Barry Hertz

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.

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.

As much a deeply affectionate love letter to eighties-era horror-comedies as it is a synapse-stretching exercise in defiant maximalism, Joseph Kahn’s new film, Ick, is a true ride designed to hold, thrill, kiss and kill you.

Saulnier has returned with a tremendous, high-impact blast of a movie, making any delayed gratification all the more satisfying.

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.

The film’s sense of history is hasty, its characterizations crude. And by combining a twinkly-eyed tone with some of the goofiest performances in recent memory, the whole thing constantly threatens to reveal itself as a stealth parody flick.

Incoherent and cheap, with its aesthetic sensibilities seemingly cribbed from an elevator pitch of “John Wick goes goth,” Sanders’s version of The Crow is a truly ugly thing to endure.

Although sometimes dizzying and disorienting, the visual language of Between the Temples is relentlessly alive, with the camera never considering-slash-allowing for the possibility that its audiences’ eyes might wander.

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.

Roth likely deserves much of the blame, though the film is so relentlessly middling that it feels curiously divorced from his typically extreme sensibilities.

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.

The new comedy Kneecap is a riotous delight that will have even the most staid audiences ready to flip the bird.

A wonderfully uncomfortable, deeply hilarious coming-of-age movie, the new film Didi plays like an extended and surprisingly welcome visit to the filmmaker’s childhood bedroom.

The screenplay feels like the feverish byproduct of an all-nighter pulled off the very first day back from a writers' strike.

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.

The film spins off into several tonally unsteady directions.

This is an imaginatively conceived, impressively scaled, and surprisingly funny ride. Just pay as little attention to the promotional scare tactics as possible.

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

Writer-director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s feature is built on a number of sly narrative and stylistic tricks that gradually cement its status as a new action classic full of nasty surprises.

The sequel isn’t a masterpiece of children’s entertainment by any stretch, but it is sufficiently bizarre and thrilling enough to turn the head of any kid, parent or – judging by my curiously populated press screening the other night – fully grown and childless adult around and around till the room resembles a Looney Tune.

Not much of Sam and Eric’s journey is all that compelling, or even makes sense . . . but at least they’re nudged along by Sam’s emotional support cat, easily the cutest MVP (Most Valuable Pet) since Messi the dog from last year’s Anatomy of a Fall.

If enough people end up watching the masterful and soul-shaking Green Border – and absolutely everyone should, as soon as possible – the collective conscience of the world could very well shift, even just a bit. And sometimes a little bit is all we need to effect urgent change.

The worst side effect of Hall’s thin and sizzle-free script is that it encourages Johnson and Penn to go overboard in a bid to compensate.

A truly torturous experience for almost everyone involved – up to and including the starry cast of Lanthimos regulars, who must now surely realize they have been duped by a master cinematic con artist – the film is an aggressively juvenile and tedious dissection of the notion of free will.

It is an anthropological drama that never cracks its subjects open – an approach that might work on paper, but feels beset by engine troubles on-screen.

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

So much of its script is frustratingly trite, its perspective on grief never rising above grade-school emotions, with thin characters forced to carry its surface-level themes.

A tonally bizarre and dramatically inert feature that is so detached from baseline human emotion it might as well be the fever dream of Artificial Intelligence, the new Canadian-Israeli film Longing is the most frustrating cinematic experience of the season.