At times, the film is unabashedly cloying, like a ASMR Forest Gump or a Minion with sensitivity training. But if you can get past that, there’s an admirable ingenuity to the technique, integrating live action and stop-motion with humour and an easy, natural flow.

It takes incredible talent to make something this spare work. The Mastermind is the kind of high-wire act that only someone as gifted as Reichardt could pull off.

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.

Four Daughters is a strange, moving, weirdly stagey film, heartbreaking in most aspects but infuriating in others.

Sometimes, in equations of the heart, you can solve for X. And sometimes it remains stubbornly, soul-stabbingly unknown.

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

Though most of the content here is too familiar for the film to qualify as an exposé, Totally Under Control adds background context and highlights some of the voices who raised early alarms about the dangers of the disease and the impending social disruption.

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.

It’s a movie that is well intentioned and aims big, but ends up being somewhat shallow.

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

While not an instruction manual, in an economical 93 minutes, You Hurt My Feelings is a lovely little encouraging slice of life.

Most of the participants who knew Armstrong are dead and there’s something melancholy about realizing that the human being behind that voice is silent. What remains is a quality that Marsalis identifies as essential in Armstrong’s music, a gift which he was fully conscious of, conveying a “transcendent joy” through sound.

Terrence Malick’s latest, A Hidden Life, is one of the year’s most ambitious films and an arguable masterpiece, though, admittedly, your receptivity to it depends on your capacity to experience three solemn hours of waving fields of wheat, theology and Nazi cruelty. c

The film employs a punk-inspired cut-and-paste collages, smashing together footage of police and protestor clashes, rock concerts, television shows and political marches, all annotated with animated handwritten letters, posters, newspaper clippings, and excerpts from RAR’s fanzine, Temporary Hoarding.

It’s a lovely, intelligent movie that explores relationships, creativity, inspiration and the benefits of wrestling with the blank page.

Let’s cut to the chase: Barbie is the greatest advertisement of all time. As a thrilling, escapist summertime movie? Yeah, no.

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

Strange Darling is a thriller structured as a complex series of surprises. Writing anything much about the story runs the risk of spoiling some of those surprises, so this will be a short review. Go and see it.

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.

Compellingly artful if dramatically blunt, The Settlers is Chile’s entry into the best International picture Oscar race, a kind of Western that critiques the reasons for the genre.

Bonnello wants us to take our time. He’s given it a certain pace that weaves you in if you’re willing to go with it. And things to contemplate if you do.

There are some very funny lines in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, much of it predicated on the outwardly ludicrous meeting of profound cynicism and hope. Lloyd’s character arc is well handled by Rhys (The Americans), and the denouement is one only a Scrooge could call humbug.

Adapted from a novel by Finnish writer Rosa Liksom and set in brutal cold of a northern Russian winter or in a cramped jostling train car, Compartment No. 6 somehow lands in an unexpected warm place between the grim and the serio-comic.

Nikolay Michaylov’s up-close and occasionally claustrophobic, documentary-style camerawork pushes the realization that Anne’s giddiness is always flirting with a dark rebound. We sometimes feel we’re in it with her as the camera whips around Campbell’s face.

If you are not a King Crimson fan, but love music or are interested in the process of making music, then, you should consider watching this documentary anyway.

I must admit I am something of an ignoramus when it comes to classical music, barely able to tell a violin from a viola. But Measures for a Funeral also has much to say on the broader subject of music, and indeed sound.

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.

David Crosby: Remember My Name is an excellent debut by first time documentary director A.J. Eaton. He has a journalist’s sense of story-telling. He doesn’t soften or romanticize Crosby’s story, or the era for that matter, and stays just far enough away from his subject to avoid judgement.