Reel Encounters

Many Christmas films have revolved around a recurring concept: “What if Santa Claus were real?”

British screenwriter Kelly Marcel makes her directorial debut with “Venom: The Last Dance”, the third film in the “Venom” series in six years.

JT Mollner’s thriller “Strange Darling” feels shorter than 96 minutes. It breezes through its six chapters (and epilogue) with an impish excitement, teasingly daring audiences to guess what new twist might be waiting in store.

Brad Anderson’s “The Silent Hour” adds a mild twist to a familiar genre tale and delivers a surprisingly efficient jolt of energy to the month in new releases.

“The Substance”, a French (allegedly) satirical body-horror film with an American cast from director/writer/co-producer Coralie Fargeat wears its allegorical underpinnings overtly.

Lawrence Sher’s camera moves through the halls of Arkham State Hospital with a desultory grimness that refuses to let up.

Conventional wisdom tends to suggest that origin stories are rarely the best ways to inject energy into familiar intellectual properties.

If there’s one inarguable thrill about “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice”, Tim Burton’s sequel to his 1988 horror-fantasy-comedy “Beetlejuice” is that it is an actual sequence and not a remake masquerading under a different title.

A war veteran shows up in a smalltown for personal business and becomes the target of a police-orchestrated manhunt after a series of mishaps.

For a film so firmly entrenched in the power of solidarity and togetherness, I was surprised that my favourite moment in the recently released “Sing Sing” is one defined by separation.

There’s a sharp and knowing sense of the zeitgeist running through “Blink Twice”, the directorial debut of actress Zoë Kravitz.

The sounds of Eurhythmics appear early on in Yorgos Lanthimos’ anthology-film “Kinds of Kindness”, the seductive sounds of 1980s pop-perfection that serve as a complicated promise of the film to come.

In “Trap”, the latest film from M Night Shyamalan, former teen-heartthrob Josh Hartnett plays Cooper Adams.

New Zealander Lee Tamahori’s new film offers a note to audiences before the film begins.

The montage that opens the American independent drama “Ghostlight” is a familiar one.

 The promised thrill of “Deadpool & Wolverine”, the third cinematic outing of Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool, is found in its title.

After a brief opening sequence set in the 1970s, which the film will later return to, most of Osgood Perkins’s newly released “Longlegs” takes place in a grim and austere version of Oregon in the 1990s.

In the last decade, two of South America’s best directors (Pablo Larraín and Sebastian Lelio, both Chilean) made their English language debuts (“Jackie”, and “Disobedience”) with bold films about women resisting to be quelled by their historical and societal circumstances.

Lupita Nyong’o’s face is the most effective visual effect in “A Quiet Place: Day One”.

It feels cruel that if you search for “The Heartbreak Kid” on Google, the Farrelly Brothers lethargic 2007 comedy comes up first, rather than the 1972 Elaine May film that it is (somewhat) based on.