Where Mufasa distinguishes itself is Jenkins’s eye for balancing emotion with action.

It is a remarkably beautiful portrait of agony, anchored by Craig’s remarkably understated performance. But it’s also a film at odds with itself.

September 5 splices together its thoroughly researched dramatic recreations with the actual programming ABC aired, an initially nifty back and forth that quickly wears thin.

This film doesn’t flinch from violence, but it finds hope in a people’s patient refusal to surrender who they are.

Clearly, Oppenheimer is an ambitious and courageous filmmaker – his chilling documentaries alone are enough to ensure his place in the pantheon. But so much of The End prioritizes purpose over execution, with the result stretched out over interminable lengths.

The big, disappointment here are the flat musical numbers that bide time between adventures and fail to sink Maui’s hook in us.

By focusing his lens on the personality of the diva, as opposed to her artistry, Larrain doesn’t truly give us insight into what made Maria into “La Callas.” We get glimpses of the tragedies and scandals in her life that inspired and informed her powerful – and often divisive – vocals. But we don’t understand the artistry behind the voice.

Though the stately pace can be frustrating, its anti-war stance ultimately feels modern and urgent.

For anyone wondering why women don’t come forward to report sexual assault, Black Box Diaries offers a glimpse into the many indignities women can face when reporting the crime, and the amount of personal resolve needed to follow through.

Oddly enough, the movie is both sumptuous and somewhat soulless.

It’s funny, sad and beautifully acted, and, like the best indie fare, it offers no pat conclusions.

For all its built-in cynicism and tired tropes, Red One is not as insufferable as you’d expect. At the least you can count on Evans and Johnson committing to the bit and selling all the broad gags they can, which should be enough to win over the elves in your family.

Mescal and Pascal are both fine; though they often seem too overwhelmed by the tired plot machinations to really make an impression beyond how fine they both look in Roman garb.

While it may depict events of the past, its relevance to the present couldn’t be more striking.

In lieu of sensationalizing the persecution of these young women, Small Things Like These compellingly casts its gaze onto the complicity of the community and the social architectures which uphold abuse.

Perhaps Bird is best understood as a film about self-consciousness or perhaps it is just a self-conscious film, ironing out the flaws of these well-meaning characters to create a fairy tale or apologue.

Diop’s latest documentary film is a poetic witnessing of the contradictions, mediations and politics of cultural restitution.

There are melancholic bits later in the film that work – and reward anyone who sticks by the whimsical “time flies” structure.

It’s a shallow and soulless outing that has no faith in the intelligence of its audience, squanders the considerable skills of its lead actresses, and, in its shallow and inert politics, is pathologically audacious in the worst sense.

Clint Eastwood is still making movies at 94. That’s amazing. What’s more shocking is that Juror #2 is not just pretty good but arguably the Unforgiven director’s most satisfying work in well over a decade.

Venom: The Last Dance remains steadfast in the franchise’s commitment to storytelling that, like a pot of water that never quite hits boiling point, is neither so-bad-it’s-good nor so bad it’s raucously entertaining, even if only unintentionally so.

Berger’s film is a sometimes zippy, frequently ridiculous drama.

Madison never loses grip on the character for a second. Together with Baker, the pair craft a whirlwind of a character, provocative and powerful and so very easy to imagine as the object of anyone’s obsession.

As the two women clash in the film’s final moments, Tjahjanto executes a truly glorious extravaganza of choreographed carnage, as impressive as it is overwhelming.

Pugh’s fierceness and Garfield’s ready access to emotion make them a good match; the dialogue is witty and it’s a pleasure just to listen to them talk. Most importantly, everyone involved is serious about and committed to and yes, in love with the story.

You will leave the film as hungry for Simpson’s food as you will be full from his emotional journey.

An experiment in prestige quirk, Maddin and the Johnsons’ film isn’t as interested in satirizing the complex and frustrating nature of geopolitics as they are in using the material to unload a heaping load of gags ranging from the scatological to the philosophical.

[Kendrick] delivers a taut thriller that’s also a sharp critique of the casual misogyny women face.

Unlike its subject, The Apprentice largely sticks to documented facts. Most of the cheating, lies, greed, vanity and misogyny on display are hardly new or shocking, and rather mild compared to what’s to come.

It’s perfect popcorn fare: the story of a creative genius against the playfulness of a Lego landscape mixed with a boppy tune.

As Sara and Julien bide their time in the barn, escaping into their imagination, Forster keeps himself interested by turning the movie into an ode to cinema.

Why so serious, Phillips seems to be saying, in this follow-up. Relax, it’s all entertainment. The challenge, however, is that Joker: Folie à Deux is more ponderous rather than acting as a riposte. It has its moments of movie magic, but they largely get overshadowed by the weight of this redemption endeavour.

There is an intensity and commitment in Campbell’s work that mesmerizes, even frightens, with its sheer boldness.

Frankie Freako is designed to melt your brain. The only question is whether you might welcome such cerebral liquefaction or not.

This is a movie that so badly wants to be as cool as its source material that it trips over itself, in backward Chevy Chase style, into something so old-fashioned and dully familiar that no amount of retro sheen can boost its cool bona fides.

Leave it to a robot to break our puny human hearts.

Kuras’s film, especially the paint-by-numbers script credited to a trio of writers, seems to oddly object to such a strong spirit, boxing the character into the most formulaic of narratives.

Megalopolis might be Coppola’s decades-in-the-making passion project, an epic of ambition and imagination, but it is also a magnificent mess of a masterpiece, as irredeemably silly as it is sincerely sublime.

Ultimately the film struggles to balance its various commitments, with a screenplay that never seems sure of whether it wants to be a pure comedy, a lore-packed adventure or a peppy children’s film that shuffles kids straight to the toy aisle.

Once the half-clever set-up is established by Watts – what happens when two lone wolves must work together? – the film is content to merely coast on the charms of its stars.

While its celebration of all things fleshly, protrusive, and gloriously ectoplasmic may not be for those viewers too faint of heart, Fargeat’s no-holds-barred, wholly beyond your wildest expectations approach with The Substance will leave genre fans kicking their feet up in glee.

As much a deeply affectionate love letter to eighties-era horror-comedies as it is a synapse-stretching exercise in defiant maximalism, Joseph Kahn’s new film, Ick, is a true ride designed to hold, thrill, kiss and kill you.

Where the horror of 2022′s Speak No Evil feels deeply, almost inescapably cruel in its final moments, Watkins’s film takes a relatively conventional approach, relying more on slasher tropes than producing a deep-seated sense of unease.

Saulnier has returned with a tremendous, high-impact blast of a movie, making any delayed gratification all the more satisfying.

Michael Keaton’s go-for-broke performance is such a possessed work of splatter comedy that he almost proves right the producers who have been advocating for this nostalgia-play cash grab for decades.

The film’s sense of history is hasty, its characterizations crude. And by combining a twinkly-eyed tone with some of the goofiest performances in recent memory, the whole thing constantly threatens to reveal itself as a stealth parody flick.

Incoherent and cheap, with its aesthetic sensibilities seemingly cribbed from an elevator pitch of “John Wick goes goth,” Sanders’s version of The Crow is a truly ugly thing to endure.

Fitzgerald gives a strong performance, especially considering the lack of depth her character is afforded, but her impact is drowned out by the film’s truly rancid attempt at upending the gendered inferences that Mollner has staged her character within.

Though this intricate scenario neatly develops upon its director’s catalogue, Close Your Eyes still feels singular and prodigious – a film that works just as well for those unfamiliar with Erice, moving with the viewer to unveil its secrets.

The film is a fun and unsettling showcase for Kravitz, who proves herself to be an intentional and provocative filmmaker, putting jarring edits, precise framing and a sensational ensemble cast led by Naomi Ackie, Channing Tatum, Adria Arjona and Geena Davis to great use.

Although sometimes dizzying and disorienting, the visual language of Between the Temples is relentlessly alive, with the camera never considering-slash-allowing for the possibility that its audiences’ eyes might wander.

Denied a second act, Shane is recognized with a heartfelt film that celebrates an undersung icon who lived her authentic self, sparkled on her own terms and defied the squares.

Gloriously, every actor and department head is making exactly the same movie, one that looks, feels and sounds simultaneously spare and lush, realistic and fable-like.

Álvarez eventually gets there, with the third act of Romulus impressively nauseating. But otherwise, the filmmaker isn’t developing this cinematic universe so much as he is stunting its growth.

Roth likely deserves much of the blame, though the film is so relentlessly middling that it feels curiously divorced from his typically extreme sensibilities.

Certainly, it’s fun to see Schafer, best known for her work on HBO’s teenage-wasteland series Euphoria, match wits with Stevens, including a gnarly sequence of knife play. But neither actor can figure out where their director is going with all this madness or where he might want to be at any given moment, tonally and thematically. It’s enough to drive anybody, even the king of kook Stevens – well, you know.

The new comedy Kneecap is a riotous delight that will have even the most staid audiences ready to flip the bird.

A testament to the insidiousness of systemic abuse, Kidnapped illuminates the tragedy of unchecked power exploited by men. It upholds the importance of separating church and state, serving as a painful reminder that authoritarianism is a dangerous road soaked with the tears of its countless victims.

A wonderfully uncomfortable, deeply hilarious coming-of-age movie, the new film Didi plays like an extended and surprisingly welcome visit to the filmmaker’s childhood bedroom.

The screenplay feels like the feverish byproduct of an all-nighter pulled off the very first day back from a writers' strike.

The sequel to Twister – which pluralizes the title, while following the same beats as its predecessor – is serviceable. But it also misses what made director Jan de Bont’s disaster spectacle such chaotic fun to begin with.

An extraordinarily French story is flattened into conventional Euro-pudding nothingness. There is little here to surprise, less to even expect and still savour. The performers sometimes, but not always, outwit their material.

Touch, adapted from Olafur Johann Olafsson’s novel, is handsome, sentimental and restrained (admirably, in parts). But it also leaves a lot to be desired – yes, a movie about yearning left me yearning – chiefly when it comes to the central romance, which is presented as more ornamental than passionate.

The film spins off into several tonally unsteady directions.

This is an imaginatively conceived, impressively scaled, and surprisingly funny ride. Just pay as little attention to the promotional scare tactics as possible.

Ultimately, Yintah wants to leave you with the sourest of tastes in your mouth. Mission accomplished, in a way.

Writer-director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s feature is built on a number of sly narrative and stylistic tricks that gradually cement its status as a new action classic full of nasty surprises.

The sequel isn’t a masterpiece of children’s entertainment by any stretch, but it is sufficiently bizarre and thrilling enough to turn the head of any kid, parent or – judging by my curiously populated press screening the other night – fully grown and childless adult around and around till the room resembles a Looney Tune.

As compared to both X and Pearl, West’s bag of cinema tricks in MaXXXine reaches a level of engagement that feels both compulsive and abridged.

One can lodge the complaint that Last Summer is redundant, though Breillat’s aims differ significantly from el-Toukhy’s. The trouble lies instead with the inconsistency and loathsomeness of these aims.

Not much of Sam and Eric’s journey is all that compelling, or even makes sense . . . but at least they’re nudged along by Sam’s emotional support cat, easily the cutest MVP (Most Valuable Pet) since Messi the dog from last year’s Anatomy of a Fall.

If enough people end up watching the masterful and soul-shaking Green Border – and absolutely everyone should, as soon as possible – the collective conscience of the world could very well shift, even just a bit. And sometimes a little bit is all we need to effect urgent change.

The worst side effect of Hall’s thin and sizzle-free script is that it encourages Johnson and Penn to go overboard in a bid to compensate.

A truly torturous experience for almost everyone involved – up to and including the starry cast of Lanthimos regulars, who must now surely realize they have been duped by a master cinematic con artist – the film is an aggressively juvenile and tedious dissection of the notion of free will.

A tender comedy at heart, Thelma is a delightful romp that focuses on the different textures of the human experience and the poignant (and sometimes very silly) moments that come with it.

At its worst, the film is an homage to Dion’s presented indomitability. At its best, it serves as a compelling portrait of a powerhouse performer’s lifeblood love of stage and audience.

It asks similar questions about millennial New York life as Girls. And its naturalism is straight out of mumblecore. Yet Arnow carves out her own style. But what is truly groundbreaking is her depiction of BDSM.

It is an anthropological drama that never cracks its subjects open – an approach that might work on paper, but feels beset by engine troubles on-screen.

Perhaps now more than ever, the Pixar folks seem to be stuck inside their corporate heads instead of listening to their beating hearts.

So much of its script is frustratingly trite, its perspective on grief never rising above grade-school emotions, with thin characters forced to carry its surface-level themes.

Mostly I love how Pankiw drops important pieces of information in almost casual ways, because she knows that’s how people, especially funny people, talk.

Shyamalan 2.0 is shaping up to be an elegant filmmaker whose work could use more torque. Images like Fanning’s golden locks disappearing into the cold grey fog or reflections layered upon reflections during a climactic stand off caught my eye, if not my breath.

A tonally bizarre and dramatically inert feature that is so detached from baseline human emotion it might as well be the fever dream of Artificial Intelligence, the new Canadian-Israeli film Longing is the most frustrating cinematic experience of the season.

Simply but smoothly animated, and featuring no dialogue whatsoever, director Pablo Berger’s film is a charming fable that rides the line between sentimentality and schmaltz just right.

The plot’s believability is stretched to the point of emaciation, even for this series. The comedy, which arrives on cue every other scene, is pained. And the action is now a fully cribbed and inferior sizzle reel of Bay’s greatest hits. . . Still, there are a few flashes of fun.

An energetic coming-of-age film that pairs the tonalities of a rugged sports flick with the depth of a well-scripted drama, Backspot is a promising debut from Waterson that will leave audiences cheering.

The film is a slight but sweet ode to a particular flavour of Britannia that will leave its target audience in sentimental shambles.

This is an ambitious, methodical, immersive, and admirably devious experiment in conjuring atmosphere and testing gag reflexes. It will quicken your pulse, tighten your throat and – for those on its extremely particular wavelength – bust your gut.

Starring De Niro and Bobby Cannavale as two generations of “whaddya talking about!?” Noo Yawkers and directed by sometimes actor Tony Goldwyn, so much of Ezra feels like a “favour” film – a good excuse for a well-liked director to persuade friends to hang out with each other for a few weeks of shooting, without delivering something worthy of their collected talents.

The film is a level-headed look at artists who promoted joy but lost their own.

This is action cinema filtered through the thousand pile-on details of a serialized Dickens novel, grand and seismic. And when the action sequences do arrive, they are glorious.

Linklater knows exactly the power that his leading man commands, but instead of lazily exploiting it off the top, the director reverse-engineers a charm offensive so earth-shaking that it registers on the Richter scale.

This new Garfield outing is a true feat in shoulder-shrugging nothingness.

While it’s not as much of a slow-burn of psychological torture as Bertino’s original, Chapter 1 sticks to the course and doesn’t let up on its lead characters once.

It is at once a singular piece of pop-cult art, delivered with the brash confidence of a filmmaker who has either been told “no” too many times or not enough, and a film that could not exist without the contributions of Cronenberg and a dozen of his contemporaries and acolytes (including Donnie Darko’s Richard Kelly), their midnight visions co-opted by Schoenbrun into one slickly nostalgic neon-lit nightmare.

The Burning Season offers a fresh and heart-wrenching take on the collisions of love, betrayal and personal tragedy.

The tenderest thing Taylor-Johnson does in Back to Black is remind us how very young Winehouse was when she wowed the world.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a fun enough distraction.