Liam Lacey

Mixing Chaplinesque delicacy with the architectural grandeur of a Stanley Kubrick film, director Andrew Stanton recycles film history and makes something fresh and accessible from it without pandering to a young audience.

It's one modern film worthy of being called a contemporary classic. [2002 re-release]

With its elliptical, patched-together structure and multi-year duration, Caught By the Tides can be a challenging film to follow but, by the end, it achieves something both original and rewarding.

Yes, The Voice of Hind Rajab is both emotionally distressing and ethically uncomfortable, brutally so, as it was intended to be. But for all the reviewers’ gut-wrenching adjectives, the critics were physically safe from harm.

Apart from the inspired split-screen gimmick, the film works because the cast is superb, with Argento as the impatient, angry old lion holding on to his threads of power. Lebrun’s performance, though, is the heart of the film.

Faithful to Chekhov, Ceylan spells out nothing except that unhappiness unrecognized is unhappiness compounded, and despite the film’s wintry chill, there’s a thrilling warmth in this struggle to shine a light on life.

Charm, humanity and a passel of filmmaking insights are all here, rewarding both the dedicated fans and newcomers to Varda, who achieved a new level of public profile in her last decade.

The story may stretch credibility until it's ready to pop its seams, but Patel conveys the simple confidence of a prodigy who has learned everything important in life, except how to lie.

While this is an autobiographical story about a young aspiring filmmaker and his skateboarding crew, it also speaks volumes about contemporary rust-belt USA, masculinity and abuse, weaving its themes and characters around scenes of the boys sailing through the near-empty streets.

At heart, though, every moviegoer can recognize a love story, no matter how unusual the context.

An audacious and absurdly entertaining genre-hopping musical thriller set in Mexico, Emilia Pérez tells the tale of a drug cartel boss who enlists the talents of a junior lawyer, played by a Zoë Saldaña, to help him undergo gender-affirming surgery, then entangles her in his quest for redemption.

The gender questions are open-ended and the sacrifices of the artist’s life familiar ground, but Kokuho truly comes alive in the performance sequences that evoke the deep roots of theatre, and the semaphore of emotions represented in gestures, poses, strange movements and painted faces that evoke feelings beyond words.

A simultaneously realistic and absurdist examination of police work.

Shot in black and white, with scenes of razor-wire barriers and terrified families hiding in the forest, Green Border evokes images of the Second World War and the Holocaust, the subject of Holland’s films Europa Europa (1990) and In Darkness (2011).

A great film about a good man.

A bravura example of an endangered species: the unapologetically enigmatic, visionary European art film.

As refreshing as it is to find a movie that leaves you smiling, it's something much rarer to discover a film that makes you think about what a commitment to happiness really means.

Extracting big drama out of small events is Mike Leigh's forte, and with his latest little masterpiece, Another Year, the English director pushes himself to the extreme.

There's something about this story, and this war, that brings out the stripped-down conceptual artist in her (Bigelow): Against blank canvases of desert sand and rubble, explosive wires are linked to nerve ends, and everything that matters depends on the twitch of a muscle or a finger on a button.

The genuine cathartic effect of the film is achieved by an accumulation of smart choices, including the dryly witty narration, the ingenious visual surreal world building using kids’ crafts table materials, the strong voice cast (including vocal cameos from Eric Bana and Nick Cave) and an elegant classical-style score.

If Apocalypse Now was criticized in the past as a series of impressive sequences that don't quite add up to a tidy story, the new additions put this in perspective. It's a filmed epic, not a filmed drama. [10 Aug 2001, p.R1]

Beanpole makes you feel its two-hour-plus running time, with drawn-out scenes full of off-centre framing and claustrophobic close-ups, but there’s an exhilaration in the audacity of the filmmaking, as the boldness of its portrayal of the survival drive.

No doubt, there's a certain theme-park appeal to this use of technology to reconstruct a facsimile of the past, but it's shockingly immediate, seeing those old monochrome images of anonymous men in mushroom-cap helmets turned into images of pink-cheeked youth staring back at us through the camera lens.

It's always presumptuous to refer to a slice of history as "little known" simply because you didn't know about it, but it's probably safe to say that Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution — a rousing look at disability rights — will tell a new story to a lot of people.

Their excitement is infectious and the entire endeavour both mind-bending and tremendously human: Near the end, Peter Higgs, the recent Nobel Prize-winner and one of the scientists who first predicted the particle back in 1964, is seen in Switzerland watching the data results come in, while a tear trickles down his cheek.

With Sir David as our guide, it’s a theme well worth plunging into.

Historical hindsight lets us predict where this kind of train ride inevitably ends.

Linklater’s film is very much its own hybrid creature. While the dramatic scaffolding is lightly drawn, it becomes apparent that Linklater has organized his material along certain themes, most notably that of the passage of time and the dream life of childhood.

The real achievement of Roma is Cuarón’s bold conception of a memory movie, blending childlike detail and adult detachment, and the rich visual and aural design that make this one of the more sensually pleasurable films of the year.

A road trip movie that refreshes and elevates the genre, Hit The Road follows a squabbling Iranian family on a life-changing journey. Though it would be a stretch to describe the film as the Iranian art cinema’s answer to Little Miss Sunshine, this deft hybrid of crowd-pleasing fun and poetic melancholy comes close.

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.

As an intelligent, adult examination of a marriage gone sour, wrapped up in the trappings of a legal thriller, Anatomy of a Fall is original and engaging, though perhaps not so profound an investigation into truth as some of its advocates have claimed.

Like the small bistro that is the film’s setting, Nose To Tail is minimal and uncompromising in the details, from the delicious tasting dishes onscreen to the retro jazzy score from Ben Fox, that propels the action forward.

Souleymane’s Story immerses us in an unrepresented world of African migrants in France with a ticking clock urgency that puts most thrillers to shame.

Featuring terrific performances from Get Out alumnus, Daniel Kaluuya as the young revolutionary Hampton, and LaKeith Stanfield as FBI informant, William O’Neal, the film is a revelation from King, a director, who until now, was known for his television work and the 2013 comedy, Newlyweeds.

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.

No doubt, it’s pretty great to watch and listen to Franklin, 29 at the time and at the height of her powers, demonstrating her mastery in the genre of music she grew up on.

Both complex and rawly immediate, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Laura Poitras’s film about the 69-year-old photographic artist and activist Nan Goldin, is a great documentary and maybe the most essential film of the year.

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

Funny, fascinating, utterly unclassifiable film.

Granted a rare degree of access to reporters, and later to the Minister of Health, Collective is a tribute to people who work together to uncover the truth, even if the immediate benefits are not obvious.

The Christophers is full of heady thumb-sucking questions about legacy, artistic expression and commerce, and reinvention, a subject Soderbergh knows well. This is far from blockbuster Soderbergh (Erin Brokovich, the Oceans trilogy, Magic Mike), but a return to the basics: A set, a mobile camera, a couple of terrific actors, and a story to explain what brings them there.

The same didactic instincts that sometimes mar Lee's fictional filmmaking serve him well as a documentarian and eulogist, both with Four Little Girls and this film, a record of the worst natural disaster in American history.

Bosnian director Jasmila Žbanić succeeds where many filmmakers fail in conveying the dimensions of a mass atrocity in a film that matches clear-eyed personal experience to history in a lightly fictionalized story.

That core idea here, the pole in the middle of the merry-go-round, is that the stuffy, secretive King, as Robertson Davies suggests, is the embodiment of Canada’s locked-down colonial psychology. The Twentieth Century is a strange creation, though but there’s nothing unusual in the notion that Canadian blandness may be a form of camouflage. Anyone who has read history, or for that matter, watched a hockey game, knows that.

Gravity, a weightless ballet and a cold-sweat nightmare, intimates mystery and profundity, with that mixture of beauty and terror that the Romantics called the sublime.

Hornby is a fine craftsman and his dialogue sparkles, though occasionally the scenes are too calculated.

The triumph of Foxcatcher is not in the subject but in its art. The clear-eyed compassion and moral intelligence of Miller’s film brings sense to the senseless, and finds the human pulse behind the tabloid shock. It’s not a movie to make you feel good, but, at moments, it reminds you what goodness is.

If nothing else can be said of Dogville, it's a film that is like nothing else.

This fictional "rockumentary" about a mediocre, aging heavy-metal band's last tour of America is surprisingly modest, subtle and funny. Not only is this the kind of satiric treatment rock music has been crying out for, it may be one of the most original film comedies in years. [20 Apr 1984]

The subject may be glum but there is something consistently pleasurable about Mouthpiece, a film that is both audacious in execution and relatable, even for those of us who don't live in women's bodies.

Although The Dissident is, arguably, unnecessarily juiced-up with the editing and scoring of a Hollywood thriller, the excesses are balanced by the procedural rigour worthy of a crack prosecutor.

In short, Universal Language is something of bag of mixed nuts, a Frankenfilm, a cinematic turducken, with comic non-sequiturs and sight gags linked by three narrative strands.

Watching each new documentary by Poitras (The Oath, Citizenfour All the Beauty and the Bloodshed), is to lock into a mental track, with a balance of structure and pace, coherence and surprise, intellectual and emotional engagement.

The documentary of the year may also be its most hair-raising thriller.

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.

Shot in Louisiana, with non-professional actors and apparently set-designed from a junkyard, Beasts of the Southern Wild marks one of the most auspicious American directorial debuts in years.

Mann’s laidback, dramatized-reality approach to the subject is to treat Carmine Street Guitars, at 42 Carmine Street, as a village general store from another era, a place for friendly gossip and home-made goods.

A poetic drama about the lives of three Maori girls from the 1950s to the 1980s, Cousins is a heart-breaker, tempered with hope.

The adjective “inspirational” doesn't do justice to the quality of Schnabel's film.

There's a giddy, absurd charm to the story, in which the strange setting only enhances the comfortable familiarity of the narrative and characters.

Both a film and an obituary, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, is a dark, unique document of the Gaza war focusing on a 25-year-old Palestinian photojournalist and poet, Fatma Hassona (sometimes spelled Fatima Hassouna).

Dive into a masterpiece.

Compassionate and original, Crossing is an odd couple road movie about friendship and acceptance of differences that demonstrates rather than preaches its theme.

The project is a unique social experiment which we can all participate in, in a way, dipping back in time to connect with old acquaintances and, inevitably, measuring our own ups and downs in the interval.

Once in a rare while a film comes along that is boldly original, communicates an important idea in an elegantly simple fashion and happens to be highly entertaining. Such is the case with Moolaadé.

Mostly, Nebraska impresses for its sure rhythms and artful balance of comedy and melancholy, resulting in Payne’s most satisfying film since "About Schmidt."

The movie bridges the traditional Restoration comedy to the political satires of Armando Iannnucci (Veep, The Death of Stalin). Comedy also entwines with tragedy here, and bold touches of absurdism and iconoclastic revisionism.

Sissako’s point, while never heavy-handed, is hard to miss: Traditional Muslims are among the world’s biggest victims of Islamic militarism.

Wistful, funny and complicated in interesting ways, Quentin Tarantino’s new movie, Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood, may be his warmest film since Jackie Brown - which may not be what you expected to hear about a movie set against the background of the 1969 Manson murders.

Mostly, though, A Dangerous Method is a suave chamber piece: a series of glimpses of two 20th-century intellectual titans, in friendship and separation, and the story of a remarkable woman who history had swallowed up, brought into the light again.

Like Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut," Anderson's latest is enigmatic. But if you have eyes and can see, The Master it is unmistakably some kind of wonder. At least, it's an exhilarating demonstration of big-screen moviemaking in dreamlike colours and a sense-heightening 70-mm format.

As well as an engaging fable about a homeless orphan living in a train station, Scorsese's film is a richly illustrated lesson in cinema history and the best argument for 3-D since James Cameron's "Avatar."

Running a digressive two hours and 43 minutes, this idea-filled absurdist comedy, presented in the fragmented visual language of social media, ties together economic inequities of the European Union, political corruption and the exploitative labour practices of foreign film productions. Also, it’s seriously funny.

Sosa, who shared cinematography duties with two other women, Judy Phu and Monica Wise, depicts a world of humble beauty, of sunrises and dogs and chickens and weed-strewn lots. With a measured pacing (the film was edited by co-writer Isidore Bethel), she has created a film that is more like an elegy than a simple chronicle of events.

Performances are still the heart of Leigh’s work, and at the heart of this film is an extraordinary performance by Leigh’s frequent collaborator, the British actor Timothy Spall.

On an obvious level, it’s a character study of the artist as an insufferable young prig, a type that, as Petzold no doubt knows, is familiar to the point of cliché. But as the film unfolds, and boldly shifts tone, the character suggests the larger theme of struggling to stay humane in a broken world.

Take the backroom political machinations of "Lincoln," add in the showbiz sleight of hand of "Argo," and you’ll get something like No, a cunning and richly enjoyable combination of high-stakes drama and media satire.

Mendonça, a former film critic, has crafted a film steeped in seventies’ cinematic references, especially Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, David Cronenberg’s body horrors, and the paranoid American political thrillers of the era, stuffed with affectionate care for depicting the fashion, cars, décor and music of the era.

The focus of [Germina's] story is rebellion and liberation and treating his story as a sombre fable of a soul’s journey through time, he turns the luridly familiar to something poetic and tragic.

Far from the push-button catharsis offered by most Hollywood redemption tales, the work is sober and deliberate, a mix of visceral intensity and artful design.

Behind the shell game of motives between the three main characters, there are subtle perceptions about class, youth alienation, and disposable people in contemporary Korea.

The film is kinetic and elliptical, with clips from different eras juxtaposed in panels, moving back to a single frame of dancers’ feet, or artfully posed in instants of euphoria. This is a film that makes you want to absorb the language of dance or, at least, immerse yourself in more Merce, which makes this an exemplary introduction to a major twentieth century artist.

A preening terrorist for the Me generation, his primary drive was vanity and his main professional asset an absence of empathy.

One of the pleasures of Support the Girls is that it explores the constant fender-benders of sex, race, class, and age without ever coming off as preachy or lecturing.

With elements of "A Star Is Born" and "Singing in the Rain," The Artist is a rarity, an ingenious crowd-pleaser.

The story of a man afflicted with fearful visions, Take Shelter is a film that's hitting the right apocalyptic trumpet call at the right time.

The film is immersive, in the sense of the frog in gradually heating water, where you reach boiling point before you realize it.

Though I am sure there will be many more family memory films, Blue Heron sets the bar at a new level.

Evil Does Not Exist, the new film from Drive My Car director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, is a slow-burning wonder, an eco-fable of meditative beauty and menace, down-to-earth realism, and mythic resonances.

Ash Is Purest White — constantly dislocating and unpredictable moment by moment — feels all of its 135-minute running time but long after, the individual sequences hang in the memory.

Poised, delicate, powerful, hovering between poignancy and pealing laughter, it is a feast formed by skill and serendipity.

Le Havre, offers the director's usual humour, pitch-perfect acting and compassionate message, with a Gallic twist that should win new converts.

Adapted from a novel by Finnish writer Rosa Liksom and set in brutal cold of a northern Russian winter or in a cramped jostling train car, Compartment No. 6 somehow lands in an unexpected warm place between the grim and the serio-comic.

This is like no movie you've seen before, a haunting mixture of horror, history and fantasy that works simultaneously on every level.

Dreamgirls is one of the best movie musicals in memory.

In summoning the artist and his eighties’ art-scene milieu, the film also serves as memorial to the generation of creative voices silenced by the AIDS virus.

It’s a stripped-down French legal drama, with a carefully controlled, expanding emotional impact, touching on matters of motherhood, gender, immigration and race.