Barry Hertz

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!).

Norbit was memorably offensive. Coming 2 America is merely offensively forgettable.

While Macdonald manages to come up with one of the most impressively brutal cut-to-black endings in recent memory, the rest of this feature cannot hope to match the power of his cast.

Director Maria Sodahl tracks the couple’s story over the course of only one Christmas break, but the film is more a chronicle of one family’s entire existence. Skarsgard, by the way, is typically excellent – it’s just that he mostly, and graciously, cedes the screen to Hovig, who is given much more to do and handles it with aplomb.

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.

Cherry is a mess. Nonsensically stylized, wildly overlong and constantly mistaking yelling for dramatic tension, the film unintentionally underlines everything that made the Russos’ Avengers films so sloppy .

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

Think of one of Wiig’s closer-to-1 a.m. Saturday Night Live sketches coloured with the purposefully unpalatable aesthetic sensibilities of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! and you’ll start to form the right picture. If none of the above appeals or even makes sense in the slightest, then feel free to run far, far away.

If you want a movie to nail-gun you to your seat, then you must visit Greenland.

Malcolm & Marie is the worst kind of self-indulgent nonsense. It is an obnoxious gripe about everything and anything that is so devoid of wit and imagination that it ends up being about nothing at all.

Mostly, Falling succeeds because Mortensen is playing by his own uncompromising rules. The result is a vision that may grate, but will never be lost to memory

Completely miscast, egregiously plotted and ludicrous in absolutely every single other way, Bliss is a true cinematic disasterpiece.

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.

I don’t know how many subscribers actually interested in its mature story and top-level craft will be able to unearth it from their Holidate-choked queues, but here’s hoping some are willing to embark on the excavation.

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.

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.

Timberlake fares fine enough in his strong-and-mostly-silent role, displaying genuine chemistry with Wainwright (though let’s not bring in whatever the tabloids and gossip sites have to say about the matter). Allen is delightful in that refreshing way that only newcomers can be. And in terms of Apple TV+’s bid to become a more family-friendly competitor to Netflix, Palmer makes good, decent sense.

A delirious, disgusting and delightfully dark concoction, this low-budget movie is the latest throwback creation from Steven Kostanski (Manborg, The Void), whose artistic vision seems perma-stuck in the sugary-cereal haze of a Saturday morning circa 1989.

The resulting film, while sporadically affecting, is ultimately a slog of gooey sentiment and needlessly long death rattles.

Imagine the worst night of two-hander theatre that you were ever subjected to in the Before Times. Then add in 12 too many scenes of (accurate but annoying) glitchy Zoom calls featuring other famous actors. And then multiply that by the number of minutes you’d be better served scrolling through the back catalogue of your streaming service of choice.

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.

Climate of the Hunter is less concerned with story than mood. A sensuous, trippy mood that successfully seduces – at least for those who can easily settle into these kinds of campy experiments. (Guilty!)

There are performances that shock you, that ground you, and that break you apart before building you back up. It is not often when an actor is able to deliver all of those reactions and more in the span of two hours, yet here is Vanessa Kirby proving herself as one of the most capable and ferociously talented stars of the moment.

While Barbakow and writer Andy Siara don’t exactly reinvent the ever-spinning wheel here, they do add enough of a winsome, layered charm that Palm Springs feels like a vacation you actually might want to extend forevermore.