Brad Wheeler

Director Maggs tells a tough, sympathetic story in an imaginative way that makes Goalie feel like a war story.

A modest, hard-faced film, offering a nervous study of humanity and civil disobedience in a societal-bullying era.

What we have here is an honestly simplified film for teen audiences that gently breaks barriers and embraces diversity, LGBTQ sexuality and pure romantic love. It's nothing close to a great film, but neither is it something young audiences see every day.

Though compelling in the acting and cinematography, Triple 9’s plot is by the numbers and about nothing.

The chipper tale is admittedly interesting, though not “fascinating,” as self-advertised.

Most of the film’s action happens at night, so we really don’t get a good look at the colourful city. Why hire New Orleans as a location if you’re not going to show it off?

What doesn’t go in Skyscraper is watching Sawyer and his family face staggering calamity and danger with barely a concern raised or a sweat broken. As for the actors portraying them, they’re the brave ones. And if they were scared, they didn’t show it.

The victory of The Accountant is in the tone. The title character isn’t presented as a superfreak – this isn’t "Rain Man," in which autistic gifts are presented as powers for parlour tricks – but as a prototype and a beautiful mutant, maybe even a superhero.

The scriptwriters did Perry no favours. Lengthy swaths of dialogue are consumed by tedious exposition on vampire types and the ways they can be killed.

Ironically, Middle School’s message is about encouraging kids and grown-ups to think outside the box and yet, the filmmakers themselves do precisely the opposite.

There’s enough action to keep things moving along, but the drama is ho-hum, juiced up with a turgid soundtrack and sirens howling in the night. It’s all just so average.

Is it much of a movie? Not really. It’s more of an experience – a passive sort of virtual reality – that uses a bare-bones narrative as a vehicle for a big-time body count.

I’m not sure audiences are getting what they deserve with this plodding, so-so action-thriller, but they’ll get what they’ll pay for: Washington as a relentless old-man on a moral-code mission of setting things right (and sometimes setting things on fire).

Midnight meets madness in a surrealist exercise in existentialism and deft satire that will unsettle the average viewer while exciting those with freakier tastes.

Gudegast, a first-time director who wrote the script to Den of Thieves (and who has probably watched Michael Mann's "Heat" more than once) attempts to comment on humanity's complexities. But all he does with his soulless, hollow characters is make a solid case that men are violent sleazes.

The result is a metaphor run amok, with a limp plot, implausible action and three barely sketched characters played drearily.

The cast has chemistry, but Little is marred by plot holes, a strange fixation on donuts and at least one inexplicable scene.

Played adroitly by Patrick Sabongui, this guy wouldn’t hurt a fly. Or would he? A couple of nice plot twists overshadow the predictable sound-of-sorrow ethnic wail that closes the film.

The quirky romantic comedy The Tomorrow Man relies on the believability of their late-in-life love in order for the film to work. Which it does, to some degree – that degree being small-story preciousness and the simple pleasure of eating popcorn while watching Blythe Danner and John Lithgow watching television as they eat popcorn.

As for who’s the cat and who’s the mouse, that’s easy: Filmmaker Campbell is the former and we’re the latter. The Protégé plays with its viewers – if one is up for the game, there are worse ways to spend 109 minutes.

The photography is elegant, but nothing else is. With action that is standard and not at all tense, the melodrama is much higher than the reward.

Stately, handsome and ferociously romantic, the new biopic of British high-fantasy writer J.R.R. Tolkien won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, though there is some excellent tea drinking to be had.

At the heart of the problem with this period piece is an absence of a riveting scene or a memorable slice of dialogue.

No clichés are avoided in the pleasant, if relentlessly adorable ensemble comedy Dog Days.

The problem is that somewhere around the middle of the film, one begins to realize it probably isn’t going any place worthwhile.

Perhaps a better name for Marc Abraham’s well-crafted biopic would be His Cheatin’ Heart, for this motion picture concentrates on the marital distress between a philandering Williams and his flat-singing wife (played with vibrancy by Elizabeth Olsen).

In real life, of course, nobody can be hypnotized against their will. To be mesmerized is to willingly succumb. Just keep that in mind when you head off to see something like Now You See Me 2.