Is this about forgiveness as a pathway to love? Lowery doesn’t sew it up for us in a neat package or give us the answers, but I have no doubt that anyone who resonates with the film will come away with thoughts of their own.

Fuze’s denouement is terrific, completely unpredictable and surprisingly funny. It’s as if summer blockbuster season came early. Fuze is… wait for it… a must-see blast.

I Swear is what’s usually described as a “crowd pleaser” but there is an issue with the way the film conveys the alienation John Davidson feels. A viewer gets a pile-on of terrible events rather than the deep character dive required for emotional investment.

If you don’t know much about Michael Jackson and are content to keep it that way, Michael is the film for you.

Though I am sure there will be many more family memory films, Blue Heron sets the bar at a new level.

Cronin doesn’t just show you something disturbing—he insists you sit with it until it becomes personal.

The Christophers is full of heady thumb-sucking questions about legacy, artistic expression and commerce, and reinvention, a subject Soderbergh knows well. This is far from blockbuster Soderbergh (Erin Brokovich, the Oceans trilogy, Magic Mike), but a return to the basics: A set, a mobile camera, a couple of terrific actors, and a story to explain what brings them there.

If Lorne really is “the most boring” doc of the Oscar-winning Neville’s career, it’s only because his career bar is high. As it is, Lorne is a terrific backgrounder for devout fans of Saturday Night Live. Fairweather fans, on the other hand, might find it like an overlong sketch.

Writer-director Genki Kawamura keeps his camera angles tight, the better to maintain tension at a boil, and makes the most of his minimal and repetitive set. Fans of the Canadian horror classic Cube should enjoy.

It’s your typical mistaken-identity love story, in which one pretty person must decide between two pretty people, with the choice heavily influenced by who looks best when wet.

The film is immersive, in the sense of the frog in gradually heating water, where you reach boiling point before you realize it.

For a movie that lazily spins its wheels, Fantasy Life is oddly amiable. The only wholly dislikable character is David, and he’s so great at being dislikable, you almost like him for it.

A sweet and uplifting documentary twist on the horror genre, Silver Screamers is, as they say in Yiddish, a “mitzvah” on the part of director Sean Cisterna, and a gift that keeps on giving.

It’s an exceedingly black comedy threaded through with intense drama that completely deconstructs the rom-com, casting it as both a shiny and sinister thing… and one frequently inducing vomiting.

If Logan’s Run and The African Queen had a baby, it might look something like Brazilian dystopian sci-fi drama The Blue Trail. If that’s too much of a narrative stretch, then imagine a close cousin to 2024’s Can I Get a Witness? Except, sadly, not nearly as good.

Palestine ‘36 is at its most moving in the scenes of archival footage, and most provocative as an illustration of how England’s imperial tactics of pitting national groups against each other and terrorizing civilians (characters refer to similar approaches India and Ireland) became the template for Israeli’s ongoing military domination of the Palestinian territories. The argument is unlikely to change fixed hearts and minds, but it is difficult to ignore how familiar it seems.

The scenes feel like they've come straight out of 1970s and 80s B-comedies, outdated and out of step with the main plot, which feels richer in comparison. It’s distracting enough to slow the movie down.

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.

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

We can see the character’s angst, happiness and sorrow, but it doesn’t cut through. The film’s emotional life doesn’t quite connect and feels remote.

There’s a particular confidence to Undertone that doesn’t announce itself with spectacle, but with restraint. It’s the confidence of a film that knows exactly how little it needs to show you in order to get under your skin.

Project Hail Mary, the latest cinematic adaptation of an Andy Weir novel, is a crowd-pleaser loaded with humour, charm, and tropes galore. In the best tradition of sci-fi, there’s also a lesson in being the best a human can be, as shown by an alien teacher.

By the end, we have the sense of witnessing a blackly funny social encounter, but watched a heroic fable in reverse, in which the clueless Donghwa, instead of a hero-conquering the dragon and saving the princess, has been politely demolished, chewed up and spit back out.

The Things You Kill is a challenging movie about the world men inhabit, about patriarchy, about intergenerational trauma and about all the exigencies of “masculinity.” Iranian-Canadian writer/director Alireza Khatami presents a family drama that has rich social and political underpinnings.

It’s messy. It’s excessive. It overstays its welcome. But like any good dysfunctional family gathering, you don’t leave early.

For a film where not a lot happens, and what does happen happens very slowly, Islands is strangely gripping. That could be the hypnotic effect of its endlessly sun-drenched Canary Island setting, as writer-director Jan-Ole Gerster dips his audience in the languorous pace of a holiday destination in this low-boil psychological drama.

There is no question that Gyllenhaal packs her film with so many ideas that it can become dizzying. The themes sometimes pile up, the tonal shifts arrive quickly, and the story occasionally feels less like it’s unfolding than tangling itself into elaborate knots. Some viewers will likely bail when the plot begins tripping over its own ambitions. But the film also has an undeniable boldness. A willingness to be strange. To be excessive. To be gloriously weird.

If you want proof that hell hath no fury like an angry mom, look no further.