Gomes is a director poised between ironic narrative and experimentalism pure and simple, and his films (often described as strange, lyrical and hypnotizing) divide audiences into the visionaries and the unconvinced.

A gripping drama -- almost a mystery -- about ordinary people from Japanese master Kore-eda Hirokazu connects to viewers, despite an ambiguous ending that feels overly complex and arty.

A little more narrative rigour and psychological depth would have been welcome here. Messy lives do not always require messy films. That said, Tomasz Naumiuk’s whirling, kinetic camerawork has a freewheeling rock’n’roll energy that suits the material.

Álvaro Gago´s first feature is the moving and humorous portrait of a hardworking yet almost powerless woman, in which the myth of matriarchy in Galicia is debunked.

The film comes alive when Mamacruz joins a sex therapy workshop. We are introduced to a delicious assortment of older women who bring joy and laughter into her life, along with a moving dose of heartbreak.

Vermiglio is a film that proceeds carefully with few narrative missteps, until the ending sends Lucia on a highly improbable journey across Italy that upsets the tale’s strong sense of geographical unity. One wishes for a more emotional and convincing ending.

There are dazzling, funny, heartbreaking sequences throughout this examination of the music legend and his complicated personal life, but they are undercut by aspects that might have benefited from more attention or deeper thought.

This Colombian comedy contains enough dark humor to lighten the situation, irony to offer subtle social criticism, and a sense of self-confidence to challenge the stereotypes of a protagonist who goes from cursed poet to Pygmalion in the ´hood.

Hoppers tells an effective story with wit and ingenuity, not to mention distinctive character design for every corner of the animal kingdom, from a kind-hearted shark (Vanessa Bayer) to a bratty caterpillar (Dave Franco).

With so many potential crises underfoot, Saturday Night manages to pass the Apollo 13 sniff-test of historical dramas: we know everything’s going to come out all right, but the film nonetheless generates enough suspense to make us think that it might not.

This sly and clever reverse reworking of romantic drama tropes warmly suggests that there can be as much hope and connection to be found in splitting up as there is in coming together.

Send Help becomes its own unique, mischievous, horrifying creation, thanks to director Sam Raimi and his singular gift for eliciting laughter that turns into screaming (and vice versa).

Blending autobiographical elements with heartfelt homages to Iranian cinema, writer-director Matthew Rankin's charmingly surreal comic fable reimagines Canada as a Farsi-speaking dreamland.

Rian Johnson may remain the unchallenged modern master of the whodunnit, but with A Haunting in Venice, Branagh shows more affinity for the genre than ever before. Not since Dead Again has the director so successfully applied his flair for showmanship to the requirements of the murder mystery.

Maria is most truly involved with its subject when it abandons any impulse to scale her down, to reduce a titan to life-size, and opts instead to remember the singer as grandiose, allowing her memory — and Jolie’s perfectly suited performance of that memory — to fill the biggest screen.

The Equalizer 3 is a remarkably stylish entry in the series, elevating a barebones story with Washington’s gravitas and Richardson’s uncanny cinematography. All things being equal(ized), it’s a relatively satisfying thriller.

The film doesn’t stop to give the six characters time for major exposition and backstory, which would only get in the way of the film’s B-movie sensibility, accentuating scalpel-edge thrills above all else.

The use of first-time and non-professional actors gives the film an authenticity and immediacy that more seasoned performers may not have delivered.

Ullmann Tøndel deftly uses the claustrophobic setting to gradually unveil the layers of psychological chaos lurking beneath many respectable façades, particularly in the tightly constructed first half of the film, where the verbal and the visual coexist in a riveting harmony.

Director Dallas Jenkins comes from the world of faith-based media, and that world is not generally known for delicacy in its messaging, so it counts as a Christmas miracle that Best Christmas Pageant generally avoids heavy-handed sermonizing.

The challenge is to balance the mayhem with the holly-jolly, to blow stuff up while also allowing troubled characters to find the nice in themselves and in each other, and Red One fulfills both of those wish-list items with a cheeky finesse.

Sometimes silly but always propulsive, this franchise entry dares to give us an empathy-generating Predator, even if Elle Fanning’s robot steals the show.

Kinds of Kindness is lighter on jokes and visual brio than many of the director’s previous films, with an overlong runtime that weakens the twist-heavy tension and punchy rhythm of having three back-to-back stories. Despite a solid-gold cast and some deliciously bizarre fairy-tale plots, it still plays more like a fun personal stop-gap project than a major career step.

Nosferatu offers all the atmospherics and the creeping dread that it should, but this version remains locked-in and static when it might have dared to explore new ground. Like its antagonist, it’s simultaneously living and dead.

Mumenthaler’s screenplay works best when it lives and breathes in the ambiguities of Lina’s malaise and dissatisfaction, and how she balances it with her responsibilities as an entrepreneur, wife, and devoted mother. Splitting the difference between its more lyrical touches with more straightforward storytelling saps some of the power out of the film.

Urban has never been funnier, and he makes Johnny’s character arc from cynical Hollywood burnout to a champion capable of self-sacrifice a believable one. Not that many people are buying to tickets to Mortal Kombat II for the character arcs, granted, but Urban’s performance is a delightfully unexpected pleasure in a movie that winds up being full of them.

Despite a few bumpy moments, actor-director Noémie Merlant's gory feminist horror comedy paints a rowdy, richly imagined portrait of three ladies on fire.

Even if Philippe Garrell repeats himself at times, he still has a lot to say. Even some new ways to say it.