Barry Hertz

The result is a magnificently off-the-rails poison pill of a film, one that skitters from paranoiac thriller to reactionary satire to something far more caustic and unnerving. It is the cinematic equivalent of long COVID – lingering, haunting, and demanding rigorous, skeptical investigation.

40 Acres is a top-tier genre film that Trojan-horses a flood of knotty, provocative conversations into multiplexes via the best kind of speculative fiction.

So many of Rebirth’s images and set pieces are lifeless, and no amount of on-location filming in Thailand – versus the soundstage green screenery so favoured by most of Jurassic’s blockbuster contemporaries – can hide the fact that very little in the screenplay makes logistical, narrative or emotional sense.

More often than not, Heads of State feels as if it is missing its own leader, as if the director was simply a package lost in the Prime delivery mail.

Nothing is exactly new in F1, yet at the same time it is all immensely, rewardingly renewable – a true blue box of recycled cinematic trash, compacted into something irresistibly bright and shiny.

The real charm of Boxcutter is just how Dahya and his cinematographer James Klopko capture the city as Rome criss-crosses it. Without jackhammering the point home, the film’s vision of Toronto is one of a city shedding one skin to wear another, in the process forcing all the creative forces who make it so special further and further outside its boundaries.

More than likely, Flanagan’s film will leave you a sobbing mess. But there is a sense of betrayal, too – it’s almost too easy to wring those tears. Take this dance, sure, but bring the Kleenex, too.

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.

Dangerous Animals is like a bowl of shark-fin soup laced with a dollop of vegemite: not exactly good for either you, your taste buds or the environment, but strangely compelling nonetheless.

Bring Her Back feels less like a movie than a finely tuned instrument of doom. In the devilish hands of Australian filmmaking brothers Danny and Michael Philippou, evil has been concentrated into an exceptionally and impressively nasty 104 minutes.

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.

Once Cruise and McQuarrie expunge all the Ozymandias from their systems, The Final Reckoning manages to deliver the goods. Or at least make a decent case that Cruise has earned the right to become his own biggest champion.

The more queasy the film becomes – in both story and style, with the director preferring unusually moody natural light and nerve-rattling zooms – the funnier it gets.

Nothing in Shadow Force surprises, delights or even attempts to raise your pulse above a twitch.

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.

Canadian director Jason Buxton crafts a sometimes tense and sometimes unsteady character study that isn’t so much laced with dread as it is slathered with it.

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

The first Marvel film in ages to look, feel, and move like an actual feature film and not a slop bucket of CGI.

It genuinely wants to say something important and poignant about what we lose when we stop believing in the unreal, but it cannot quite make the leap into figuring out why anybody should be inclined to listen to such heartfelt pleas.

The easy back-and-forth chemistry between Affleck and Bernthal as they paint the town blood-red provides certain dividends.

With The Shrouds, the filmmaker – not only one of Canada’s greatest creations, but cinema’s, too – has delivered what might be his career-defining masterpiece.

It is respectful and smooth filmmaking that never loses sight of its one and only goal: keeping its audience hooked.

Director Christopher Landon injects the entire affair with so much stylistic verve and narrative propulsion that, like the best kind of first date, it whips by almost too quickly.

Alternately tedious, cacophonous and stultifying, the latest show of force from writer-director Alex Garland following last year’s equally frustrating Civil War just might be the most unnecessarily unpleasant cinematic experience you will endure this year.

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

A pharmaceutical-industry satire so flaccid that it’s in desperate need of Cialis, Death of a Unicorn is destined to fade into the mythical margins of cinematic history, with future moviegoers convinced that – like its title creature – the film never really existed at all.

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.

It’s a solid notch in Statham’s career, but nothing that will change anyone’s mind about the actor.