Barry Hertz

The only truly shocking thing about this new work, though, is the fact it took this long for von Trier to make a movie about a serial killer. For a man who loves blunt provocation, the subject should’ve been first on his hit list.

Watching Snake Eyes (full title: Snake Eyes – G.I. Joe Origins) is not a physically painful ordeal. But it is an emotionally harmful one – a soul-deadening exercise that approximates satire, minus the self-awareness.

With all due affection, del Toro is the fantasy world’s Quentin Tarantino – his originality rests in how meticulously and enthusiastically he repackages the work of others. DeKnight has no such goals; he can’t even be bothered here to ape del Toro’s imitation game.

This is spaghetti-brained moviemaking, more interested in goosing empty-calorie nostalgia than telling an original or thrilling story.

Malcolm & Marie is the worst kind of self-indulgent nonsense. It is an obnoxious gripe about everything and anything that is so devoid of wit and imagination that it ends up being about nothing at all.

From the projectionist played by Toby Jones who regularly pops up to vocalize what everyone onscreen and the audience is already well aware of – movies are an escape, of course! – to its eye-rolling treatment of Hilary’s mental health, Empire of Light is the most noxious kind of faux-benevolent “prestige” cinema.

Imagine the worst night of two-hander theatre that you were ever subjected to in the Before Times. Then add in 12 too many scenes of (accurate but annoying) glitchy Zoom calls featuring other famous actors. And then multiply that by the number of minutes you’d be better served scrolling through the back catalogue of your streaming service of choice.

A House of Dynamite doesn’t so much self-destruct as fail to even ignite a spark.

The Public is writer-director Emilio Estevez’s grand, well-meaning and extremely dumb vanity project/tribute to the public-library system.

There is the overwhelming sense that Domino was not directed by any one person at all, but rather spliced and diced by committee into something barely watchable.

I can’t imagine that the filmmakers behind the new horror film Isabelle were thinking about anything other than cold, hard cash while producing this utterly disposable work.

Whereas Jang’s original film was driven by a funky visual inventiveness that embraced wacky comedy over repellent and snide creepiness, Lanthimos’s version merely doubles down on the filmmakers’ most annoying tendencies: obvious observations about power dynamics, ostensibly outrageous acts of violence that underline a juvenile affinity for shock humour, and an overall contemptuous view of humanity that is played for easy, repetitive yuks.

In a more controlled and less punishing film, Lawrence’s deeply committed performance would be the discussion of the year. Yet she has tossed herself to the wolves here, the star provided no care or cover by her director. What is the point in going so raw, so feral, if the result is so scattered, so interminable, so irredeemably silly?

If that wasn’t enough, there is something even more dispiriting about Doctor Strange beyond its halfhearted visual and narrative ambitions – an issue that made a brief blip on the cultural radar when the film was first announced but has distressingly gone unheard of since: This is a movie that revels in whitewashing.

It’s a stew so thick with brand loyalty that you just might choke on all the intellectual property and consequential commerce.

The director’s pedestrian tactics are most evident in his command, or lack thereof, over his cast. While Parker knows how to expertly play to the camera – he all but winks at the audience, so confident is he in his admittedly captivating lead performance – he abandons his fellow actors, allowing them to exploit their worst instincts: hammy accents, wild gesticulating, uneasy line readings.

The screenplay feels like the feverish byproduct of an all-nighter pulled off the very first day back from a writers' strike.

When you combine the megawattage of Gyllenhaal and Adams with Ford’s directorial … well, “prowess” would be too strong a word, so let’s go with “vision.” So, when you combine those two actors with Ford’s vision, what you get is a ridiculous, high-camp mess that could easily be mistaken for substance, if it weren’t so irredeemably silly.

Coloured wall-to-fake-wall with cheap-looking CGI, the film looks like it was shot from inside the guts of a first-generation iPhone – there is an aesthetic emptiness to it all that is soul-crushing.

Zoolander 2 feels like a hasty collection of last-minute comedy panic attacks.

So many of Rebirth’s images and set pieces are lifeless, and no amount of on-location filming in Thailand – versus the soundstage green screenery so favoured by most of Jurassic’s blockbuster contemporaries – can hide the fact that very little in the screenplay makes logistical, narrative or emotional sense.

Chalamet seems to be a Gene Wilder fan / But he can’t live up to the original candyman / He’s flat, and he’s grating, and he can’t sing a tune / The heartthrob is best off on the sands of Dune.

Condescending, self-righteous and sloppy, Truth is simply a bad film for which there are no excuses.

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.

There are movies that are on-the-nose and then there is Ruben Ostlund’s Triangle of Sadness, a satire™ that is so pharyngeal that it is the cinematic equivalent of a COVID-19 swab.

Cheney remains an enigma throughout, less a character than another anonymous object for McKay to smash in his cinematic rage room.

There is an occasional sense of self-awareness that this is all pointless and silly, but 139 minutes is a long time for a film to forgo even delayed gratification.

By this point in his career, star Nicolas Cage does crazy like no one else, but his descent into insanity here – not too far from how his character acts at the beginning of the film, really – can't elevate Taylor's juvenile take on adulthood.

A thoroughly pointless cash grab of a thing, this new Little Mermaid is one of the most uninspired films to slither out of Disney since the company started raiding its own vault.

Complete Unknown is the perfect case study of what happens when bad movies rope in good actors. In this case, it’s Rachel Weisz and Michael Shannon, two of the most talented performers working today, who get sucked into writer-director Joshua Marston’s vortex of nothingness.

More often than not, Heads of State feels as if it is missing its own leader, as if the director was simply a package lost in the Prime delivery mail.

The resulting film, while sporadically affecting, is ultimately a slog of gooey sentiment and needlessly long death rattles.

Appropriately for a film about art forgery, every cast member in The Last Vermeer seems to be attempting their best impression of someone else.

Simply put, I didn’t care for a single person or situation on-screen, and Jacobs’s curiously unconfident and drab direction, which is in desperate need of tighter editing, only hastened my growing annoyance.

It’s all too silly to arouse, but too garish and annoying to be thoughtful. It feels as if Fennell is torn between having her cake and eating it out, too.

Ostensibly an homage to Woody Allen’s Manhattan, Louis C.K.’s “secret” movie – it comes to TIFF only a few months after it was shot, with no prior publicity – is more an overlong rebuke to allegations of the filmmaker’s own sexual misconduct.

There are good intentions lurking here, especially in star Louis Garrel’s performance, but the film consistently fails to engage on an even basic level.

Even when the maximalist visuals grab hold – as in, by your collar with an unpleasant yank – it is hard to feel much but exhaustion.

The Boys in the Boat is a film made with such a gently dull spirit that you cannot help but wonder if Clooney put himself to sleep during production. Someone get this man a Nespresso.

It's a jumbled mess, to put it mildly.

Norbit was memorably offensive. Coming 2 America is merely offensively forgettable.

Deep inside the new Charlie’s Angels movie, there is a fun film struggling to breathe. There are momentary flashes of energy, of wit, of something sorta-kinda-maybe resembling entertainment. But every time writer-director Elizabeth Banks’s reboot threatens to come alive, it immediately falls to the floor, leaden and lifeless.

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.

No matter how many nifty shots he inserts of Major’s hologram-ridden metropolis, the director cannot shake the impression he simply does not care about his creation. At least Johansson makes an effort.

The entire endeavour is so crass, sloppy, and infuriating (especially the “twist” ending, although the film contains no real ending at all) that it treads close to zero-star, brand-killing territory. But then Jude Law pops up all-too-briefly as a younger, sexier version of Albus Dumbledore, and everything seems mostly right with the Potter-verse. But the magic, it’s fleeting.

From its lazy title down to its yes-we-all-saw-that-coming third-act twist, Dangerous Lies offers a particularly boring kind of last-resort viewing.

There is, buried deep somewhere in Linklater’s film or however many edits it may have undergone – the thing reeks of indecision – an insightful, even invigorating story about what happens to a creative genius once they stop creating. But the actual work presents a good argument that, for some artists, it might be best to quit while you’re ahead.

The Marvels is just that kind of production, a white board of sticky notes that magically coalesces, slowly and grudgingly, into a feature-length motion picture that merely acts as a long advertisement for the next.

Make no mistake: Ron Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy is a bad film, inert and clichéd and largely devoid of cinematic imagination. But it is not a problematic film.

I also appreciated the film’s quick glimpse of Hell itself, which Lucia is plunged into as a warning to whose who won’t accept salvation. With its cheap CGI demons and soundtrack of wailing souls, it was unintentional comedy of the highest order. If you need me, I’ll be laughing all the way to Hades.

Just because Body could be made doesn’t mean it needed to be.

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.

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.

But hey, at least Zwick and company carve out some time for Tom Cruise to run, with Reacher dashing across a busy avenue for about 18 seconds or so. It’ll make for a great supercut one day.

Irresistible is toothless, it is weak-willed and it is depressingly unaware of either of these facts. If this is indeed Stewart’s response to the madness of the Trump era, then we should all be glad that he decided to depart The Daily Show when he did. It is clear that he didn’t have anything left to say.

This is regurgitated shoot-’em-up nothingness fetishistically dressed in the cosplay of equality. The women are not characters to care about, but props to kill and be killed.

If someone somehow convinced somebody somewhere to turn the screenplay for Gringo into a real-life motion picture with real-deal actors, then, hell, it could happen to anyone.

As interesting as reading the computer code that was used to create the original Mortal Kombat video game, and about as fun as getting your spine torn out.

The filmmakers score half a point for at least avoiding the old “hero-who’s-constantly-filming” device, but fail to add anything else to the proceedings, except, perhaps, the movie’s unique setting.

Everyone here is simply a mismanaged thing to be moved around an isn’t-that-shocking storyboard as needed.

Steers can compose and capture a shot fine enough, but seems otherwise bored to be here. Each of his scenes collide lazily against the next; transitions are rushed and often ugly, and the director never seems to know what emotions he should be steering his cast toward.

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

Miracles from Heaven is mostly an embarrassment.

A work of soulless indifference. It is not so much a movie as an exercise in how to wring the life out of even the most lifeless of properties – grave robbing writ large, except the ostensible corpse was never more than a worthless bag of bones in the first place.

The film might be pretty to look at, but narratively speaking, it is a disaster.

It is all very, very stupid, But first-time director Simon McQuoid regrettably refuses to embrace that stupidity.

Diesel’s "Fast & Furious" movies have heart. His "Riddick" movies have weirdness. His "XXX" entries have lunacy. (Can we pause to admire how many franchises this man has to his name?) Bloodshot, though, only offers mere generic mediocrity.

The action, when it does arrive, is quiet enough to send the most insomnia-plagued of audiences to sleep.

It isn’t hard to find all the many ways in which this film exhausts both itself and Lisbeth. It is time, already, to give this Girl a rest.

Instead of funnelling his inspirations into one singular vision that he could call his own, Boone has made a Frankenstein of a franchise movie, a giant elevator pitch that leads directly to the sub-basement of originality.

McAvoy and Paulson fight as hard as they can against Shyamalan’s instincts – even though, as with "Split," it’s gross to watch dissociative identity disorder played for horror and laughs – but theirs' is a pointless battle. The somnambulist Willis and Jackson have the better idea, dozing through their scenes until the cheques clear. (Jackson, to be fair, has the benefit of his character being literally asleep for the film’s first hour.)

There are small spurts of creativity ... but everything else about the production feels more watered down than the landscape our four interchangeable leads find themselves flailing about in.

It’s not about nothing, but it is nothing special.

Unless you are a direct descendant of Robert the Bruce, or perhaps part of the Macfayden clan, you’re better off letting this particular version of history get lost in the sands of time.

This is a movie of pussyfooting and sidestepping, unconcerned with race, history, heroism or really any idea at all beyond “Hulk smash.”

If there is a one-word skeleton key to unlocking Guns Akimbo, it might simply be: “sloppy.”

An exercise in miserablism that, although clocking in at an ostensibly tight pace, feels never-ending.

There is no harm in allowing Clooney to further stretch his directorial muscles – "Good Night, and Good Luck" is not bad – but there ought to be a law against wasting such talents as Matt Damon, Julianne Moore and poor ol' Oscar Isaac in this hollow exercise.

Johnson, who is also a producer here, having shepherded Black Adam through a decade and a half of development, gets off relatively easy. The real victim, or perhaps perpetrator, is Collet-Serra.

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.

As far as the preaching-to-the-choir genre goes, though, I Still Believe is a far more tolerable exercise than, say, last year’s anti-abortion screed "Unplanned" or any recent movie with the word “Heaven” in the title (Heaven Is for Real, Miracles from Heaven).

What's worse than the actual movie itself, though, is how indicative it is of modern group-think studio production.

Isaac pulls a full Tom Hardy by adopting a weirdo voice, awkward mannerisms and unknown motivations in a bid to give life to a villain who is, in his own words, pure “motiveless malignancy.” It doesn’t work, nor does anything else in this so-bad-it’s-good-no-wait-still-bad mess from William Monahan.

For a movie about an assassin charged with killing Santa Claus (!) on the orders of a Richie Rich-like brat (!!), and starring Mel Gibson (!!!) as Kris Kringle himself, Fatman is astoundingly boring.

Crowley knows his way from adaptations thanks to 2015′s Brooklyn, but as this 149-minute mess proves, The Goldfinch should have never flown away from its literary perch.

Completely miscast, egregiously plotted and ludicrous in absolutely every single other way, Bliss is a true cinematic disasterpiece.

Welcome to Marwen is the ultimate Robert Zemeckis movie. This is not intended as a compliment. The film – not quite comedy, not quite drama, but definitely indigestible – finds Zemeckis embracing his worst late-career indulgences.

This film is a dud all on its own, a watered down Woody Allen facsimile that is long on F-bombs and short on wit, with an internal logic that falls apart with barely a half-cocked glance.

The new animated film UglyDolls is a lazy flip, its main intention to foster the toy-aisle bond between kids and its quasi-hideous title characters.

And before anyone pulls out the “guilty pleasure” card – no. There is zero pleasure here, no matter how low your bar is currently set. Only pain. So much pain.

Somehow, Mile 22 devolved from what Berg promised STX would be – “the new wave of combat cinema” – to exactly the kind of generic late-summer garbage any studio could, and has, released for Augusts immemorial.

The Green Inferno offers up extreme gore, unlikable characters and seriously confused themes (is it a pro-environment film, an ode to imperialism, a satire of social-justice warriors or a poorly sketched combination of all three?).

Who needs original stars Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones when you have, um ... well, what does this new Men in Black Cinematic Universe offer, exactly? As evidenced by MiB:I, absolutely nothing of value.

A cheap, lazy exercise in myth-making. The goods, as it were, will have to be found elsewhere.

A C-grade thriller that is further dumbed down to dunce-cap calibre, Flight Risk might have worked as an enjoyably grimy piece of genre trash had Gibson not made every single wrong directorial decision along the way.

Chaos Walking is, in its own way, a masterclass in everything that contemporary filmmakers should avoid doing.

The “new” film is firmly an artifact of the past. More specifically the imaginary era of Gotham that Allen has become a permanently unstuck-in-time guest of since "Annie Hall."

The new movie is dumb, pointless and completely bereft of laughs. It wastes a talented cast and all of your time. Worst of all, though, it is unconscionably lazy, starting with its generic title (again, who is naming these things?) and ending with its shrug-of-the-shoulders climax.