Liam Lacey

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.