Benjamin Lee

There’s never really enough for the underserved trio of actors to sink their teeth into, although they all manage to coast comfortably enough.

The journey is slick and diverting, and at times incisive, but Turning Red is yet another Pixar film that coasts rather than glides. Hopefully its next offering can turn into something more.

Against the Ice is a Danish story flattened for a global audience.

It’s an airport novel that’s now an airplane movie.

Against considerable odds, a very, very low bar has been met and then shuffled over with this mostly effective and incredibly nasty update, a jolting little slasher that should repulse and satisfy those with a suitably depraved idea of what they are clicking into.

Dog lovers eager for a dog movie primarily about a dog will be reassured by the knowledge that Dog does feature plenty of dog but they might be a little surprised about what else the film has to offer, an odd and atonal ramble across the US where the dog comes first and plotting comes a long way after.

It’s a far better version of a romantic comedy than we’re used to streaming of late.

It has the feeling of a short film stretched beyond its limit, with all that early tension dissipating, and while there’s certainly something jolting about the gonzo violence in the finale, it’s otherwise ineffectual.

It’s a deft and thrilling conceit, experiencing the highs and lows of life through different people. Stolevski, in a film that feels less like a debut and more a late-stage magnum opus, has found an ingenious vessel to make profound observations on gender, sex and being.

Ford has a knack for making us sweat without relying on an over-egged score or over-stacked stakes. It’s a genre movie with its feet firmly on the ground, small in scale and tight in focus.

At a young age, Raiff still remains an exciting up-and-coming film-maker of note and even in his sophomoric slump, there’s enough, coupled with his standout debut, to suggest that better things will come. Hopefully better titles too.

For those who like their dating movies with a bit of gristle, Fresh is a perfect match.

It’s a film of people telling themselves they’re making a difference without really doing much of anything and it’s hard not to feel similarly unmoved by the time it’s all over.

Films such as The 355 live and die by the quality of their action set pieces and while there’s a propulsive pace to the proceedings, there’s never quite enough genuine excitement.

It’s flawed for sure but still moves with more deftness than most (arriving after Eternals is a blessing for any Marvel film) and there’s an ending that suggests an awareness of its roots (post-credits scene aside), hinting at a promising way forward rather than back. Consider the curse of sorts sort of broken.

It’s [Del Toro’s] most strikingly beautiful film yet, a velvety, precisely styled noir with the year’s most impressively stacked cast (two Oscar winners and six nominees, all bringing their A game) but its sleek shell is sadly as duplicitous as its untrustworthy conman protagonist, blinding us with dazzle but leaving us tricked.

It’s pure mass market Christmas cookie cutter stuff that’s only made vaguely interesting in very short bursts because of its queerness.

There’s an admirable sense of pluck to the film, as if those involved know very well they’re making something that doesn’t need to exist but they’re making the most of it anyway.

An inoffensive time-filler that’s hard to love but easy to like.

There’s something so soulless and ineffectual about the aggressively unnecessary Red Notice that it almost plays like a pastiche of a Hollywood blockbuster, like a bot consumed the last 20 years of studio fare and spat out a facsimile as an experiment.

Without the franchise pull behind it, Next of Kin is a rather anonymous horror of demonic possession, competently made and with decent acting but indistinguishable from the pack, where predictability wins over personality.

There’s zero, nay negative, fun to be had here, a potentially interesting, if not exactly original, sub-Manchurian Candidate idea (pre-programmed victims/accomplices are activated by a phone call) taken nowhere of interest.

There’s nothing markedly necessary about universe expander Army of Thieves, niche fan service that gives backstory to a character who we know dies later on, but Schweighöfer, also acting as director, keeps his frothy caper afloat with a light knockabout tone, never insisting the film as anything that it isn’t.

There’s probably a semi-decent creature feature here and maybe, with a hefty amount of redrafting, a semi-decent human drama but as it stands it fails at both, a satisfying, coherent film buried underneath copious amounts of animal guts.

Night Teeth isn’t quite as dreadful as its truly dreadful title but it’s just as forgettable.

Director Patrick Brice is so distracted with trying to be of the moment that he forgets to make his film base-level fun or at times even base-level coherent, its thesis crammed into a laughably on-the-nose killer speech where buzzwords are clumsily crashed together, trying to make a point about something but ultimately saying not a lot about anything.

It’s at least a short film, clocking it at around 90 minutes, Serkis chopping off any extraneous fat, but it floats by and floats on without ever causing us to sit up and pay attention. Let there be no more.

There are imperfections here, especially near the end, but it’s the work of someone striving to stand out, to do something that will linger in the memory rather than fade into the over-populated homepage background.