Barry Hertz

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.

The result is an indecisive and shapeless drama that never seems confident in the characters or situations it has created.

Hardy’s use-it-or-lose-it charm very nearly drowns out the dreadfulness all around him, but ultimately it’s not enough to sustain life. And given that the actor has a “story by” credit here, he deserves more blame than praise.

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!

Like her first film, 2016′s fine-young cannibals tale Raw, Ducournau is tracing taboos to sketch a messy but compelling treatise on life’s endless growing pains. Ride or die.

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

A highly abstract look at family, memory and regret, all filtered through the reality of daily life in the Métis Nation, Ste. Anne makes a big impression.

With Night Raiders, Goulet can confidently claim to be today’s most effective practitioner of Indigenous sci-fi, a subgenre in which time-tested cinematic thrills – speculative fiction, violence, a heightened sense of style – act as Trojan Horses for themes that audiences might otherwise ignore. Everyone wins.

Quiet and reverent, as if filmed entirely in hushed tones, Sciamma’s film is supremely confident in its every element.

Director Maria Schrader’s new sci-fi-tinged rom-com might be conventionally structured, but it is also smoothly crowd-pleasing work, tackling all the anxieties and neuroses of midlife romance with the fears and promises of next-generation technology.

Misha and the Wolves is as much a documentary as it is a wrestling match: filmmaker versus subject, truth versus fiction. Ultimately, the viewer comes out the winner.

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.

By focusing on the old men and their dogs who spend their time in the woods of Northern Italy searching for the prized fungus, Dweck and Kershaw operate on a level of gentle, removed observation.

We’re still a long, long way from the heights of animation titan Pixar. But you (parents, that is, not whichever five-year-old might have a Globe subscription) might also put your phone down for a stretch to see just what’s happening on-screen. At the very least, you’ll see which toys you’ll soon have to buy. Yelp!

There isn’t enough raw drama, deep-felt emotion, or genuine artistry on display here to keep CODA from staring down its own obligatory end: a half-smile and a shrug.

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

Free Guy is here, it repeatedly reminds us, to have a good time, not a long-franchise time. But there is something so overwhelmingly corporate and safe about the thing that you can see the glimmer of a brand-new cinematic universe in every twinkle of Reynolds’ dreamy hazel eyes.

The most derivative but finely tuned of superhero movies to come out in ages.

The power of Lowery’s work here is to filter his many influences into a singular vision that feels entirely in his sole possession.

It is at once highly watchable and baffling.

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.

The movie, and I don’t think I’m over- or under-selling this, is pure chaos. From its rib-poking opening to its magnificently messy conclusion, Old is a feverishly earnest look at mortality, responsibility and, um, well … I wish that I could explain just what I think Shyamalan is getting at in his final 15 minutes

Watching Snake Eyes (full title: Snake Eyes – G.I. Joe Origins) is not a physically painful ordeal. But it is an emotionally harmful one – a soul-deadening exercise that approximates satire, minus the self-awareness.

Director Michael Sarnoski’s feature debut is more like a Nicolas Cage supercut: alternately ridiculous, bare-bones, heartfelt, puzzling and what-in-god’s-name-y. And more often than not, it works.