Spielberg hooks us again with state-of-the-art craft, the director taps into powerful myths, both primal and pop, and makes them seem new. He allows grownups to return to childhood, but manages to catch fish in all generational waters.

Colette is a satisfyingly conventional biopic about a highly unconventional woman.

Peter Fonda's the bee's knees in the performance of his career.

For all that it tells a highly unusual story, Hidden Figures is a classic Hollywood feel-good movie. This has been a year of notable achievement for African-American performers and stories, from the surprising observations about masculinity in Moonlight to the gently told civil-rights saga of Loving. In that sober-sided company, Hidden Figures is a face-licking puppy dog of a film.

This film offers a child's perspective on the ravages and complexity of war and is also a convincing testament to the healing power of creative expression.

Riveting and courageous documentary.

Spike Lee's voluminous "When the Levees Broke" proved a thorough indictment, a compilation of tragic and appalling facts encyclopedically catalogued. By contrast, Trouble the Water (on Oscar's short-list in the best doc category) has a more personal focus and, although just as damning, manages to strike a more hopeful chord.

Let the Right One In is a children's film, but you wouldn't want your child to see it. It's a horror film, but the gruesome splatter is the least of its scares. And it's a love story, but the prepubescent kind where sex is a distant idea and loneliness a shared reality. A wicked trick, a cinematic treat, this is some Halloween offering.

If only Taking Lives had given Jolie a greater foil than Ethan Hawke -- a young Kevin Spacey or Jack Nicholson say -- the film might have been a B-movie classic.

Kick-Ass is some kind of twisted fun.

Aloners manages to delicately infuse what otherwise seems like a slice-of-life drama with shots of mystery that keep us invested in Yu Jin’s otherwise humdrum life.

The songs are clever; the actors dig in (especially Amy Adams and Julianne Moore as Connor and Evan’s moms, respectively). And Ben Platt’s voice is undeniable, a thing of wonder, a pure emotion-delivery system. You will be moved.

Although Von Trotta skips around Bergman’s filmography a bit haphazardly, and touches upon his romantic proclivities in a frustratingly brief manner, there’s little room to go wrong when a film is seemingly 50 per cent composed of Bergman’s own footage.

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

What is it that sets this film apart from assembly-line animation - all the bright baubles that are momentarily diverting and instantly forgotten (Rock-A-Doodle is a recent example)? The most obvious, and important, difference is the story line itself. FernGully has the deceptive simplicity of all good fables. [18 Apr 1992]

The movie wears its situational zaniness lightly and depends on the rapid-fire dialogue, charm and killer chemistry of its romantic duo. Just enjoy its loopy pleasures.

This broad farce about a group of soap-opera stars is played at a hysterical pitch, but there are some real chuckles amid the mayhem. [31 May 1991]

It's a cop movie that refuses to cop out in the usual way.

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.

The Measure of a Man is about one of those everyday people who lose their livelihood and are at risk of losing everything else, and on this small scale and rather ordinary canvas the human drama is keenly felt.

By multiplying the number of body-swaps, the script seems to have accidentally increased its plot padding, too, resulting in a mushy mess that is only fitfully charming. But when the film does work, it delivers the kind of thank-goodness-it’s-Friday success story that will warm the heart of every long-time Lindsay Lohan fan out there (we are legion).

Frankly, with so much to feast my dazzled eyes upon, I barely noticed that the plot was missing in action. And that's because the action itself is so pure.

The best thing the film does is to show us not only what that mind looks like, but how the creative process itself operates: messily, erratically, outside of most people's morality, but with a force and purposiveness that makes the machinations of the rest of us look irresolute by comparison.

Rather than another oppressive film about poverty, it's a revealing experiment in perspective.

Although the tale feels a bit slight – and yeah, I’m still aware we’re talking about a Bill & Ted movie – the affair is ultimately breezy, harmless fun.

It’s a hybrid drama/art-history essay about how looking at art recasts our experience of looking at the world.

Has a refreshingly different twist: What we have here is a "what if" comedy.

Quite consciously, Sprecher has dramatized that wry riff from Frank Zappa: "Life is high school with money." [12 Jun 1988, p.C3]

Starbuck is unapologetic genre filmmaking with a winning performance from its lead, Huard ( Bon Cop, Bad Cop), a shambling, likeable comedian who can flip, flop and fly off a diving board while maintaining his sex appeal.

The Hunting Ground’s film’s biggest journalistic “get” is the first on-camera interview with Erica Kinsman, the Florida State student who accused star quarterback Jameis Winston of drugging and raping her.

A highly abstract look at family, memory and regret, all filtered through the reality of daily life in the Métis Nation, Ste. Anne makes a big impression.

An unabashed crowd-pleaser.

Spike Lee's Crooklyn is a charming little movie. [14 May 1994]

Ultimately, though, it's the life-affirming sentiments of the documentary and not its backstage drama that may turn it into a popular hit, especially among boomers who can now legitimately fantasize about their impending retirements as musical stars.

Boisterous, cloying, simultaneously raunchy and innocent, hip and klutzy.

You don’t need to root for the best movies and you don’t want to root for the worst. But, occasionally, along comes a picture so nearly good that you dearly wish it were better. Welcome to She’s Out of My League, where the rooting interest is strong but so is the frustration.

This much we know: The photographer takes the picture. Less clear is the reverse process – what the picture takes back. And this, to a large and illuminating extent, is the subject of Wim Wenders’s The Salt of the Earth.

This is a mannered comedy, more stylized and theatrical, almost surreal at times, and less accommodating to his trademark brand of razor-sharp dialogue.

Everything you've come to expect, and cherish, in a Mike Leigh movie.

Just like a jazz tune, the film establishes an image, elaborates on it and brings it back to a more-or-less satisfying close.

The rare example of an understated, effectively told young-adult yarn that places emphasis on grounded characters, nuanced performances and stunning visuals over convolution and clichés, Canadian filmmaker Jason Stone’s At First Light boasts unpretentious but exciting surface-level charms.

Animation seems an odd means of addressing such a grim tragedy, but it gives Maitland the creative freedom to effectively tell a suspenseful, harrowing and moving story.

Highly entertaining.

Its rhythm is deliberate and unhurried, yet the film is rich with detail and with small, meaningful character revelations -- the running time of more than two hours feels just right.

The wildly ambitious but flawed biographical film about the English cellist Jacqueline du Pré.

What it doesn't have is the resonance of Cronenberg's "A History of Violence," a film that exploited the same genre even while transcending its limitations. Eastern Promises delivers, but not on that scale.

Although all these actors prove the shrewd casting choices of Bad Moms, it is Hahn who makes this unassuming summer blockbuster something close to stellar.

Waydowntown may not be perfect, but it is perfectly astute in the target it selects and in the questions it raises.

It's perfectly admirable, absolutely controlled, and fully understandable. [09 Oct 1992]

This omnibus of four tales is cheerful, campy, garish, ghoulish and gross. That means it's a success on its own unambitious B-movie terms. [05 May 1990]

Rohmer doesn't attempt to create any skepticism about Grace's perspective on her experiences; we are shown them as she saw them, and seeing is the real pleasure of The Lady and the Duke.

So you figure, what the hell, go with it and enjoy it for what it is, which is C-plus, but A-minus for effort and B-plus for honesty, and since you gave the book a D-minus, you decide you're going to tell your friends to skip the book and see the movie. Then you're left with only one nagging question as you walk out of the theatre into the bright lights of whatever big city you happen to be in: how is Pepsi going to feel about Michael J. Fox doing so much coke? [1 Apr 1988]

The film is poetically structured and Lear is a spry, emotionally involved participant in a lively bio-doc that succeeds eulogistically and contextually.

Aquarela’s soundtrack shifts from ambient post-rock to gnarly speed-metal to widescreen strings. The effect is a serenely apocalyptic warning: Climate change is a killer, with water as its indiscriminately lethal weapon.

Breakdown is a taut little thriller, the kind of well-crafted yarn that sets itself attainable goals and then meets them.

Comes as a pleasure. It's a comic drama set in a Chicago hair salon where the characters are engaging and the story has a bustling richness.

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.

Audaciously whacked-out and never less than entertaining, Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan mixes a backstage dance drama with a Freudian psychological thriller that's indebted to Roman Polanski's studies of shattered feminine psyches and David Cronenberg's movies about repressed bodies in rebellion.

Ballet 422 is narrative without the heavy structural imposition of much plot, and the small, captivating tensions that are framed by the film seem to parallel current innovations in contemporary ballet.

May be well-trod territory, but worth a walk down the movie aisle.

Fans will probably spend little time debating Star Trek's intellectual depths; there are none. But the human element triumphs over the technological in a resolution that is sentimental and highly satisfying. Star Trek is a visually boggling 23rd-Century fantasy. But peel away the budget and it's as comforting as an old-fashioned fable. [8 Dec. 1979]

Adults should get a kick out of Phantom Boy’s sly humour but the story and the action is for the kids.

At times, these singers’ versatility has kept them both regularly employed and deliberately anonymous.

If Blaze is not historically or psychologically reliable, it is a reliable good time. This is a meaningless movie, but there's no arguing with Ron Shelton's skills as a frothy screwball romantic: in Blaze, nobody gets burned. [14 Dec 1989]

Hall creates a fierce, uncompromising portrait of a woman who was prescient enough to see the dark places her culture was headed – the logical end game of our “if it bleeds, it leads” obsessions – but also damaged enough to succumb to them.

I don’t know how many subscribers actually interested in its mature story and top-level craft will be able to unearth it from their Holidate-choked queues, but here’s hoping some are willing to embark on the excavation.

All that's deliberate, but the lingering question is not: Is Melancholia a sly depiction of the end we deserve, or simply a lovely load of bombast? Be prepared to choose one or the other; unless there's an extra moon in tonight's sky, it can't be both.

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.

The movie doesn't have the heart of the book, but it does have a solid mechanical pump, strong enough at least to keep a robust story on two-hour life support.

The direction is dynamic, the cutting has verve. To confess, Rambo: First Blood Part II is unexpectedly taut and exciting, despite its sermonizing and predictable conclusion, assuming Stallone is accepted as that impossible creation, the one-man army. [23 May 1985]

An intense story about an all-powerful Chinese crime lord and his extended family. [26 Jan 1996]

For the conquering Sacha, no pack ice can prove too crushing nor hardened sailor too obdurate: It’s only the unusual setting and subtle animation that raise this adventure above the formulaic.

A painful documentary film, partly because of its subject, partly because of the troubling questions raised by the filmmaker's approach.

What's fun about Benson Lee's documentary Planet B-Boy isn't just the amazingly athletic displays of B-boys he puts on screen, but the film's sense of cultural discovery.

The film is a savage but funny, unsparing but oddly kindly, examination of a hell-bent-for-a-bigger-bank-account brand of behavior that was celebrated in the fifties, tolerated in the early sixties, rejected in the late sixties, tolerated again in the seventies, and is once again being celebrated in the eighties. [06 Mar 1987]

An innovative romantic comedy that is a mixture of British spice and American sugar.

Kureishi's sensibility is very much his own - he's more compassionate than Fassbinder (the portrayal of the white mistress is heart- wrenching) and far funnier. The zingers fly by so fast in My Beautiful Laundrette they almost go unnoticed. [28 Mar 1986, p.D1]

In the end, it’s the songs that provide the most eloquent and lasting testimony.

God Help the Girl is about aspirations and goals, musical or otherwise. Murdoch is working some things out here, gracefully on the whole. His own band has toggled between frail sincerity and pop mastery itself over the years. The former is more endearing and original, but it’s not for everyone. Which is how I might describe his film.

Like newfangled Western revisions of ramen itself – sprinkled with corn niblets and topped with melty hillocks of shredded Swiss cheese – Tampopo is an exercise in hybridity.

But like Tasya, Possessor succeeds in getting under your skin. If this is just a taste of what Brandon Cronenberg has in store for cinema, then long live the new flesh.

Whether or not this flies in the unforgiving fan world remains to be seen. But for those less intemperately invested, The Wolverine will come as a welcome and bracing surprise: An almost human-scaled superhero movie about a guy who goes to die in Japan and ends up beating his way back to life.

A fantastic holiday toy that, amazingly enough, doesn't require batteries.

Relentless, thorough and devastating.

There are zombie movies and then there are George Romero films.

This is a profoundly disturbing work. It should be essential viewing, particularly in high schools and universities, whence the next generation of policy makers will one day emerge, hopefully more enlightened than we have been.

The film is at its best in scenes set in Europe in the 1950s – the protracted genesis of "Mastering the Art" provides the drama here.

Certainly long and not always engaging and comes with a predictably basic ending, yet there are unexpected pleasures, moments of beauty and tiny pockets of joy to sustain you through the journey.

Wong Kar-Wai makes gifted use of a hand-held camera in Chungking Express; little seems to have been shot with anything else. That, linked with a clear taste for chiaroscuro imagery, makes for a fast-paced film that combines visual flair with story lines that are subtle enough to leave the most important things unspoken. [15 Mar 1996]

A masterly piece of documentary chicanery that kills George W. Bush without once pandering to his legions of ill-wishers.

The Canadian film "Atanarjuat" travelled back to the past to meet an ancient legend on its own ground and treated the tale realistically. Whale Rider whisks its legend up into the present, and then adds a touch of lyricism.

The producers of Hidden in Plain Sight decided that they couldn't deal with Sept. 11 in the film without losing focus on its principal subject. The result is that the film stands as a testimonial to the world as it existed before that date, a world very different from the one we now live in.

With his breathy, antic delivery, pouring out his heart in staccato bursts, Cusack puts a nice loop on the sensitive teen theme. For his is an upbeat, mature brand of sensitivity, the healthy kind that makes fine discriminations, not nasty judgments.

Both Page and Wood hand in tough yet delicate performances as, over the course of a year, adversity shapes their characters.

It’s a fine yarn spiced up with moments of hip hop, animation and pop culture references, all packaged nicely in something like the hot-pink doughnut boxes that the cruller maestro Ngoy supposedly invented.

Willie may not have a heart of gold. But he’s got a heart of bloody, barely thumping meat, same as the rest of us. And in this bitter season of unceasing, frostbitten darkness, it’s heart enough.

A Canadian spin on Thelma & Louise, the ambitious new drama Nika & Madison has all the fiery spirit of its made-in-Hollywood inspiration, if not quite the narrative dynamism and endless resources.

An efficient, cold-blooded sci-fi splatter movie that never makes the mistake of forgetting that on some level it is deeply ridiculous.