Stephen Whitty

Despite his draw to tragic subjects, Lonergan holds onto a sharp, dark, Irish sense of humor, and a feel for the absurd that comes out at the most unexpected times. A playwright's sense of what actors do, too. Affleck gives a career-best performance here.

It's really a movie about love at first sight, about the dizzying early days of a relationship, about a passion so strong it can't be described, or denied. And that's something everyone can identify with. If they're lucky.

Let other directors play with toy soldiers and computer effects. This is big-time, old-school filmmaking. Dunkirk isn’t overdone. It’s simply done epically...But it’s also human. It has room for small acts of heroism, of kindness, of forgiveness. And for a single, simple important, timeless message of resilience: Take what comes. Do what you can. Never surrender.

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.

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.

The terrific Hell or High Water is like a gritty new retelling of the Frank and Jesse James story — only with getaway cars instead of horses, and assault rifles replacing six-shooters.

Grumpy T'Challa may be on the throne, but it’s the women who rule. And Michael B. Jordan adds fire as Killmonger.

Gradually the film turns its very specific story of one immigrant into a moving group portrait.

For a movie about purpose, Captive never finds its own.

It’s not just “Impossible,” it’s irresistible.

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

With standout performances by stars Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand, expert imagery and striking production design, Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth is hardly a tale told by an idiot. But it could actually use a little more sound and fury – and a better idea of what it’s supposed to be signifying.

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.

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 result is a careful chronicle that, while staying true to its observational ethos, nonetheless, leaves plenty of questions – and, occasionally, its audience – behind.

There's never an emotional moment here to compete, or even compare, with his last film, "Boyhood." But there's not supposed to be. Everybody Wants Some!! is as laid-back and low-pressure as a Saturday afternoon at someone's dorm room.

Kind of like all the other characters Annette Bening plays, year after year - never to nearly enough applause.

True, sometimes director Steven Spielberg lays it on so thick you think he has a trowel. Inspiring scenes are flooded with sunshine. John Williams’ score swells and kvells. (Of course, Spielberg didn’t become America's most popular director by being its subtlest.)

Old silver-fox Gere looks great. He’s almost embarrassingly charming — which is the point — but there’s not much else here.

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

The cast is all top-notch. Harrelson can peel and eat scenery like a bunch of bananas, but he’s mostly in control here. Andy Serkis is beautifully intense as Caesar, and Steve Zahn a welcome addition as the scaredy-cat Bad Ape.

The Lobster is a love story for the unloved. Dark-hearted and brutally sour - and imaginative, and sometimes very funny - it's set in an alternative world where relationships are mandatory.

This may be a sci-fi fantasy about giant man-eating bugs, but it’s grounded in human facts and folly. Little here is safe. Nothing is predictable. It’s surprising how effectively the silence increases the scares, too.

Director Kelly Reichardt, who made the great "Wendy and Lucy," likes stories that unfold slowly and simply. Sometimes she'll just let the camera run, making us watch the awkwardness of people who can't connect.

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.

Directed with calm passion and controlled outrage, the movie — named after the amendment which outlawed slavery, but left a significant loophole when it came to criminal convictions — is a study in profits. And power.

Whenever the movie begins to falter — it cuts, sometimes confusingly, among at least three different timelines — Portman pulls it back together, and sets it back on course.

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.