Barry Hertz

It’s not half-bad. I mean, don’t get too excited – this is still a bad movie. But it is the kind of better-than-it-should-be bad instead of merely bad-bad.

With a tongue-in-cheek title inviting audiences to immediately dismiss its supposedly intense fear factor, Damian McCarthy’s new horror film arrives ready to play with convention and expectation. The scary thing, though, is that the movie exhausts itself halfway through, revealing Hokum as something closer to hogwash.

Ultimately, Blue Heron is an epic exploring the power and fissures of memory. But there is no chance that audiences will ever forget what Romvari has accomplished here.

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

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.

For all the behind-the-scenes footage and ostensible opportunities to grill Michaels about everything and anything, Neville’s film walks away with the impression and insight that anyone paying even half-attention to network television over the past few decades already knows.

Soderbergh, once again acting as his own cinematographer under the alias Peter Andrews (and editor, with the nom de plume Mary Ann Bernard), finds his own way of keeping the camera swirling and twirling, electrifying lengthy, densely composed monologues that require some visual energy to keep them from landing with a cinematic thud.

The concept might work for especially patient gamers, but rendered cinematically by director Genki Kawamura, the result is a frustrating and ultimately boring exercise in audience endurance.

In an era where studios are obsessed with reviving ostensibly comforting intellectual property, Goldhaber has twisted the end-goal of modern Hollywood radically and beautifully.

The resulting drama, while perhaps predictable in an American Movie meets Cocoon kind of way, is still awfully sweet and warmhearted.

Atkins, a multidisciplinary artist, proudly doesn’t obey the almost obligatory rhythms of documentary filmmaking. There are no talking heads, no manufactured narrative momentum.

The real trick of the film, though, is how it constantly steadies itself in the face of ever-mounting absurdity. This is a movie of such sexual outrageousness and stylized depravity that it should topple over every few minutes. And yet Glowicki and Petrie (who plays multiple roles) ride the razor’s edge of delirium to create something fantastical, even beautiful.

Rest assured that the story is as nonsensical as it is disposable, a cocktail-napkin of an idea brought to digital life with hundreds of millions of dollars of the emptiest-looking CG animation ever produced.

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

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 nervy, eye-popping reimagining of the AIDS crisis as filtered through the lens of a frenzied domestic drama, Julia Ducournau’s new film is, like the very best Cave song, a profoundly upsetting creation to sink into, equal parts blood-pumping passion and skin-crawling menace.

A Canadian spin on Thelma & Louise, the ambitious new drama Nika & Madison has all the fiery spirit of its made-in-Hollywood inspiration, if not quite the narrative dynamism and endless resources.

In its bold aesthetic courage and rigid thematic spine, Khatami’s movie is a full-body experience that leaves you fully alive.

The film works best when it is only Evy and her headphones on the screen, the character’s head (and ours) becoming overwhelmed by some truly impressive, singularly creepy sound design.

At almost every turn, Project Hail Mary attempts to convince you that it is groundbreaking, innovative filmmaking. But in actuality, the movie lands as a grand act of cinematic recycling – the fusing together of familiar, comforting bits and pieces into something determined to please crowds and warm hearts.

It flails wildly from minute to minute, bursting with ideas and themes it barely has time to articulate, but the sheer unpredictability of its narrative and aesthetic gesticulations guarantee that your attention never threatens to drift, and that your nerves remain constantly on edge.

Shot entirely in the director’s home country with a largely amateur, untrained cast, the film blends a striking sense of street-level realism, political commentary and poetic nostalgia for the naive innocence of youth.

While Ed Harris, as the cruel patriarch of the Redfellows, is not so much phoning his role in as he is sending it by carrier pigeon, it is Margaret Qualley and Glen Powell who do the most unintentional damage.

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.

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

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.

The evolution of Colin and Ray’s relationship is traced with a steamy kind of sensitivity. Lighton, in his feature directorial debut, never treats the BDSM scene as an object of fetishistic curiosity, but rather a culture rich with yearning, compassion, jealousy – the entire gamut of romantic life.

Ratner’s film commits too many cinematic sins to count.

Statham is as enjoyably stern and semi-serious as ever, but his sturdy presence cannot enliven a weirdly buttoned-up exercise in mercenary mayhem.

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.

Glowicki and Petrie are immensely committed and often fearless performers – so much so that you can see them frequently bouncing against the constraints of the story surrounding them, the actors seemingly confident that if they pushed themselves just past the brink, the movie’s half-untapped potential might burst wide open.

In just her second feature, Schilinski creates a true art-house epic, haunting and lyrical.

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.

A corrupt-cop drama that is mostly aware about its B-minus-movie aspirations, Carnahan’s film is a thoroughly enjoyable if not particularly original mashup of Training Day, Cop Land, Triple 9 and a dozen-plus other films in which it is up to One Good Cop™ to solve a mystery involving a dead police captain, dirty officials and millions of dollars in drug-cartel money.

Seyfried, who has already cemented her status as one of today’s most beguiling and unpredictable performers – any other actress would get whiplash going from playing tech-schemer Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout to a betrayed opera virtuoso in Atom Egoyan’s Seven Veils to the sudsy theatrics of last week’s The Housemaid to this – is simply phenomenal.

Ma’s film isn’t solely set on establishing The Peg’s winter bona fides, but rather exposing the city’s throbbing romantic heart, which might be able to melt the coldest of days.

While Nicholas Hytner’s new film The Choral is, above all, exceedingly polite, there is no need to be genteel about the movie’s qualities. This is a period piece of insignificant impact and distressingly drippy intentions, its filmmakers so concerned with their project being considered handsome and respectable that they fail to spark any emotional response beyond the most passive of shoulder shrugs.

From beat to beat, it is impossible to predict where Park is going with this film. Best to just turn up the volume, and trust in the rhythm that Park has set for himself. Let him lead the dance.

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.

Jackman is such a finessed force of nature that he’s as good as you might expect, but Hudson – who never quite landed as juicy a part as in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, which is now more than a quarter-century old – matches her co-star beat for beat, bar for bar. Good times, they never seemed so good.

Safdie and Bronstein know they’re playing with fire in every frame, and it’s a miracle of Maccabean proportions they’re able to keep the entire thing from self-combusting.

Arnett delivers something warm and genuine here, especially every time he’s paired against Dern, who perhaps knows this territory better.

Only Seyfried truly understood the assignment that Feig handed her, the actress oscillating between two modes – intense and freakishly intense – with finesse.

The bulk of Fire and Ash feels distressingly derivative of what came before, down to ultra-specific plot beats

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.

It can be slow going, certainly, but it’s always rewarding. Pull up a chair, stay a while.

The deeper that Resurrection goes, the more that Gan’s vision delicately, meticulously, and, of course, slowly envelopes you, no matter your level of comprehension.

The Secret Agent is not only mining the director’s own personal cinematic education – it is rich in homages to everything from The Parallax View and McCabe & Mrs. Miller to Shivers and, of course, Jaws – but also excavating an entire nation’s past.

Burger and Tateisi don’t quite deliver a film as energetic and unpredictable as their subject.

In so many ways, The Whole Bloody Affair is the movie-est movie to ever be movie’d, with Tarantino generously trepanning his skull wide open in order to provide everyone a direct portal inside his cinema-addled brain.

The most disappointing part is that the film is peppered with so many brief moments of comic flair and clear-eyed truths that they are collectively almost enough to convince you that it doesn’t matter what Baumbach’s intentions might’ve been. Unfortunately, those sharper-edged bits and pieces eventually become subsumed by a drippy sentimentality that sticks to you like the crisp white suit that Clooney is often wrapped inside of.

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.

Edgerton doesn’t allow pity or easy sympathy to seep in. Things are hard, things fall apart. And sometimes it all comes together. It’s a living.

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.

It is tidy, it is easy and it is, by the end, far too flinty.

There are multiple endings of various potency, secondary characters who bizarrely drop out of the proceedings, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the real-life tension that drove so much of the trial’s backroom machinations, with the most fascinating element of the central Goring-Kelley relationship reduced to a quick line of end-credit text.

This is Sweeney’s show, and when she’s not framed in its dead centre, the movie’s blood cannot help but drip down the drain. The star deserves whatever awards might be coming her way. Don’t make her put up a fight.

Audrey is the best kind of inscrutable hero, as precise in her obsession as she is enigmatic in every other aspect of her life. For moviegoers starving for something new who, like Audrey, have nearly given up the ghost, Measures for a Funeral is a symphony, full and rich.

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?

The lack of genuine slaughter in Badlands isn’t the film’s only problem. While it flips the franchise’s history by making the Yautja a hero instead of a villain . . . there is not nearly enough tension or world-building on display to become invested in this particular game of kill-or-be-killed.

The entire experiment feels limited, constrained by both unfettered admiration and nostalgia for a time that Linklater never experienced firsthand. It is a movie of limits, whereas Godard knew none.

As is the case with much of Reichardt’s work, The Mastermind is a genre movie that zeroes in on a formula only to meticulously scrawl over it in jet-black ink.

The film never catches fire, but White and Strong do their very best to give it a spark.

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

A miracle of a movie that could only exist due to everything going so very wrong.

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.

Bronstein infuses every moment of If I Had Legs... with a jagged kind of intensity, stringing together scenes with an adrenalized propulsion that makes a story of a mother struggling against a world pitted against her feel both singular and universal.

It is all fairly silly and sometimes wildly uneven stuff, with Ansari’s rather dark socioeconomic themes often colliding uneasily with a barrage of lighthearted zingers. But the laughs rarely let up, with Ansari committed to ensuring that barely a minute passes by without a wry observation or sharp gag.

Moondi’s film feels of a piece with his previous work – films in which relationships are tested and almost pulverized – while also pushing into new, more emotionally complex territory.

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.

Ares is a mostly disposable and thoroughly dumb product of lazy franchise fetishism from filmmakers who could not seem to care less about what story they are trying to tell. But as a two-hour visual screensaver to a thunderous and hypnotic Nine Inch Nails soundtrack, Ares rules.

While there are several moments in the film, including two extended monologues, that remind audiences just how ferociously committed a performer Daniel can be, so much of Anemone feels a few dozen workshops away from being camera-ready.

Safdie recognizes that The Smashing Machine is a single-purpose invention, one built to run on the blood, sweat and sometimes even the tears of Dwayne Johnson. Consider the act of watching the movie a double dose of cinematic benevolence: rewarding yourself, and saving the star from his own worst Hollywood instincts. Two birds, one Rock.

Thoughtful yet incendiary, romantic yet skeptical, patently absurd yet at the same time brandishing a mirror that so clearly and unforgivingly reflects our own cracked reality, Anderson’s film arrives with the kind of casual, confident brilliance that feels deceptively effortless.

This is not a film to easily swoon over, but mournfully contemplate.

While Lawrence keeps the momentum steady – just like his contest’s most able-bodied walkers – and ensures that every few minutes delivers some kind of violent jolt, there’s just not enough meat to this particular roadkill story to keep one cinematic foot in front of the other.

This is a remake built on equal parts care and admiration, a love letter to all the sickos out there. It’s nothing to simply wash your hands of. Or flush away.

The Roses is not nearly acrimonious, or funny, enough to justify its peculiar existence. If DeVito’s original was the cinematic equivalent of going through the divorce from hell, this new break-up feels more like a trial separation.

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.

Guts will be busted, and sides will be split. Heck, moviegoers might even learn to kiss and make up with comedies for good.

When Lee puts Washington in just the right scene, with just the right power dynamics and just the right nerve-rattling dialogue, the result is a thing of high art. Forget the film’s initial low points – just keep aiming toward the top. And keep watching King David’s throne.

Quickly and efficiently, Cregger sets up his world and its impossibly high stakes with style to burn. Finally, we have a horror movie director who knows how to properly light a nighttime scene. But once Cregger’s narrative threads are laid out, the writer-director has a helluva time stitching them together.

By multiplying the number of body-swaps, the script seems to have accidentally increased its plot padding, too, resulting in a mushy mess that is only fitfully charming. But when the film does work, it delivers the kind of thank-goodness-it’s-Friday success story that will warm the heart of every long-time Lindsay Lohan fan out there (we are legion).

Whenever Rockwell’s purr comes on, which is often given Mr. Wolf’s central role, the whole affair sings, uniting both children who are naturally entranced by the actor’s delivery and adults who get Oscar-calibre work in an otherwise forgettable kiddie flick.

Together is such a sharp blend of the hilarious and the terrifying that it busts your gut at the same time it has you gritting your teeth.

While one-time teen dreams Hewitt and Prinze Jr. earn their paydays by lending a semblance of gravitas to the silliness, their brief on-screen presence only underline the lifelessness of today’s fresh meat.

By the film’s haunting finale – a gut-punch moment of reckoning that follows nearly half an hour of entertainingly amateurish gunplay – Kurosawa’s sentiments on the current state of e-commerce are clear. Whether emptor or venditor, capitalism is full of caveats.

If you can’t Smurf anything nice, then don’t Smurf anything at all. Such is the key lesson to be taken away by discerning parents this weekend after being dragged by their children to yet another big-screen adaptation of everyone’s second-favourite blue-man group.

The result is a magnificently off-the-rails poison pill of a film, one that skitters from paranoiac thriller to reactionary satire to something far more caustic and unnerving. It is the cinematic equivalent of long COVID – lingering, haunting, and demanding rigorous, skeptical investigation.

40 Acres is a top-tier genre film that Trojan-horses a flood of knotty, provocative conversations into multiplexes via the best kind of speculative fiction.

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.

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.

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.

The real charm of Boxcutter is just how Dahya and his cinematographer James Klopko capture the city as Rome criss-crosses it. Without jackhammering the point home, the film’s vision of Toronto is one of a city shedding one skin to wear another, in the process forcing all the creative forces who make it so special further and further outside its boundaries.

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.

Exploiting a mere sliver of story from John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, Ballerina concocts an especially dull origin story for an ancillary piece of Wickian lore.