Thelma is really entertaining. The cast (which includes Malcolm McDowell) is very strong. The performance from Squibb, a 70-year vet of the industry and Oscar-nominated for her work in Nebraska, is fantastic, and Roundtree is likewise magnetic.

In a word, it’s terrific.

On the Rocks is a delight.

You don’t need to be a comic book nerd to enjoy the film though. It stands on its own merits well enough. But, go see it with one anyway. Watching them enjoy the film is almost as fun.

What it took to put together one of the most highly acclaimed exhibits ever on the art world calendar is captured in Close to Vermeer, a documentary brimming with passion, intrigue, history and beauty from director Suzanne Raes.

Squaring the Circle is a gripping true story told with towering visual panache.

It’s fascinating stuff, and it rests both on its leads and on the universal truth that unburdening to strangers is often easier than unburdening to intimates, as any real-life cab driver or bartender can attest. And yet, as Daddio shows, that very spontaneous act fosters an intimacy all its own.

Mary Poppins Returns is a rare treat. It’s an old fashioned movie musical with an old-fashioned message that works perfectly in the modern world.

Sinners, the new film directed by Ryan Coogler and starring Michael B. Jordan, needs no more than a one-word review; Stunning. Magical also works. So does unforgettable.

Agnes is a genre breaker that veers into unanticipated areas of drama, some of it absurd, some street-wise, and yet inescapably entertaining.

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

One of the pleasures of Support the Girls is that it explores the constant fender-benders of sex, race, class, and age without ever coming off as preachy or lecturing.

The women's stories are devastating. And familiar.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is not likely to make the same rounds at the Academy Awards as its predecessor. But it remains a winning formula. And when someone tells you that it has the best action sequences put to film—believe them.

It’s an exceedingly black comedy threaded through with intense drama that completely deconstructs the rom-com, casting it as both a shiny and sinister thing… and one frequently inducing vomiting.

May December is a movie about moral gray zones, a look at contemporary culture through the unique Todd Haynes lens. What’s involved are great writing and great performances.

City-dwellers may go their entire lives without realizing that the greatest movie screen of all is above their heads, telling billions of stories.

The film is immersive, in the sense of the frog in gradually heating water, where you reach boiling point before you realize it.

The Menu is the most entertaining ensemble film since Knives Out, and the most engaging horror-satire since Get Out. But no matter what comparisons and assumptions are made, The Menu will not be the movie you expect.

Simply said, there is magic in this film, rising out of simple observations, allowing the camera to linger through moments of play, pausing for glimpses of charity while holding fast to the possibility of tragedy. A film that nurtures a balance of trust with betrayal.

It is at times a terrifically uncomfortable movie to watch. But director Michel Franco's New Order, a searing and relentlessly grim indictment of class division and government corruption, scans not only as possible but entirely likely given our current world. Heavy doesn’t begin to describe it.

Legacies don’t come more dazzling. Sidney is a fitting tribute.

Though I am sure there will be many more family memory films, Blue Heron sets the bar at a new level.

Sorry, Baby, the feature debut of American writer-director Eva Victor, who also stars, is a clear announcement of an original new talent able to create highly inventive visuals with a limited budget. It is also a terrific — and sad and funny and contemplative — testimony about how trauma profoundly stains people’s lives, with far-reaching and unpredictable outcomes.

Ultimately One Battle After Another is about a father and daughter, and I think about one of PTA’s big themes: Love. But that’s just me.

It’s bonkers and a hell of a film. And even better, with The Lighthouse, Eggers establishes that he’s more than a one trick pony. He’s a true original, auteur and clever filmmaker who isn’t interested in pandering.

This is pared-down storytelling that leaves you to draw your own conclusions, but nobody’s dreams are coming true here. Filmmaker Franco seems to assume his viewers will be paying attention, so Dreams is a typically understated affair, just slightly chilly in its detachment and stripped down in action and in dialogue. Money talks, though.

A work of sublime sweetness and beauty.

Evil Does Not Exist, the new film from Drive My Car director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, is a slow-burning wonder, an eco-fable of meditative beauty and menace, down-to-earth realism, and mythic resonances.

In evocative and understatedly emotional scenes, carried out with a mature grace by Banderas, we come to a connection of how we get where we are, and what holds us back from what we dream of becoming.

Ash Is Purest White — constantly dislocating and unpredictable moment by moment — feels all of its 135-minute running time but long after, the individual sequences hang in the memory.

Poor Things is like nothing else you’ve seen this year: A darkly comic satire set in a dazzlingly designed steampunk world. It plays like it’s for fun, but is built around a deep philosophical core, that is ultimately about living authentically.

Quiet, understated and unforgettable, The Mustang is a winner by five lengths.

Rosaline is a delight from start to finish, a brisk, bright-eyed, and inventive romantic comedy with constituent parts that probably shouldn’t work this well together but do.

Given the devotion Ball continues to inspire in fans, it was perhaps too great a challenge for anyone to live up to casting expectations. Still, Being the Ricardos hits all the right notes, making these larger-than-life people seem at once pointedly human and even more ground-breaking than ever.

There’s a lot more going on than meets the eye in Steven Soderbergh’s wise and deceptively breezy new film Let Them All Talk.

As you might expect from King, The Monkey is dark, ruthless, and violent. What you might not expect is just how funny it is. Like, it's genuinely hilarious.

Freaks is a mind-bending thriller that is subversive enough to be rebellious, and in this era of CGI superhero cinema, the revolution is welcomed.

On the surface, it’s a simple enough premise: a young woman transitioning into adulthood, trying to find her place in the world. But in the hands of Norwegian director Joachim Trier, The Worst Person in the World is at one level a social satire about love, identity and relationships, and at the same time, a warm and deeply poignant look at the imperfect way life can creep up on us.

Adapted from a novel by Finnish writer Rosa Liksom and set in brutal cold of a northern Russian winter or in a cramped jostling train car, Compartment No. 6 somehow lands in an unexpected warm place between the grim and the serio-comic.

It’s one helluva conversation starter, from one very thought-provoking story.

Sure, The Eternal Memory is tough and occasionally relentless, but it is also affirming in ways unexpected. Significant and intense indeed, but the excursion is far from weary.

The Cleaners is a doc of remarkable access and a feast for thought.

Joyride is terrific, a storytelling and acting gem bursting with heart yet never saccharine.

Writer/director Sébastien Pilote has turned this piece of Quebec history into a visually stunning, deeply satisfying piece of cinema, a gorgeous period piece. Canadian history has rarely, if ever, looked so sumptuous on the screen, or felt so rich.

Burnham’s debut is a little gem that feels true and is surprisingly tender.

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

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.

It’s a stripped-down French legal drama, with a carefully controlled, expanding emotional impact, touching on matters of motherhood, gender, immigration and race.

It’s a roiling mix of wry race comedy, economy-grade dystopian sci-fi, and Silicon Valley satire. Also, it's as funny and as caustic as hell.

The film is an indictment of law enforcement as it operates (or doesn’t) for aboriginal people.

There is not much more you can ask of a film than that it provides you with another perspective, a new angle to look at old problems. The Beasts does that.

Civil War is both premium entertainment and a cautionary tale.

While the characters and events are real, the artful design of this film and its allegorical resonances seem to put Honeyland in its own genre – that of a real-life fable.

It’s a fast-paced joyride, enlivened by great talent in even the smaller roles.

Johnson delivers a wicked satire on faith and fanaticism, a lively mockery of far-right politics cloaked in the sacred robes of a classic whodunnit. It’s feel-good entertainment with just enough spiritual cleansing to seal the deal.

There’s great writing in the screenplay (also by Ma), and fantastic music choices, including an otherworldly score by Montreal electronic music artist Marie-Helene Leclerc Delorme, and a groovy cover of the old love song “Unchained Melody.”

It’s energetic, bonkers, and very funny. It’s also two-and-a-quarter hours long, and I didn’t begrudge it a single minute.

Anora is frenetic and entertaining and sometimes very funny, but it will break your heart.

Occupied City is designed not so much to provoke emotions as to challenge our capacity for paying attention (“It’s okay to drift in and out,” recommends McQueen in the film’s production notes.) When we focus, we’re compelled to connect the double strand of the narrated past history and contemporary images in front of our eyes.

Shortland has given us a fast-paced movie with action sequences, character depth, and very subtle social and political subtexts about the way women are seen, treated and exploited in the world.

With Breakdown 1975, Neville isn’t asking us to consider whether the year was pivotal. He’s making the case that it was.

Suffice to say this Naked Gun packs an Airplane!’s worth of sight gags, non-sequiturs, malapropisms and misunderstood lines into a rapid-fire, comedy-friendly 85 minutes, the exact (and perfect!) timing of the 1988 original.

Certainly, it’s a welcome call-back to grownup movies of 1960s and 70s, about adult intimacy and meaning-of-life concerns. Shot with crisp, unfussy clarity inside a car or in boardroom offices and the streets of the modern urban Japan, it’s a drama about the intricate ways love, performance, and work merge into each other.

Led by performances by Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand, the production makes this story of treachery, murder and the psychological cost of crossing moral boundaries feel both era specific, and frighteningly modern.

Two Women, for all its entertainment value, is silly and shallow, though deeper than porn, it must be said.

At times, No Bears can come across as frustratingly convoluted, but Panahi is an artful filmmaker, who surprises us by breaking the rhythms of the film with disruptions, confrontations, and plot twists.

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.

This is some of De Niro’s most moving work in years. His performance full of anxious misfit energy, where his often-parodied grimaces, tics and haunted gaze feel entirely correct.

Set, script, performances, and direction - it all works.

In I’m Still Here, Walter Salles’ first feature film in a dozen years, the Brazilian director manages an impressive feat of teleporting, placing the viewer inside the cheerful chaos of a large Brazilian family.

To a Land Unknown is unquestionably topical. It’s also rooted in a well-known movie tradition, films that are empathetic portraits of low-level urban criminals struggling for survival and dignity.

Ernaux’s precise and thoughtful commentary connects the images to memories, discovering yet another harvest from the well-cultivated field of her autobiography.

Anemone is a redemptive tale, but slow and dark and haunting, sometimes slipping into fantasy and playing out like a fairytale, and sometimes unfolding like a Greek tragedy. As films go, it’s a triumph.

It occurs at a certain point that Ronstadt was kind of the Meryl Streep of pop music, capable of taking on any vocal role and making it sound like she was born to it.

The Cave may be the saddest, most infuriating chronicle of the ghastly ravages of war on a country’s most vulnerable citizens —children — ever made.

Weeraskathul also explores how identities emerge, dissolve, and connect but he steps onto that shifting ground of memory and experience through a poetic, reverent portal.

We can see Cold War as a look back on recent history, not through the lens of realism, but as a Hollywood fantasy, a kind of romantic protest against a political nightmare.

Hale County, in the best sense, is the kind of film that asks more questions than it provides answers for.

Women, men, relationships, the patriarchy feminism, nature, and body-horror merge in writer/director Alex Garland’s creepy, allegorical art-house horror thriller Men.

A semi-autobiographical and powerfully moving story by Kyle Hausmann-Stokes, My Dead Friend Zoe is inaccurately described as a “dark comedy” or as a “buddy film”.

Yes, it’s a formula and we’ve been here before. But the characters are engaging, the performances elevate the material, and the various dilemmas of each gives this more layers than you might expect.

What draws us in is the inventive and luminous cinematography from Michal Dymek (with additional footage by Pawel Edelman and Michal Englert), using drone shots, fish-eye lenses and red and blue filters. Accompanied by an unsettling electronic score, the donkey-in-a-disco effect is trippy, a hallucinogenic projection of what it might be like to live in an animal’s consciousness, including its dreams and flashbacks.

Pointed, wryly funny, and well-cast, American Fiction is easy to recommend for its humour and timely commentary.

A major factor in making this work as well it does are the performances, which are pitch perfect.

Out Come the Wolves director/co-writer Adam MacDonald keeps us guessing until practically the final frame as to how it’s all going to play out in this finely crafted sylvan thriller.

The Wizard of the Kremlin is one of those rare dramatized histories that seamlessly blends facts with fiction.

Life, like love is messy. The beauty of the film is the way Miele, through the dilemma of Adrienne and Matteo, asks us to look at our own messy lives and see it through fresh eyes.

Starring two grande dames of French cinema, Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche, The Truth is a mistress-class in the art of French close-up acting, from the twitch of a dismissive eyebrow to a pout of disappointment.

Queer Japan serves as a series of lively snapshots of a multifaceted and shifting subject and comes up a little short on the issues of day-to-day experience of Japanese gay life.

If the film’s execution doesn’t always rise to the level of its elusive ambitions, the fault is not a lack of sincerity.

It’s wonderful for its restraint, and for the things it doesn’t do.

The success of Miranda’s musical story is not just the strength of its lead, but the strength of the supporting characters.

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.

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.

The Plague is what remains if you strip most of the actual horror out of a horror movie, but keep the fear. The tension gets so thick you could cut it with a knife. Then it goes beyond that; you’d need something stronger, and sharper.

Ruizpalacio’s purpose is to present the harried workplace as a microcosm of American capitalism, its obsession with abused undocumented immigrants, anger at women’s reproduction rights and devotion to the churning machinery of consumption. The message isn’t new but, in the present moment, the sheer bluntness of the critique feels liberating.

Groff and Radcliffe are great in two very different roles (each won a Tony last year for their performances) but there really isn’t a weak link in the cast, and the music is grand.