Liam Lacey

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

Palestine ‘36 is at its most moving in the scenes of archival footage, and most provocative as an illustration of how England’s imperial tactics of pitting national groups against each other and terrorizing civilians (characters refer to similar approaches India and Ireland) became the template for Israeli’s ongoing military domination of the Palestinian territories. The argument is unlikely to change fixed hearts and minds, but it is difficult to ignore how familiar it seems.

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

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.

Smith’s musical performances in the film, which are big on power chords, anthemic hooks, and gravel-voiced melancholy, help fill some the film’s emotional weak spots. What primarily distinguishes this lowkey, unsurprising drama is a well-stocked soundtrack, courtesy of music supervisor Natasha Duprey, amounting to a survey of Canadian alt-country songs over the past three-and-a-half decades.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

In a streaming universe glutted with accounts of bizarre and brutal crimes, Rosemead risks being just another example of the terrible things that people do and have done to them.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Though predictable in its messaging — don’t be afraid to be your wild eccentric self! — the film is visually stylish and clever enough to engage sugar-jagged children and even adults for its merciful 90-minute running time.

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.

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!

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.”

Director Mercedes Bryce Morgan (Fixation, Spoonful of Sugar), working from a script by Joshua Friedlander, keeps the pace moving well and creates some undeniable fun in a shell game of the three movie genres that depend on physical reaction —comedy, horror, and erotic thriller.

Every so often, though, a film like Bau: Artist at War comes along which is so off-balance it feels, not just flawed, but embarrassing, an unintentional parody of the ethically entangled genre.

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

If it earns a D for tone-deaf dialogue, The Glassworker earns an A for ambition and bonus points for the useful reminder that war destroys things and art isn’t shatterproof.

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.

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.

There are plot turns, double crosses and, appropriately for the online world, threats of live streaming torture and echoes of video battle games. But there’s at least a half-hour too much of it.

It is to Costa’s credit that she provides a soothing, reflective tone to the subject, both in her poetic voiceover and a hypnotically smooth editing that movies from drone shots of crowds, congregations, rallies, and protest marches to handheld closeups of politicians clawing their ways through teeming throngs of admirers.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

That the movie also inspires more wholesome feelings is entirely thanks to Ferreira (Euphoria), whose character communicates enough warmth, energy and emotional fragility to make even a doubtful curmudgeon soften a little.

It’s jittery in its pacing, the characters thinly drawn, and the youth crime drama elements formulaic...At the same time, the film feels emotionally original in its discordantly tender moments.

Thick with dank atmosphere and well-acted with a cast that includes Colm Meaney and Barry Keoghan, it’s a drama about angry men with mommy issues that starts with a slow burn and ends up to its ears in gore.

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.

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.

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.

The film’s star Amy Adams balances relatable comedy with dramatic empathy. In practice though, Nightbitch fails to converge their talents, resulting in a film of interesting moments that drifts to a tepid conclusion.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

With the one-off low-budget Nutcrackers, Green says he wants to pay tribute to the rough-edged adult-child comedies of his youth, films like The Bad News Bears and Uncle Buck. The result is a film that often feels, beat by beat, like you’ve seen it somewhere before.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Working from a script by Neil Forsythe, Marsh has created a superficially experimental if tame take on an artist of grim truths and dark comedy.

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

It’s a forgivable fault for a first feature such as Before I Change My Mind to try to do too much, especially at a time when gender issues have become so politically contentious. The film can plausibly be understood as a protest against the kind of new more restrictive youth gender laws introduced in several jurisdictions, including Alberta earlier this year.

With no risk of over-subtlety, Uproar mixes gentle quirky comedy with a few digs at clumsy white allies and the myth of the innocent bystander.

It feels unbalanced, a collection of often-compelling sequences stitched together in a way that is unpersuasive or sometimes simply puzzling.

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.

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.

These images are intriguing and intermittently beautiful, but the technique gets repetitive, and the gap between the visual lavishness and the so-so script is distracting.

Compellingly artful if dramatically blunt, The Settlers is Chile’s entry into the best International picture Oscar race, a kind of Western that critiques the reasons for the genre.

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.

Performances are, predictably, strong with the 85-year-old Hopkins, bouncing about like a bantam-weight fighter, and Good, in the more restrained role, calmly watching the phenomenon as much as responding to it, eventually wearing down his opponent with compassion.

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

All in all, it’s something of a merry mess, barely held together by Eigenmann’s wary, steadfast performance as Joy, an illegal immigrant mother whose life is a nightmare even before the movie turns into one.

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.

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.

The film is, in a word, ostentatiously odd. Whether one finds it insightfully askew or laboriously quirky will be a matter of taste.

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

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.

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.

A bawdy comedy about male strippers that lives up to mediocre expectations, Back On the Strip is directed and co-written by Chris Spencer who has previously worked with the Wayan Brothers comedy team.

The film Dark Windows, by Norwegian director Alex Heron, manages to work in both forms of teen-o-cide in a film that feels like a Mothers Against Drunk Driving public service announcement appended to a slasher film, though that makes it sound more exciting than it is.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Even with its decent performances and polished production values, Persian Lessons never clears the hurdle of its improbable premise, an idea that could serve as the setup for a bad-taste Mel Brooks’ sketch.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Carmen, the debut film from French dancer-choreographer Benjamin Millepied, is an example of a work that flagrantly colours outside the recognized lines, blending melodrama, myth, dance and stagey spectacle. The result doesn’t coalesce into a neat bundle, but at moments, it’s peculiarly exciting.

None of this adds up to a deep or compelling examination of the papacy. Think of it more like a wave from the motorcade on the way by.

While 88 has characters who have lots to say about the history of white supremacy, dark money in politics, and the delusion of fixing a corrupt system from within, this is a stiff, artless effort that barely makes the transition from explanatory journalism to fiction.

In the end, there’s insufficient emotional pay-off or psychological insight here to justify the credibility-defying tricks and narrative convolutions. But the kid is adorable and Exarchopoulos, as the hot and cold Joanne, is believable at every moment, in a film more attuned to mood and sensation than literal meaning.