As the movie travels from country to country over Fisk's career, it's not always easy to follow the chronology. But overall, Mike Munn's editing is astute, covering decades of work and complex multi-party conflicts with as much clarity as could be reasonably hoped for.

Their creative process in action is just one of the cool archival treats in Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie, a jam-packed two hours of pop cultural hindsight that is part extended sketch, part couples therapy, and part traditional documentary.

If everything is fair in love and war, buckle your seatbelts. Aided by a superb cast, writer-director Chloe Domont makes a strong feature debut with Fair Play, a deft drama about gender dynamics in intimate relationships and in the workplace.

Director Chris Smith resists unnecessary embellishments to tell the story of the friendship and partnership of Andrew Ridgeley and the late George Michael two school friends who became international music superstars. The result is a satisfying documentary that resists hagiography and instead focuses on the human beings.

Like sequels of beloved movies, puberty can either be terrific, passable or really suck. So, while Riley, the lead character in Pixar’s Inside Out, has a rough-ish start to adolescence, the sequel Inside Out 2 — I’m relieved to say — is terrific.

The Fall Guy is hugely entertaining. A love letter to stunt persons and to filmmaking in general, the film is a romantic comedy for everyone who hates romantic comedies and an action thriller for those less than keen on the genre.

Creed III has the fights, it has a story, and it has a heart. For Jordan, it’s a feature directing debut with punch.

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.

A first-person documentary about a Los Angeles couple’s decision to move to the country and start a farm overcomes its excessively preciously start to become a genuinely insightful meditation on agriculture, nature, and our precarious relationship to the planet that feeds us.

The film looks at so many things at once, that in some ways it lacks depth or resolution.

Although the film gets the mood and feeling right, the story is maddeningly spotty. Its arrow is in the bow, but it feels like it’s one rewrite away from neatly hitting the mark.

Despite its gloomy name, A Disturbance in the Force is in fact a celebration, one to rival an all-night Ewok rave.

Air is enjoyable, engaging, sprinkled with some of the ‘80s sprightlier hits (including Sister Christian and Money for Nothing), and good for some laughs.

While Stahelski is unlikely ever to be called upon to make a rom-com or coming-of-age movie, he and Reeves have taken the fluid action of the John Wick series to a point of “how are they going to top that last insane thing they did?” And there’s an imagination at work that’s straight out of Looney Tunes.

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.

The mind behind TV’s Hannibal and Pushing Daisies makes his feature directorial debut with Dust Bunny, a wonderfully strange mix of murder, mayhem, and childhood monsters-under-the-bed.

It’s a neo-Western, a sensitively acted, heartfelt and ambitious drama which stumbles when it resembles an illustrated thesis about the legacy of the West.

The film is full of lovely images, macro close-ups and time-lapse photography mixed in with some inspirational politics...But by the end, this gentle meandering film about a man who loves forests feels at least half-nonsensical.

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.

The results are what might be best called “solid” journalism, with the occasional eye-brow raising surprise (Nixon wanted to firebomb the Brookings Institute?) There’s a wealth of archival, often familiar, television clips along with fresh interviews with some of the first-hand witnesses and participants.

This is an exhilarating action picture. The Killer involves brutal violence leavened with incisive social commentary, all of it put across with great Fincher style. And bloodletting.

The film is part buddy comedy, part rom-com, and partly just good natured silliness, but it coheres. It’s entertaining enough that you can just go with it, but there is depth there, if you’re so inclined. It says a few meaningful things about relationships without becoming a self-help class. And it has heart and charm in spades.

In this feature debut, De Filippis paints an utterly believable picture of the kind of immigrant/children-of-immigrants family where emotions fly and can turn from rage to love on a dime.

The subject may be glum but there is something consistently pleasurable about Mouthpiece, a film that is both audacious in execution and relatable, even for those of us who don't live in women's bodies.

Back in the 1950s the cars were little more than cockpits on wheels, without so much as a seatbelt. There might be a few hay bales by the side of the track. And then as now, there was a morbid fascination in the notion of a crash taking a driver and car out of a race. But be careful what you wish for.

Hanks and young German actress Helena Zengel (Shock System) play off each other faultlessly, with minimal dialogue, relying on gaze, gesture, and tone and we can easily understand how the twice-orphaned Johanna can look into Kidd’s warm, melancholy gaze and recognize a fellow misfit and survivor, accepting him as her protector.

If you’ve ever been a dog owner and you’ve ever been nervous about what’s out there in the shadows, then more than likely, you’ve appreciated the company of a good dog by your side. Good Boy gives you that feeling when you’re watching it, and quite frankly, there were a couple of times when I reached for my own dog to give her a reassuring scratch behind the ears.

This lovely film with its unapologetically female gaze . . . kept me beguiled throughout.

With its languid pace, rural setting, and natural beauty, The Long Walk is not your typical ghost story.

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.”

With the words, the coffee-table monochrome images of the aged troubadours hard at joyful labour, and the moody drone shots of the snow-covered New Jersey woods, Letter To You is an opportunity to listen to the new album at a bargain.

While Dark Waters is something of a let-down for a Haynes film, it’s otherwise sturdy enough. One can admire the commitment of Ruffalo, who plays the role of the modest, decent, semi-accidental hero without vanity or trite psychology.

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

Wharton’s film benefits from exceptional timing, which may not be accidental. Carter’s diplomacy and decency, his easy smile and comparatively youthful veneer contrast dramatically with the current American president and his secretive, self-aggrandizing, circled-wagons administration.

A rom-com it is. A typical rom-com it isn’t.

The film has a wonderfully quiet, reflective, and intimate tone, but that lovely subtlety ultimately robs it of some of its impact.

As fresh as the female perspective is, as Skate Kitchen circles and swoops through the Manhattan twilight toward its conclusion, there is a sense of missed potential, that the film could have been much richer than it is.

It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley is a reminder of the beauty of what he was looking for, and why his loss still reverberates so many years after his death.

A great script and a great cast are key to Juror #2, a gripping moral study dressed up as a courtroom drama.

In the coming-of-age sub-genre of youthful rebellion and forbidden love, DJ Ahmet from Macedonian writer/director Georgi M. Unkovski is about as mild as they come. But that doesn’t diminish its crowd-pleasing pleasures.

What holds all this, mostly, together to the presence of Mulligan (An Education, Shame) and her own ambiguous performance.

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.

Mickey 17 is a long ride with a running time of about two hours and twenty minutes, with unexpected twists and turns. It’s a lot of fun, and as previously noted, is stuffed with ideas.

If His House doesn’t quite achieve the deeply unsettling tone that makes a good horror movie hard to shake, it still succeeds as an exploration of trauma, and the way it can shape and challenge the human psyche.

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.

Because the potential is extraordinary, it’s a surprise that the film, co-directed by Herzog and Andre Singer, is so conventional and enthusiastic, bordering on adoring.

This is arthouse vacation horror. As such, Infinity Pool scrapes closer to Spring Breakers than Hostel. But it's also science-fiction, and it's the science fiction that moves the horror beyond shock.

It’s not accurate to say the film stars Saoirse Ronan. Saoirse Ronan is the movie, the luminous north star of every scene.

On the surface, Luce is a study of race and privilege in contemporary America. But it’s more broadly and more subtly about family relationships and the psychological deals we make with others and ourselves.

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.

The Color Purple is an intense and complicated story about race, gender and history and wrestling that tale into a two-hours-plus musical is a daunting task. This version, while plot-heavy and occasionally confusing, has its own epic sweep. It’s moving, but given current events, the final celebratory spirit rings false.

Craig is easily the best thing in Queer, which grows a little maudlin at the end. Burroughs himself never properly completed the story, having lost interest along the way. But that’s not to say that his performance is the sole reason to see it.

Bugonia is not Lanthimos’s best, but it is likely off-kilter enough for fans, or maybe introductory-weird for newcomers to his genre.

The studio set recreation of Hong Kong’s famous Bar Street, along with the gaudily delectable costumes throughout, give Master Z a dreamy heightened artifice. More than once, the film seems on the verge of breaking into a vintage Hollywood musical.

There may be a lot of questions unanswered in Possessor, but there’s feverish imagination at work.

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.

Into the Weeds: Dewayne “Lee” Johnson vs. Monsanto Company is a cautionary environmental story, that raises unsettling questions about what’s in the food we eat, and how our farming practices are affecting the biosphere.

If there was anything missing from the lives of swords ‘n’ sorcery-loving nerds, it would be a proper Dungeons & Dragons movie. Now we have one.

A chamber-sized display of cinematic razzle-dazzle, and convoluted political allegory filled with gallows humour and broad polemics, Pablo Larraín’s El Conde re-imagines the Chilean dictator as the 250-year-old vampire star of a 1930s horror movie.

In contrast to the complex psychodrama of Nolan’s opus, A Compassionate Spy is a gentle and intimate film, largely narrated by Hall’s wife, Joan, who was 90 at the time of filming. She tells a love story.

From very early in the film, we have a sense where it’s all going. With no real narrative surprises then, the movie becomes all about the characters and the journey. Aster’s playing out of the journey is problematic.

Die My Love has gorgeous cinematography, delicious nudity, way-cool music and Robert Pattinson, but the irresistible urge to check one’s watch kicked in early — at the one-hour mark. That’s not a good sign.

It’s, ironically enough, a terrific, serious performance by Will Arnett, arguably the best of his career.

Watcher is a successful thriller, good enough to hold viewers through its three acts and into the final scene. But the reward for sticking around might not be the payoff viewers were waiting for. Neither is it all that original.

The Suicide Squad, Gunn’s sequel to David Ayer’s poorly reviewed first try at the tale of a group of super-villains forced to be good guys, is a nihilistic orgy of brightly coloured gore and violence apparently envisioned while on mushrooms. If you’re sitting near the front of an IMAX theatre, it plays like being in the “splash-zone” of a GWAR concert.

For a movie that lazily spins its wheels, Fantasy Life is oddly amiable. The only wholly dislikable character is David, and he’s so great at being dislikable, you almost like him for it.

In a streaming universe glutted with accounts of bizarre and brutal crimes, Rosemead risks being just another example of the terrible things that people do and have done to them.

Eileen is a slender drama distinguished by strong performances.

Batman as a straight-ahead film noir anti-hero – just psychos and murder, no end of the world scenarios - is an idea that’s overdue. It was the tone the original comic book set way back when. And for long stretches, The Batman gets it.

The deliberate pacing, cinematographer Tómas Örn Tómasson's images reminding of the vulnerable human scale against the landscape and the skeletal narrative, bringing a refreshing purity to a classic predicament.

The movie jumps between reality and fantasy, and its device, Zed’s autoimmune disease, where the body is literally rejecting itself, is perhaps a bit of an obvious metaphor for Zed rejecting his cultural roots. But strong, heartfelt and sincere performances, especially by Ahmed and Kahn draw us in.

Assembled by first-time French director and Callas devotee Thomas Volf, this adoring clip reel has both pros and cons.

There is enough story, enough heart and action here for a fun time at the movies.

There is enough right and apparently painstakingly accurate about Prey – the Predator series prequel in which the now-familiar species of extraterrestrial hunters sets sights on a tribe of 18th Century Comanches – that hearing the characters speak an actual indigenous language would have taken it to a whole other level. Instead they speak jarringly modern English.

For a film where every single scene is rigidly contained within a screen — framed by an iPhone FaceTime chat, a laptop exchange, TV image, home movie or security camera surveillance — Searching has a surprising sense of momentum.

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.

Seeking Mavis Beacon starts off as one thing and then becomes another, overall a chaotic but intriguing journey about art, identity and history in cyberspace … where everything lasts forever.

Expect deep conversations to follow your screening.

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.

Spider-Man: No Way Home is a comfort-food present to long-time fans, like a cross-over episode of one or more beloved TV series, with winks, call-backs, trivia, cameos, super-villains and copious destruction.

Ralph Breaks the Internet is everything that made Wreck-It Ralph enjoyable, painted on a canvas as big as the Internet itself. The satire is sharp and the pace is relentless, a can’t miss combination for a kid outing.

Lorelei is a lovely story told with heart and without judgment.

Though the emotional appeal of this story of resistance to brutal repression is genuinely moving, the documentary has limitations in both style and content.

With its dark palette and atmosphere, Honey Bunch could have been a simpler, more disturbing and pointed story. There’s enough there to suggest as much.

What is easy to watch are the superb performances from Chastain and Sarsgaard, both of whom are emotionally naked here. Their job is to convince you that despite the past, an odd and unexpected relationship may well flourish in future.

As standard a documentary as it is in presentation, Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes is cleverly assembled and edited, making the most of available archival material to flesh out the stories of Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bud Powell, Art Blakey, Horace Silver et al, and of Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, the two German-Jewish immigrants who escaped the war and redefined America’s music culture.

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

There’s one illuminating segment in Alexis Bloom’s documentary, Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes, which might have made a fascinating stand-alone short doc.

The film succeeds on fan appeal and that’s obviously who will thoroughly and absolutely love this film.

Writer-director Genki Kawamura keeps his camera angles tight, the better to maintain tension at a boil, and makes the most of his minimal and repetitive set. Fans of the Canadian horror classic Cube should enjoy.

What National Anthem lacks in spectacle it more than makes up for in quiet moments of beauty, tenderness and heartache.

As a leading feminist voice in post-War German cinema, Von Trotta’s devotion to Bergman, the archetypal self-absorbed male genius, seems unfashionably but refreshingly forgiving.

The lack of clear identification of interview subjects and amorphous shape of the film can be frustrating. A segment on the history of book-burning, for example, feels gratuitous but, for the record, everyone in the film is against it.

Once again, [Pugh] brings a determined energy to her performance that almost compensates for the often unpersuasive, sometimes stilted, film built around her.

There’s enough of Austen’s generous social vision and her character-revealing dialogue to make this watchable but Emma. takes a long time to connect emotionally.

The new documentary Billie is for music nerds what hieroglyphics on a cave wall are for anthropologists: not so much a revelation as clear confirmation of a more nuanced life than previously known. It also has one heck of a back story.

The nut of the movie, the thing I return to again and again when thinking about it, is the issue of how much the odds were stacked against Kusama. Kusama-Infinity is a perfect movie for the #metoo era: A glimpse into the life of a woman with a vision who had the misfortune of being born at a time when even what was arguably the most progressive culture felt that it was just fine to ignore a woman’s voice.