Barry Hertz

Kuras’s film, especially the paint-by-numbers script credited to a trio of writers, seems to oddly object to such a strong spirit, boxing the character into the most formulaic of narratives.

It is the kind of screenplay that erases itself with one minute of second thought.

The dead-seriousness with which Sims-Fewer and Mancinelli approach their subject is admirable, as is the former’s unsettling lead performance. And you won’t find another film this year that subverts the male gaze in such a brutally naked manner.

The performances nearly save the film from itself.

It is as if every time Forster is presented with an opportunity to do something mildly unconventional – or even, gasp, European in sensibility – he defaults to the easy and cheap Hollywood option.

Exceptionally overlong, crammed with miscast performers putting in half the effort they should, and so overly pleased with its various (and rather middling) twists that it leaps from “clever” to “pompous” in one fell swoop, Wake Up Dead Man represents a hard and rough fall from grace.

Perhaps fittingly, the directors’ big foray into Hollywood is saved by the star power of the two industry legends headlining the film. Bening and Foster are absolute delights from beginning to end.

While the new doc was spurred by Roher’s own existential anxiety about what kind of AI-dominated world he would be bringing his unborn son into, the resulting film feels so determined to walk the middle road between doom times and boom times (hence its cheeky title) that its message cannot help but land as something almost algorithmically mushy.

A compelling, if ultimately predictable, coming-of-age drama.

Where Mufasa distinguishes itself is Jenkins’s eye for balancing emotion with action.

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.

The Fabelmans contains reels’ worth of beauty and wit, all delivered with the honest and enthusiastic drive to entertain that has become Spielberg’s signature. But you will learn more about Steven Spielberg by watching almost any other Steven Spielberg film.

It’s Dano who floats away with the most goodwill, giving Hanus a tender, ultimately haunting air despite being, you know, a horrendously frightening creature that, in a parallel universe, might’ve inspired Stephen King to write It.

An extraordinarily French story is flattened into conventional Euro-pudding nothingness. There is little here to surprise, less to even expect and still savour. The performers sometimes, but not always, outwit their material.

As nice as it is to see New York play itself or watch Ahmed and Worthington run circles around each other, the entire caper is rendered unsolvable by one big, meatheaded twist that undermines everything that came before.

There is some drama here, all right. But the curtain can’t draw down soon enough.

Russell’s film is not remotely playable. Amsterdam so badly wants to be a light romp with heavy-duty meaning that it cannot help but be flattened by a sagging self-exhaustion. It is an exercise in interminable madcappery.

There is a certain charm to Shaw’s deadpan comedy – and I genuinely appreciated what I can only assume was an intentional callback to Michael Cera’s fate in 2013′s This Is the End – but one visit to the Cryptozoo was enough for me.

Álvarez eventually gets there, with the third act of Romulus impressively nauseating. But otherwise, the filmmaker isn’t developing this cinematic universe so much as he is stunting its growth.

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 trouble with Renfield, though, is the fact that it’s called Renfield and not Dracula. Snivelling when not stiff, the title character is a bore, as is Hoult’s shoulder-shrug of a performance.

Dafoe is captivating as always, but not even his slinking, slippery presence can save the film from turning into a rather torturous endurance test.

The film’s central problem is that it takes Fuqua forever to make the inevitable happen, and when he gets around to it, the entire set-piece arrives with all the refined taste of an overcooked noodle swimming in a bowl of ketchup.

Ultimately Murder Mystery 2 is the most business-as-usual kind of Sandler shtick, its only real surprise being how the production manages to pull off one solitary, very lonely surprise toward its end (it involves a quick appearance from Jillian Bell, bless her heart).

So highly imitative as to strip the word “derivative” of any meaning, Rebel Moon is fan-fiction writ large, as if Snyder believes he’s outsmarting everyone from George Lucas and George R.R. Martin to the estates of Frank Herbert and H.R. Giger.

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.

Nelson seems content to just swing one giant axe after another, hoping that he busts as many guts as he does brains. His intentions are naughty, and the result isn’t so nice. Even for those who prefer a little blood on their snow boots this time of year.

The film is neither heartbreaking nor thrilling, often feeling like a blown-up version of a Hallmark flick-of-the-week, its ambitions far greater than its capabilities.

Perkins’s version of The Monkey is an annoying, snarky and slight endeavour that just about kills itself in its bid to satisfy all the many cinema-starved sickos out there.

The experience of watching this new Shazam! is akin to watching an exceptionally wealthy but ultimately sweet and innocent child smash their toys together for 130 minutes. There’s little point in it all, but hey, at least the kid is happy.

Ultimately, Yintah wants to leave you with the sourest of tastes in your mouth. Mission accomplished, in a way.

Despite all the wonder that Strange World has going for it, the film cannot help but land with the softest of thuds.

It is an overstuffed, manic, exhausting piece of instant movie-meme catnip – likely impenetrable to all but the hardest of hardcore genre devotees.

The director fumbles frequently, but at least he is confident enough in his uneven vision to push through all (warranted) doubts and deliver a story that is every bit awful as it is uncompromising.

Once we’re in the story proper . . . Black Widow quickly turns into another rote exercise in Marvel house style.

Ultimately, Fear Street is a shiny and expensive super-cut of callbacks and needle-drops. It is cool but empty horror worship.

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.

While Dosa has a talent, and perhaps a fascination equalling her subjects, for illustrating the hidden beauty of the natural world, she ultimately crafts a film that is too neatly packaged.

We Have a Ghost is a desperate mix of feel-good sentimentality, watered-down surreality, and comedy as transparent in its hackiness as the film’s title spook.

What could have been a layered, insightful portrait of the most complicated, significant figure in pop-culture history has been reduced to a supersized music video slash concert documentary, the man in its mirror more of a faded reflection than anything else.

While his character is intended to be lost and powerless, Pine seems adrift in another way, too – a star without a proper star vehicle.

The Color Purple arrives as a confused byproduct of the industry’s best intentions and worst habits.

By the time the deep dark truth about the mysterious case is revealed – in a series of twists that are more “agh” than “aha” – even the hardest core of Christie fans won’t be itching for a fourth Poirot go-round from Branagh. Which will not only benefit audiences but also the filmmaker himself.

With Men, the British filmmaker is stubbornly needling his audience with a never-ending barrage of pointy-ended questions that he has neither the inclination nor intention of vaguely addressing or even thinking through on his own terms. Men is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, all scrawled in crayon.

After watching the film twice in quick succession – a futile attempt at catching a glimpse of what usually makes a Falardeau film so immensely watchable (see the Quebecois filmmaker’s Monsieur Lazhar, The Good Lie, My Internship in Canada and Chuck) – My Salinger Year ultimately lands as a mere footnote.

An ambitious but ultimately sloppy time-travel epic, Good Luck wants to deliver an incendiary critique of artificial intelligence and our reliance on big tech. Yet it ends up being so exhausting and weirdly dull that it will force audiences to pull out their phones out of sheer restlessness.

The script, which has a “story by” credit from Stuckmann’s wife and fellow genre enthusiast Samantha Elizabeth, jumps all over the place in tone, from wild to solemn, with no real resting place in between.

A cheap, crass and ruthlessly sloppy skewering of celebrity culture that is barely a millimetre above the material it thinks it is so sharply satirizing, Gormican’s new film is the definition of disappointment.

It is a fool’s errand to imagine what someone like Verhoeven would have done with The Tomorrow War’s material – this is a movie made for the express purposes of delivering some lazy woo-hoo summer fun, not any kind of sneaky subversiveness.

Every single beat of The Alto Knights feels like an historical footnote from Goodfellas or The Godfather Part II stretched out to interminable feature length – musty, dusty, dry.

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

Seven years is a long time to attempt a reheating of all the many ingredients that made the original film go down so easily, and Another Simple Favor simply tastes off.

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.

The star’s eager-to-please persona and overgrown puppy-dog physicality keeps the film from falling into complete shtick. It is all the more remarkable a feat given that Phillip is a complete cipher of a character.

Presented with every opportunity to say or do something remotely new or compelling, Wright, typically a talented stylist, elects to shrug his shoulders, delivering a wafer-thin confection that is aggressively disinterested in both ideas and action.

Similar to getting caught in the grip of a giant Amazonian snake, in which you have the privilege of hearing your bones break before the power of the embrace causes your veins to explode, the experience of watching Tom Gormican’s new action-comedy Anaconda is a painful one.

The film spins off into several tonally unsteady directions.

The Devil Made Me Do It is a resolutely pedestrian kind of horror.

No Hard Feelings tries so very hard to shock – to score that collective audience gasp – that it ends up clutching its own pearls.

The filmmaker assumes that aping the cheap aesthetics of the era are enough to establish style, and that making Enid a mystery amounts to layered characterization. It all leads to a climax that is nasty for all the wrong reasons.

There are several ways to make a serial killer movie, and in the sometimes compelling and sometimes repellent Holy Spider, filmmaker Ali Abbasi has chosen all of them. At once exploitative and contemplative, thrilling and disgusting, the film makes a bloody mess of itself before coming close to solving its own case.

The filmmaker is obviously toying with what horror films can be, with what audiences expect of both cheap thrills and high-priced performers. But I can’t admire, and don’t take much pleasure in, being tossed into Semans’s cinematic sandbox along with his well-compensated cast and crew.

This is flat, flaccid action that makes the wan green-screenery of the MCU look like the delirious highs of Mad Max: Fury Road.

Spenser Confidential makes far more narrative and visual sense than the incomprehensible "Mile 22," and carries less of an America First odour than any of the pair’s previous partnerships. But it also proves that it is finally time that Berg and Wahlberg explored a trial separation. If you really love someone, guys, set them free.

There are so many missteps that Hancock and screenwriter John Fusco make here, but to list a few briefly: The dialogue is 85-per-cent clumsy exposition, the heroes are given exactly one character trait each (Gault’s a drunk, Hamer’s a jerk) and the film’s politics read as MAGA-esque vigilante evangelicalism (the movie is perpetually on the verge of having Hamer say, directly to the camera, something along the lines of, “the only good criminal is a dead criminal”).

This shiny and progressive and golly-gee packaging misrepresents how Captain Marvel made its way into the world, and what it is actually about. Namely: money, the easy exploitation of intellectual-property, artistic conformity and queasy politics that undermine whatever liberal notions it’s peddling.

Unfortunately, Hart and her co-writer/husband Jordan Horowitz don’t have much more to offer than a different perspective – and no POV shift can compensate for a film that looks otherwise so familiar in its twists and turns.

A disposable, ultimately best-forgotten movie.

Even if I could muster the strength to defy studio marching orders on plot details, there is no point. There is little in Endgame that is worth spoiling, given how its core is spoiled rotten to begin with.

A wild, reckless, gleefully immoral work of pop nihilism.

So much of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is pulled from what has come before, and so much of it carries the wear and tear of repetition.

Dealing with such heavy matters as death, faith and forgiveness, the film wants to be a classic-in-the-making, but it just doesn’t hit the emotional and narrative cues necessary for such a weighty job.

Any sports film, no matter its scale or handicap, has to land its narrative and aesthetic punches – and Tiger clings to the ropes more often than not.

Too terrifying for children, too boring for adults and arriving far too soon after a nearly identical project, Andy Serkis’s Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle is a frustrating, fascinating mess.

From a technical standpoint, this might be Clooney’s finest work as a director. . . . But as a storyteller, The Midnight Sky is an irritating experience.

By the time the film reaches its obvious conclusion – by the time Hart expends more energy than Bugs Bunny, by the time the espionage plot twists itself into corners too convoluted for even "Homeland" fans, by the time Thurber exhausts the audience by unleashing cameo after cameo – it’s only Johnson who remains standing tall.

Hafstrom’s feature might be fine background noise to fold your laundry to. But there is also a very real danger that the film’s sloppy plotting and watered down set-pieces might also make you so disoriented and frustrated that your socks will end up in mismatched little balls.

The result is that the particularly cruel delights of Pollock’s writing get lost in an adaptation that can never nail any of its sprawling cast of characters, or escape the Southern-fried clichés that the novel transcends.

This material might make for a sly, subversive take on the genre, but writer-director Tyson Caron positions Dash as the hero of his story, a fatal flaw.

It Chapter Two is a film in need of a good ending. How badly it needs that ending is never in question, either. Hell, the movie cries out for help on the subject.

There is certainly much to celebrate and remember about the former U.S. president’s tenure, but Souza, and Porter, don’t seem much interested in anything approaching nuance.

It is almost as if Gibson is daring his audience to turn away from his opera of barbarity – but perversely, his violence is the only compelling element of Hacksaw Ridge. Perhaps ironically for a war film, the rest of it is mostly a draw.

The film’s middling but good intentions might be enough for the work to skate by unnoticed – but then Leder constructs an unforgivably sentimental finale that builds to a cameo from Bader Ginsburg herself. At that point, we must object.

Without Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World would be an absolute bore.

Another stroke of casting fortune was landing Scott as the disturbing Miles. I hesitate to applaud any business decision that encourages a kid to channel the spirit of a rapist and murderer, but the young actor accomplishes what I can only assume The Prodigy set out to do: make you reconsider parenthood, and just how much paprika you should stock.

While Spinster works well enough as a showcase for Peretti’s talents, Dorfman never matches the power of her star. With a bare-bones production design and most of its scenes blocked in a pedestrian manner, Spinster looks like a TV show that simply goes on too long.

Velvet Buzzsaw is ultimately a matter of taste – and mine was to spit it right back out.

It’s the type of film that was birthed with 1997′s "The Full Monty," which shares a director with Military Wives in Peter Cattaneo – as well as a flat, incurious sensibility that lacks any hint of complexity in the layers of its world or the inner lives of its characters.

Typically, Whitaker can lend the sloppiest assignment some much-needed dignity, but here he gives far more than the easy and lazy script ever demands, so much so that you begin to feel sorry that he took the time and energy to do so.

A uniquely Canadian exercise in down-and-out misery, Amy Jo Johnson’s second directorial effort, Tammy’s Always Dying, delivers a wealth of interesting talent to the table, and leaves them to fight for scraps.

It doesn't actually explain much, throwing a bunch of names and seemingly arbitrary incidents at the screen in the hope that everyone watching the film happened to work at the Washington Post back in the day.

The longer I Am Greta goes on, the more clear it becomes that Grossman is content to just tag along for the ride, adding little cinematic depth or insight to the environmentalist’s trajectory.

Unfortunately, the new film Matthias & Maxime arrives lacking much of the emotional urgency of the Dolan who once captured the international art-house crowd, feeling provincial in more ways than one.

Daddy’s Home is not the world of Peak Ferrell, where jokes fly fast and absurdism rules the day. Instead, it is a land of predictable punchlines, easy sight gags and easier paycheques.

Despite the too-twisty story and drippy characters, Larney does extremely impressive work with a limited budget, creating an entire world (or two) as if he had the resources of a Marvel escapade, or at the very least a Terminator entry. It’s only a shame that his performers don’t quite match his aesthetic ingenuity, especially Smit-McPhee, who wails and garbles with grating abandon.

A solid, well-acted, and slightly predictable drama of morals whose novelty evaporates once you realize that the general beats of the story itself have been presented before, to far more haunting effect.

Yes, the filmmaker and co-director Duke Johnson laboured for years over this project, and their set design is often astonishing. But that doesn’t mean the film is a masterpiece, or even half a masterpiece.

The sequel is often loud, occasionally obnoxious and so consistently convinced of its own awesomeness that it will not, it cannot, stop pointing out everything that makes it so utterly wonderful.