Not once does anyone question the war or their involvement in it. We can't depend on big answers from filmmakers, but to not ask big questions seems like a dereliction of duty.

There is no harm in allowing Clooney to further stretch his directorial muscles – "Good Night, and Good Luck" is not bad – but there ought to be a law against wasting such talents as Matt Damon, Julianne Moore and poor ol' Oscar Isaac in this hollow exercise.

It’s a by-the-numbers profile, complete with the requisite visit to his childhood home, but, partway through, it becomes a rather piercing portrait of a man constantly doubting himself – while he studied under Carl Sagan, he lacks a PhD and is therefore, in the eyes of his detractors, not a real scientist – and struggling with his celebrity.

Floating in between the dramatic and the campy, Novitiate doesn’t tell a straightforward story of love and sacrifice, of faith and its crises. Betts’s film is ritualistic and enthralling, with a complex feminism woven into its cloth, and it’s something of a blessing.

Serkis achieves a careful balance with a film that tastefully covers some delicate territory (their sex life; his right to die), avoids the maudlin and injects some surprising if not entirely successful comedy into the mix.

It pains that this documentary was so tedious, since the New York Public Library is the crown jewel of public institutions, deserving of every accolade. If you want to spend three hours finding out what the library has to offer, save yourself the price of a movie ticket and head down to your local branch.

The film may not shed any new light on Hamilton, but the footage of him riding 100-foot-high waves is nothing short of awesome.

Like the film's punishingly gory set pieces, the storytelling itself is meaty.

These are not easy people to understand, nor to watch unravel, but they are urgent, complicated, captivating characters.

It's a movie intent on telling us the hotshots were heroes, without sufficiently dramatizing either their professional decisions or their private lives.

An awkward, needlessly dark, atrocious mess whose visual tics courtesy of director Tomas Alfredson amount to, basically, snow. So. Much. Snow. Shockingly, a fetish for the white stuff in no way overcomes any clunky narrative obstacles here – and they are legion.

It’s a sort of bad-luck situation most documentarians secretly dream of, but to their credit, For Ahkeem’s co-directors don’t exploit the situation, merely letting their cameras continue to capture Daje’s ever-dire situation.

Films about single film scenes, however, represent unexplored territory. Which is why 78/52 is such an enticing prospect – a deep dive into one of the most influential moments in cinema history: the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.

The comedy is clever; the study of family dynamics is sharper still. Sandler's performance is superb, his character limping through the movie psychically as well as physically.

We all love Winnie the Pooh; that is why we are interested in the story of the real Christopher Robin. To learn that public affection all but destroyed his childhood makes an audience uncomfortably complicit in this cuddle-free origin story of the world's most famous teddy bear.

Baker mostly crafts a tiny adventure of absorbing wonder.

The intrigue is high and the action is furious, but a sort of meta subplot is also at work: Sextagenerian action-film hero Chan against onetime 007er Brosnan.

It doesn't quite succeed, in spite of a playful, self-consciously unreliable narrative that mixes flashbacks and fantasy solutions to the case.

It doesn't actually explain much, throwing a bunch of names and seemingly arbitrary incidents at the screen in the hope that everyone watching the film happened to work at the Washington Post back in the day.

There's a spunky charm to the Scream-meets-Groundhog Day thing, and the film is well-built. The problem is its chipper message.

Because like the Wonder Woman mythos itself, there's almost too much ground to cover in just a single installment.

Human Flow ventures further into pure documentary than Ai's previous work in that field but it's still an art film, with a circular rhythm to its scenes, lingering imagery and a prolonged running time of 140 minutes.

In a film where two leads are alone on screen for almost the full running time, that is the true catastrophe. When at last Alex and Ben lock eyes, we should not be looking around them to see what the dog is up to.

It wants so much to cover everything, and do so in a way that is so laudatory of Salinger's genius and purity that it never really delves into anything interesting or complex. It merely skims.

Making his directorial debut is actor John Carroll Lynch (no relation to David Lynch). This first-timer quirks things up occasionally with surreal scenes of a nightmare and an on-the-nose allegory (Lucky walking toward an exit sign and standing at an abyss).

Loving Vincent is gorgeous. It's a film of immersive beauty.

The new film is the rare sequel that truly merits its existence, updating and expanding the themes of the 1982 original to bring them from the 20th century into the 21st. Yes, Blade Runner 2049 is one hard-working and deep-thinking replicant.

Though it might initially look like a wacky foodie adventure show, Bugs has a conscience.

Frears has attempted to fashion a contemporary message of diversity and inclusion delivered by a tolerant and culturally inquisitive Queen in opposition to her hide-bound and racist courtiers, but in the end that theme is undercut by the film's own Eurocentric realities.

Woodshock is a sensuous, visual tone poem of human consciousness. It works even when the languid pace, disorienting shifts and Theresa's elastic perception of time stretch a little too thin.

There's an aspirational pleasure in seeing Cruise, now in his mid-50s, jump through these hoops. He knows we prefer him when he shades his easy charm with self-doubt, and Barry has a pleasingly sweaty desperation.

In the film's finest moments, as a generous Iranian host explains traditional Farsi poetry, the animation and the themes mingle and explode in a riot of cross-cultural colour as the stringy Canadian cartoon meets gorgeously rendered illustrations – and personifications – of Persian traditions.

Beach Rats stands on its own merits as one of the boldest, most original films of the year. It does that incredible thing of making you miss it before it's even over, like fireworks that turn to smoke before you're ready.

The result is an irreverent, kinetic presentation with snappy dialogue and a hammered-home message that is graspable to even those with cup-shaped hands: One's true powers are internal, not external devices.

A wild, reckless, gleefully immoral work of pop nihilism.

Rat Film is most compelling when it moves out of the history of Baltimore's civic-planning and pest-control schemes and settles on its denizens, both human and rodent.

The film is surprisingly timely: Today's fierce, revitalized misogyny makes the 1970s male chauvinism droll and quaint in comparison.

Realism will only take you so far, and Stronger eventually opts for a conventional tale of rekindled romance and resurgent resilience.

The plot finds loopholes as it rambles ahead semi-plausibly to its conclusion. Audiences will no doubt applaud this entertaining film, but the case is under appeal.

This movie is not just badly executed, it's also stupid.

Mother! is an unparalleled achievement, entirely unprecedented and unexpected in this era of studio filmmaking.

Entertaining but manipulative.

Of course, this is social satire and some bits are very funny...but the message is too obvious and the humour too gentle for the whole affair not to feel like so much white male whining.

One part relationship comedy, one part existential human drama, one part environmental warning and, regrettably, one part white-saviour myth, Alexander Payne’s Downsizing is a beautiful, confounding creation.

Home Again is a tight, witty script from a first-time director with a long list of hits ahead of her – and, of course, the golden age of Hollywood dynasties lighting her way.

From its haunting opening in Derry's gently flooded streets to its nightmarish finale in the forsaken sewers underneath, this new version of It stands as a solid execution of King's modus operandi.

Tulip Fever is a film a-swirl in what-ifs and what-could-have-beens. The years-long anticipation of its arrival has only heightened the stakes for what is – and what maybe always would have been – a harmless historical romp through some flowers.

The formula is a bit too neat and the dialogue is often painfully expository, but there are some fine performances – especially from Gillian Anderson as the earnest Lady Mountbatten – and plenty of compelling drama.

Doesn't quite reach the heights of the original film, which found surprising pathos in Doug's tale of sweet good guy to brutal goon. But it delivers on nearly every other scale, including standout performances from returning players Scott, Alison Pill and Liev Schreiber, as well as some bits of comic gold courtesy of series rookies Wyatt Russell, T.J. Miller and Jason Jones.

Director Marc Webb proved he could do youthful love and heartbreak as well as anyone in his debut feature (500) Days of Summer. Here, working with a script by Allan Loeb (The Space Between Us, Collateral Beauty), he puts all the pieces together, but can't make the magic happen.

Bushwick is an unpolished work, but there's an adrenalin charge, sure thing. It's close combat and it's closer than most Americans might wish to believe.

Trueba, 62, has reassembled a lot of the old cast, most of whom play characters trying to recapture old magic. Make of that what you will. It's fun.

Patti Cake$ for the most part avoids feeling like a song you've heard before. It's too big-hearted and genuine not to love.

Xia's humble sifu lends more gravitas than this dreck deserves, and a rousing, improbable finale in which Lee and Man take on the mob together offers some great fight choreography, but it's all too little, too late.

Tense, immersive and excellently assaulting, Good Time is hella time.

Much to an audience's discomfort, Ingrid's desperation to bond with the phony Taylor soon breaks the bounds of sanity – until the film rebukes her warped world view with a highly moral ending. The critique is clever but the limit is the one so common in satire: it's hard to care about the fate of a character this exaggerated.

The elegant, condensed saga covers a dozen years, starting in 1933. You don't need to be an Einstein to guess where the story is heading. An evocative, slow-blooming feature is a study on the flash horrors of war and the gradual death of dreams.

The film hits a truly unexpected high when it introduces Daniel Craig's bank-vault expert Joe Bang, an imprisoned force of comic fury whose unhinged performance elevates Logan Lucky above any notions of genre shtick. Good luck keeping that one locked up.

This is Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote territory. How are we to reconcile such images with righteous vengeance wreaked on a genocidal war criminal? Not even a busload of popes could make moral sense of this one.

The news behind the understated drama Menashe is that it’s a rare thing, a film performed in Yiddish, covertly shot in Brooklyn’s guarded Hasidic community.

The mentors and the mothers are just as important as the dance routines. Step is a story about relationships. And how even the most challenging family ties shape us into the people we are destined to become.

Sheridan knows how to craft a tidy whodunit – and a late-act switch in perspective works better than it should – but he eventually leans toward sermonizing instead of storytelling, a well-intentioned move that edges the story just this close to melodrama.

Over all, the food porn was played down, the series is getting a little road-weary and who knows what happens with these guys next. If they’re thinking about heading to France, a horny Frenchman has some good advice: Paris can wait.

Inventive and vibrant action sequences boasting exceptional 3-D effects and inspired voice casting (including Jackie Chan as a warrior mouse and Peter Stormare as a deranged exterminator) help to elevate this to something better than vaporous.

The movie, which banks on the popularity of the rest of the series rather than concern itself with details such as motive, doesn’t add up to much. Annabelle: Creation is a series of slowly opened doors and close-ups of a truly ugly doll whose makeup must have been done in the dark by a deranged artist similarly possessed.

The fault in the film lies as much with Cretton’s script, which he co-wrote with Andrew Lanham, as it does with his direction.

Dad’s suspected infidelity is the tension in a film that hammers its nineties setting so relentlessly it could be called Sex, Lies and Videotape (and Floppy Disks and Payphones).

An oddball charmer of a motion picture about nostalgia, the pursuit of artistic passion and a coming of age bizarrely delayed and uniquely fulfilled. The bear itself is but a bit player.

The Dark Tower is King’s ultimate roller coaster – twisting and stomach-clenching and terrifying but, above all, fun. If only this version was as thrilling a ride.

And that’s how Detroit unfolds: like a horror film. The film flattens its historical personages and its particularities of time-and-place into excruciating exploitation – somewhere between a Straw Dogs-style “survive the night” home invasion narrative, Milgram experiment moral problem play and racial torture porn.

This film is about giving credit where previously neglected credit is due. “You wouldn’t let us talk about it before,” Robertson says at the end of the doc. “But now I’m going to talk about it real loud.” No volume is too much at this point.

The brazenness of her actions and opacity of her emotions suggest a tragic heroine in the grand tradition – the novel is the basis for the Shostakovich opera of the same title – but the film lacks the propulsive drive to make her fate moving.

Atomic Blonde is bold, brazen and frequently bonkers. But it’s also killer.

However you feel about commercial dog sledding, Fern Levitt’s Sled Dogs is bound to rankle – either because of the material itself or the filmmaker’s take.

As entertainment, the film is pedantic and over-dramatic, with the string section working overtime on the soundtrack.

If you’ve ever loved anyone or anything, A Ghost Story is going to break your heart. It is devastating – and devastatingly good.

There is no raunchier, more raucous, filthy and truly crass movie out this summer than Girls Trip – and I loved every minute of it.

Technically awe-inspiring, narratively inventive and thematically complex, Dunkirk reinvigorates its genre with a war movie that is both harrowing and smart.

This is a movie that will make you scream – in confusion, in delight, in anger, in ecstasy. Sometimes all at once.

A masterpiece. Admittedly, callow viewers may have difficulty getting past the cumulously bewigged Jean-Pierre Léaud’s uncanny resemblance to Phil Spector, circa 2008.

The narrative is tightly written, fast-paced and delivered with a scorching, emotional intensity by the actors. The timeline – which moves from the dank cellars of wartime Poland, to concert halls in 1970s Berlin and Sephi’s staid music academy in Jerusalem, is smoothly interwoven. Still, the drama seems overwrought at times, even cliché.

Well conceived, deftly comic and finely acted (particularly Evelin Hagoel as the gutsy wives’ ringleader), The Women’s Balcony overlooks nothing when it comes to addressing faith, segregation and sexism in a peppery, entertaining way.

No matter how obvious the set-up – what if men and women of the cloth were … rude and sexy??? – the cast gives every scene just enough of a deadpan spin to sell it, at least for the first hour. After the final 30 minutes come and go, including a frantic detour into witchcraft, you may seek out a convent of your own.

Cross’s light-handed (but too long) film doesn’t romanticize or overcomprehend, choosing instead to concentrate on life’s non-choices.

Reeves keeps the action moving steadily, never letting the film’s 140 minutes feel even slightly bloated, and surrounds Caesar with a visually stunning, compassionately conceived group of side characters.

An interrogation session involving a psychotropic drug is just too weird for words and some will find the film sentimental and too naked in its Academy baiting. That said, 13 Minutes works like clockwork as an artful (if not terribly ambitious) take on a grotesque era.

Still, the thing is almost watchable until a ridiculous reveal spoils whatever chances this film had at succeeding.

Taksler’s film is a testament to the quick slide from democracy to tyranny and a reminder to watch closely what political leaders do with the free press.

The film is dialogue-heavy, easily imaginable as a two-hander for the stage, but watching the ice-thawing process between the two enemies is less compelling on screen.

As far as movies-as-line-items go, Homecoming is better than it has any right to be. The story is slight but spry, thanks partly to the jettisoning of origin story but also due to its blessedly small stakes.

Chaplin is a mediocre movie that you can't take your eyes off. Your wandering mind is telling you one thing: This is a standard check-list biography, the kind of glossy whitewash that treats a man's accomplishments like so many vegetables from the produce aisle - toss 'em in, tick 'em off, and move on. But those riveted eyes are saying something else entirely - they're watching Robert Downey, Jr. with rapt attention, marvelling at his every move, pondering his every gesture.

TERRIFIC cast, imaginative direction - Patriot Games is such an enjoyable film that you keep hoping it will go the extra mile, that it will transcend the action-genre and progress from an intelligently made picture to an intelligently themed picture, That it doesn't - not quite, anyway - is mildly disappointing but easily forgiven; there's a lot to be grateful for here. [9 June 1992]

An immersive, compact and unpolished documentary from the Kurdish-born, Oslo-based filmmaker Zaradasht Ahmed.

Here’s a layered, nuanced film whose only goal is to tell a story of real people and real heartache, not to act as a crass marketing plank for a series of hopeful sequels and spinoffs (hi and bye, Baywatch and CHIPS).

A splashy ending does something to redeem the action before setting up the characters for a potential sequel but who needs more Dru?

The Beguiled is Coppola’s bloodiest, most visceral movie to date, and it is also one of her best.

Even as he cuts confusingly between talking heads and time periods, Kastner elides key details that might have given viewers a more complex portrait of both the setting and his anti-hero’s role in the drama.

WHEN you go to see a film by those wild and crazy filmmakers who brought you Airplane!, Police Squad!, The Naked Gun and The Naked Gun 2, you pretty much know what you're going to get: puns visual and spoken, sight gags and pratfalls, parodies of other films and mockery of film conventions. It's just a question of how well they do it this time, and in Hot Shots!, which opens today in theatres across Canada, the answer is: not bad, not bad at all. The plot is the usual silly trifle, but the actors are good and the production is slick.[31 July 1991]