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.