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 Promised Land is visually splendid and utterly absorbing, a rags-to-riches/vengeance/love story packed with action and heartbreak.

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

Well shot, well acted and with locations that vary from brutalist factory sites to beautiful nearby forests, No Other Choice is both believable and absurd as it unfolds. But its social relevance remains spot-on.

With its elliptical, patched-together structure and multi-year duration, Caught By the Tides can be a challenging film to follow but, by the end, it achieves something both original and rewarding.

Yes, The Voice of Hind Rajab is both emotionally distressing and ethically uncomfortable, brutally so, as it was intended to be. But for all the reviewers’ gut-wrenching adjectives, the critics were physically safe from harm.

Apart from the inspired split-screen gimmick, the film works because the cast is superb, with Argento as the impatient, angry old lion holding on to his threads of power. Lebrun’s performance, though, is the heart of the film.

My Old School is an original, fascinating, and compelling documentary that tacks on a gimmick to better tell its story. Although Cumming’s participation can't fairly be called a gimmick if his role makes the film work.

Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain is a carefully made film, a wonderful homage to a flawed hero. It will lift you up, it will potentially break your heart. But it will remind you that you’re not alone. We’re in this together.

It’s a wistful, beautiful, and tender movie that works across generations, yet another feat accomplished. It's not just clever storytelling, dammit! There’s heart and magic at work here.

Dazzling.

Hard Truths is a film centered on a difficult, damaged human being. Watching the movie is not unlike the experience of being in the company of just such a person — uncomfortable, sobering, deeply moving.

Charm, humanity and a passel of filmmaking insights are all here, rewarding both the dedicated fans and newcomers to Varda, who achieved a new level of public profile in her last decade.

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 wildly funny film for all fans with a refined sense of nerd-humour, this is a must-see.

Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood is definitely Linklater's most granular film, rich in the small details and moments of daily life that unite to power the biggest stories of our times.

[A] crazily imaginative, hilarious and frenetic animated feature that’s practically a palate-cleanser for comic book earnestness.

Psycho Therapy is a charming return to form for the adult comedy—dialogue-driven, character-first, and delightfully absurd. A smart and silly piece of narrative chaos that earns every word of its unwieldy title.

There’s more depth than meets the eye, and When You Finish Saving The World manages to be sweet and yet not sentimental, and with much to contemplate after the movie ends.

Wild Rose may not be what the summer season typically delivers to cinemas, but audiences miss it at their peril.

It’s hard to describe exactly how fun it is to watch the performances and archival footage generously offered in Bad Reputation. Suffice to say rock fans with a bellyful of beer will have a ball.

The Scottish green hills and forests make for an intriguing change of scenery for the series, with nighttime given that added edge of dread that comes with unseen menace and glowing eyes.

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

While this is an autobiographical story about a young aspiring filmmaker and his skateboarding crew, it also speaks volumes about contemporary rust-belt USA, masculinity and abuse, weaving its themes and characters around scenes of the boys sailing through the near-empty streets.

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

By turns exhilarating and exhausting, Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme is a whirlwind race of a movie anchored by another brilliant all-in performance by Timothée Chalamet.

An audacious and absurdly entertaining genre-hopping musical thriller set in Mexico, Emilia Pérez tells the tale of a drug cartel boss who enlists the talents of a junior lawyer, played by a Zoë Saldaña, to help him undergo gender-affirming surgery, then entangles her in his quest for redemption.

The Girl with The Needle is a harrowing drama based on real-life crimes that took place in Copenhagen around 1920. Directed by Magnus von Horn, the film is beautiful to look at but difficult to watch — this is dark, gripping, Bergman-esque fare.

A hybrid action/war/revenge film with enough octane to blast Michael Bay out of competition.

If you enjoyed Paterson, Jim Jarmusch’s 2016 drama about… well, not much of anything to be honest, then you may similarly be moved by its spiritual cousin, Perfect Days by Wim Wenders.

EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert doesn’t ask you to worship Elvis so much as to remember what it felt like when the man took control of a room and decided—joyfully, deliberately—to make it move with him.

With The Power of the Dog, Campion has crafted a contemporary Western masterpiece that turns on the same pacing and style of 50-year-old films. She takes her time, letting the story, based on the 1967 novel by Thomas Savage, reveal itself in languid style.

The gender questions are open-ended and the sacrifices of the artist’s life familiar ground, but Kokuho truly comes alive in the performance sequences that evoke the deep roots of theatre, and the semaphore of emotions represented in gestures, poses, strange movements and painted faces that evoke feelings beyond words.

Filmmakers Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine, inspired by the Alan Light’s book The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley & the Unlikely Ascent of Hallelujah, leave almost no stone unturned in their quest to examine the enduring appeal of “Hallelujah” across the years and mediums.

The result is a quiet film that doesn’t push an agenda, doesn’t rush, doesn’t trade on sensationalized emotion, but leaves us space to engage with wonderful characters. There’s a feeling of intimacy and sense of connection, open-heartedness and good will that stays long after the movie ends.

Shot in black and white, with scenes of razor-wire barriers and terrified families hiding in the forest, Green Border evokes images of the Second World War and the Holocaust, the subject of Holland’s films Europa Europa (1990) and In Darkness (2011).

Tetris is dynamic combination of thriller and historical drama.

Encanto is just so lovely to look at that its story, while well-told, is almost secondary. You honestly just want to crawl inside the screen, wear Mirabel’s swooshing skirts, pet those donkeys, sniff those flowers, and chow down on that grilled corn. Wonder and imagination are in abundant supply.

With brilliant work by Colman, The Lost Daughter is a haunting work about choices, motherhood, and memory.

I Am Greta is a wonderful, rich documentary and at points it moved me to tears.

A bravura example of an endangered species: the unapologetically enigmatic, visionary European art film.

Powerful, unrelenting, and with excellent performances — especially from Song who is never less than outstanding — Memories of Murder is unforgettable and justifiably described as a masterpiece.

His choice of shots is remarkable, from the mirror house to an institutional hallway chase that goes on forever, to static shots of possible entry points that double down on the suspense. Us is a well shot, artfully chilling movie, one awash in mood but which doesn’t fail to deliver the story.

Transformers One is a great watch for longtime fans. Though the franchise’s box office success in this century has been predicated on noisy live action with a CGI assist, this exciting and fun-filled film returns the Transformers to their animated roots.

Mothering Sunday, which unfolds on one day in the 1920s English countryside, is an exquisite expression of the female gaze that sifts through the memories, reveries, and revelations of a writer and explores—in a story that captures “the whole feeling of life,” as one character puts it— how she became one.

The story of Bram Stoker’s Dracula is so well-known that it’s hard to find a new angle. That is, unless you’re Luc Besson and you go back to the book’s inspiration, and present Dracula as a lost soul in need of forgiveness and redemption. And, refreshingly, that’s exactly what you get in this film.

There is a joyful lightness of spirit — and some very beautiful cinematography — in The Queen of My Dreams, the dazzling debut feature from Canadian writer-director Fawzia Mirza which premiered last fall at TIFF.

It’s hard to imagine anyone who enjoyed Radner’s performances in their lifetime not finding much to love about Love, Gilda… even as our hearts break a little at what might have been had she lived longer.

RTA is a strictly volunteer program, with no academic requirement to enter or good-behaviour code to remain. Sing Sing, while not an advertisement for the program, does seem to capture what makes it special, and what its participants get from the experience.

The Piano Lesson is a hugely energetic, albeit often bittersweet, film.

The Taste of Things is rare, with a depth and maturity we don’t often see on screens anymore. It charts the connection of two mature adults who are at peace with themselves and each other. There’s a calm restraint to their relationship, and that adds to the film’s sensuality.

One hopes Sugarcane will be shown in schools all over North America.

The high school rite-of-passage film canon may have been raided here but its thieves — screenwriters Susanna Fogel, Emily Halpern, Sarah Haskins, and Katie Silberman, doubtless abetted by producers Will Ferrell and Adam McKay — have wrung every drop of weird, contradictory, and squeamish fun out of the teenage experience.

What holds it all together is a superbly understated performance from Wang, who is fully three-dimensional as Chris — a decent kid trying to figure it all out. Absent here are all the usual cinema cliches and exaggerations about teen life, thank the goddess.

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

Land of Bad is an atypical war film because of the contrasts that reflect the different style of modern warfare.

The genuine cathartic effect of the film is achieved by an accumulation of smart choices, including the dryly witty narration, the ingenious visual surreal world building using kids’ crafts table materials, the strong voice cast (including vocal cameos from Eric Bana and Nick Cave) and an elegant classical-style score.

This coming-of-age film captures the exuberance of childhood even as it shows the gradual encroachment of outside social pressures.

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.

Throughout, Rasmussen never loses focus on the humanity. He’s telling the story, not of a refugee, but of a fellow human being whom he knows personally. The rapport between the two, the quiet honesty with which Amin speaks and the respectful and obviously deeply affectionate way in which Rasmussen tells the story, makes this film something special.

Beanpole makes you feel its two-hour-plus running time, with drawn-out scenes full of off-centre framing and claustrophobic close-ups, but there’s an exhilaration in the audacity of the filmmaking, as the boldness of its portrayal of the survival drive.

No doubt, there's a certain theme-park appeal to this use of technology to reconstruct a facsimile of the past, but it's shockingly immediate, seeing those old monochrome images of anonymous men in mushroom-cap helmets turned into images of pink-cheeked youth staring back at us through the camera lens.

It's always presumptuous to refer to a slice of history as "little known" simply because you didn't know about it, but it's probably safe to say that Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution — a rousing look at disability rights — will tell a new story to a lot of people.

With Sir David as our guide, it’s a theme well worth plunging into.

Historical hindsight lets us predict where this kind of train ride inevitably ends.

It’s rare for a feature debut to be as fully realized and executed as Firecrackers. It’s as if someone forgot to tell director/writer Mozaffari that making your first feature film is a tough go, filled with doubts, indecision and second guessing; her choices never seem obvious yet always feel right.

Metaphors abound in The Secret Garden if you are so inclined. But the beauty of the story on its surface is enough.

It’s hard to imagine a lovelier fly-on-the-wall experience than Nothing Like A Dame – a documentary that basically intrudes on a regular, wickedly-funny get-together of four octogenarians who’ve been friends since they were barely more than precocious schoolgirls.

The real achievement of Roma is Cuarón’s bold conception of a memory movie, blending childlike detail and adult detachment, and the rich visual and aural design that make this one of the more sensually pleasurable films of the year.

It is a wild and trippy ride that mixes “reality,” with sequences that dip into the mystical world of the Vikings, and back out again. It’s also meticulously made, with an attention to detail as close to actual 10th century Viking life as is possible.

A road trip movie that refreshes and elevates the genre, Hit The Road follows a squabbling Iranian family on a life-changing journey. Though it would be a stretch to describe the film as the Iranian art cinema’s answer to Little Miss Sunshine, this deft hybrid of crowd-pleasing fun and poetic melancholy comes close.

Bolan's film is essentially a home movie, that fantails into a larger cultural narrative of post-war North American culture. Shot on video between 2013 and 2018, mostly in intimate indoor settings, the film begins as fly-on-the-wall style cinema verite.

As an intelligent, adult examination of a marriage gone sour, wrapped up in the trappings of a legal thriller, Anatomy of a Fall is original and engaging, though perhaps not so profound an investigation into truth as some of its advocates have claimed.

The Zone of Interest is a careful movie, observant. It’s a movie that asks us to reckon with history, with human nature and, in today’s world with the drumbeat of fascism rising again. Call it a caution.

It’s all very sobering stuff and the film does a good job of capturing the kaleidoscopic awesomeness-slash-weirdness of being inside a tiny, agile vessel dipped to heretofore unimaginable depths.

Like the small bistro that is the film’s setting, Nose To Tail is minimal and uncompromising in the details, from the delicious tasting dishes onscreen to the retro jazzy score from Ben Fox, that propels the action forward.

Incredibles 2 is a movie that could have been made redundant by time. Instead, it lightens the mood in a world gone super-serious.

Despite lacking the visual scope and timeline of Polley's earlier works like Take This Waltz, Away From Her, and Stories We Tell, Women Talking is her most accomplished film to date: An intimate portrayal of a group of people driven to the brink of rebellion lest they concede to defeat.

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.

Souleymane’s Story immerses us in an unrepresented world of African migrants in France with a ticking clock urgency that puts most thrillers to shame.

In terms of its setting and plot, The Eternal Daughter is quite spare. But what Hogg and Swinton patiently coax out of it is affecting.

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.

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.

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

After 28 films, it’s incredible that Marvel studios has anything new to say, never mind the ability to be fresh and entertaining.

Cregger’s film is a standout — unsettling, odd, and wickedly fun. Weapons might just be the horror movie for people who don’t do horror.

Wife of a Spy is in some ways an imperfect film, sometimes stiff at the joints or broadly obvious, but it’s also carefully crafted and conceptually inspired.

The stunts are super-human, the combat is exhilarating, and definitely in the realm of the unrealistic. But that’s the joy in watching an animated show and suspending disbelief. The audience wants to be entertained and this film certainly does that with its detailed explanations of how these technologically-backward heroes are even able to stay in the fight.

Subtlety is the strength of The Humans. It is an intelligent even-handed drama where the family’s issues aren’t played to the point where they’re gruelling and destructive. Rather, they show us something more ordinary and therefore more truthful.

It’s an oddly funny journey, punctuated by some deliciously inventive camerawork (including the longest dissolve I’ve ever seen), a jazz-inflected score, and a treasured piece of vinyl that will have you searching out ’70s Argentine rock/blues band Pappo’s Blues.

In the end the joy of the movie is in watching these four very different characters interact.

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

No doubt, it’s pretty great to watch and listen to Franklin, 29 at the time and at the height of her powers, demonstrating her mastery in the genre of music she grew up on.

A movie with a surreal premise, that examines whether it’s better to be not seen than hurt, The Invisibles is a tonic for the soul.

For film nerds and fans of classical and orchestral music, it’s absolutely gold.

Both complex and rawly immediate, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Laura Poitras’s film about the 69-year-old photographic artist and activist Nan Goldin, is a great documentary and maybe the most essential film of the year.

The Boy and the Heron is a treat for the eyes, the ears and the mind. Or the soul, if you prefer.

This is an auspicious directing debut for Kendrick. Woman of the Hour has a big impact and may prompt viewers to search out more information about the Rodney Alcala case. It will certainly inspire some viewers to thread their car keys through their knuckles on the walk back to the car afterward.