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.

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.

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.

By not hammering on a hot-button issue, by avoiding turning this into a lecture, she has given us a movie about how some things in life come down to choices that are so intimate and personal that sometimes words won’t help you understand.

Within the back and forth of family squabbles and warm moments, there are also sprinkles of magic realist beauty.

Frothy, but deceptively dense, Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story focuses on Liza’s psychology and her friendships and teachers through the 1960s and 1970s.

The AI Doc is visually pretty standard — lots of talking heads, B-roll of robots, and cutesy animation to make it more personal — but it’s also a grand primer on the topic, skipping the standard news headlines of Will It Take My Job? (maybe) and Does it Espouse Suicide (tragically, sometimes yes) in favour of a kind of point-counterpoint-synthesis setup.

Companion ultimately delivers on three levels. It’s a creepy (and occasionally bloody, and also funny) thriller. It’s a whodunit, or maybe a whatdunit. And it’s a philosophical door-opener into questions to ask of ourselves when it comes to our computational creations — what to make of them, whether and how much to feel for them, whether we owe them anything.

Narratively, the film’s last two thirds feel somewhat scattered, or perhaps “shattered” is a better word to reflect the catastrophe at the center of the story. The key to holding these fragments together, and avoiding making the movie’s grim turn unbearable, is the deeply fascinating performance of Vicky Krieps as Clarisse.

The interesting thing about the remarkably intense, violent police-procedural/occult-drama Longlegs is that it doesn’t overplay the Cage card.

It brushes up ever so lightly against Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And there’s a little of early-ish Yorgos Lanthimos (Alps, The Lobster). Except, you know, more heart. Much more heart.

The Penguin Lessons is a charmer: a warmer of cockles, a tugger of heartstrings, even a jerker of tears if you’re not careful. And while it may in hindsight seem a little over-engineered to do all those things, that doesn’t dampen the effect. People’s Choice material or not, I loved it.

At three hours without much obvious plot, the movie is, no doubt, a bit of a butt-number, though there’s enough wry humour, visual delight, and psychological insight here to more than reward an open-minded viewer.

If Hokum proves anything, it’s that McCarthy isn’t just part of this new wave of horror filmmakers—he’s carving out his own narrow corridor within it. A place where folklore, psychology, and just enough chemical suggestion collide.

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.

A visceral cross-section of an Iraq War incident, related by the veterans who served there, Warfare stuns viewers into submission and leaves them with a grim apprehension of military service - albeit as close as one gets without being there.

In the current moment, with our wary physical distancing and awkward artificial socializing, Family Romance LLC’s gaze into the uncanny valley absolutely chimes with the times.

The new Netflix documentary Marty, Life Is Short is a portrait of the man and the artist, that prioritizes heart and affection and doesn't pretend otherwise. And it’s not just affection for the film’s subject.

The action, the battles, the love story… all of this continues through the film, but as it progresses it subtly turns, leading us to some bigger, and heavier themes such as the pointlessness of war, the dangers of religious fanaticism, fascism, and the questions of people who find themselves swept up in fate. It works as pure action, but with all of this, Dune: Part Two is a potent and layered film.

Semi-comic tales don’t come blacker or more twisted than writer/director Mirrah Foulkes’ quietly electrifying Judy & Punch, which might be subtitled “When Scumbags Get Bigtime Comeuppance.”

It’s an easygoing, highly enjoyable look at the life and considerable influence of Julia Child.

Ruskin gives a fresh bend to the story of the Boston Strangler, and indeed to the true-crime genre. There are plenty of true crime films to entertain, but few that reach alongside the likes of Richard Brooks’s In Cold Blood (1967), in Fincher’s Zodiac (2007), and in his abandoned television project, Mindhunter. Ruskin’s Boston Strangler belongs on this list.

Harlin has had a long and uneven career leading up to this. Though he isn’t quite old enough to have tackled Deep Water back in 1979, he did make Cliffhanger and Die Hard 2 in the 1990s, and this feels like a kind of spiritual successor to those star-driven action movies.

East of Wall is Beecroft’s first feature, and I eagerly await her second — just please don’t let it be a Marvel movie. She captures so many little moments perfectly and just needs to trust herself to let the big moments take care of themselves.

It’s an affectionate, meticulously constructed look back on a moment in cinema history that takes nothing away from the original masterpiece and may even lead a few souls to it.

Such tales never get stale, and the ones in Beyond Utopia are almost beyond belief.

Good One, a lesson in minimalist storytelling from first-time feature writer-director India Donaldson, is a movie that sneaks up on you.

As a feature-film directorial debut, 40 Acres marks a stunning entrance for Thorne into the cinematic landscape—Canadian or otherwise.