Both Colm’s initial rejection of Padraic and Padraic’s final crazed reaction are not the stuff of realism or reason but of fairy tales and nightmares, yet Gleeson and Farrell make the film a delight.

Incendiary and furious, confident and courageous, the new thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline boasts not only the best title of the year so far but also the best score, cast and itchy, charged, electric directorial vision – all of it only ever-so-slightly goosed by a political softening that perhaps says more about contemporary American filmmaking than the storytellers working within it.

It is at times brash and thick-headed in its characters and politics, but it is engineered with such an electric ferocity – a beautiful marriage of high-performance technical expertise and gonzo aesthetic imagination – that it cannot help but knock you out.

This is the chef’s-kiss premise of the new dark comedy Dream Scenario, a thoroughly imaginative and mostly brilliant movie from Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli that is easily the best thing – real or otherwise – that Cage has starred in for ages.

Together is such a sharp blend of the hilarious and the terrifying that it busts your gut at the same time it has you gritting your teeth.

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.

In terms of understanding and confronting the harsh reality that so many Canadians endure today, Attila is remarkable, verging on essential, filmmaking.

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.

What deepens this film is Reijn’s empathy for Romy and for all women.

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

A Shock to the System is a beautiful, subtle satire of corporate America, providing a fresh slant on the visceral nastiness hovering beneath the glossy surface. The tension in the film is superb, swelling and receding with just the right degrees of intensity and the plot has enough unanticipated twists to provide thrills right until the end. [13 Oct 1990]

With Night Raiders, Goulet can confidently claim to be today’s most effective practitioner of Indigenous sci-fi, a subgenre in which time-tested cinematic thrills – speculative fiction, violence, a heightened sense of style – act as Trojan Horses for themes that audiences might otherwise ignore. Everyone wins.

The dramedy of manners is as rich and rewarding an experience as any of Petzold’s more ambitious films. Afire arrives like a calm wind, and leaves with everything and everyone perfectly scorched.

What Chew-Bose gets so right about these characters is their very performativity, building a lifestyle where everyone is legible to each other despite a desire to remain unknowable.

There is a joy watching interesting people change for the better while in a carefully crafted environment . . . and Payne knows just how to balance the sour and sweet.

The brutal, bloody and bare-chested revenge thriller is essentially one big, long war cry – a guttural, primal grunt of a movie that is all raging testosterone and incendiary machismo. And I loved nearly every minute of it.

Whether, in making Saint Omer, Diop has found the answers that she’s been searching for since 2016 remains an open question. But the truth of the film is that she has certainly compelled her audience to take a complicated, fraught, and harrowing journey of their own.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This extraordinary film, a stiletto-edged domestic melodrama that, at different times, evokes the work of Sam Peckinpah, Hal Ashby, John Cassavetes, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the other, unrelated Penn (Arthur, director of Bonnie and Clyde), is harrowingly honest in content yet lyrically elegiac in style. [21 Sep 1991]

It plays out like that rare piece of art capable of capturing the individual agency inherent in both resistance and compliance. An entire history of oppression isn’t needed here – that is beyond the scope of any one film and a waste of this one.

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.

It preserves the believe-in-yourself mythos of its predecessor, but smoothly addresses the problems baked into Zootopia’s overly sunny portrayal of local government. It doesn’t regurgitate old jokes, but builds on them, and even makes them funnier.

It’s quite a film Stephens has made.

Guts will be busted, and sides will be split. Heck, moviegoers might even learn to kiss and make up with comedies for good.

This is a film containing oceans of truth, centuries of longing and vast feelings of open-hearted tenderness.