Barry Hertz

For Napoleon, Scott gives every last little slice of himself – the dramatist, the set-piece strategist, even, and especially, the comedian – to deliver what just might be his late-career masterpiece.

The animation also feels half-caught between inspired and derivative . . . Thank goodness, then, for the songs.

This is a juicy, outré exercise that gets its kicks from booting its audience into deliberately uncomfortable corners and then leaving them there to stew.

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.

The Marvels is just that kind of production, a white board of sticky notes that magically coalesces, slowly and grudgingly, into a feature-length motion picture that merely acts as a long advertisement for the next.

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.

There is a joy watching interesting people change for the better while in a carefully crafted environment . . . and Payne knows just how to balance the sour and sweet.

Priscilla the movie is as complicated and beguiling as Priscilla the woman.

There is no guts to Pain Hustlers’ try-hard gonzo-ness, resulting in a sub-Scorsese style that both underlines and loses its point.

Too tame in its violence to be thrilling, too flat in its gags to be funny, and too PG-minded to be genuinely sexy, Morel’s film arrives and exits like a mild breeze – totally and utterly forgettable. John Cena deserves better. And so do we.

This is David Fincher’s version of a sitcom: as violently funny as it is hilariously violent.

Moreno avoids putting too fine a point on just why he’s playing around with such matters of multiplicity. His film is both a provocation and a shrug – make of it what you will.

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.

Huller is asked to play a wonderful mess of contradictions – and the actress pulls off the job marvelously, all steel nerves and darting eyes.

Demanding a full audience of sickos to unlock the film’s true communal madness, Dicks: The Musical is destined for midnight-movie deification. Worship its transgressive power, or denounce it as unholy. The film thankfully offers no in-between.

This is a master artist putting a stamp on not only his own career, but also the entirety of American cinema and, why not, American history, too.

There is an unshakable and electric hum to Foe that ensures director Garth Davis’s work will stay with audiences attuned to its distinct frequency for days, months, perhaps ages.

The fact that The Royal Hotel keeps its audience as captive as its leads until that final moment is an impressive and ultimately incendiary feat.

Even though the latest horror-franchise resurrection from intellectual-property gravedigger David Gordon Green (Halloween) isn’t sullying a spotless brand, The Exorcist: Believer still reeks of sulfur-scented soullessness. The moviegoing body may be willing, but the cinematic flesh is weak.

She Came to Me is overstuffed to be sure, but in an admirable way that underlines Miller’s fierce desire to enchant and entertain an audience looking for stories about people, not intellectual property.

The film is neither a stern lecture nor cheap entertainment, with Domont instead threading the needle somewhere in-between to create a tense guessing game of just how far she will push her characters.

If you can walk away from a movie with a tune in your heart and a bounce in your step, then it’s safe to say that the film clicked in just the ways that were intended.

The homages that Edwards and his co-writer Chris Weitz make are honest, and instead of stealing the best ideas of other films, The Creator uses them as the source code to create a next-generation story that is pure, foot-on-the-gas entertainment.

Most of Nattiv’s film is a dry and frustrating affair.

The problem is that for all its R-rated ambitions, none of the kills in Expend4bles is particularly inventive, memorable, or even base-level fun. For a movie centred on the cathartic pleasures of mercenary murder, the only death wish that audiences will walk away muttering is one directed straight at the screen.