Kinds of Kindness is certainly a display of disparate kinds of weirdness. But unlike Poor Things, which was both provocative and told with absurd clarity, this anthology is a mixed bag of wannabe profundities.

It’s a quiet, thoughtful movie that aims to be sensitive to the family, while plumbing some of the darker feelings that this late success wrought.

In parlance its subject would have understood, the documentary The Capote Tapes, about iconic American writer Truman Capote, feels like something late to the party and underdressed.

Though The Apprentice does not really explain Donald Trump as a psychiatric or political phenomenon, it justifies its existence as pitch dark comedy with some terrific performances and a reminder that even the Orange Menace was once someone’s darling boy.

What’s interesting about the lifelong war-buff’s approach to this movie is that Hanks has been absolutely ruthless with Forester’s novel, paring it down to 91 minutes of pure tension sandwiched by bursts of action.

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

The charm and the limitations of this modestly budgeted, good-hearted trifle, set in a middle-class Scottish village, are its youthful energy and anxiousness to please. Along with the mechanically efficient tunes from the team of Roddy Hart and Tommy Reilly, the entire film feels as if it could have been written and produced by a group of bright theatre students.

There are counter-intuitive plot-turns to be sure. But like the best science fiction, The Creator is more about us than about The Other. And it has an emotional core that you seldom find in other action films of its size and budget.

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.

Rarely do remakes capture the lightning in the bottle of the source material. But The Guilty does, no doubt in part because screenwriter Nic Pizzolatto, best known for the True Detective series, drafted Gustav Möller, who wrote the original screenplay for and directed the original. Whether a remake was needed remains debatable, but the vision remains intact.

Considering the (pardon the expression) glacial pace of much of the lead-up, Hold the Dark’s eruption into massacre-level violence is jarring. Once it takes hold, it is relentless and grueling.

On Swift Horses is best admired as a visual tone poem to the era, not so much a realistic story. The conceit of casting characters who seem too splendid for their surroundings evokes the movie melodramas of the fifties, the time of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift.

It’s a testament to director Will Sharpe’s vision and humanity that a story predicated on mental illness, poverty, death, and heartbreak ultimately comes across as hopeful and lovely — whimsical even — while looking gorgeous on the screen.

With its themes of the superficiality of arena-sized hallelujahs and the worship of riches, Honk for Jesus: Save Your Soul is a terrific platform for some solid actors to strut their sanctimonious stuff.

Director Simon Curtis and writer Julian Fellowes deliver the dual comedies of errors with cheer, sprightly/stately music and the lightest of drama. The scenery, both at Downton and in France, is worthy of Rick Steeves’ Europe. If this is a goodbye (and there are plenty of signals that it is, barring unexpectedly huge box office), it ends on a note of smiles, tears and no hard feelings.

Knock at the Cabin doesn’t send you home with a clever epiphany that has you rethinking everything you just saw. What he gives you is an ending that you never have to think about again. And a film to match.

Kiss of the Spider Woman remains an engrossing tale in this new century, and a lovely paean to old movies and the thrills of getting lost in them.

Blood Quantum is not short on social, and cultural observations, but neither does it scrimp on zombies gorging on lengthy intestines.

The writer-director behind The Card Counter and First Reformed makes a misstep here, courtesy unlikely characters and sometimes mystifying plot changes. Luckily, stars Joel Edgerton and Sigourney Weaver are in top form, which is enough to keep a viewer happily occupied for the first hour.

While H is for Hawk is a genuinely lovely film — often visually beguiling, beautifully acted, and tender-hearted — it lacks dramatic punch, which may be the inevitable byproduct of a cinematic interpretation of a deeply introspective book that rooted the reader deep in the author’s psyche.

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.

In drawing similes between the then and the now, Goulet juxtaposes history with prophecy. Using conventional science-fiction tropes—the collapse of society, a military state, dystopia, and unidentified flying orbs—she creates a sound case for entertainment to share the screen with stories that have meaning and social impact.

It’s a fantastic mix of the funny, the astute, the disturbing and the brainy in the very specific style of Östlund. It’s a pleasure to watch it play out.

Let Him Go doesn’t reinvent the wheel. It is a genre thriller, where the good guys face impossible odds against cartoonish bad guys. But it plays out with style, violence that doesn’t strain credulity, and a consequence for every action taken.

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.

For a biopic about Maria Callas, one of opera’s most vivacious personalities, director Pablo Larraín’s visually sumptuous Maria is unusually downbeat.

You can’t come away from Love, Cecil without appreciating how much of Beaton's aesthetic outlived him.

Thick with dank atmosphere and well-acted with a cast that includes Colm Meaney and Barry Keoghan, it’s a drama about angry men with mommy issues that starts with a slow burn and ends up to its ears in gore.

The Last Suit has its narrative flaws and leaps of faith. But the sheer force of its central character’s untethered voyage of discovery – and the acting behind it - overcomes all.

Meander, by director Mathieu Turi, uses the device of the escape room, or tunnel in this instance, as a way of negotiating the story of a woman’s perilous journey through a debilitating sadness. It’s allegorical, no doubt. But it’s an allegory that makes excellent use of an incredibly intricate and claustrophobic set piece.

Alpha aims to be not just a story but a transporting visual experience, which is one area where it over-reaches.

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.

There is an overarching story and some obvious themes, including the extreme fear suggested in the film’s title. There’s also anxiety, masculinity, toxic femininity, toxic mothers, the road not taken, etc. But there’s also plenty going on beneath the surface, clues that a movie that is already surrealist enough, might be even more surreal than you can catch in one viewing.

Poirot’s latest adventure may engender some brief happiness in audiences, but I’m not sure it will leave them fully satisfied.

The Matrix Resurrections is an incoherent, narratively sloppy mess.

Director Mercedes Bryce Morgan (Fixation, Spoonful of Sugar), working from a script by Joshua Friedlander, keeps the pace moving well and creates some undeniable fun in a shell game of the three movie genres that depend on physical reaction —comedy, horror, and erotic thriller.

The film is Roth’s, and so expect a silly premise, comic-book violence, and gory set pieces. What you might not expect is the humour. Thanksgiving is funny.

To put Uncorked in wine terms, it’s not complex, but only a philistine would dismiss what’s easy and pleasing as flawed.

The craft of the re-enactment is more impressive than the script, which defaults to hackneyed dramatic moments, reminiscent of a generic disaster film, with its stock upstairs-downstairs tropes, young lovers, the cynic-turned-hero, and the dutiful subalterns showing courage above their pay grade.

All the intricacies — and absurdities — of creating a modern relationship are on display in Oh, Hi!, a clever comedy with Molly Gordon and Logan Lerman as a couple getting to know each other better.

While it’s fun to see the characters back in action, The Devil Wears Prada 2 is overstuffed and meanders. The film also suffers from self-consciousness. Too many celebrities show up in ways that feel pointless, turning TDWP2 into self-congratulatory mush.

These questionable narrative kinks aside, Lee still features one of the year-to-date’s best performances, honouring a woman who needs to be remembered, along with a sober consideration of the roles of women in wartime.

The film loses momentum as it settles into movie-of-the-week familiarity, detailing the activities of the Jane collective, some of which seem hardly credible, though historically accurate.

It’s jittery in its pacing, the characters thinly drawn, and the youth crime drama elements formulaic...At the same time, the film feels emotionally original in its discordantly tender moments.

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.

In the end, all Beetlejuice Beetlejuice did for me was make me want to see the singular version again.

The film, alas, feels far more emotionally conniving than its title character.

Credit the towering talents of Emma Thompson and Stanley Tucci with redeeming The Children Act, a film oddly thin on story despite coming from the marvelous Ian McEwan, who adapted his own novel for the screen but somehow failed to capture the surge of the source material.

It’s a clever bit of noir that keeps a viewer slightly off-balance at all times as the tension builds.

To its credit, Fall doesn’t pretend to be a metaphor for more meaningful ruminations on life and death. It’s a female-led thriller designed to make you gasp and wince, plain and simple. You probably should see it just for the acrobatic camerawork and insane vistas. But you will hate yourself.

The urge to find hope in tragedy is as inevitable as the one to recognize shapes in clouds. But Funny Boy leaves an unsettling chasm between this one slender story and the grim history it represents.

Intermittently witty, technically impressive, Free Guy sheds points in its second half, with pandering (Star Wars and Captain American references) and a series of numbing narrative loops, celebrating originality while practicing the opposite. And all of this with the usual alibi that none of this is meant to be serious.

Like its characters, I Want You Back, is likeable but somewhat unambitious and complacent.

The interconnected Irish anthology Lost & Found – about lives that intersect in and around a small-town train station - starts at an interesting, pleasant hum, and pretty much stays there, avoiding high drama. The result is something like an Irish-accented Coronation Street with more locations, fewer confrontations, and beer, which, to my mind, isn’t a bad way to spend time in a theatre.

Plane is a mild diversion that carries more baggage than necessary, a forgettable thriller pieced together from a collage of other films and ideas.

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.

What keeps the movie from being simply a series of lurid events is the relationship between Mía and Euge, played with an easy grace by Gusmán and Bejo. Their chemistry is so comfortable, you have to remind yourself they aren’t actually sisters.

This will disappoint those who prefer their werewolves with teeth. Still, The Cursed rises above most standards set by the genre. I only wish I could say it was a Howling success.

What redeems The King, beyond the excellent performances, is the way the film gets around to asking questions about making war. Why go to war and who benefits is part of the story here, which leaves it in an interesting place.

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.

Weir is beyond amazing, out-cursing Linda Blair's Regan from The Exorcist, out-dancing M3GAN, and out-terrifying the child with the garden-trowel from Night of the Living Dead.

Destroyer is all about Kidman as tortured, haggard detective Erin Bell. A single look into those bleary, bloodshot eyes alerts us to the fact that this character has been through the wringer. Destroyer is a forensic study of how Bell got this way. The trick, I suppose, is making us care.

I was ultimately less enthralled with the final film than I was with some of the performances in Cuckoo. Stevens and Schafer are amazing, and Bluthardt makes an excellent oddity, a convenient ally with his own mysterious agenda. But Cuckoo can’t quite bring all its disparate elements together into something cohesive and coherent.

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.

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

DeBlois elevates a beloved cinema memory and creates a spectacle, a mythical fairy tale—Game of Thrones lite—with enough DreamWorks Animation magic to warrant its own theme park ride.

Sadness is the dominant emotion in this film, not fear. While there are those moments that will accelerate the audience’s hearts, there are also those moments that will open them. After all, zombies were once people, too.

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.

There is joy in seeing this gifted ensemble have fun with their broadly scripted characters with Los Angeles in all its trashy splendour backdropping it all. But this angel comedy doesn’t quite reach for the heavens.

For a film that’s about decades of interstellar aimlessness, Aniara seems hopelessly rushed and superficial.

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.

What shines through in all these performances — and in recollections by Wilder himself and others — was a man dedicated to his craft and excited about the creative process.

I’d almost recommend seeing the first act of Song Sung Blue and then heading home in high spirits. But it would be wrong to whitewash real life (rewrite it a bit, sure).

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.

Typical of a certain kind of Sundance feelie comedy, Before You Know It is both promising and exasperating enough you’ll probably leave the cinema thinking of ways it could be improved.

It’s a decent, eye-catching, stay-the-course addition for Cameron, who has pretty much turned his entire career to this franchise, a la George Lucas with Star Wars.

Despite some impressive kills and a respectable body count, Heart Eyes is more romcom than slasher. However, it's a genre mishmash that creates a wholly unexpected delight. Imagine Jason Voorhees stumbling onto the set of Sleepless in Seattle or an entry in the Scream franchise directed by Garry Marshall.

Ambitious in the sweep of history that it chronicles, it’s a sometimes entertaining, often sordid movie about movies in the earliest Hollywood era. At a running length of just over three hours, it both makes its point, and overstays its welcome.

There are two types of pirate film fans: those who love the genre for its thrilling adventure. Then there are the fans of actual piracy, the more bloody and violent the better. The Bluff combines the salt and tang of piracy with a daring, bloody fight to the finish that will satisfy fans of all ranks and allegiances.

The movie looks great. The casting is wonderful.

Although [McCartney] uses her personal connection to the studio as the premise, If These Walls Could Sing ends up being a worthy history of a building that, for more than 90 years, has seen and withstood changes in music and technology, and still retains the magic that came from what the Beatles accomplished there.

Dog is a bumpy, unpredictable ride because that’s what our heroes are on, but it’s all delivered with a gentle touch and authentic feeling that assure us that Briggs and Lulu are heading in the right direction.

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

Ultimately, Spoiler Alert is earnest, emotional, good-hearted and edgeless.

These images are intriguing and intermittently beautiful, but the technique gets repetitive, and the gap between the visual lavishness and the so-so script is distracting.

Middleton plays Abby with a pleasing note of vulnerability that is often supplanted by a nagging anticipation she’ll tip off the edge. She and Gross have smooth chemistry as estranged sisters.

There’s still plenty to admire: Derrickson’s eye for atmosphere, the bleakly beautiful snowscapes, and a handful of effective scares. But where The Black Phone haunted you with what might happen, Black Phone 2 simply tells you what will.

The White Crow is really “Nureyev before Nureyev,” and it’s a struggle to sort out its purpose.

Dazzling.

Walter Hill’s new film Dead for a Dollar is in some ways your grandpa’s Western, a big-sky drama full of horses, hats, guns, hairpin plot turns and an ensemble of colourfully drawn characters.

Respect, the new movie starring Jennifer Hudson as the late soul singer Aretha Franklin, proves once again that musical biopics have become the tribute mediocrity pays to talent.

What really works are the thoughtful and committed performances of the two leads.

Despite evoking a lot of previous pop-cultural touchstones (including Harry Potter, Shrek and even Weekend at Bernie’s), the nerd-minded, fast-moving Onward has wit, eye-catching anachronisms and imaginative actio

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.

The ponderous storytelling is such that you’re always aware you’re watching a movie.

While Reyes’ Blue Beetle isn’t as endearing as Ted Kord’s, the movie still finds its audience. The music and cheap jokes that are substituted for where meaningful dialogue could have been more successful still manage to carry the film. In short, the cheap laughs worked.

There is a lovely kookiness to The Persian Version which elevates an essentially straight-up mother-daughter conflict story with myriad snappy visuals and storytelling devices before settling into its main narrative trajectory, advancing the idea that we are all just doing the best we can with whatever tools we have.

The film is blessedly short, which does allow for its quirky pace and oddball plotting to play out without exhausting the viewer’s curiosity, even if it is just a series of head-scratching WTF? scenes leading to nowhere.