Viola Davis is an actor apparently incapable of a false note. She’s a force of nature, playing a force of nature. She is perfection. And even though Ma is the center of the story, Boseman’s Levee goes through the most changes through the film, and covers the most emotional territory. It is a masterful and powerful performance - a beautiful take on a difficult and tragic character.

Both the Arctic survival story and the spaceship drama are derivative, and while action sequences are well done in isolation, they never develop a convincing momentum.

Oh, but they’re a quirky lot, so they are, in Wild Mountain Thyme, which arrives December 22 stuffed with blarney, Irish clichés, and a head-scratcher of a plot about an odd yet spectacularly attractive pair who just can’t seem to get their romantic act together.

Hanks and young German actress Helena Zengel (Shock System) play off each other faultlessly, with minimal dialogue, relying on gaze, gesture, and tone and we can easily understand how the twice-orphaned Johanna can look into Kidd’s warm, melancholy gaze and recognize a fellow misfit and survivor, accepting him as her protector.

If our planet should collapse into some colossal cyber-punk afterworld, we can take comfort knowing that Milla Jovovich has our back.

Dahl’s work demands darkness and an edge, but instead there’s a bright Hollywood-y antic sense to Zemeckis’s The Witches, and the overused and unconvincing FX only serve to trivialize what we’re seeing.

If you’ve seen enough of the studio’s movies, even something this full of imagination suffers from some predictability. There is a period in Soul, where, in spite of the lovely creativity and goofy story-telling, it lags and feels a bit listless, before bouncing back.

There’s a lot more going on than meets the eye in Steven Soderbergh’s wise and deceptively breezy new film Let Them All Talk.

You want to escape? Well, there’s a couple of hundred million U.S. dollars up on the screen for action and special effects, and retro amusement provided by pastel-coloured shopping malls, big shoulder pads, and Sony Walkmans.

Queer Japan serves as a series of lively snapshots of a multifaceted and shifting subject and comes up a little short on the issues of day-to-day experience of Japanese gay life.

Life, like love is messy. The beauty of the film is the way Miele, through the dilemma of Adrienne and Matteo, asks us to look at our own messy lives and see it through fresh eyes.

The urge to find hope in tragedy is as inevitable as the one to recognize shapes in clouds. But Funny Boy leaves an unsettling chasm between this one slender story and the grim history it represents.

In its corner, Baron offers the often-entertaining prospect of watching extremely large men beat each other up in acrobatic ways. The recent winner of the dramatic feature award at Toronto-based imagiNative Film and Media Arts Festival, it has a crowd appeal familiar to WWE fans, but some snappy dialogue from screenwriter John Argall and a family-friendly message to accompany the cracking bones.

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.

Intriguingly weird, and only loosely tethered to its own reality, Lawrence Michael Levine’s Black Bear is two movies in one - both on the theme of creativity-squeezed-from-pain, and both offering Aubrey Plaza the acting turn of her career.

The Belarus-born Loznitsa, now a Ukrainian citizen, is not a follower of the “brevity is the soul of wit” school of dark humour. Each vignette is almost too long to earn that descriptor, almost as if he doesn’t want to let go of a scene until the viewer is utterly uncomfortable. But that churn builds on itself, taking us by the last act to a dark and cynical place.

There is a terrific movie to be made about the trial of Han Van Meegeren, one of the most successful art forgers in history, who made millions selling his paintings to rich and prominent Nazis during the Second World War. Unfortunately, The Last Vermeer isn’t it.

That core idea here, the pole in the middle of the merry-go-round, is that the stuffy, secretive King, as Robertson Davies suggests, is the embodiment of Canada’s locked-down colonial psychology. The Twentieth Century is a strange creation, though but there’s nothing unusual in the notion that Canadian blandness may be a form of camouflage. Anyone who has read history, or for that matter, watched a hockey game, knows that.

Mank is not, ultimately, a movie to embrace or believe but to study with a certain uneasy fascination.

On the surface it’s a solid and and absorbing character study. But thanks to Marder’s script and masterful direction, and Ahmed’s beautiful performance, there are increasingly deeper layers that take this movie to a deeper place.

Granted a rare degree of access to reporters, and later to the Minister of Health, Collective is a tribute to people who work together to uncover the truth, even if the immediate benefits are not obvious.

Let’s be clear: Vanguard is not a great film. Arguably, it’s one of the lesser successes in the Stanley Tong/Jackie Chan oeuvre. But even if Vanguard tilts the scales slightly lower than the duos earlier efforts (Vanguard is their ninth collaboration), it still doesn’t dip low enough to be a failure.

Freaky jumps to the top of a long line of genre films with one of the best horror/comedy concepts since Shaun of the Dead (2004).

There is much to admire and contemplate in Martin Eden, including Marinelli’s performance, the marvelous range of faces that appear onscreen, the disorienting time shifts and melancholic seascapes that form many backdrops. While the tension between Martin’s right-wing superman fantasies and working-class status is a rich field, it’s not obvious that there’s a coherent intellectual framework behind the collage of beautiful moments.

I get why people want to make movies about comedy that make you cry. But making you laugh first – I mean, really laugh – would make for a potent combination indeed.

I thoroughly enjoyed Kid Detective. It’s not the kind of picture that wins awards, which is too bad because nestled within a traditional tale of a detective in need of redemption, is a story surprisingly unique and humane.

Strong performances abound while sly and sometimes slapstick comedy lightens the more intense themes of betrayal and vengeance.

Awash in good intentions and weighed down by its grim premise, Come Away is a fantasy that fails to inspire, despite its star power (including David Oyelowo and Angelina Jolie) and occasionally clever flourishes.