a Spy is in some ways an imperfect film, sometimes stiff at the joints or broadly obvious, but it’s also carefully crafted and conceptually inspired.

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

For all that The Sessions does well, it offers some telling deviations from the real story.

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

Parents of young children should be warned: Here's a family-values film that won't be much fun for the whole family.

Throughout the film, Cheadle's eyes are constantly scanning his environment for opportunities or anything that may be amiss.

It's a film of vigorous performances and provocative modern resonances, though it sometimes struggles to grapple with a grim, politically ambiguous, 400-year-old play.

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.

Like that camel-hair coat Abel wears, A Most Violent Year is classy and commands respect, but a stronger pulse under the lapels would make us care much more.

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.

As long as Chbosky sticks to the story of surviving high school, Perks has a modest charm. But a melodramatic last-act bombshell about Charlie's troubled past, is jarring – like the giant foot of Godzilla descending to squash tender Bambi. It's a case of too much, too late and, ultimately, from a different kind of movie.

The pitch on Dear White People is that it’s “Do the Right Thing for the Obama generation,” which is both an oversell and a disservice to Justin Simien’s witty satire about race relations on a fictional Ivy League campus.

Ultimately, the edge that Navid is pushing is less to do with a rant against the Israeli government than in creating a cinematic depiction of a tortured psychological state, in both the individual and collective meanings of that word.

Cluttered, improbable, brash, silly and over the top, the film is far more fun than it should be. [19 July 1996, p.D1]

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."

The night scenes are particularly resonant, mixing humour, suspense and textured visuals. This is the kind of film dream from which you feel reluctant to wake.

If the Miranda musical touches are getting familiar, they’re still a lot fresher than the script here, yet another story of a pet animal on a mission and its special bond with a lonely child.

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.

The movie's title proves to be not entirely a case of bait-and-switch. The film really is a homage to vintage Hollywood comedy.

Cynical, hip, politically opportunistic and loaded with kick-ass comic action.

Zathura involves a lot of yelling, a lot of explosions and a lot of flying objects -- but what else would you expect from a movie that is, honestly for a change, intended for 10-year-old boys?

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.

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.

The somewhat awkwardly titled documentary, The Return of Tanya Tucker: Featuring Brandi Carlile, turns out to be an accurate summary of a film that celebrates two women.

Taken strictly as a movie, though, Selma is an uneven yet generally skillful effort that has probably drawn more praise and criticism than it warrants.

What we have is a solidly crafted reworking of some familiar Western tropes by director John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side, Saving Mr. Banks), a Texas native who shows care for the period details, with handsome cinematography on the original Lone Star State locations.

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.

The most unexpected thing about the Lebanese film Caramel is its predictability.

Less satisfying are the moments when the film concedes to American horror conventions, especially the scuttling vampire effects, which pull us out of the haunted world of these lovely damaged creatures into a place that, while not of this world, feels entirely too familiar.

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.

Light to the point of disposability, Sweet Home Alabama is a small screwball comic idea that spins out far too long.

The most provocative aspect of this compulsive riddle is how it resists closure. The end comes not when we have the answer, but when the movie reaches its irresolute end.

Taken on its own, this is a masterful little slice of computer-generated animation, but it gets lost here in the visual racket.

Audaciously whacked-out and never less than entertaining, Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan mixes a backstage dance drama with a Freudian psychological thriller that's indebted to Roman Polanski's studies of shattered feminine psyches and David Cronenberg's movies about repressed bodies in rebellion.

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?

The wildly ambitious but flawed biographical film about the English cellist Jacqueline du Pré.

Enough Said confirms filmmaker Nicole Holofcener’s status as one of America’s best stealth satirists.

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.

The truth is you can find more entertaining absurdities and thrilling nihilism from watching the average episode of Melrose Place or Beverly Hills, 90210 and, at least on those shows, they don't confuse dumb with doomed. [13 June 1997, p.C6]

This is a human-sized drama about people with contradictory motives, trying to help or use each other.

Comes alive with the more relaxed performances from its senior set.

Though sometimes over-explanatory, the film gains in complexity as it progresses, raising thorny questions about the duty of victims to maintain their humanity.

In a movie about an ant colony, perhaps it's futile to complain about a superfluity of characters. Yet this need to cover every permutation of cuteness is one major drawback to the cast of A Bug's Life.

Though the progress of Atim's increasing empathy is predictable, the film understates its points effectively, without simplification.

Precious is a bit like having a piano dropped on your head: messy but memorable.

Like a lot of well-staged parties, though, the affair peaks shortly after the introductions, and then devolves into intrigues, fights and mayhem.

The characters are entertainingly contradictory, though in a somewhat predictable way: Nice people aren’t honest, and honest people aren’t nice.

Rather than another oppressive film about poverty, it's a revealing experiment in perspective.

Both a moving first-person essay and an artful exercise in political advocacy, 5 Broken Cameras is about the experience of West Bank protests from the inside.

The value of Amandla! is that the film helps the rest of the world understand, both with our ears and minds, where South Africans have come from.

By its third act, Okwe has found his solution and Dirty Pretty Things comes across as both clever but a little pat, another British drama about the misfits who pool their resources to defy the oppressive system, though it does not precisely leave a warm glow.

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

A conventional mixture of thriller and moral drama, the film is unsettling in both intentional and unintentional ways.

The phrase in the title "wanted and desired" is offered by a producer friend of Polanski's who describes him as "wanted" in the United States, but "desired" in Europe, where sexual behaviour is treated more honestly and artists' dark sides are celebrated.

A bland, workaday detective flick that should have been much better than it is.

Directed by Alli Haapasalo and written by Ilona Ahti and Daniel Hakulinen, it is an empathetic, almost sociological portrait that could be shown in health class in a progressive high school.

The Guard is guilty of being overly cute, but it brims with talent and a freshness that extends beyond the clever script.

Ex Machina is a clever film with one indelible performance from Isaac.

This is a movie about draining, tenderizing and chopping up the audience emotionally.

The script by Richard Kaplow, who wrote Linklater’s 2008 film Me and Orson Welles, feels as though it were adapted from an off-Broadway play, with the action mostly in one location over the course of one night, March 31, 1943, the opening night of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, Oklahoma!

The movie's climax takes Harry Potter into territory that is much more like epic horror than most of what the series has seen before. There is more obvious religious symbolism and apocalyptic violence as Harry emerges into his role as “the chosen one.”

Sad news for Bard watchers: Julie Taymor's adaptation of William Shakespeare's The Tempest is not such stuff as dreams are made on.

Sugar Daddy impresses as an idiosyncratic film with a forceful visual style and sound design, attached to a familiar story about the ways of bad men and a young woman getting lost in the fast life.

At just under two-and-a-half hours and spanning three decades, The Eight Mountains feels thorough, as well as sensitively acted and moving. Its weakness is a tendency toward grandiosity, treating an anecdotal drama as though it were an epic.

In essence, a 90-minute commercial for the festival, inviting audiences to come down to “the most kickass party in the world’ and “the world’s greatest backyard barbecue.”

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.

One of the more ingenious and fresh surprises of the summer.

It’s a roiling mix of wry race comedy, economy-grade dystopian sci-fi, and Silicon Valley satire. Also, it's as funny and as caustic as hell.

As the careening cars go splat, splat, splat, the director's vision of the future looks like a cheerfully mindless combination of two extremes of carnival entertainment: demolition derby and whack-a-mole.

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]

Anyone expecting a crowd-pleasing crossover movie from the French director of modern art-house landmarks like Beau Travail and 35 Shots of Rum may be ill-prepared for this perplexing, repellent/fascinating vision of bodies in tight spaces.

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

A celebration of Hong Kong action cinema that mocks gravity, both emotional and physical.

Reservations aside, Clemency has moments of shivering gravity. Almost all of them involve complex emotions registered in Woodard’s extraordinary face, her dignified resistance to a turmoil of emotions within her, and her agonized need for forgiveness.

Running at about three hours, The Aviator is long, and the momentum occasionally flags. The depiction of Hughes's first mental breakdown feels a little obsessive-compulsive itself.

Like Martin Scorsese's "The Departed" or James Gray's "We Own the Night," The Town is a deliberately old-fashioned melodrama that echoes the pulpy mix of violence and romanticism of gangster films of the Thirties and Forties.

Bolan's film is essentially a home movie, that fantails into a larger cultural narrative of post-war North American culture. Shot on video between 2013 and 2018, mostly in intimate indoor settings, the film begins as fly-on-the-wall style cinema verite.

Unclassifiable and wildly original, it is almost wordless but teeming with sound.

The movie's last two minutes, in which they all do goofy dances and have no dialogue or script to get in their way, is easily the highlight. It's the previous 113 minutes of plot that cause problems.

A painful documentary film, partly because of its subject, partly because of the troubling questions raised by the filmmaker's approach.

Compelling, disturbing.

As with his previous film, director Chang nurses a compelling drama from a multilayered cultural reality, at once intimate and unfathomably large in implications.

As a young man he dreamed of racing cars. Now he rides a bicycle to the market each day, to negotiate with an elite fraternity of top fish dealers, who save their best for Jiri's restaurant. Like the fish that are disappearing from the oceans, they're probably the last of a breed.

The work is more muted than Miyazaki’s more fantastical films, but visually complex and gorgeous, from the rustic mountain scenes to the urban scenes and soaring aerial views.

The narrative arc of Islands, so minimalist it’s really more of a slow bump, is about the gradual breaking down of Joshua’s small shell of comfort, his family and cultural conventions.

At the end of Courage Under Fire, you feel torn between admiration and annoyance with the filmmakers.

A mixture of social realism, melodrama, and road comedy, the two-hour-plus Broker isn’t Kore-eda’s best work. But it’s redeemed by the filmmaker’s signature deep empathy for his lonely characters.