Liam Lacey

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.