Barry Hertz

Bring Her Back feels less like a movie than a finely tuned instrument of doom. In the devilish hands of Australian filmmaking brothers Danny and Michael Philippou, evil has been concentrated into an exceptionally and impressively nasty 104 minutes.

All the magnificent little elements add up to a whole lot of not-enough this time around, resulting in a creaky and exhausting pastiche of Andersonia rather than the real deal.

Once Cruise and McQuarrie expunge all the Ozymandias from their systems, The Final Reckoning manages to deliver the goods. Or at least make a decent case that Cruise has earned the right to become his own biggest champion.

The more queasy the film becomes – in both story and style, with the director preferring unusually moody natural light and nerve-rattling zooms – the funnier it gets.

Nothing in Shadow Force surprises, delights or even attempts to raise your pulse above a twitch.

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.

Canadian director Jason Buxton crafts a sometimes tense and sometimes unsteady character study that isn’t so much laced with dread as it is slathered with it.

It becomes clear that there’s just not enough meat on the bones of Craig’s film to justify all the dismemberment.

The first Marvel film in ages to look, feel, and move like an actual feature film and not a slop bucket of CGI.

It genuinely wants to say something important and poignant about what we lose when we stop believing in the unreal, but it cannot quite make the leap into figuring out why anybody should be inclined to listen to such heartfelt pleas.

The easy back-and-forth chemistry between Affleck and Bernthal as they paint the town blood-red provides certain dividends.

With The Shrouds, the filmmaker – not only one of Canada’s greatest creations, but cinema’s, too – has delivered what might be his career-defining masterpiece.

It is respectful and smooth filmmaking that never loses sight of its one and only goal: keeping its audience hooked.

Director Christopher Landon injects the entire affair with so much stylistic verve and narrative propulsion that, like the best kind of first date, it whips by almost too quickly.

Alternately tedious, cacophonous and stultifying, the latest show of force from writer-director Alex Garland following last year’s equally frustrating Civil War just might be the most unnecessarily unpleasant cinematic experience you will endure this year.

Freaky Tales has neither the patience nor the depth to imagine any one person or story with a legitimate hook.

A pharmaceutical-industry satire so flaccid that it’s in desperate need of Cialis, Death of a Unicorn is destined to fade into the mythical margins of cinematic history, with future moviegoers convinced that – like its title creature – the film never really existed at all.

Like Majors’s chiselled physique, which is almost a special effect all its own, Magazine Dreams takes unironic pride in flexing its themes so nakedly and frequently that there’s little left to the imagination.

It’s a solid notch in Statham’s career, but nothing that will change anyone’s mind about the actor.

This new Snow White is neither a chore à la 2023′s The Little Mermaid nor an abomination on the scale of Robert Zemeckis’s ghoulish Pinocchio redo. Whistle hard enough, and it almost sort of works.

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.

Ultimately, We Forgot to Break Up’s broken social scene offers a lot of hum, but not enough rattle.

Blanchett, as always, is flawless as the seductive and secretive Kathryn, but it’s Fassbender who reveals a different side of himself.

Zoopocalypse’s bid to revel in the kiddie-macabre space is admirable.

More than anything, NTBTSTM is simply hilarious – a furiously funny roller coaster of a film whose energy never, ever dips. It is difficult to imagine a better, sharper comedy coming along this year. Or the next.

The entire spectacle is so unabashedly outrageous that you cannot help but side with its many excesses.

The underwater cinematography, orchestrated by Nick Remy Matthews, is often startling, destined to make the dark box of a movie theatre all that more engagingly claustrophobic. And the ultimate story behind Last Breath is incredible, verging on the unbelievable.

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 Gorge is half a smouldering romance, half a zombified venture into overkilled horror-movie tropes.

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

Thanks to Lee’s smooth construction and her performers’ carefully calibrated performances – Beirne is particularly engaging in a role that doesn’t automatically earn sympathy – it all clicks together.

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.

Deeply playful while never falling for the more hoary tendencies of the genre – remarkably, Soderbergh seems to have invented a new way of filming a “jump scare” here – Presence keeps its audience close and tight, building to a finale that forces you to reconsider the entire experiment.

Universal Language is a film flooded with sorrow and spirit, discombobulating surrealism and comforting sentimentality.

Pantera mixes its many influences into a smooth spectacle so confident and patient in its assemblage that it instantly wins you over.

Long underutilized and certainly undervalued, Canadian actress Pill is a pure delight here as Charlotte, anchoring and then elevating every single scene that she is in.

Ultimately, it all becomes too strained to take seriously.

The Brutalist is a movie of big ideas constructed inside the transformative majesty of epic-scaled cinema. You can try to describe it, but nothing can match the power of simply opening your eyes.

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

Clearly, Oppenheimer is an ambitious and courageous filmmaker – his chilling documentaries alone are enough to ensure his place in the pantheon. But so much of The End prioritizes purpose over execution, with the result stretched out over interminable lengths.

Berger’s film is a sometimes zippy, frequently ridiculous drama.

Madison never loses grip on the character for a second. Together with Baker, the pair craft a whirlwind of a character, provocative and powerful and so very easy to imagine as the object of anyone’s obsession.

As the two women clash in the film’s final moments, Tjahjanto executes a truly glorious extravaganza of choreographed carnage, as impressive as it is overwhelming.

You will leave the film as hungry for Simpson’s food as you will be full from his emotional journey.

An experiment in prestige quirk, Maddin and the Johnsons’ film isn’t as interested in satirizing the complex and frustrating nature of geopolitics as they are in using the material to unload a heaping load of gags ranging from the scatological to the philosophical.

There is an intensity and commitment in Campbell’s work that mesmerizes, even frightens, with its sheer boldness.

Frankie Freako is designed to melt your brain. The only question is whether you might welcome such cerebral liquefaction or not.

This is a movie that so badly wants to be as cool as its source material that it trips over itself, in backward Chevy Chase style, into something so old-fashioned and dully familiar that no amount of retro sheen can boost its cool bona fides.

Leave it to a robot to break our puny human hearts.

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.

Megalopolis might be Coppola’s decades-in-the-making passion project, an epic of ambition and imagination, but it is also a magnificent mess of a masterpiece, as irredeemably silly as it is sincerely sublime.

Ultimately the film struggles to balance its various commitments, with a screenplay that never seems sure of whether it wants to be a pure comedy, a lore-packed adventure or a peppy children’s film that shuffles kids straight to the toy aisle.

Once the half-clever set-up is established by Watts – what happens when two lone wolves must work together? – the film is content to merely coast on the charms of its stars.

As much a deeply affectionate love letter to eighties-era horror-comedies as it is a synapse-stretching exercise in defiant maximalism, Joseph Kahn’s new film, Ick, is a true ride designed to hold, thrill, kiss and kill you.

Saulnier has returned with a tremendous, high-impact blast of a movie, making any delayed gratification all the more satisfying.

Michael Keaton’s go-for-broke performance is such a possessed work of splatter comedy that he almost proves right the producers who have been advocating for this nostalgia-play cash grab for decades.

The film’s sense of history is hasty, its characterizations crude. And by combining a twinkly-eyed tone with some of the goofiest performances in recent memory, the whole thing constantly threatens to reveal itself as a stealth parody flick.

Incoherent and cheap, with its aesthetic sensibilities seemingly cribbed from an elevator pitch of “John Wick goes goth,” Sanders’s version of The Crow is a truly ugly thing to endure.

Although sometimes dizzying and disorienting, the visual language of Between the Temples is relentlessly alive, with the camera never considering-slash-allowing for the possibility that its audiences’ eyes might wander.

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.

Roth likely deserves much of the blame, though the film is so relentlessly middling that it feels curiously divorced from his typically extreme sensibilities.

Certainly, it’s fun to see Schafer, best known for her work on HBO’s teenage-wasteland series Euphoria, match wits with Stevens, including a gnarly sequence of knife play. But neither actor can figure out where their director is going with all this madness or where he might want to be at any given moment, tonally and thematically. It’s enough to drive anybody, even the king of kook Stevens – well, you know.

The new comedy Kneecap is a riotous delight that will have even the most staid audiences ready to flip the bird.

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.

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

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.

The film spins off into several tonally unsteady directions.

This is an imaginatively conceived, impressively scaled, and surprisingly funny ride. Just pay as little attention to the promotional scare tactics as possible.

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

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.

The sequel isn’t a masterpiece of children’s entertainment by any stretch, but it is sufficiently bizarre and thrilling enough to turn the head of any kid, parent or – judging by my curiously populated press screening the other night – fully grown and childless adult around and around till the room resembles a Looney Tune.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a fun enough distraction.

However you choose to interpret it, Evil Does Not Exist lingers, magnificently and furiously.

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

Whenever the camera is on Hathaway, which is almost always, the film feels a hundred times more rich and substantive.

The film’s most egregious misstep, though, is sabotaging its own best stunt: the high-wire chemistry between Gosling and Blunt.

This is a startlingly entertaining, erotically charged movie that hits its many targets with a kind of ferocious and crazed accuracy that’ll knock the wind, among other things, right out of you.

Cronenberg offers a light touch to the material, spiking the deeply depressing dystopia with a sibling-rivalry battle royale that eagerly, if sometimes wobblily, shifts between sharp humour and slippery sentimentality.

Weaving in footage from Lucian Bratu’s 1981 film Angela Moves On (a melodrama following a female taxi driver and set during the heart of Nicolae Ceausescu’s crushing reign in Romania), and capped off by an extended movie-within-a-movie contained in one static shot, Jude’s film is an ambitious experiment of the mad-science variety.

Classical and ultramodern – Bonello closes things off with a QR code, of all things – The Beast is an experience both bold and rich.

Imaginary is as dour a slog as M3GAN was a bloody bit of self-aware camp.