Barry Hertz

After all, it’s a movie about professional wrestling – the blows may feel real, but the match is fixed from the very beginning.

At times, it approaches self-parody, but that’s just Woo having some much-needed fun.

For 2020, though, this new and unexpected Borat is a nice surprise. Very niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice.

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

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.

Rarely, though, has cinema been so devoted to idealizing the importance of journalism than in Collective.

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

It may not go the distance, but it’s surely worth a step into the ring.

Hauser is just as skilled and invested an actor as any of the more critically certified players alongside him here, including Sam Rockwell as Jewell’s anti-authoritarian lawyer and Kathy Bates as Jewell’s overprotective mother.

When Keoghan and Peters are onscreen, their performances are compelling enough, as is most of Layton’s narrative script – adding in the doc footage feels less revolutionary, and more like easy filler. It’s enough to feel, well, a bit robbed.

The film essentially disintegrates before your eyes, with Koreeda displaying little of the quiet elegance he’s built his entire career upon.

There is something undeniably charming about the film in spite of itself, its familiar but pleasant narrative momentum and tense on-court action wrapped around a lovably scruffy lead performance from a man who knows how to turn it on when he wants to.

Parents might get more of a kick out of the voice-casting and darker corners of the story than school-aged children. But Vancouver’s BRON Animation studio provides a strong, often beguiling sense of tyke-hypnotizing flair to the visuals, and the zippy, synthy score by Wes Anderson favourite Mark Mothersbaugh should keep kids bouncing up and down, in a good way.

Nothing is exactly new in F1, yet at the same time it is all immensely, rewardingly renewable – a true blue box of recycled cinematic trash, compacted into something irresistibly bright and shiny.

Campbell is tasked with carrying much of the film’s action and dialogue -- including two seemingly rambling but actually profound monologues delivered to unseen audiences in a nondescript bar -- and easily commands the screen.

Executed with more energy than either of Guy Ritchie’s recent blockbusters, and with Henry Cavill acting as a more suave Sherlock than Robert Downey Jr., director Harry Bradbeer’s adventure is a perfectly fine piece of Holmes-ian content, if not a work of actual, you know, cinema.

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.

Whereas Michael Mann gave Heat the perfect narrative offramp, Crime 101 tends to circle the block toward the end.

It is both eager to distinguish itself from the series’ shaggiest shenanigans but also happy to embrace them whenever it feels things threaten to get too heavy. The result is an overlong and conceptually loopy thing – but when it works, which let’s say is, oh, I dunno, 83 per cent of the time, it offers one helluva view … to kill!

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

Jordan and Foxx take the little material they’re given and play it as deep as possible, turning in memorable, eventually gut-punching performances.

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

In a Hollywood ecosystem obsessed with brands and inoffensive genericism, there is something admirable and fresh about a movie that has nothing on its mind other than delivering 87 minutes’ worth of gory gator-chomping thrills.

Crimes of the Future is a dirty little thing because it dives deep into the muck of humanity, where Cronenberg finds a perverted pleasure in the absence of pain. Every millimetre of this film is filthy, decayed, polluted. And thank god for that.

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.

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

Climate of the Hunter is less concerned with story than mood. A sensuous, trippy mood that successfully seduces – at least for those who can easily settle into these kinds of campy experiments. (Guilty!)

For all its aches and pains, the heart of You Can Live Forever doesn’t so much beat as skip, haltingly and disconcertingly, as it tries to keep its own lifeblood pumping.

Director Andrew Haigh (45 Years, Lean on Pete) knows how to build towering moments of human drama from the tiniest foundations. And he mostly pulls off such a feat again in this tale of grief and generational pain.

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.

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

The Way of Water is the kind of tremendously entertaining, spectacularly ambitious, not-a-little-bit-silly epic that only James Cameron can, and should, make.

"The Road" meets "Leave No Trace" with a sprinkling of another half-dozen sharper films, Light of My Life is Casey Affleck’s ode to the power of storytelling. Namely, Casey Affleck’s brand of storytelling: glacial, meandering, but not entirely ineffective.

Corbet’s work is a big, sloppy wet kiss to all manner of rise-and-fall clichés. Yet it mostly works, with Corbet as eager to display his influences...as he is to prove he can handle his own gonzo-spectacle set-pieces.

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.

Framing John DeLorean is a film that delights in stretching the truth, so maybe its constant ignorance of Hamm’s work is just part of its whole meta-narrative shtick.

It's fierce, it's lean, it's mean, and it has at least three first-pumping "Hell, yeah!" moments.

Gleeson and Wilson deliver tightly-wound performances, while the ending is more chilling, and perhaps perplexing, than audiences might expect.

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

While Janiak is able to easily tick off the hallmarks of the genre, and perhaps convince those actually alive in the nineties that the entire decade must have been backlit in aggressive neon, her film doesn’t quite scream (or Scream) out for two more films’ worth of context.

Foster is, as always, exceptionally compelling to watch as she tries to puzzle out Lilian’s motivations. And the actress is surrounded by France’s finest men of a certain age. Auteuil, Amalric and Vincent Lacoste do their due diligence as performers, even when Zlotowski’s screenplay asks them to abandon all pretenses of rationality.

By the time Marguerite’s chapter concludes, laying bare the wrenching source of the story’s tensions, The Last Duel will have you in the palm of its calloused hand, whether you like it or not. It is as ambitious and memorable and impressively messy a storytelling experiment as major-studio films come these days.

After all its blood is spilled – on perfectly white sheets of ice and snow, of course – Slash/Back still announces the arrival of a major talent in Innuksuk. Here is hoping that she gets to kill bigger and better Canadian actors for many years to come.

A delirious, disgusting and delightfully dark concoction, this low-budget movie is the latest throwback creation from Steven Kostanski (Manborg, The Void), whose artistic vision seems perma-stuck in the sugary-cereal haze of a Saturday morning circa 1989.

Annette’s failure to ignite is especially frustrating because, not infrequently, Carax delivers images and moments that verge on the indelible.

Unless you are made of stone – to say nothing of being actually stoned – it is pretty damn funny. For at least 100 of its 137 minutes.

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.

As usual, Levine rounds out his supporting cast with a suspiciously stacked roster of comic actors – Randall Park, June Diane Raphael, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Bob Odenkirk, and Andy Serkis, the latter taking his love of heavy makeup a bit too far this time – and keeps the story moving with a breezy briskness that should be studied by any aspiring rom-com director.

Landon is not aiming to break new ground here – only to use well-trod territory for his own gag- and gross-out-happy ends. This is candy-coloured mayhem, bright and snappy and enjoyably wince-inducing in its desire to disgust. And just as Vaughn can easily play both male murderer and winsome teen girl, so, too, can the charming Newton ace her required flips.

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.

Leigh Whannell’s new film is exactly the kind of pure trash that feels suited to spaces that are dirty, neglected, a little bit worse for wear. But this is no insult.

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.

More than likely, Flanagan’s film will leave you a sobbing mess. But there is a sense of betrayal, too – it’s almost too easy to wring those tears. Take this dance, sure, but bring the Kleenex, too.

Van Sant has some fun with the briefly time-jumping narrative, but otherwise it’s shocking how little interest he seems to have in his subject. At least the director helps his star by filling out the supporting cast with performers who do their best to match Phoenix’s dedication, including a wonderful Jonah Hill as Callahan’s skeptical AA sponsor and Rooney Mara as the cartoonist’s off-and-on love interest.

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.

More than any other MCU outing over the past three years, though, there is more to appreciate here than not. The performances are all filled with sorrow and spirit, a true melding of real-life emotion and whatever heightened reactions are typically required for an expensive play session in a superpowered sandbox.

The film is all the more frustrating an experience given that it inches so close to greatness.

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.

Momoa and Bautista are having an unhinged blast in The Wrecking Crew, as eager to rip each other a new one as they are to compare themselves (unfavourably and intentionally) to such contemporaries as John Cena and Dwayne Johnson.

The resulting tale is a wicked, gory and even occasionally funny take on George A. Romero.

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.

Just as it is possible to make a compelling doc without telling an entire life’s story end to end, Lost Girls proves that you can make a substantial thriller that doesn’t rely on a comforting real-world conclusion.

Its mystery elements are infused with a uniquely Feig-ian sensibility, equal parts broad comedy and ironic winks. The genre-meld shouldn’t work as well as it does, but Feig wrangles all the disparate elements under his control.

If Mel Brooks went insane, he would make Sausage Party.

Ultimately, Ponti’s film survives on the one surprise that’s not much of a surprise at all: the power and majesty of his lead actress. And how did the director score such a casting coup? You’d have to ask his mother ... Sophia Loren.

When the bloody finale does eventually arrive, though, you’ll be thankful that Leigh is at the helm. Once again, the director proves himself to be a master of basic human conflict, on whatever scale is necessary.

Whatever you normally do during the rousing finale of a Rocky movie. It will feel familiar, but just go with it.

Overly sensitive pet owners, however, would be advised to take a walk.

As limp and cold as The Founder is as a movie, it contains one of the finest Keaton performances of his entire career, maybe the one he’s been working his whole life toward.

Sumptuously designed, brightly costumed and shot with an eye toward epic grandeur, the new film is simply gorgeous to take in, no matter the size of the screen. Less pretty is the script, which took four screenwriters to conjure even though there’s perfectly good source material just sitting there, waiting for a photocopy machine.

It is riveting, deeply depressing stuff – and would be more engaging if co-directors David Darg and Price James had decided to explore the many similarities that movie-making and wrestling share, such as their devotion to putting on a highly fictional show.

Stripped of its parts, Bumblebee (as annoying to type as it is to say!) is just another needless franchise extension that should’ve been junked years ago.

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.

Maybe arguing the merits of a quote-unquote bad movie through the means of an imperfect documentary is the only option that makes sense. I have the distinct feeling, though, that somewhere in Europe, Verhoeven is laughing his ass off.

If Frankenstein is enough to shake the director of his creature comforts and push him to explore something new, then so be it. But don’t expect everyone else to devote themselves to such an exquisite corpse.

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.

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.

There are performances that shock you, that ground you, and that break you apart before building you back up. It is not often when an actor is able to deliver all of those reactions and more in the span of two hours, yet here is Vanessa Kirby proving herself as one of the most capable and ferociously talented stars of the moment.

There is a distinct, and welcome, lack of sentimentality here, too, with Baumbach able to swerve the tone into a more cerebral version of National Lampoon’s Vacation franchise, of all things. Imagine if Clark Griswold studied fascism and carried around a teeny-tiny pistol, and you’ll start to get the idea.

The new Chip ‘N Dale: Rescue Rangers movie is a delightful, zippy and genuinely fun thing

Jolt is a perplexing mix-up of genre and intentions. From one scene to the next, I had no real understanding of where the film might go next – but instead of anticipating the unpredictable, I came to quickly dread the arbitrariness.

Like the stock market itself, there are peaks and valleys.

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.

Mid90s doesn't feel like a recreation of an era so much as a lost artifact of the time. There's one predictable and regrettable narrative beat toward the end, but otherwise Hill has crafted a debut that will last a lifetime.

When Howard focuses on the head-scratching mechanics of the mission itself, Thirteen Lives excels – and its many claustrophobic underwater scenes likely play excellently inside the confines of a darkened theatre. But by the time we’re in pure rescue mode, it is almost too late. What should be the highest of high-stakes dramas arrives with a drippy thud.

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

First-time feature director Tim Miller has created a work that’s both aggressive and not aggressive enough.

It is a sadly out-of-touch tactic that recalls an old man yelling at the clouds (or, more accurately, cloud computing).