Stephen Whitty

A warm gathering of Scandinavian artists, with Sweden’s Skarsgård and Norway’s Hovig both excelling under Norwegian director Maria Sødahl’s attentive care.

Evan Morgan’s sometimes weird, sometimes whimsical thriller delivers a grown-up blend of film-noir tropes and deadpan humor, for a comedy-drama which starts off lighthearted and then deftly darkens.

Spun mostly of sugar and air, this film is a lightweight, but mostly sweet, treat – and a lovely reminder of when pictures could just be low-key amusements, and the pandemic hadn’t yet turned cities into ghost towns.

In a way, the film is its own genre – the found-footage documentary. There are no interviews with other people, no self-described experts. Just Hoon, who – adding to the film’s melancholy sense of waste – comes across as an unspoiled, charismatic and mostly amiable young man.

Its quiet humanism and painstaking attention to detail are sure to appeal to the core audience which has faithfully followed her for more than a decade.

Built on a potent mixture of quiet bravery and hard-won access, David France’s new documentary, Welcome to Chechnya, puts audiences in the middle of the literally life-or-death struggle of an already endangered minority.

The Painter and the Thief suggests, human relationships are complex and multidimensional things. And whenever you foolishly start to try to contain them in a simple frame, they stubbornly burst out.

Lit like a Rembrandt, acted like a neo-Realist classic and with all the searing social conscience of a new Dardenne brothers film, Vitalina Varela is both richly familiar and profoundly unique; if occasionally a challenge to watch.

The Irishman is vintage Scorsese, with an often sinuously moving camera, occasional break-the-fourth-wall monologues, wicked wise-guy humour, and explosions of sudden tenderness and casual violence. And its final half-hour pulls something even deeper from the filmmaker – moments of reflection, twinges of regret, worries about chances thrown away.

An artful, deeply felt documentary, Always in Season has its own, sadly necessary reasons for being.

Like the sequinned, simpering erotic dancers it spotlights, Hustlers is a lot smarter than it initially looks. Given a story about a gang of larcenous strippers, audiences might expect little more than dirty jokes and steamy sex. But this slyly feminist movie pushes empowerment, too; it’s a film about being in control, not losing it.

17 Blocks ... is packed with gritty realism, and at times its uncensored honesty almost makes you want to look away.

Carefully made and perfectly acted.

It takes more than simply celebrating rural life and marveling at nature to make someone the next David Gordon Green, let alone the next Terrence Malick. While Yeomans inarguably finds something significant in the slow pace of small towns, the power of narration and the jolt of handheld cinematography, exactly what that is isn’t always clear. In fact, sometimes it’s literally unclear; shots slip out of focus, and some close-ups are so poorly lit the characters’ features disappear.

This is a small, carefully crafted film that tries hard to pierce the protective armor of a recluse known to be difficult and domineering. In the end, Stokes still remains slightly unknowable, as she’d undoubtedly prefer. Yet the documentary’s deep dive into her extraordinary archives, and the grainy video treasures it unearths, make for fascinating viewing.

With authentic spaces like this around them, Ahn’s actors relax into the realism.

Watergate is a fascinating film that both draws disturbing parallels and offers the opposition encouragement.

Anchored by standout performances by Naomi Watts, Octavia Spencer and young Kelvin Harrison Jr., it’s a strong indie film about race, family and trust that should connect with fans of smart, provocative cinema.

Jordan really commits, and his scenes with Thompson have genuine warmth and intimacy.

The smartest kind of sequel, Ralph Breaks the Internet remembers what you liked about the first film. And then, not only gives you more of the same, but something different.

The Front Runner works hard to accommodate all points of view.

In the end, perhaps, von Trotta’s search for Bergman never quite finds him. But did he ever quite find himself? All he knew was that he was an artist.

Foy and Alvarez have still spun the old and new elements together in an effective web. If this is a trap, it’s one you won’t hurry to escape from—or even fear being caught in again.

This is a simple, macho morality tale—of the oppressors and the oppressed, of good and evil, and of the one man who sets out to settle the scales of justice. And the level on which it works is primal—and frighteningly effective.

although it’s far too fannish—this is not a movie that wants to dig deep into anything uncomfortable—it does give the rocker her props, while reminding fans of some modern rock history.

Even if you disagree with Moore, it’s hard not to admire his bravura filmmaking.

A few minutes into The House with a Clock in Its Walls, you realize Eli Roth knows what he’s doing—and that means carefully mixing the scares and stillness for a horror comedy that’s made-to-order for certain monster-loving 10-year-olds.

This is a film with the logic of a dream, which is to say, no logic at all. But it also has the power of a nightmare. And, like some of them, it lingers.