Barry Hertz

More an extreme theatre-school exercise than a substantive act of filmmaking, the new drama Wolf is one wild, rabid mess.

While Benedetta the woman may have been touched by Heaven or cursed from Hell or neither, Benedetta the film is undoubtedly a miracle.

House of Gucci is a movie about a family at war with itself – yet Scott’s film is engaged in its own distracting skirmishes, with battles messily waged over tone, genre and performance.

There is almost zero chance that this film escapes the festival or art-house circuit to become a mainstream cultural artifact – its sexually explicit material all but guarantees it – but Jude’s work is an almost profound act of high-wire lampoonery that deserves to be seen and debated far and wide.

Take three hours out of your life, and enjoy one of the most fulfilling cinematic rides of the year.

Come for Phoenix, stay for Phoenix and maybe also Norman and Hoffman, the latter of whom bounces off of both her co-stars with a nervy charm. But everything else? C’mon.

Once you surrender yourself to what King Richard is doing, and what it’s not doing, that’s okay. It’s especially easy to shut up and go along with whatever rosy view the Williams family wishes to preserve because Smith is here the whole time, helping sell the story.

In terms of musical-theatre bona fides and genuine, soaring emotion, Tick, Tick … Boom! drowns out its contemporaries all the way up to the rafters.

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

With one foot in lighthearted romantic comedy and another in also-light political commentary, Gaza Mon Amour never takes a wrong step, exactly, but also feels ambivalent about its final destination. And if that tortured metaphor doesn’t work for you, then the essence of the film, directed by twin brothers Tarzan and Arab Nasser, might feel just as wobbly.

The film is not a masterpiece, but a memory box. Comforting, inviting, and one you won’t mind keeping close.

The filmmakers have leapt over franchise concerns to somehow deliver a movie that engages kids and entertainingly puzzles adults.

When Beans works, it resonates deeply. And when it doesn’t, it’s not a tragedy – just evidence of a filmmaker finding what works for her voice and vision, and what might work better for an anticipated follow-up.

A bold, raw, bordering-on-manic mashup of Eyes Wide Shut, Ivans XTC and HBO’s Entourage, the new thriller-cum-satire The Beta Test is here to test your limits.

The story is bland, the action incoherent, the surprises detestably nonsensical, the humour never rising above the level of a half-smirk. And for a movie that gathers the world’s most perfectly sculpted denizens, everything is bafflingly sexless. If Red Notice is the future of the big and shiny movie, then we are now in the era of the neutered blockbuster.

Sapochnik (Game of Thrones) wisely puts Hanks at the centre of nearly every scene, letting the actor’s ceaseless charisma carry audiences through the End Times. We attach ourselves to Finch partly because of the character, but also because we’re rooting for Hanks to escape the island, oops, I mean the apocalypse.

Eternals is shockingly, depressingly lifeless.

There is a delicate touch deployed here, and not only with Julie, but those surrounding her. Depression, Koppleman seems to be saying, is not a one-person battle. It can swallow everyone in a victim’s orbit.

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.

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.

The story is captivating, the characters are magnificently fleshed out, and the emotional stakes are entirely, utterly believable.

Whimsically beautiful, as if Anderson discovered a long-lost Antoine de Saint-Exupéry picture book.

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is, at its best moments, pure and gigantic cinematic madness.

Kranz can’t quite figure out a way to make his characters’ collective misery cinematically interesting. This is a serious movie, but not a searing one.

There is something entertaining, or maybe just enjoyably puzzling, about what Gordon Green and McBride think a Michael Myers movie could or ought to be. If it ain’t dead, don’t kill it.

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.

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.

Whereas the directors’ last project, the Oscar-winning free-climbing doc Free Solo, chronicled an open-air kind of anxiety, The Rescue is a claustrophobic exercise in tension, expertly assembled for maximum emotional impact.