Both a heist film and a revenge story, Ritchie’s Wrath of Man is the cinema equivalent of a hollow-point bullet. It’s not weighty, but it causes a lot of destruction.

Canadians already made the definitive young-woman-turned-werewolf movie, with 2000’s Ginger Snaps, which is a bar to clear if Bloodthirsty is to make an impression on veteran horror fans. But the pop music angle, an LGBT angle, and a studio Svengali who lives in a mansion in the woods, gives Bloodthirsty some points for fresh twists.

The Retreat’s premise is as effective as it is disconcerting. The violence against its gay characters is horrific, but the film’s gimmicks and twists eliminate it from adding much to a conversation about hate crimes. And the surprisingly comic elements that arrive in the third act suggest there was never any intent to be political.

Drunk Bus has some pros and cons. At its best, it evokes the freewheeling style and emotional pangs of Greg Mottola’s 2009 film, Adventureland.

For viewers of this doc, Strike A Pose, though perhaps overly long and repetitive, is a touching reminder that we all occupy the same world and are vulnerable to its pitfalls… even those lucky (or unlucky) enough to have briefly dwelled in the shadow of the almighty Madonna.

Jensen is a master at finding that sweet spot between oddness and pathos. Mikkelsen makes you believe it’s all possible.

The dubbing is a distraction that undermines Laurent’s efforts and robs the movie of much of its intensity and some of its integrity. Still, the movie engages as a mystery with a countdown element that effectively raises the stakes to nail-biting anxiety.

There’s more than an echo here of The Client, the 1993 John Grisham adaptation which saw Susan Sarandon playing a maternal role to Brad Refro’s 11-year-old Mafia witness. But the surrogate mother-child bond barely develops here, as Hannah and Connor leap from one near-death experience to the next in this relatively brisk 100-minute film.

In the Earth is engrossing even in moments that might challenge both patience and logic. And despite the slight nudge towards something more commercial, Ben Wheatley’s art-house reputation remains solid.

Hovering over Together Together is the expectation that two people who enjoy each other’s company as much as Matt and Anna do will eventually end up together. Beckwith plays with this trope nicely.

At 74 minutes, the film has little time for deep character mining and ends up feeling more like a collection of uneven scenes and engaging dialogue riffs rather than a fully realized drama.

The starkly lit and shot film is a gently paced family drama about a collapsing marriage which, come to think of it, merits its horror-story veneer even if it is something of a red herring.

Despite the film's willingness to playfully stir unrest, it never reaches its full potential, and the promise of confronting abusers who hide behind avatars gets second billing to a less exciting defense of free speech. And yet, The Columnist works because of Katja Herbers’ performance.

Duty Free spends little time exploring the ageism that’s at the heart of Danigelis’ employment difficulties. There’s a quick mention at the end of the doc that 25 million Americans don’t have enough money to pay for retirement, but no exploration of the how and why. It would have made for a more satisfying film had Regis gotten beyond the road-trip selfies.

Bolivia’s 2019 Oscar submission for best international picture, adapted by writer-director Rodrigo Bellott, the film floats freely through different chronologies, creating a level of intellectual play that prevents the drama from sliding into earnest messaging.

Possibly, Eat Wheaties! will age well, but at this point, there’s more cringe than comedy here. The character of Sid isn’t just endearingly awkward or amusingly fatuous, like Steve Carell’s Michael Scott in The Office. He’s just thickly insensitive.

Despite a brief reprieve with films like Mandy (2018) and Color Out of Space (2019), both of which successfully harness Cage's outlier approach, he makes a swift and disappointing dip back onto Hollywood's B-list here.

This story about stories is best absorbed if you’re not in a hurry. The Oak Room is not long (88 minutes), but the words demand attention.

Mostly, this is a look at how solid actors can carry a nuts-and-bolts, dramatically undemanding action film. Jordan is physically imposing, and handles the action choreography with style.

Colourful and crazy paced road trip animation, The Mitchells vs. The Machines is the goofy-smart and entertaining family fare we’ve been needing in these fun-challenged times.

Rodgers has created familiar and relatable characters despite dialogue that occasionally slips into melodrama.

The surprisingly conventional Tiny Tim – King For A Day mixes archival photos and film, and animation, to present an image of the man before and after he hit the pinnacle of pop culture by getting married to first wife Miss Vicki live on The Tonight Show.

Visually drab, tonally flat, and with precious few sympathetic or relatable characters, Brothers by Blood reduces the high-minded concept of filial loyalty across multiple generations to a paint-by-numbers power play.

Sure, we’ve seen variations on this story and theme before but few better.

No doubt Henrik Kauffmann (Ulrich Thomsen), the Danish ambassador to the United States during Nazi-occupied Denmark, was good. But The Good Traitor, the pseudo-docudrama depicting his life is sadly not.

The Violent Heart lies somewhere between a chasm that divides soft-peddled melodrama and Young Adult fiction. It's unlikely director/writer Kerem Sanga intended the story to be categorized as either melodramatic or Young Adult.

Casting Leachman as Margaret and remarkable newcomer Thomas Duplessie as budding drag queen grandkid Russell propels Jump, Darling into the winner’s circle. Connell further comes through with a solid script sprinkled with often-delightful dialogue.

3 ½ Minutes, 10 Bullets, as well as being a compelling real-life courtroom drama, offers some clarity about race and injustice in the pre-Trump era.

Nomadland is a beautiful and affecting film: a small scale, spare movie with a deep well of compassion at its center.

Beyond the premise though, Held is pretty much stale ginger ale, not fresh, no fizz, thinly acted and tepidly paced. While it’s passably interesting, watching co-directors Travis Cluff and Chris Lofing (The Gallows) explore the antiseptic house as if watching a a real estate video, the accompanying thin drama drifts into episodic genre violence and doubtful logic.

As it is, Embryo is a routine alien abduction story repackaged as an experimental film.

For everything Senior Moment gets right, there seems to be an equal and corresponding wrong which mars the film and the efforts of its clearly committed cast under the helm of action director Giorgio Serafini.

Bosnian director Jasmila Žbanić succeeds where many filmmakers fail in conveying the dimensions of a mass atrocity in a film that matches clear-eyed personal experience to history in a lightly fictionalized story.

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.

I struggle to find the point in this exercise, although I know one exists. I think it might have something to do with the breakdown of privilege and the importance of opening up to other equally unfortunate rich people.

As a valentine to influential 80s alt-rockers The Smiths, Shoplifters of the World is unbeatable, propelled by original Smiths music along with archival footage of band interviews and performances, vintage posters, magazine covers, album sleeves and just about every other bit of era-specific ephemera you can name.

The Marksman is a minor entry in the Liam Neeson Action Oeuvre, but it's unlikely to boost his genre status. Neeson puts in a valiant effort to give Hanson the edge of a man grown weary, not just by time but by the assumptions of his age and the disappointing belief that his country has let him down.

While stopping short of camp, and giving the movie all the visual aplomb it deserves, Godzilla vs. Kong isn’t ashamed of being light entertainment writ large. The dramatics are few, the quips just about right, and the booms are bombastic.

Six Minutes to Midnight shifts focus between classroom drama and war thriller without allowing time for either genre to take shape.

Seligman’s tight script landed her on Variety’s list of 10 Screenwriters to Watch for 2020. She uses classic Jewish humour and archetypal characters here that echo 1960s comedy albums and TV sitcoms but freshens it with Generation Z angst and a cascade of emotional pileups.

Regardless of how derivative Nobody is of films both better—John Wick—and movies a whole lot better—A History of Violence—hardcore action fans will find Nobody hard to resist.

SLAXX is tailor-made for anyone who has ever felt concerned for the mental state of the clothes they discard on the floor. For the rest of us who can abandon our wardrobe with no regard to its psychological well-being, SLAXX is a straight-off-the-rack farce.

Fill the cupboards and refrigerator with junk food, lock the doors, roll yourself a couple of fat ones and settle in for a couple of hours of stupor/reverie. Warning: Resist any temptation to roll the movie back to figure out what just happened; it won’t help.

Much of Doors comes across as experimental. But its weirdness, its stone-faced humour, and its none-too-complicated effects can be hypnotizing. Doors is compelling and indiscernibly droll; A 2020 Space Odyssey as mesmerizing as it is strange.

The film is strong enough in performance and direction to survive any discrepancies between the social drama it begins as with the revenge thriller it becomes. Still, Rose Plays Julie's sudden turn of events feels like an intrusion on a better story.

In summoning the artist and his eighties’ art-scene milieu, the film also serves as memorial to the generation of creative voices silenced by the AIDS virus.

The Father is a compelling, illusionary story about aging's disorienting symptoms. It is a masterpiece of structure, narrative, editing, and performance.

As effective as Enforcement is on a visceral level, it comes up short in any deeper reflection on the social crisis of its premise.

Sims-Fewer clearly follows her vision, and paints an unsettling picture with sure strokes. I look forward to more.

A reality-based hillbilly thriller that can’t decide what flavour of noir to serve up, Above Suspicion is one of those curious failures that the current appetite for home streaming often rescues from theatrical limbo.

It’s not for lack of trying as Crisis has a terrific ensemble cast doing terrific work. But the film never sparks or soars.

Like a rash of contemporary films — The Trial of the Chicago 7, Judas and the Black Messiah and Da Five Bloods — F.T.A. reminds us how much the anti-war and civil rights battles of the past are currently resonant, even when we have our history slightly wrong.

Despite a memorable opening scene and terrifically spooky music from composer Colin McGinness, director/writer David Creed's Sacrilege fails to adhere to all good horror films' sacred oath to build suspense.

Sorting out what’s true and what’s not becomes so convoluted that the abrupt ending seems a case of either running out of money or ideas. Still, Come True is a movie that you’ll likely remember for the images it burns in the brain, more than for its story.

There are remarkable and rewarding moments in the film despite its lack of bite.

But what lands with Land is underwhelming; not quite a disappointment but considerably less than what was hoped for given Wright’s professional toolkit and the endless possibilities a subject as complex as profound grief offers.

You couldn’t call Coming 2 America a good movie or even a so-bad-its-good, but just puffed-up mediocre concoction with a few pockets of delight.

The best way to appreciate The Affair is to sidestep its pot-boiler pretentious and think of as an exceptionally elegant episode of House Hunters International.

A day in the life of Zeytin is, for the most part, an agreeable experience that doubles as a dog’s-eye-view of humans.

The problems with The United States vs Billie Holiday aren’t about Day’s creditable performance, but pretty much everything that happens around it. That includes Pulitzer-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks’ time-hopping, confusing script and Daniels’ direction, which is both feverishly pulpy and stilted and laden.

Oddly, in spite of all the pain, what sticks in Rosi’s Notturno is a feeling of resilience.

It works as a buddy road movie (as is Patrick’s argument) and as a hero’s quest (as SpongeBob argues). Either way, there is not a lot of twists and turns complicating matters, save for one outrageous side-trip.

The Vigil is a satisfying work of suspense and mystery with a few well-executed jump scares.

Though it’s a movie with an identity crisis, Rahim’s magnetic performance carries enough of The Mauritanian to make it a worthwhile watch.

Chung’s well-crafted film is amply aided by a uniformly superb, note-perfect cast, who bring colour, nuance and heart to the film.

While the gangster genre over the past 50 years has been the specialty of Italian-American auteurs (Coppola, Scorsese, DePalma and The Sopranos’ David Chase), Mafia Inc., directed by Quebec director Daniel Grou (a.k.a. Podz), stands up surprisingly well.

Nikolay Michaylov’s up-close and occasionally claustrophobic, documentary-style camerawork pushes the realization that Anne’s giddiness is always flirting with a dark rebound. We sometimes feel we’re in it with her as the camera whips around Campbell’s face.

Writer/director Harry Macqueen (Hinterland) does best with this deeply moving drama of devotion and the dread of approaching loss when he stands back and lets these two actors loose. Firth and Tucci provide arguably the best performances of their careers as two 60-something lovers facing a crisis.

Sure, there are some odd turns in the movie that I’m still trying to work out, but that didn’t diminish the fun. Even more, to the point in this COVID era, is how this theme of being trapped also speaks to anxiety, depression and that feeling that no matter what you do, you can’t escape yourself.

Shot when COVID protocols allowed for minimal location shooting, the film is amusing partly because it hits on these resonant COVID-tropes. That and some nice stunt casting, makes this rom-com/heist fun.

Malcolm and Marie starts well, but very quickly, once the situation has been laid out and discussed, the film veers off in directions that don’t take the characters, or their situation very deep. Without that emotional heft, the film ends up spinning its wheels, and doesn’t take the characters, or us, far enough.

I Blame Society barely scrapes by as midnight movie camp; it’s much better as a form of wryly witty performance art/film criticism.

A farce that fizzles, a satire that sags, and a dead-end for its gifted cast, Breaking News In Yuba County at least starts well.

Featuring terrific performances from Get Out alumnus, Daniel Kaluuya as the young revolutionary Hampton, and LaKeith Stanfield as FBI informant, William O’Neal, the film is a revelation from King, a director, who until now, was known for his television work and the 2013 comedy, Newlyweeds.

There is plenty to like about director Anna Kerrigan's film Cowboys. Its (near) family-friendly pitch on transgender issues is refreshing. Its uncluttered presentation is disarmingly frank.

I imagine it's possible to enjoy Paradise Cove. Going in with low expectations is a good start. Accepting the film's dated approach to demonizing the less fortunate helps. Relinquishing any hopes of credibility in plot or character is essential. Manage that, and Paradise Cove might have a campy, if not tawdry, appeal.

A masterpiece of squeamishly uneasy, nightmarish mood-making, the demonic-possession film, Sator is partly in the vein of The Blair Witch Project – though much more sure-handed and stylistically sophisticated.

Director West makes excellent use of the film's set pieces, from runaway trams to spectacular underwater lava spills. Yes, Skyfire stretches believability to its breaking point. But with comic-book action so firmly planted in most every scene, any attempt at credibility would only be an unwelcome intrusion.

The film suffers from the over-interpreting mental “glitch,” eagerly connecting coincidence, mental illness, drug experiences, religious awe, computer gaming, and science fiction movies in an over-arching pattern.

How wonderful to see a movie that deals with the emotional and sexual life of two very different women north of 60, who are the sum of their lives, not bound by cultural cliches or perceptions.

It’s an unoriginal, budget-conscious and hardly brain-taxing race against time. But that doesn’t negate its entertainment value or its often heart-pounding pace.

Looking past its nostalgia and unhappy ending, More Than Miyagi: The Pat Morita Story is kind of a time capsule of an era of North American showbiz, and the compromises and struggles that faced people because of their faces.

It’s a heartfelt film that seems to be aimed at the strength of familiar love in spite of difficulties. The elements are all there, but the film’s repetitive structures render it frustratingly flat.

Rams is a film that goes its own way, settling like a cozy sweater made from beautiful sheep.

As flat and uncompelling as its title, Jiu Jitsu plays like a hybrid of rejected audition tapes from Predator with the outtakes from the fifth Highlander movie (and not the ones starring Christopher Lambert). But just how bad is Jiu Jitsu? Well, bad enough that the phrase “a waste of Nicolas Cage's talents” actually means something.

A stately 20th Century period piece in the style of the best British dramas, The Dig is just what the anglophiles ordered.

The parts of The Little Things that are good aren’t original, and the parts that are original aren’t good.

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.

Despite the relationship he had with the Enaches, Ciorniciuc sticks to his roots as an investigative journalist and makes no judgements. He avoids giving easy answers.

There’s nothing new in noting that crime and dirty politics are fast tracks to success. (“Is it the same in your country?” Balram asks the viewer). What’s more interesting here is how The White Tiger explores the paradoxes of the master-servant dynamic. Singer-actor Gourav is marvelous in capturing the duality.

With winks at the cheesiness of a previous generation’s entertainment and a razzberry directed at contemporary blockbusters with a thousand times its minuscule budget, Psycho Goreman is an entertaining exercise in low-tech sci-fi camp.

Beautifully shot and terribly sad, with a wildly twitchy score ratcheting up the tension, the Mexican drama Identifying Features is a profound statement about maternal love, brutal inequality, and institutional corruption.

The whole package — written by Sarah Henderson and directed by her husband Curtis Vowell — has a casual, episodic vibe, mixing sardonic banter and broad physical comedy.

To be sure, Climate of the Hunter is an oddball outing, a melodrama disguised as a horror-thriller with not much horror and not many thrills. And if, by the end of the final act, you're shaking your head, mumbling, "Wait…what?" you won't be alone.

Its warm-heartedness, positivity, and consistently striking visuals are a pleasant counter to ugly January days and nights, and a reminder that a compelling story well told is… wait for it… a can’t-miss recipe for success.

One Night in Miami is a powerful imagining of one of the most intriguing private gatherings in contemporary history. And though we are merely a fly-on-the-wall, eavesdropping on a conversation that is likely far more electrifying than the actual discussion, it's still a remarkable experience.

The result is a film that is presented as a kind of a fable, and a microcosm of a country whose fortunes once depended on oil.

Effectively the Ripley of this flight, Moretz makes a good case – again - for her ability to work an action film. Shadow in the Cloud is a fun ride through enemy territory, both human and demonic, and Moretz wields her weaponry with aplomb.