Beautifully shot and terribly sad, with a wildly twitchy score ratcheting up the tension, the Mexican drama Identifying Features is a profound statement about maternal love, brutal inequality, and institutional corruption.

Despite the participation of the traveler’s wife and biographer, Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin is as much about Herzog as it is about his subject. You can be a fan of either and enjoy the film and its voice, so seamlessly did they apparently share a vision of the world.

If Decision to Leave is indeed intended as an homage to a genre, mission accomplished.

Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, which won the coveted People’s Choice award at the most recent Toronto International Film Festival, is a warm and easygoing family drama and coming-of-age story based on the director’s life. But you’re out of luck if you’re looking for deep insights into how a boy seized by movies, grew up to be one of the most successful directors in Hollywood.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

When the creepy conflux of the title occurs, it’s terrifying because its conclusion is unforeseeable. Like life you might say: impossible to predict but nevertheless captivating.

The film adaptation of this treasured novel is absolutely delightful. Written and directed by Kelly Fremon Craig (The Edge of Seventeen), it’s honest, realistic, heartfelt and captures the emotions of Margaret and her young friends perfectly.

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.

Wistful, funny and complicated in interesting ways, Quentin Tarantino’s new movie, Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood, may be his warmest film since Jackie Brown - which may not be what you expected to hear about a movie set against the background of the 1969 Manson murders.

The President’s Cake remains a lovely tale, with some sweeping, almost touristic views of Baghdad, and a slightly ambiguous downbeat ending.

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.

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.

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.

The focus on Woody means that Toy Story 4 is less of a metaphor about the things we leave behind as we leave childhood, which means emotionally it's the lightest of the series. That may mean fewer hankies for those of us sitting together in the dark falling in love all over again with a box of animated toys. But the sweetness persists.

Seagrass is a small Canadian film that delivers a huge emotional impact.

All this is big, busy fun and while one might wish for some a bit more grit in the charm offensive, the catchwords here are feel-good and broad appeal.

Although Fire of Love isn’t about the ins and outs of [the Kraffts'] marriage or relationship, in this film, they do seem to have found an almost magical connection - to each other, to their work, and to volcanoes which they found endlessly fascinating.

Hamnet is a sensitively told, beautifully realized pastoral tale, driven by Buckley’s magnetism, and a well-placed cast.

In spite of all the talent, in the end, the success of a heist movie is in whether you buy the movie’s twists and turns. In this case, it’s an enjoyable ride, but some of the story’s weaknesses make it less than it might have been.

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

Synonyms free-wheeling episodic structure can grow a tad wearying, but Mercier’s aggressively kinetic performance and Lapid’s take-no-prisoners dismantling of the Israeli macho mystique — or French hypocritical superiority — are, in the best way, outrageous.

Therapy Dogs is fuelled by adolescent angst, fears of mortality, unruly energy, and frustration.

The Rescue will take your breath away. It’s an incredible chronicle of a true impossible mission, of how the world can come together to save life.

In short, Universal Language is something of bag of mixed nuts, a Frankenfilm, a cinematic turducken, with comic non-sequiturs and sight gags linked by three narrative strands.