A “clever” film that doesn’t do anything clever at all beyond its Hitchcockian opening credits, Windfall is a disposable and eye-rolling endeavour that will have you re-evaluating your household streaming budget.

I do see one bright future for this film: the Deep Water drinking game, where the Bingo squares read “Melinda’s dress falls off,” “Vic clenches his jaw,” and “Naked breast.” Everyone will end up very, very drunk

The Outfit is not, strictly speaking, a movie about magic. Yet the gangland thriller pulls off a number of nifty tricks, with first-time director Graham Moore playing his hand with equal parts sleight and might.

The first 90 minutes is an audacious shock, petering out with an exceptionally messy and chaotic climax. But while Fresh takes obvious cues from Get Out and Promising Young Woman, it’s something unique, a balm to any singleton that promises to turn you off online dating and red meat forever.

To director Gilles de Maistre’s credit, a story about two astonishingly different animals – who still share a friendship – is rife with footage that puts almost every Dodo video to shame. Yet sadly, nearly all human interactions weigh it down to the point of creating a frustrating, dramatic and heavy-handed film.

If Darshi had truly embraced Mona’s messiness, it might have made for a more meaningful, even if tentative, conclusion.

After Yang is a tightly controlled yet tremendously alive film, powered by the beating heart that is Farrell’s performance.

It is fast-food fantasy, artificially flavoured and quickly devoured.

This is an energetic, heartfelt, poignant and often delightfully subversive story of one young girl’s path into adulthood, and embrace of her cultural heritage.

The sometimes mesmerizing, sometimes frustrating film proves that Stone, ever the professional provocateur, still has what it takes to rile an audience. Or at least make your head spin round so many times that you’ll be backward thankful for the migraine.

The dramatic set-up courtesy of director and co-writer Clint Bentley (whose family has a long history on the track) isn’t exactly novel, but the film’s acute sense of place and specificity of profession lends Jockey an authenticity that is irresistible.

Grimy, slick and genuinely frightening in true horror-movie fashion, Reeves’ new film reassembles the best elements of Batman lore into one overwhelming and epic-length package. Almost everything here works – not despite our current overload of Batman culture, but because of it.

The film manages to showcase Scarborough’s beauty, even when things look bleak.

Wright has created a truly rich and vibrant world, full of dramatic sets. Most importantly, the film is genuinely fun, with enough of an emotional pull to justify some of its bigger swings.

Originally titled Eight for Silver, the film from British writer-director Sean Ellis is brooding, uneasy and fog-filled, with an apprehensive soundscape. Werewolf mythology mixes with biblical allusions and ideas on payments for the sins of elders.

The beauty of a film such as Dog is that it is one of many, omnipresent in its ordinariness and commonplace in its undertaking – a brain holiday, if you will. It’s another notch in the filmography of a crowd-pleasing A-lister, another run-of-the-mill movie to emote with when we can’t feel much else.

In a franchise rife with missteps, this sequel does not dishonour its source. Hats off (and heads off) to the film’s creators.

There is something perversely impressive about a movie that can make globe-trotting adventure seem so relentlessly boring.

Most impressively, Lemercier manages to make Dion/Aline’s not-terribly-dramatic hardships – she has trouble conceiving with her husband, she misses her family while on the road, she feels exhausted by her Las Vegas schedule – feel relatable and compelling. Part of that is Lemercier’s full-throttle commitment to the bit.

Quotation forthcoming.

Soderbergh, once again acting as his own cinematographer and editor, pulls out nearly every cinematic trick he has to elevate Koepp’s material, but the film too often tip-toes when it should run: Every narrative and character beat feels muted, as if the tech-thriller is being apologetic for its own place within the genre.

Parallel Mothers’ twin purposes merge into something just shy of profound. It is a moment, and movie, that just might save your soul, too.

More prickly than David Suchet and more mischievous than Peter Ustinov, Branagh plays Poirot as a tremendously fun nuisance, embracing the character’s cleverer-than-thou righteousness with glee. Whenever Branagh puts himself at the centre of the action, Death on the Nile clicks well enough to justify the whole act of big-budget copy-pasting.

Much as I have enjoyed the actor’s embrace of scuzzy revenge-thrillers, he may have hit the point of diminishing returns. Put it this way: Blacklight is a movie that Bruce Willis would deem below his standards.

While Robinson’s lecture is thought-provoking and his living tour of that same history is illuminating, the Kunstlers don’t add much in terms of directorial vision. Robinson is an apt orator and tour guide, but the literal translation of his lecture to screen lacks life and suffers from the inherent banality that comes with watching a recording of someone – no matter how charismatic – speaking to a live audience we are not part of.

I can sympathize with the skeptics who take one look at Jackass’s cultural durability and shake their heads in disgust over the state of the world. But, as ever, there is a subversive method to Knoxville’s madness: an obsessive, and impressive, drive to tease the forever-blurry lines between comedy and pain.

The 86-year-old director could stand to at least polish the material, which in Rifkin’s Festival is so well-worn that it threatens to disintegrate into nothingness.

Farhadi wrings two magnificently raw performances from both actors, providing A Hero with its one and only honest truth.

Split into two parts and narrated by Koberidze himself, What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? is a true magic act, intimate and massive at the same time.

There is much to appreciate about Definition, Please, including its indie aesthetic. It’s a welcome addition in redefining the diasporic experience.

Each of the three short stories making up Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s new omnibus film Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy could stand on its own as a work of top-tier drama. Yet when stitched together, with the themes of coincidence and kindness being the only real connective tissue, the narratives spin themselves into something just shy of cinematic profundity.

At this point in his career, Clooney is more than a seasoned director, yet The Tender Bar lacks any artistic vision. We’re left with the type of movie that you snooze through on a Sunday afternoon – or in a high-school English class.

The 355 is enjoyable, go-lady nonsense that eventually exhausts itself with its ambitions to be more. It’s like watching a woman have a furious argument with herself about a man who doesn’t love her enough, only it’s about spy movies.

American Underdog is a film so disjointed, so boring and so deeply uninspiring that it is difficult to root for anyone, or even think of Warner as a genuine underdog.

There is a specific tone to films scheduled for a holiday release – in short, they’re corny. And while that’s not always a bad thing, this year’s yuletide flick, A Journal for Jordan, feels particularly dated and often times emotionally cloying.

In The Lost Daughter, Gyllenhaal isn’t interested in judgment, only truth. Every decision she makes is exactly the right one. Her three lead actresses have never been better, and casting Buckley as the young Colman is particularly inspired. It doesn’t matter that they don’t look alike – they share a crucial essence.

I’m fascinated by these women who cover dangerous ground – treading centuries of patriarchy and caste prejudice with measure and grace.

Given the number of songs worked into the script, there’s a music video quality to the film. If you’re looking for some lighthearted distraction from the worries of the world right now, however, give Sing 2 a shot.

A weird, hilarious, romantic, messy, violent and upsetting manic spectacle, Lana Wachowski’s sequel-reboot-remake encapsulates every emotion of this supremely messed up year.

There is as much wit as there is wretchedness, the director having no trouble finding the human comedy scratching beneath the title tragedy.

With some deft trimming, Being the Ricardos could be a fine HBO Sunday night movie “event,” as they used to be (or still are?) called. But as it is, this is less a cinematic thing and more an elaborate joke without a kicker. As Lucille Ball might say: waaaaaaaah.

A comedy, a drama, a romance, a memory, Licorice Pizza is the director’s warmest and fuzziest creation.

A tonally wild and historically, um, loose First World War thriller, The King’s Man arrives as a head-scratching mess of bewildering ambition and outrageous style.

There is a sincerity here that sticks.

What I can say, without angering (almost) anyone, is that Spider-Man: No Way Home is both a gigantic act of franchise-mad hubris, and a ridiculous amount of fun.

Some moviegoers will be repelled – there was only a smattering of light applause during the film’s Toronto premiere, which was filled with audiences who likely leapt to their feet at the end of The Shape of Water – but it is as effective a nightmare as Del Toro has ever conjured.

From the cult Oklahoma director Mickey Reece, the horror film Agnes is funny – both funny ha-ha (in sly ways) and funny-peculiar all around.

Conceived as a climate-change metaphor, but given an oily new layer thanks to the pandemic, the film’s conceit could be sharply effective, in careful hands. But McKay knows only of punching down with meaty fists, so the result is a messy, smarmy assault.

There is something magical in Sorrentino’s tender, flawed familial portrait that risks social taboos. I’d rather watch something beautiful and dumb vying for real emotional truth than the woke-est and most sanitized cinema, which only wants my approval. The Hand of God is a sprawling, gorgeous mess, but one you can’t look away from – and it might just break your heart.

The final shot is one of the most poignant images I’ve ever seen.

Here is a glorious and genuine movie-movie: a vivid, sweeping, beautiful piece of top-tier pop-art. You will leave the theatre swooning, in love with the biggest kind of big picture.

More an extreme theatre-school exercise than a substantive act of filmmaking, the new drama Wolf is one wild, rabid mess.

While Benedetta the woman may have been touched by Heaven or cursed from Hell or neither, Benedetta the film is undoubtedly a miracle.

With a plethora of archival material and strong interviews, this documentary argues that the exuberant Julia Child was a protofeminist who invented the profession of TV chef as she introduced the notion that food should taste good to the land of the Jell-O salad.

Drawn, taut and nearly silent, Bullock convincingly creates a shell of wariness and self-protection, and then gradually lets it crack.

House of Gucci is a movie about a family at war with itself – yet Scott’s film is engaged in its own distracting skirmishes, with battles messily waged over tone, genre and performance.

There is almost zero chance that this film escapes the festival or art-house circuit to become a mainstream cultural artifact – its sexually explicit material all but guarantees it – but Jude’s work is an almost profound act of high-wire lampoonery that deserves to be seen and debated far and wide.

Drive My Car is a beautiful and mellow ride, although you’ll need to stretch your legs after it ends.

Come for Phoenix, stay for Phoenix and maybe also Norman and Hoffman, the latter of whom bounces off of both her co-stars with a nervy charm. But everything else? C’mon.

Bruised is a well-directed debut: Berry understands how to make a competent sports drama complete with all the emotional training montages and passion that viewers expect. Plot-wise, though, Bruised doesn’t offer more than the genre has delivered time and time again, which is a shame because the film contains some remarkable performances.

Once you surrender yourself to what King Richard is doing, and what it’s not doing, that’s okay. It’s especially easy to shut up and go along with whatever rosy view the Williams family wishes to preserve because Smith is here the whole time, helping sell the story.

In terms of musical-theatre bona fides and genuine, soaring emotion, Tick, Tick … Boom! drowns out its contemporaries all the way up to the rafters.

This is a movie that is one giant Easter Egg, cracked and rotten and sulphurous in its stink.

Encanto ends up being overwrought rather than enchanting.

With one foot in lighthearted romantic comedy and another in also-light political commentary, Gaza Mon Amour never takes a wrong step, exactly, but also feels ambivalent about its final destination. And if that tortured metaphor doesn’t work for you, then the essence of the film, directed by twin brothers Tarzan and Arab Nasser, might feel just as wobbly.

The film is not a masterpiece, but a memory box. Comforting, inviting, and one you won’t mind keeping close.

The filmmakers have leapt over franchise concerns to somehow deliver a movie that engages kids and entertainingly puzzles adults.

When Beans works, it resonates deeply. And when it doesn’t, it’s not a tragedy – just evidence of a filmmaker finding what works for her voice and vision, and what might work better for an anticipated follow-up.

A bold, raw, bordering-on-manic mashup of Eyes Wide Shut, Ivans XTC and HBO’s Entourage, the new thriller-cum-satire The Beta Test is here to test your limits.

The story is bland, the action incoherent, the surprises detestably nonsensical, the humour never rising above the level of a half-smirk. And for a movie that gathers the world’s most perfectly sculpted denizens, everything is bafflingly sexless. If Red Notice is the future of the big and shiny movie, then we are now in the era of the neutered blockbuster.

The film’s heart may be in the right place, but a melodramatic score, pastoral cinematography and deeply sentimental character arcs make for an altogether mediocre drama, not an urgent thriller.

As a filmmaker, Tailfeathers doesn’t pretend to be an objective observer. She’s interested in community-based, trauma-informed storytelling. She allows her subjects to be in control. The result is scenes of extraordinary honesty and openness from people whose voices we rarely hear, but cry out to be listened to.

Some might find the characters written with heavy cynicism. I’d rather see their desperate pursuits as poignant and comically human, even if the film’s tone is dark. These are lonely people seeking love. It’s not that complicated.

Sapochnik (Game of Thrones) wisely puts Hanks at the centre of nearly every scene, letting the actor’s ceaseless charisma carry audiences through the End Times. We attach ourselves to Finch partly because of the character, but also because we’re rooting for Hanks to escape the island, oops, I mean the apocalypse.

Eternals is shockingly, depressingly lifeless.

There is a delicate touch deployed here, and not only with Julie, but those surrounding her. Depression, Koppleman seems to be saying, is not a one-person battle. It can swallow everyone in a victim’s orbit.

Buoyed by its urgent yet playful references to the real-life history of the Black West, Netflix’s newest genre outing The Harder They Fall is an energetic and poppy crowd-pleaser of a film made even better by its punky indifference toward staid conventions of period filmmaking.

If you squint hard and focus most of your mental energy on folding your laundry, yeah, Army of Thieves is kinda cool. But it’s also kinda bland, kinda formulaic, and kinda sad. If this is the sort of instantly franchisable content that the streaming giant thinks its audiences want or need, then we’re truly doomed.

Russell, Plemons and especially the young Thomas excel at highlighting the emotional and spiritual fissures that can result from living in an easy-to-ignore, easier-to-disdain community. But there is a ultimately a hollow sickness to Antlers – a film intended to provoke gasps and gags, but at the same time so superficially produced that it chokes on its own ambitions.

The story is captivating, the characters are magnificently fleshed out, and the emotional stakes are entirely, utterly believable.

The bond between Barney and Ron is clearly the reason this movie works.

Whimsically beautiful, as if Anderson discovered a long-lost Antoine de Saint-Exupéry picture book.

Denis Villeneuve’s new Dune is a breathtaking film worthy of the visionary Herbert’s rich, sophisticated source material.

Kranz can’t quite figure out a way to make his characters’ collective misery cinematically interesting. This is a serious movie, but not a searing one.

With his film, Bogosian remembers a springboard venue in the evolution of the uniquely American artforms of jazz and comedy.

There is something entertaining, or maybe just enjoyably puzzling, about what Gordon Green and McBride think a Michael Myers movie could or ought to be. If it ain’t dead, don’t kill it.

By the time Marguerite’s chapter concludes, laying bare the wrenching source of the story’s tensions, The Last Duel will have you in the palm of its calloused hand, whether you like it or not. It is as ambitious and memorable and impressively messy a storytelling experiment as major-studio films come these days.

The Addams Family 2 allowed me a couple of nostalgic chuckles, while the kids were entertained by the antics. It wasn’t entirely a snooze, but I can’t say it was particularly memorable for either of us.

More Tusk than, say, the goat who runs wild in The Witch. I won’t make the obvious joke and say it’s baaad. But its sheep thrills are mutton to write home about, either.

The combination of less-experienced actors with a deadpan script is hit-and-miss. The naturalistic performances give the feeling of real high-school students, but at times that vibe veers more toward high-school drama production.

Whereas the directors’ last project, the Oscar-winning free-climbing doc Free Solo, chronicled an open-air kind of anxiety, The Rescue is a claustrophobic exercise in tension, expertly assembled for maximum emotional impact.

The coolest-looking movie of the year is surprisingly lame.

The result is an indecisive and shapeless drama that never seems confident in the characters or situations it has created.

Hardy’s use-it-or-lose-it charm very nearly drowns out the dreadfulness all around him, but ultimately it’s not enough to sustain life. And given that the actor has a “story by” credit here, he deserves more blame than praise.

It is both eager to distinguish itself from the series’ shaggiest shenanigans but also happy to embrace them whenever it feels things threaten to get too heavy. The result is an overlong and conceptually loopy thing – but when it works, which let’s say is, oh, I dunno, 83 per cent of the time, it offers one helluva view … to kill!

French director Julia Ducournau, however, delivers a mindblower that keeps you guessing for all of the film’s excellent 108 minutes. She shocks; she entertains; she wickedly defies expectations.

Leong’s documentary realism is powerful – if tough on an audience – but his fiction skills are erratic in a film that relies too heavily on Sister Tse’s narration, much repeated flashbacks and heavy exposition of the characters’ motivations.

Best known for her award-winning shorts, Sallam extends her storytelling here to great effect, making it clear she is a talent to watch.