Thom Ernst

Love Lies Bleeding is bent in the most unexpected ways, filling the screen with the impossible while refusing to make excuses.

It’s possible to leave the theatre unaffected only to look back at Empire of Light with affection. And it’s the movie’s ability to linger unnoticed until surfacing with a revised and unexpected understanding that is at the heart of movie magic.

Kneecap is one of the most likeable films this year. Turn up the volume and enjoy.

Credit goes to the Philippou brothers for their originality and perfectly queasily executed bits of ghoulish anarchy.

The Hand of God lacks the imagination and mysticism that elevated The Great Beauty from being just a navel-gazing narrative about film. And the movie's presumptions about sexuality and coming-of-age are far too male-centric to be comfortably amusing.

All You Need is Death is a film to experience. It requires some work from the audience. An impassive viewer is unlikely to piece together the fragments that make a cohesive whole. This is a film to be discovered, made by a director worth discovering.

If Hokum proves anything, it’s that McCarthy isn’t just part of this new wave of horror filmmakers—he’s carving out his own narrow corridor within it. A place where folklore, psychology, and just enough chemical suggestion collide.

If John Wick is a ballet of ultra-violent choreography, then Sisu: Road to Revenge is its bad-ass country cousin: a full-body-contact square dance where you don’t just swing your partner to the left, but off the top of a speeding train, headfirst into a tree.

What begins as a weird tribute to The Wizard of Oz becomes a genuinely creepy horror. West chooses deliberate methodic movements rather than jump scares to terrify the audience, and the film is all the better for it. And he never lets loose of an underlying sense of humour that is as clever as it is demented.

Pacifiction is a movie to experience. In the end, it’s all an analogy between politics and nightclubs and the assumption (fiction?) of power and persuasion. But that’s my guess. Your guess is as good as mine. And to that effect, ours is as good a guess as even Serra is willing to offer.

A vicious, relentless dark comedy, the film takes the well-worn “unlikely duo forced to work together” premise and strips it down to the bone—then starts gnawing.

Ultimately, Bring Her Back is a film of contradictions: intimate and epic, bloody and cerebral, empathetic and terrifying. It’s the kind of horror that might take until long after the credits roll before its full impact lands.

I thoroughly enjoyed Kid Detective. It’s not the kind of picture that wins awards, which is too bad because nestled within a traditional tale of a detective in need of redemption, is a story surprisingly unique and humane.

Beans is an ambitious film that, for the most part, works. It extends its efforts to reach a larger audience, but the story it tells is easy to admire.

Those living in Birdy’s fictional universe see her as an irascible (albeit endearing) nuisance, but in movie language, Birdy is a feminist out of time, and time is the device Dunham tinkers with most. Dunham faithfully recreates the era and then infuses it with an alt-mix soundtrack, presumably as a way of drawing the politics of then into the politics of now.

The movie feels like a novel with well-developed characters weaved through the story without feeling like segmented excerpts from a more extensive work. The film's love story is made more palatable by casting two beautiful people as the leads. And Kajganich's script finds all the right words and tone to tell the story.

As a feature-film directorial debut, 40 Acres marks a stunning entrance for Thorne into the cinematic landscape—Canadian or otherwise.

Beyond the humor and pathos, Will & Harper is a touching and heartfelt exploration of friendship.

Aside from the exquisitely executed acts of outrageous (comic-book) mayhem, KILL is fun. KILL unleashes a vicious ballet of hand-to-hand combat, all within the narrow confines of a passenger train en route to New Delhi.

Tick, Tick…Boom! packs a great deal of joy into a story that pushes a more modern and darker take on the make-it-or-break-it mantra of classic ‘40s musicals. The songs are engaging and staged with a feel-good choreography that consists less of formalized dance (for the most part) than it does gleeful bursts of movement.

Final Destination: Bloodlines doesn’t completely reinvent the wheel. It realigns the tires and tightens a few bolts. And for a franchise that is built on inevitability and expectations, that’s as close to cheating death as you could hope.

Wicked can at times feel like a movie that’s one brick short of a road. But when all is said and sung, it’s still a road paved in gold.

It’s a clever hook, and the film milks it for some genuinely inventive, well-executed set pieces. As a delivery system for imaginative deaths, Whistle does its job with a certain professional pride.

The writing in The Coffee Table is almost acrobatic in its delivery, manipulating feelings and ideas by rendering deep guttural emotions in the all too familiar ways. The terror in Casas’ film is linked to the unknown. But differing from other horror films, the unknown in Casas’ film is neither ethereal nor otherworldly.

Johnstone knows his way around dark comedy, and camouflages much of the film's humour in whimsical, sometimes uneasy, encounters between M3GAN and Cady. But in directing the film's most comedic characters — an overtly judgmental childcare worker, a nosy neighbour (Lori Dungey) with an unruly dog, and a schoolyard bully—he sets a tone that feels incompatible with the rest of the characters.

No one should mistake The Long Walk for fun. But there’s satisfaction in its endurance, in the way grim inevitability drives the narrative with allegorical force. By the credits, you’ll feel as though you’ve marched every mile alongside the boys exhausted, shaken, and strangely, perhaps, wanting more.

From the first act straight through to the third, the film engages on a level far higher than it needs to. Which is what happens when you put real craft behind a premise that could have coasted on novelty.

What the film lacks in traditional scares, it makes up for with an unsettling scenario that plays slowly throughout the film, indicating harsher realities even legends can't compete with. And DaCosta's vision is highly stylized, accented with performances that resonate with disquieting accuracy.