Barry Hertz

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.

After almost two and a half hours, all of it glued together with plot-vomiting dialogue and characters that only vaguely resemble the ones Spielberg carefully built, Dominion becomes its very own Jurassic Park: Designed to thrill and enchant, it instead becomes a ride to survive.

Bullet Train’s biggest weapon, of the secretly funny variety, rests in the chiselled form of star Brad Pitt, who once again proves that he is as charming a buff-and-tough movie god as he is a wry, self-deprecating comedy star.

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.

Megalopolis might be Coppola’s decades-in-the-making passion project, an epic of ambition and imagination, but it is also a magnificent mess of a masterpiece, as irredeemably silly as it is sincerely sublime.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

With some deft trimming, Being the Ricardos could be a fine HBO Sunday night movie “event,” as they used to be (or still are?) called. But as it is, this is less a cinematic thing and more an elaborate joke without a kicker. As Lucille Ball might say: waaaaaaaah.

Long underutilized and certainly undervalued, Canadian actress Pill is a pure delight here as Charlotte, anchoring and then elevating every single scene that she is in.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

When the narrative knife is as dull as it is here, there is just no fun in bleeding out. If Caron and his collaborators don’t learn their lesson, though, at least we will. Work smarter, not Sharper.

A tonally wild and historically, um, loose First World War thriller, The King’s Man arrives as a head-scratching mess of bewildering ambition and outrageous style.

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

Knives has just enough expensive style, steamy sex, and wild plot contrivances to hold your attention.

Alice, Darling does so much right that it is acutely painful when it goes wrong.

Clocking in at a severely bloated 165 minutes, Chapter 4 is both a thrill and a slog, an all-you-can-eat buffet that insists on stuffing your guts before it spills them.

There is only one Spielberg, so the result is an adventure that sands away the edges of its own taste for danger, with the destination – those gobs of cash – mattering far more than the journey.

Ultimately the film struggles to balance its various commitments, with a screenplay that never seems sure of whether it wants to be a pure comedy, a lore-packed adventure or a peppy children’s film that shuffles kids straight to the toy aisle.

While Lawrence and his producing partners got deserved flak for breaking up Collins' third novel, Mockingjay, into two films, they've learned the wrong lessons here, compressing what should have been either two films or a miniseries into one excessive production.

Berger’s film is a sometimes zippy, frequently ridiculous drama.

Perhaps sensing that the film needs all the toe-tapping energy it can get, Spiderhead’s cast make the most out of their thin material.

In writer-director Keith Thomas’s bid to add a layer of thematic novelty to a familiar genre, he has come up with a mish-mash that will satisfy only those with extremely acquired tastes.

Certainly, it’s fun to see Schafer, best known for her work on HBO’s teenage-wasteland series Euphoria, match wits with Stevens, including a gnarly sequence of knife play. But neither actor can figure out where their director is going with all this madness or where he might want to be at any given moment, tonally and thematically. It’s enough to drive anybody, even the king of kook Stevens – well, you know.

It is a lot, and Ascher only has so many stylistic tricks up his sleeve – including a unique, if eventually exhausting, spin on talking-head Zoom footage – to delay the sheer weight of his subject matter from crushing his film into multiverse-ready dust.

Supernova feels less like a film to cherish and more a tweet to favourite.

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

Ultimately, Thor: Love and Thunder will leave you feeling sad, empty, deadened. Which is what frequently happens in the MCU these days – it is an enterprise built with an Axl Rose-sized appetite for destruction, but no stomach for genuine risk or imagination.

Carmen is a wild and unrestrained attempt to empty its director’s entire brain onto the screen, and for that it deserves recognition. But the ultimate result slips too easily between heroic effort and hot mess.

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

Freaky Tales has neither the patience nor the depth to imagine any one person or story with a legitimate hook.

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.

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.

Conceived as a climate-change metaphor, but given an oily new layer thanks to the pandemic, the film’s conceit could be sharply effective, in careful hands. But McKay knows only of punching down with meaty fists, so the result is a messy, smarmy assault.

The Gorge is half a smouldering romance, half a zombified venture into overkilled horror-movie tropes.

Through it all, Smith’s performance grounds the horror in a place of courage, heart and soul.

Once Land of Bad establishes its stakes – one man versus an army – the film settles all too comfortably into war-machine territory, minus any particularly inventive kills or sense of style.

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.

At around the hundred-minute mark, everything in Gunn’s perfect little cinematic galaxy falls apart in a magnificently depressing fashion. It is as if the MCU higher-ups got wind of what was going down and quickly engineered a black hole of studio notes to suck the Guardians into a tesseract of meaningless set-pieces and prolonged B-plot detours.

Despite strong performances across the board – most notably Wright, who has never before been able to flex such leading-man magnetism – there is an overriding flatness to Monk’s personal life.

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.

The talented performers are ultimately overmatched by a janky script that telegraphs every emotional swerve and narrative beat as if audiences are not to ever be trusted.

All the magnificent little elements add up to a whole lot of not-enough this time around, resulting in a creaky and exhausting pastiche of Andersonia rather than the real deal.

The result is messy, zippy and smart-alecky. But never boring, and occasionally funny enough to warrant a spit-take or three.

"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.

It mostly all comes together in the end, but you still cannot help but watch the film and wonder why the need for just so much of everything.

Jamie M. Dagg's new film, Sweet Virginia, is a lot to take in – too much, really. It's a revenge movie, a crime thriller, a gentle and low-key romance, and a dusty drama about the pains of leaving the past behind. It doesn't succeed at being any one of those things, too muddled is the script and too unsteady is the direction.

The Moneychanger has fun on its road to a predictable ending. You won’t feel cheated, but you might think you overpaid.

The filmmakers make excellent use of the Manitoba shooting location (perfect for an eerie mood of societal isolation) and the story's key theme – can we be responsible for things that are out of our control? – is a compelling one. Unlike its lead characters, you can safely, if not eagerly, approach Radius without fear of dying.

When the film’s pace slows down every now and then, and Cohen gets room to breathe, the film is a genuine riot.

The movie surprises on almost every level, breaking a number of contemporary rom-com rules along the way thanks to Tiffany Paulsen’s self-aware screenplay. I don’t mean in the meta-satirical sense of, say, David Wain’s absurdist They Came Together. More like a watered down Nora Ephron project.

It’s not that every film has to achieve some grand epiphany, but Touch Me Not is not nearly as satisfying as the primal act it’s obsessed with.

There are a lot of words that come to mind when watching Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Suspiria: beautiful, gross, overwhelming, frustrating, disturbing, powerful, long, gross, audacious, baffling, explicit, extravagant and did I mention gross?

Listen carefully, and you can almost hear the enjoyably comic and nasty tone Harpoon was likely going for – before it drowned in a flood of unwatchable idiots.

Michael Keaton’s go-for-broke performance is such a possessed work of splatter comedy that he almost proves right the producers who have been advocating for this nostalgia-play cash grab for decades.

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

Gordon-Levitt, absent from the big screen since 2016′s "Snowden," oscillates nicely between maintaining an air of remarkable calm and then breaking down completely, and he pretends to know what all those airplane buttons do quite well.

Joker reveals itself as very expensive cosplay: effective at first glance, but at its seams superficial, disposable and dishonest.

The few parts of director Gene Stupnitsky’s film that feel new, then, don’t feel that new at all, from the ultra-shaggy plot to the gross-out gags that misunderstand the power that repetition might hold.

It is an entertainingly cheesy narrative, but overly comfortable for someone such as Miike, whose gonzo talents seem somehow muted here.

At times, this cinema-vérité approach results in a claustrophobic and engrossing viewing experience. But its construction also frequently, and curiously, lacks urgency, and the few characters the filmmakers keep returning to never quite stick.

It’s shocking and troubling, but it doesn’t add much to the reality we already know cruelly exists.

It’s zippy and distracting enough to keep you and your brood entertained for half an afternoon, but don’t get too comfortable – I can see the soundtrack eventually grating if you ever find your kids demanding to watch it over and over again. Which is inevitable.

Ford v Ferrari’s narrative and emotional beats feel assembled in a factory-floor kind of way. The characters are stock, the story’s ups and downs are easily telegraphed, and the inoffensive but not particularly inventive dialogue is spat up as if the actors were eager to move onto the next thing.

Like Majors’s chiselled physique, which is almost a special effect all its own, Magazine Dreams takes unironic pride in flexing its themes so nakedly and frequently that there’s little left to the imagination.

A con-artist movie that is something of a con itself.

As is the case with such movies – where every character's passing glance hints at a dark secret – everything is not as it seems, and the story quickly collapses into itself.

Pure blockbuster gloss – perfectly fine for a Saturday afternoon matinee, but instantly forgettable once you’ve emerged from the dark of a multiplex.

The actor offers an incredibly committed and determined performance, but by the film’s end, you wish he’d be able to get back to doing what he does best: eating.

Hanks is sturdy as ever, grounding the proceedings in a warm sense of familiar, fatherly comfort. But the rest of the film feels weightless, and at parts unbelievably dumb. One mid-film shoot-out in particular is executed with such listlessness that it’s a wonder Greengrass was able to stay awake while filming it.

Yet despite the efforts of its stars and the inherent juiciness of its source material, the film falls flat when it should bounce with surreal glee. Perhaps it’s because Kelly is only telling half a story here.

Ultimately Dark Fate is nothing more than a run-duck-and-repeat production – an extraordinarily familiar, if efficiently made, exercise in Terminatorology. If the franchise pattern holds, it’ll be back.

Watanabe and Moore acquit themselves well (although the latter’s lip-syncing is questionable), but Bel Canto falls short of the operatic notes Weitz attempts to hit.

Ewan McGregor does a solid job as Danny, still shining (i.e. reading minds and performing other freaky feats of the head) after all these years, and Rebecca Ferguson is having a great deal of fun as his new nemesis, driving across the country sucking souls and finding new and inventive ways of wearing chapeaus.

But Schneider, whose only other directing credit is the extremely low-key 2009 family drama "Get Low," finds a way to portray the nautical action with clarity and precision. You might not know what Krause and his crew are saying at all times, but you definitely know what they’re witnessing.

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.

In its thin conception, shaggy form and muddy execution – and in its glee in coasting on a perceived aura of cool whiz-pow-bang energy – the film is as much a comic-book movie as they come.

But viewed from another, more cynical angle, The Broken Hearts Gallery reveals itself as just another lightweight Saturday-night diversion – zippy and heartfelt, certainly, but hardly reinventing or even seasonally rotating the rom-com wheel.

The strong cast keep their heads down and offer all the obligatory rhythms – if you hire Bruce Dern as a crabby horse-trainer, you are going to get exactly what you paid for – and the film eagerly embraces the purely filthy dullness of prison life.

In 96 minutes, Soderbergh presents a series of vignettes underlining humanity’s subservience to greed. Some of the segments work – especially one involving an African business titan who decides to teach his daughter an expensive family lesson – and some are too thin (maybe there is a downside to that brisk 96-minute runtime after all).

The tension between trying to make something unique and trying to adhere to whatever expectations you place on yourself when you call your movie Capone (although to be fair its working title was Fonzo) is right up there onscreen. In all its glorious mess.

Phillips delivers a mostly by-the-book rise-and-fall saga of two bros in way over their heads, complete with ostentatious title cards that, instead of subtly addressing the film’s themes of greed and jealousy, only hammer the moral lessons with the grace of a rusty Kalashnikov.

The most shocking part of this too-shocking-for-audiences-today production is that Cuse and Lindelof are even involved, given the far smarter and sharper work they did last year on HBO’s "Watchmen," which took the carcass of U.S. politics and thoroughly eviscerated it in a new and startling fashion.

The humour doesn’t go nearly as deep as the science of “looking eternity in the eye,” resulting in a neat-enough educational experience, if not a fulfilling work of documentary cinema.

For a while, it’s quietly meditative and riveting – worthy of the Palme d’Or it captured last spring in Cannes. But in the film’s final 10 minutes, Audiard lets his bombastic sensibilities loose, creating an over-the-top revenge tale that’s bewildering.

Each frame is drowning in vibrant colours and packed with so many decked-out extras that Aladdin’s environment seems less like a typical CGI-enabled sound stage, and more like a tangible, if bombastically stylish, world of its own.

Hancock (The Blind Side, The Founder) keeps the action moving briskly and with little tonal confusion, highlighting just what a polished studio-favoured professional can do when given gobs of money and zero intellectual-property obligations. And his trio of leading men are all given ample space to play to their strengths.

Once the big twist kicks in, there’s plenty of gritty fun to be had, but patience is a hard-won virtue in genre filmmaking.

A zany mix of dark comedy, slapstick, and high-concept adventure, The Lovebirds moves fast in the hopes that no one notices how messy its construction is.

Lawrence Michael Levine’s film, though, is only sporadically clever enough to pull off its central trick. Mostly, we’re stuck with a group of rather unpleasant people doing rather unpleasant things. To what desired end, it is never quite clear.

Once the half-clever set-up is established by Watts – what happens when two lone wolves must work together? – the film is content to merely coast on the charms of its stars.

A film in which every single character is despicable, but some are more despicable than others, could have run into a sympathy problem. Yet thanks to J. Blakeson’s zippy direction and a chillier-than-thou lead performance from Rosamund Pike, the movie is immensely watchable. Just not especially memorable.

Anyone who has ever watched a movie about young love and the C-word (no, not Clouds) will know exactly where the film is headed, as well as the obligatory narrative beats that stretch out the inevitable. But for a sob story, Clouds is not nearly as watery as it could have been.

Vivarium is an exercise in wringing dry the audience’s emotions until we’re nothing but husks. For some, that could be appreciatively cathartic right about now. Myself, I felt little other than a deep and nagging depression.

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

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

The film is not quite a medallist. But it’s certainly a spirited contender.

Unfortunately, despite Egerton’s most dedicated efforts to pump some life into his hero, Rogers is the blandest kind of capitalist hero. Meanwhile, the various Soviets and Brits caught up in the Tetris antics are just one graphics card away from being Super Mario Bros.-ready boss-level villains.

In five years’ time, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Far from Home ranked near the bottom of everyone’s favourite MCU efforts – the film evaporates, Endgame-style, immediately after viewing.

Clearly, Oppenheimer is an ambitious and courageous filmmaker – his chilling documentaries alone are enough to ensure his place in the pantheon. But so much of The End prioritizes purpose over execution, with the result stretched out over interminable lengths.

Watching it all unfold in my sweatpants while shoving frozen pizza into my gullet, I found it deeply, unshakably depressing.

Given that his movie never gives us an opportunity to understand who these men are, it is hard to mourn them beyond a superficial fashion.

There are jump-scares aplenty, and a great deal of barely visible shots of its monster, culminating in a full-on creature reveal that’s nicely gross. The characters are sketched out just enough to make you care whether they live or die, with solid performances from all involved, including a rare star turn from Messina.

Perhaps this is Anderson's version of a parlour game – walk into Phantom Thread expecting a portrait of a testy male genius as portrayed by another testy male genius, but be gifted with a stealth drama about the hidden lives of the women who suffer in his shadow.

The one overwhelmingly positive thing that you’ve heard about The Whale is true: Fraser does a remarkable job.

A giddy and fitfully amusing mashup of "Adventures in Babysitting," "Date Night," the Spy Kids franchise and, um, "Wet Hot American Summer," The Sleepover is the latest entry in Netflix’s experiment in catch-‘em-all entertainment.

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.

Natali’s aesthetic exercise eventually outgrows his narrative trappings, and he’s forced to add unnecessary and foggy backstory to the source of the overgrown greenery.

It’s frequently funny and entertaining enough, but its insights are far from revolutionary.

Part revisionist history and part deeply grim fairy tale, writer-director Mirrah Foulkes’s feature debut wants to be as clever as it is fiendish, as funny as it is dark, and as progressive as it is exploitative – but such goals collide instead of coalesce.

The international cast manage to acquit themselves fine enough, with Jagger in particular having a ball as an energetic rapscallion.

No matter how obvious the set-up – what if men and women of the cloth were … rude and sexy??? – the cast gives every scene just enough of a deadpan spin to sell it, at least for the first hour. After the final 30 minutes come and go, including a frantic detour into witchcraft, you may seek out a convent of your own.

It becomes clear that there’s just not enough meat on the bones of Craig’s film to justify all the dismemberment.

Mostly, Chandor, working with a screenplay co-authored by Zero Dark Thirty writer Mark Boal, engages in drive-by subversion, smoothly twisting his way through the obligatory genre steps until he arrives in the territory of a morally fraught neo-western: more The Treasure of the Sierra Madre than Sicario: Day of the Soldado.

Farrelly’s film is worth witnessing, especially given how it is now all but destined to dominate the awards conversation. But do yourself a favour: Each time your fellow moviegoers burst into applause, ask just who it is they’re clapping for.

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.

At least Bell and Fisher make the most of their screen time, with each playing off each other like close friends simply thrilled for the opportunity to frolic in the film’s ridiculous fantasyland.

It’s an intense and sharp opening that would impress Spielberg, if he could hear the dang thing. Nearly the entire movie is torpedoed by its cranked-to-11 sound mix, with a good chunk of dialogue drowned out by whirring airplanes and myriad explosions.

There are a few scenes where Theron is an inch away from completely rewriting the proceedings – she just needs a slight jolt in the right direction from her director, a nudge toward chaos. But filmmaker Gina Prince-Bythewood never quite delivers the inspirational spark her star needs to unleash such fury, and the resulting antics rest somewhere between spectacle and shoulder-shrug.

It makes for intriguing and often gripping viewing, but delivers a more confounding experience than is necessary. Still, the director knows how to break those bones real good.

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 is also weighed down with a hokey record-scratch moment, a triumphant big-game sequence and a church-set finale that seems to be aping "The Graduate" but doesn’t quite have the courage to fully embrace the comedy of the moment.

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.

Part "Billy Elliot" and part Chadha’s own underdog hit "Bend It Like Beckham," Blinded by the Light is a feel-good coming-of-age movie that often feels way too good about itself.

This isn’t some cutsey, bordering-on-laughable inspiration porn. It is more patient, messy and dead-serious than its sight-gag of a poster might have you believe. This doesn’t mean it’s a great movie – just a passable one.

What we’re instead left with are two diametrically opposed performances: Williams goes small and intimate as the distressed Isabel, while Moore opts for a more operatic, less successful tenor that results in what might be the actress’s most unhinged moment ever (and not in a good way).

Touching, if by-the-books, documentary.

For those entering grade school, there is likely no better and more concise primer on the scandal. For everyone else, well, you know the story.

A smooth family drama with hints of big, bold comedy and a spicy, complicated aftertaste reminiscent of Lifetime movie-of-the-week tropes, Uncorked is the cinematic equivalent of merlot: fine enough if you’ve drained all your other options, but nothing to get drunk on.

The best thing about Late Night, a new comedy about modern office life, is that it could be set in almost any workplace and still feel mostly sharp and entirely necessary. The worst thing about Late Night is that it’s set in the world of late-night television.

While the scale of Hu’s production is indeed impressive in its giganticness, and likely plays excellently on the IMAX screens for which it is intended (I had to settle for watching it on my television), The Eight Hundred falls a few hundred yards short of war-movie greatness.

Cranston and Hart fight tooth and nail to keep the film as charming as possible, though, with Hart going to particularly impressive lengths. It almost works, until you remember it shouldn't.

The movie gets so, so close to achieving its goal of complete audience seduction and surrender, too. Right before it rips your heart out with a narrative turn that has to be seen to be (dis)believed.

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.

Ultimately, Weekes’s story, which pivots on a minor-key twist that doesn’t quite earn its intended gasps, falls just short of justifying its feature-film length. There is an excellent short film hiding in the corridors of His House – it just needs a slight renovation.

Bird Box could easily be reduced to, “It’s A Quiet Place meets Blindness crossed with The Happening!” And that high-concept pitch wouldn’t exactly be wrong.

It’s not that every film has to achieve some grand epiphany, but Touch Me Not is not nearly as satisfying as the primal act it’s obsessed with.

So, if you must celebrate Bill Murray Day this year, pour yourself a Suntory Whisky and watch "Lost in Translation" instead. And make that drink neat.

Summerland may not be the greatest show on Earth, but it is firmly Arterton’s show – and deserves more attention than most anyone on these shores will likely give it.

Unfortunately, not even all of McConaughey’s substantial powers can overcome director Stephen Gaghan’s lacklustre vision or the screenwriters’ muddy narrative.

Soderbergh, once again acting as his own cinematographer and editor, pulls out nearly every cinematic trick he has to elevate Koepp’s material, but the film too often tip-toes when it should run: Every narrative and character beat feels muted, as if the tech-thriller is being apologetic for its own place within the genre.

A classic private-eye tale updated for a multicultural London, director Pete Travis’s noir is entirely watchable, but it’s only because of to Ahmed’s captivating presence.

Most of all, though, it comes off as unsure, even afraid, of just what it wants to say about America today, resulting in a sometimes amusing, sometimes stilted lecture that indicts everyone, and no one.

Add it all up, and Extraction’s many creative solutions to reinvigorating the genre nearly balance out its many generic genre problems. So, it’s good enough to take a shot on, especially after a stressful day of isolated modern life. But just one shot.

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

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.

Perhaps now more than ever, the Pixar folks seem to be stuck inside their corporate heads instead of listening to their beating hearts.

S#!%house genuinely engaged with the complexities of insecure, imbalanced romantic relationships, and the flawed men who pursued them. Cha Cha Real Smooth settles for a sickly sweet sitcom approach. As Andrew might sigh during a bar-mitzvah shift: oy vey.

A lascivious comedy that might have been produced by The Big Lebowski’s fictional pornographer Jackie Treehorn were he given far too much money, Drive-Away Dolls proves that there is a yawning gap between “a Coen Brothers film” and a “film by a Coen brother.”

The film’s most egregious misstep, though, is sabotaging its own best stunt: the high-wire chemistry between Gosling and Blunt.

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.

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!

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.

It is at once highly watchable and baffling.

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

Kuras’s film, especially the paint-by-numbers script credited to a trio of writers, seems to oddly object to such a strong spirit, boxing the character into the most formulaic of narratives.

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

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.

The performances nearly save the film from itself.

It is as if every time Forster is presented with an opportunity to do something mildly unconventional – or even, gasp, European in sensibility – he defaults to the easy and cheap Hollywood option.

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.

Perhaps fittingly, the directors’ big foray into Hollywood is saved by the star power of the two industry legends headlining the film. Bening and Foster are absolute delights from beginning to end.

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

Where Mufasa distinguishes itself is Jenkins’s eye for balancing emotion with action.

More prickly than David Suchet and more mischievous than Peter Ustinov, Branagh plays Poirot as a tremendously fun nuisance, embracing the character’s cleverer-than-thou righteousness with glee. Whenever Branagh puts himself at the centre of the action, Death on the Nile clicks well enough to justify the whole act of big-budget copy-pasting.

The Fabelmans contains reels’ worth of beauty and wit, all delivered with the honest and enthusiastic drive to entertain that has become Spielberg’s signature. But you will learn more about Steven Spielberg by watching almost any other Steven Spielberg film.

It’s Dano who floats away with the most goodwill, giving Hanus a tender, ultimately haunting air despite being, you know, a horrendously frightening creature that, in a parallel universe, might’ve inspired Stephen King to write It.

An extraordinarily French story is flattened into conventional Euro-pudding nothingness. There is little here to surprise, less to even expect and still savour. The performers sometimes, but not always, outwit their material.

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.

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

Russell’s film is not remotely playable. Amsterdam so badly wants to be a light romp with heavy-duty meaning that it cannot help but be flattened by a sagging self-exhaustion. It is an exercise in interminable madcappery.

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.

Álvarez eventually gets there, with the third act of Romulus impressively nauseating. But otherwise, the filmmaker isn’t developing this cinematic universe so much as he is stunting its growth.

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.

The trouble with Renfield, though, is the fact that it’s called Renfield and not Dracula. Snivelling when not stiff, the title character is a bore, as is Hoult’s shoulder-shrug of a performance.

Dafoe is captivating as always, but not even his slinking, slippery presence can save the film from turning into a rather torturous endurance test.

The film’s central problem is that it takes Fuqua forever to make the inevitable happen, and when he gets around to it, the entire set-piece arrives with all the refined taste of an overcooked noodle swimming in a bowl of ketchup.

Ultimately Murder Mystery 2 is the most business-as-usual kind of Sandler shtick, its only real surprise being how the production manages to pull off one solitary, very lonely surprise toward its end (it involves a quick appearance from Jillian Bell, bless her heart).

So highly imitative as to strip the word “derivative” of any meaning, Rebel Moon is fan-fiction writ large, as if Snyder believes he’s outsmarting everyone from George Lucas and George R.R. Martin to the estates of Frank Herbert and H.R. Giger.

The plot’s believability is stretched to the point of emaciation, even for this series. The comedy, which arrives on cue every other scene, is pained. And the action is now a fully cribbed and inferior sizzle reel of Bay’s greatest hits. . . Still, there are a few flashes of fun.

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.

The film is neither heartbreaking nor thrilling, often feeling like a blown-up version of a Hallmark flick-of-the-week, its ambitions far greater than its capabilities.

Perkins’s version of The Monkey is an annoying, snarky and slight endeavour that just about kills itself in its bid to satisfy all the many cinema-starved sickos out there.

The experience of watching this new Shazam! is akin to watching an exceptionally wealthy but ultimately sweet and innocent child smash their toys together for 130 minutes. There’s little point in it all, but hey, at least the kid is happy.

Ultimately, Yintah wants to leave you with the sourest of tastes in your mouth. Mission accomplished, in a way.

Despite all the wonder that Strange World has going for it, the film cannot help but land with the softest of thuds.

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

The director fumbles frequently, but at least he is confident enough in his uneven vision to push through all (warranted) doubts and deliver a story that is every bit awful as it is uncompromising.

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

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

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.

While Dosa has a talent, and perhaps a fascination equalling her subjects, for illustrating the hidden beauty of the natural world, she ultimately crafts a film that is too neatly packaged.

We Have a Ghost is a desperate mix of feel-good sentimentality, watered-down surreality, and comedy as transparent in its hackiness as the film’s title spook.

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.

While his character is intended to be lost and powerless, Pine seems adrift in another way, too – a star without a proper star vehicle.

The Color Purple arrives as a confused byproduct of the industry’s best intentions and worst habits.

By the time the deep dark truth about the mysterious case is revealed – in a series of twists that are more “agh” than “aha” – even the hardest core of Christie fans won’t be itching for a fourth Poirot go-round from Branagh. Which will not only benefit audiences but also the filmmaker himself.

With Men, the British filmmaker is stubbornly needling his audience with a never-ending barrage of pointy-ended questions that he has neither the inclination nor intention of vaguely addressing or even thinking through on his own terms. Men is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, all scrawled in crayon.

After watching the film twice in quick succession – a futile attempt at catching a glimpse of what usually makes a Falardeau film so immensely watchable (see the Quebecois filmmaker’s Monsieur Lazhar, The Good Lie, My Internship in Canada and Chuck) – My Salinger Year ultimately lands as a mere footnote.

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.

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 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.

It is a fool’s errand to imagine what someone like Verhoeven would have done with The Tomorrow War’s material – this is a movie made for the express purposes of delivering some lazy woo-hoo summer fun, not any kind of sneaky subversiveness.

Every single beat of The Alto Knights feels like an historical footnote from Goodfellas or The Godfather Part II stretched out to interminable feature length – musty, dusty, dry.

It is fast-food fantasy, artificially flavoured and quickly devoured.

Seven years is a long time to attempt a reheating of all the many ingredients that made the original film go down so easily, and Another Simple Favor simply tastes off.

The 86-year-old director could stand to at least polish the material, which in Rifkin’s Festival is so well-worn that it threatens to disintegrate into nothingness.

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.

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.

The film spins off into several tonally unsteady directions.

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

No Hard Feelings tries so very hard to shock – to score that collective audience gasp – that it ends up clutching its own pearls.

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.

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.

The filmmaker is obviously toying with what horror films can be, with what audiences expect of both cheap thrills and high-priced performers. But I can’t admire, and don’t take much pleasure in, being tossed into Semans’s cinematic sandbox along with his well-compensated cast and crew.

This is flat, flaccid action that makes the wan green-screenery of the MCU look like the delirious highs of Mad Max: Fury Road.

Spenser Confidential makes far more narrative and visual sense than the incomprehensible "Mile 22," and carries less of an America First odour than any of the pair’s previous partnerships. But it also proves that it is finally time that Berg and Wahlberg explored a trial separation. If you really love someone, guys, set them free.

There are so many missteps that Hancock and screenwriter John Fusco make here, but to list a few briefly: The dialogue is 85-per-cent clumsy exposition, the heroes are given exactly one character trait each (Gault’s a drunk, Hamer’s a jerk) and the film’s politics read as MAGA-esque vigilante evangelicalism (the movie is perpetually on the verge of having Hamer say, directly to the camera, something along the lines of, “the only good criminal is a dead criminal”).

This shiny and progressive and golly-gee packaging misrepresents how Captain Marvel made its way into the world, and what it is actually about. Namely: money, the easy exploitation of intellectual-property, artistic conformity and queasy politics that undermine whatever liberal notions it’s peddling.

Unfortunately, Hart and her co-writer/husband Jordan Horowitz don’t have much more to offer than a different perspective – and no POV shift can compensate for a film that looks otherwise so familiar in its twists and turns.

A disposable, ultimately best-forgotten movie.

Even if I could muster the strength to defy studio marching orders on plot details, there is no point. There is little in Endgame that is worth spoiling, given how its core is spoiled rotten to begin with.

A wild, reckless, gleefully immoral work of pop nihilism.

So much of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is pulled from what has come before, and so much of it carries the wear and tear of repetition.

Dealing with such heavy matters as death, faith and forgiveness, the film wants to be a classic-in-the-making, but it just doesn’t hit the emotional and narrative cues necessary for such a weighty job.

Any sports film, no matter its scale or handicap, has to land its narrative and aesthetic punches – and Tiger clings to the ropes more often than not.

Too terrifying for children, too boring for adults and arriving far too soon after a nearly identical project, Andy Serkis’s Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle is a frustrating, fascinating mess.

From a technical standpoint, this might be Clooney’s finest work as a director. . . . But as a storyteller, The Midnight Sky is an irritating experience.

By the time the film reaches its obvious conclusion – by the time Hart expends more energy than Bugs Bunny, by the time the espionage plot twists itself into corners too convoluted for even "Homeland" fans, by the time Thurber exhausts the audience by unleashing cameo after cameo – it’s only Johnson who remains standing tall.

Hafstrom’s feature might be fine background noise to fold your laundry to. But there is also a very real danger that the film’s sloppy plotting and watered down set-pieces might also make you so disoriented and frustrated that your socks will end up in mismatched little balls.

The result is that the particularly cruel delights of Pollock’s writing get lost in an adaptation that can never nail any of its sprawling cast of characters, or escape the Southern-fried clichés that the novel transcends.

This material might make for a sly, subversive take on the genre, but writer-director Tyson Caron positions Dash as the hero of his story, a fatal flaw.

It Chapter Two is a film in need of a good ending. How badly it needs that ending is never in question, either. Hell, the movie cries out for help on the subject.

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.

It is almost as if Gibson is daring his audience to turn away from his opera of barbarity – but perversely, his violence is the only compelling element of Hacksaw Ridge. Perhaps ironically for a war film, the rest of it is mostly a draw.

The film’s middling but good intentions might be enough for the work to skate by unnoticed – but then Leder constructs an unforgivably sentimental finale that builds to a cameo from Bader Ginsburg herself. At that point, we must object.

Without Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World would be an absolute bore.

Another stroke of casting fortune was landing Scott as the disturbing Miles. I hesitate to applaud any business decision that encourages a kid to channel the spirit of a rapist and murderer, but the young actor accomplishes what I can only assume The Prodigy set out to do: make you reconsider parenthood, and just how much paprika you should stock.

While Spinster works well enough as a showcase for Peretti’s talents, Dorfman never matches the power of her star. With a bare-bones production design and most of its scenes blocked in a pedestrian manner, Spinster looks like a TV show that simply goes on too long.

Velvet Buzzsaw is ultimately a matter of taste – and mine was to spit it right back out.

It’s the type of film that was birthed with 1997′s "The Full Monty," which shares a director with Military Wives in Peter Cattaneo – as well as a flat, incurious sensibility that lacks any hint of complexity in the layers of its world or the inner lives of its characters.

Typically, Whitaker can lend the sloppiest assignment some much-needed dignity, but here he gives far more than the easy and lazy script ever demands, so much so that you begin to feel sorry that he took the time and energy to do so.

A uniquely Canadian exercise in down-and-out misery, Amy Jo Johnson’s second directorial effort, Tammy’s Always Dying, delivers a wealth of interesting talent to the table, and leaves them to fight for scraps.

It doesn't actually explain much, throwing a bunch of names and seemingly arbitrary incidents at the screen in the hope that everyone watching the film happened to work at the Washington Post back in the day.

The longer I Am Greta goes on, the more clear it becomes that Grossman is content to just tag along for the ride, adding little cinematic depth or insight to the environmentalist’s trajectory.

Unfortunately, the new film Matthias & Maxime arrives lacking much of the emotional urgency of the Dolan who once captured the international art-house crowd, feeling provincial in more ways than one.

Daddy’s Home is not the world of Peak Ferrell, where jokes fly fast and absurdism rules the day. Instead, it is a land of predictable punchlines, easy sight gags and easier paycheques.

Despite the too-twisty story and drippy characters, Larney does extremely impressive work with a limited budget, creating an entire world (or two) as if he had the resources of a Marvel escapade, or at the very least a Terminator entry. It’s only a shame that his performers don’t quite match his aesthetic ingenuity, especially Smit-McPhee, who wails and garbles with grating abandon.

A solid, well-acted, and slightly predictable drama of morals whose novelty evaporates once you realize that the general beats of the story itself have been presented before, to far more haunting effect.

Yes, the filmmaker and co-director Duke Johnson laboured for years over this project, and their set design is often astonishing. But that doesn’t mean the film is a masterpiece, or even half a masterpiece.

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.

Midway is a choppy bore, its main source of intrigue centred around whatever New Jersey-ese accent British actor Ed Skrein is attempting as dive bomber Richard Best.

Like an exhausted artist facing a blank canvas, or an underwhelmed film critic staring at a blank screen, The Artist’s Wife doesn’t have much to say but tosses something on the screen regardless, hoping it will stick.

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.

You Should Have Left will, however, make you seriously rethink your next Airbnb rental. And maybe even push you to watch "Mortdecai," just to see what a real horror looks like.