Barry Hertz

The thrills here are both cheap and oddly, comfortingly captivating. Of course nothing can ever kill Liam Neeson, but it is a whole lot of no-brain-necessary fun to watch everyone and everything try.

F9 is a welcome blast of fizzy action glee. You won’t come out of it a better or smarter person – quite possibly dumber! – but you will leave satisfied that your summer movie season wasn’t a completely life- and joy-less bore.

The filmmaker assumes that aping the cheap aesthetics of the era are enough to establish style, and that making Enid a mystery amounts to layered characterization. It all leads to a climax that is nasty for all the wrong reasons.

New Order might go down as the most uncomfortable watch of the year. Sadistic and ugly and crushingly depressing. But also demanding of your engagement. The reward? A master-class in high-anxiety cinema, and enough fodder for a thousand uncomfortable conversations.

So for those asking the obvious: Yes, Awake should put you to sleep rather quickly.

As with other Miranda properties, In the Heights is designed to charm you into submission – and charmed you will be. You might even get up and dance. And whether that’s in the company of strangers at a theatre or in front of your indifferent pets at home, there is something to be said for a movie that can make you move.

As with every summer – even this supremely strange one – there are a ton of horror movies coming down the pike. But no matter how scary the new Conjuring or how disgusting the new Saw may be, I can guarantee that you won’t see as soul-shaking a film this season as The Amusement Park.

The Devil Made Me Do It is a resolutely pedestrian kind of horror.

It is mighty impressive, in a stupefying way, just how close Cruella’s filmmakers get to pulling the dang thing off. This isn’t to say that the movie is a success – it is embarrassing on many levels, and seems to be frequently at odds with its presumed family-friendly audience – but as far as movies that have no business existing outside sketch-comedy land go, it could’ve been worse.

Army of the Dead is exactly the kind of uber-stylish, ridiculously muscular, exceptionally juvenile storytelling that he’s made his bones on. Some audiences will make a meal of it. Some will gag. You’ll know which viewer you are after those first 15 minutes, guaranteed.

Those Who Wish Me Dead is solid meat-and-potatoes fun – it knows its job, gets it done with minimal fuss and leaves its audiences full and satisfied.

Ritchie pulls together an impressively determined thriller that sticks. Ideal for both a certain generation of viewer who gets excited when hearing the line, “We’ve got eight weeks of recon” and for those who will watch absolutely anything starring Statham (hi!), Wrath of Man is the best, bloodiest surprise of the year so far.

While there are the requisite number of jump scares and red-herring narrative fake-outs, Berman and Pulcini – who are odd fits in the first place, given their decidedly non-genre filmography – zig where you expect them to zag.

At least Without Remorse gets one thing right: casting onscreen dynamo Michael B. Jordan as the out-for-blood hero.

It is all very, very stupid, But first-time director Simon McQuoid regrettably refuses to embrace that stupidity.

Whenever the story’s central tension threatens to get interesting and complicated, the filmmakers deflate it in the most obvious of ways.

When Ben Wheatley is having a laugh, he can make for a perversely pleasant genre tour-guide. When he starts to get high off his own supply, though, it’s best to hike back to civilization.

Chaos Walking is, in its own way, a masterclass in everything that contemporary filmmakers should avoid doing.

The jokes arrive fast and plentifully, knowing just what will tickle both younger viewers and adults.

With the exception of a few demented scenes teleported over from a stranger, better comedy . . . Thunder Force is as sloppy and disappointing as the label “A Ben Falcone Film” previously suggested.

Simply put, I didn’t care for a single person or situation on-screen, and Jacobs’s curiously unconfident and drab direction, which is in desperate need of tighter editing, only hastened my growing annoyance.

Eventually, The Unholy reveals itself not to be an entertaining ride to Hell but an earnest sales pitch for the power of Christ. Fair enough. But for Easter 2021, I was hoping for something a little more enjoyably demonic and less been-there-redeemed-that. Let us pray.

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

Godzilla vs. Kong is a ridiculous movie made even more ridiculous by a distinct lack of care in its conception and execution. But it is also the kind of cinematic assault that delivers just the right jolt to the most base sensibilities hiding within our lizard brains. You walk away dazed but bemused.

There are immense, leisurely pleasures to be found in The Courier, which presents a familiar spy-versus-spy drama in a familiar way. Which is fine: So long as you’re not expecting subversion or surprise, you can gently sink yourself into director Dominic Cooke’s intentionally, pleasantly lukewarm waters and come out the other side refreshed and squeaky-clean.

While the situation is played for dark laughs, Odenkirk’s commitment to the role is dead serious. He makes its ridiculousness believable. By the end of Nobody, I wanted desperately for the producers of the next Fast & Furious film to cast Odenkirk as the muscle-car-driving villain. In your heart of hearts, you know it would work, too.

The dead-seriousness with which Sims-Fewer and Mancinelli approach their subject is admirable, as is the former’s unsettling lead performance. And you won’t find another film this year that subverts the male gaze in such a brutally naked manner.

It’s bloody, brutal, stupid fun – until it isn’t. Either running out of ideas or running into budgetary problems, Carnahan slows things down about halfway in, stopping the madness in its tracks to give Roy some humanity (not needed here, but thanks!) and to give audiences some yadda-yadda villainy from a bored-looking, here-for-the-paycheque Gibson (also, no thank you!).