Foxtrot is an admirably precise yet dreamlike film, probing the trap in which contemporary Israel finds itself. It is deliberately designed, superbly filmed and affectingly acted by Lior Ashkenazi and Sarah Adler as the stricken Feldmanns.

This pretty movie feels convenient rather than meaningful.

There are some small-time twists in this small-time thriller and, naturally, McHattie does solid work as one of the more slippery characters Saxon encounters in his quest for justice, but DiMarco just can't sustain enough tension or drama to power the film through a plodding 105 minutes.

The film is a technical wonder, especially the sound design. There's also an excellent incongruity at work: Happy faces drawn in blood, viscous killers in playful masks and cheesy eighties music as the soundtrack to savagery.

If someone somehow convinced somebody somewhere to turn the screenplay for Gringo into a real-life motion picture with real-deal actors, then, hell, it could happen to anyone.

There is a Hitchcockian creepiness in Finley's mad-as-hell teen drama.

Only a few of the characters are well-developed enough to sustain the movie's interest, while the rest speak in obscure, poetic dialogue that repeats the central thesis ad nauseam.

With its claustrophobic unity of time and place, the disintegrating party feels highly theatrical and, of various classic screen adaptations from the stage, this wonderfully performed black-and-white film recalls in particular Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf." Yet also, Potter's comic dissection of the London intelligentsia's personal and political angst is completely of the moment.

In the role, Lawrence dominates. Red Sparrow is stylish and tense enough, but the writing is run-of-the-mill and the film lacks the soul of something like the Nikita movies. The watchability comes from Lawrence.

The only thing stopping Roth's film from being an irredeemable zero-star disaster is its introduction of a dramatic principle that I'm nicknaming Chekhov's Gun Cabinet – but that's hardly justice for such a recklessly criminal cinematic act as Death Wish.

Don't Talk to Irene feels rote and re-hashed, despite the strength of its central character and the ungainly charm of McLeod's performance. Watching Mills' film, one wishes it were as weird and wonderful as Irene herself. It's almost as if the writer/director doesn't realize how rare his own creation is.

This is a raw, intense movie circling on despair, hopelessness and inevitable dead ends. It is about the dark. But in plumbing the pitch black, Werewolf offers the distinct hope of a brighter future – at least, a brighter future for Canadian cinema.

Heartbreaking, compelling and terrifying, The Cured is a quick way to re-examine our capacity for forgiveness, tolerance and above all, fear.

The overall results are unusually wholesome – and satisfyingly funny. Game Night is the kind of harmless comedy you rarely see these days, as happily entertaining as a good game of Pictionary.

There is no grand narrative or point to be hammered home; instead, Olshefski delivers a subtle, sincere and honest portrait of barely making ends meet in modern America.

By this point in his career, star Nicolas Cage does crazy like no one else, but his descent into insanity here – not too far from how his character acts at the beginning of the film, really – can't elevate Taylor's juvenile take on adulthood.

Yet for all that the director's unflinching vision, the cast's excellent performances and Mikhail Krichman's unerring cinematography impress themselves upon the viewer, there is something out of balance in Loveless.

What we have here is an honestly simplified film for teen audiences that gently breaks barriers and embraces diversity, LGBTQ sexuality and pure romantic love. It's nothing close to a great film, but neither is it something young audiences see every day.

Yet the most striking, shaking moment in Annihilation has nothing to do with Area X or the perverted flora and fauna within it. Rather, it's when the film's spare score is interrupted by the folksy strains of Crosby, Stills & Nash's Helplessly Hoping.

While the #MeToo movement is doing much to expose systemic sexism and harassment against women, In Between highlights how difficult it will be to make substantive change in the world's most patriarchal societies.

The cast of aliens, led by Matsuda, has great fun playing the humans-in-training, but it's Nagasawa's defeated young wife who really stands out as the performance that elevates the film.

There's a quaintness about the film, from the animation style to the wholesome jokes – there's not much in the way of asides for the adults in the audience – that is refreshing for this pop-culture-obsessed animation era.

Handsome, profoundly austere and vaguely traumatizing, Black Hollow Cage has no fun at all with the time-travel trope. But, then, one man's kitchen knife to the neck is another man's hot tub or Michael J. Fox.

Black Panther fights constantly and bitterly against the familiar constraints of Disney's superhero industrial complex. At every turn, the expectations of the genre, the bland sameness that breeds cinematic comfort for the millions who line up to fill Marvel's coffers, are met by the director with resistance and creative intensity.

Ultimately, the film becomes a love letter to Hall, and that's what saves it. She's such a beautiful, prickly, intelligent, singular presence that you root for Anna, no matter how many questionable choices she and the film make.

For all its tense entertainment, Fake Blood's production values and acting levels aren't high – getting what you pay for being just another ice-pick-to-the-eye reality faced by indie filmmakers.

So, romance-novel boilerplate that sounded clichéd on the page becomes outright laughable as it's transferred to the screen.

Entanglement suffers from an unsureness in tone, somewhere between quirky and sombre.

In the script Lelio co-wrote with Gonzalo Maza, the lover's family may be conveniently ghastly and the authorities who investigate the death puzzlingly erratic (as the film flirts unsuccessfully with mystery), but a quietly honest centre never wavers.

The movie is absolutely not your grandparents' beloved book. But like Peter himself, you learn to grow with this update. Because this is a new generation's version of Peter Rabbit: one that honours the original while still being itself.

The 15:17 To Paris, like "Sully," "American Sniper" and (to a lesser extent) "Gran Torino" before it, combines such conceptions of late style: both harmonious and intransigent, resolute and difficult, defined by lively contradiction.

Uziel's screenplay has some clever geopolitical ideas – though it's hard to tell how many of those came before or after it was Cloververse-ified via a tour through Abrams's magical mystery factory – but its twists feel routine, its narrative spine limp and its conclusion especially rushed.

When I walked out of the movie theatre screening Padmaavat, I was shaking in rage.

It's a decidedly odd, down-beat story and yet, if the sexes were reversed, we would think nothing of a young woman swapping the role of lover for that of nurse when her much-older partner fell ill.

By the time The Insult's verdict seems near, you may find yourself as wrapped up in the inherent tensions and entertainment of a traditional legal thriller as Doueiri is. Give the man his Oscar already. He's earned it.

Badsville's an ugly place, but the acting/directing chops in this indie film brighten it considerably.

The low-budget effort from Vancouver writer-director Scooter Corkle is earnest and methodical, with a tone-setting murkiness to it.

While thoughtfully done, the entertainment value of this sombre scare fiesta isn’t high. It’s about life’s paths taken and the rituals (and fears) we submit to.

Even Clarkson's work on the intriguingly ambiguous Paige is starting to wear thin this time out; the combination of flat characters, a young cast and a director whose strengths lie elsewhere means that the overall level of performance is painfully low.

Sparks fly and so do private helicopters, but will true love prevail? Are you paying attention?

Mainly the film is a tightly focused and tightly filmed neo-noir, as the script, which Akin co-wrote with Hark Bohm, neatly picks off parents and friends to leave Katja isolated enough to make her desperate actions believable.

A wistfulness hangs over the proceedings: Viewers can't help but realize that, just after the final scene, which takes place on the early morning of Donald Trump's inauguration, the new president's administration began to feverishly reverse all the delicate, passionate work we had just observed.

The effect of watching these viral videos as a "movie" feels genuinely singular – suspending the viewer somewhere between reality and documentary, between the dash-mounted long takes of Abbas Kiarostami's "10" and the combustible vehicular carnage of Michael Bay's "The Island," between cinema and something else.

Gudegast, a first-time director who wrote the script to Den of Thieves (and who has probably watched Michael Mann's "Heat" more than once) attempts to comment on humanity's complexities. But all he does with his soulless, hollow characters is make a solid case that men are violent sleazes.

Like Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven," the underlying tension involves the protagonist's journey to regain his humanity. Hostiles, a hotbed of hostility.

That is what makes the movie highly watchable – along with Hemsworth's affable presence, backed by the always reliable Shannon and with Michael Pena and Trevante Rhodes as two of the soldiers, providing wry commentary from the sidelines.

This Paddington, so sweetly voiced by Ben Whishaw, is just ursine enough on the one hand and just teddy enough on the other to reproduce the charm of the original.

With his debut feature Dim the Fluorescents, Toronto filmmaker Daniel Warth has created an astonishing calling card – an earnest and entertaining celebration of process and performance, not to mention a tremendous showcase for two homegrown actors on the cusp of greatness.

The debut doc is an ambitious attempt to get to the root of a tangled family tree, but the directors' close relationship to Izak (he's their uncle) means they sometimes pay so much attention to the genealogical minutiae that a viewer checks in and out to clear her head.

Haneke's ensemble is uniformly excellent – the film is packed with intriguing and provocative encounters between its various oppositional characters – and the actors succeed in the difficult task of making these unpleasant people engaging enough that we stick with them throughout a film that the director successfully balances on a knife edge between satire and drama until its final (hilarious) conclusion.

The man likes a scrap. But he's never had quite as ludicrous, and ludicrously entertaining, a fight as in The Commuter, which is essentially Liam Neeson versus a train.

Perhaps this is Anderson's version of a parlour game – walk into Phantom Thread expecting a portrait of a testy male genius as portrayed by another testy male genius, but be gifted with a stealth drama about the hidden lives of the women who suffer in his shadow.

After successfully telling a complex story, Spielberg inevitably overdramatizes its [spoiler omitted] ending.

Despite rare glimmers of triumph – even hope – and classic underdog moments of jubilation (it does, occasionally, adopt the tone of a great sports film), I, Tonya is exhausting to watch.

There is too much dead weight to this particular game – and there's an extremely queasy undertone of Sorkin-penned daddy issues that lace Molly's motivations.

The comedy is limp; a sentimental, existential ending is cut-rate and unearned.

It's an empty, moronic, pandering and utterly forgettable, low-rent "Moulin Rouge" that pays curious tribute to Barnum by similarly hailing its audience as slack-jawed rubes, slobbering for whatever passes as entertainment. It's godawful.

In the original Jumanji, young characters are caught inside a board game come to life; in the new sequel, it's a video game they adventure within – a rigid construct of one-note humour, special-effect shenanigans, relentless quest-based action and sledge-hammered messaging.

Without Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World would be an absolute bore.

Ferdinand is not going to be the next "Frozen" or "Lion King" or even the fourth or fifth "Ice Age" movie, but there's a reason the story is still being told some 81 years after it was first published. Its lessons – be true to yourself, go your own way, and don't let society tell you what you should or shouldn't be – are just as applicable today as they were then. And that's no pile of bull.

Ridley, full of charming spunk playing a skeptical rebel recruit in The Force Awakens, is the biggest disappointment here. She is less engaging now that she is committed to the fight and plays most of the later action on a single note of earnest desperation; Johnson's script leaves her little else.

It is at times extremely uncomfortable, but captivating and engaging all the same.

The story is simply told: the rise, fall and comeback of a lesbian trailblazer and soul-crushed singer. Chavela the person is more fascinating than Chavela the film – a tequila-sunrise love letter to an unknown icon.

It's a rare feat for a director whose films, from their muted humour and dated-seeming mise-en-scène, to their use of flat, unexpressive, Bressonian close-ups of characters, have always seemed weirdly outside of time.

Although Wonder Wheel begins with a few of the witty ruptures of the fourth wall that have often enlivened Allen's work, it soon descends into a bleak melodrama that is little more than warmed-over Tennessee Williams.

As much as The Shape of Water's disparate parts shouldn't work – and as much as its "originality" is sourced from the thousands of other fables del Toro has consumed over his lifetime – it does, in the end.

Wright's Darkest Hour is filled with many lush examples of the pathetic fallacy, which doesn't totally disguise the awkward truth that this is a film mainly about meetings.

The story is told cleverly with two overlapping parts. The acting by newcomer Reid Asselstine and theatre player Darrel Gamotin is easy and natural.

The childish manner in which Glowicki plays impulsive, irresponsible Ronnie makes it hard to develop sympathy or understanding toward the character. It's a problem in an otherwise gentle diversion of a film.

Somewhat incredibly, the buildings come to life: Kaspar Astrup Schröder puts Ingels's remarkable communication skills to work through a series of sketches and chats, and then shows us the finished products.

Jamie M. Dagg's new film, Sweet Virginia, is a lot to take in – too much, really. It's a revenge movie, a crime thriller, a gentle and low-key romance, and a dusty drama about the pains of leaving the past behind. It doesn't succeed at being any one of those things, too muddled is the script and too unsteady is the direction.

It is hilarious and heartbreaking all at once, especially when factoring in Dave Franco's performance, a beautiful game of shadows in which he's forced to play the more respected artist against his older, more famous brother.

It simultaneously operates as a symbol of the tension between private life and patriotic duty that is at the core of the man's disagreement with the military.

Director Bharat Nalluri sets a pace as punishing as the title character's – the film is mainly a quick romp – even if he does indulge in some unnecessarily Dickensian melodrama along the way.

Never taken seriously in her lifetime – and manipulated by powerful men like studio mogul Louis B. Mayer (sound familiar?) – Lamar never got the recognition she deserved for inventing what became a cornerstone of the wireless technology used today in WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS.

As Miguel unravels the secret behind his family's ban on music and its relationship with de la Cruz, a story emerges that is both newly inventive in the way it deploys the skeletons and absolutely classic in the way it connects remembrance with immortality. Turns out these talking skeletons have a lot to say.

Perhaps this multilingual, almost-pre-AIDS idyll does not stretch credulity – the family is surely based on Aciman’s own internationalist clan – but it can try the patience.

Owen Wilson cries, but audiences will more likely roll their eyeballs at writer-director Stephen Chbosky's outrageous emotional manipulations.

Exploring themes such as control, connection, isolation, becoming and the effects of environment on a person's sense of self, Thelma poses more questions than it answers – suggesting Trier isn't in search of what can be known. Instead, Thelma, similar to the director's other films, portrays uncertainty as the ultimate suspense.

It is an entertainingly cheesy narrative, but overly comfortable for someone such as Miike, whose gonzo talents seem somehow muted here.

Clumsy, derivative, mildly amusing and ultimately forgettable.

No, there's no shortage of interesting characters with intriguing powers on display here, but there's frustratingly little space to tell their individual stories and, biggest problem of all, they lack a worthy opponent.

Branagh finally concludes that business with another determined tapping on Poirot's own moral compass but, as his suspects face him, lined up at a trestle table across the entrance to a railway tunnel, the situation, his revelations and theirs, all feel flat and forced. Both suspense and emotion are curiously absent.

There is no rookie-film handicap required in grading the excellence on display. There are no fireworks or twists or unnecessary frills here, nor should there be – this is simply perfect filmmaking from a voice that demands to be heard. The fall movie season is saved. Thank you, Greta Gerwig.

On shifting ground, it is McDormand's fine performance that holds steady here, her wit and her fury eliciting more admiration than pity for the unrelenting Mildred. McDonagh does not always conquer this heartland, but McDormand already owns it.

Director Morgen is a bit messy with his timeline and his relentless insect photography really bugged me. But the biggest nit to pick is with Philip Glass's intrusive, crazily grandiose score.

Based on the true-life graphic novel by John Backderf (who went to high school with Dahmer), the film ponders whether Dahmer was born a sick puppy or if his environment made him that way. It's a conundrum.

It should not exist, and the fact that it does is a slap in the face of anyone suckered into buying a ticket.

The Square turns from a sharp art-world satire into something egregiously bonkers, a collision of blunt comic beats and heavy-handed social commentary that's more messy than profound.

Reiner is no Oliver Stone, but he does stir things up by presenting Bobby Kennedy in the villain's role as a serious jerk and crafty underminer.

The Divine Order plays up the fun of feminist empowerment with its anthems (You Don't Own Me, Respect), and lightens the tension with a modern-woman makeover for Nora.

God's Own Country is writer-director Francis Lee's debut and comparisons to Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain" are inevitable. But where Brokeback was sweeping Wyoming vistas and homophobic backlash, this enigmatic little film says it all in razor-sharp closeups and minimal words.

Co-directors Antonio Santini and Dan Sickles tell the story gracefully, doling out Dina's tragic backstory in excellent increments.

The dialogue is often mundane...and the actors' lurching delivery of these lines, often flattened, sometimes speechifying, sometimes rushed, but never naturalistic, forces the viewer to question the point of the action as Lanthimos crafts a dark satire about responsibility, justice and retribution.

Thor films have traditionally landed with a heavy foot. Thank goodness Waititi taught the big guy how to dance.

Yes, it's up to the older generation to provide the comedy here, and they do it fairly consistently, with the delicious Christine Baranski carrying most of the movie as Amy's mom.

The picture sings and inspires.