Chris Knight

Compulsus is a revenge thriller with a twist. No, make that two twists.

New Rome wasn’t built in a day, and we don’t always get the film we want. I doubt even Coppola did with this one. Megalopolis is what it is. You probably wouldn’t want to move there. But it’s worth visiting as a tourist, if only to gape at the locals.

Reagan the man may have been known as The Great Communicator, but Reagan the movie delivers its message stridently and with little nuance or room for debate.

Out Come the Wolves director/co-writer Adam MacDonald keeps us guessing until practically the final frame as to how it’s all going to play out in this finely crafted sylvan thriller.

Good One, a lesson in minimalist storytelling from first-time feature writer-director India Donaldson, is a movie that sneaks up on you.

The problem is the execution. As directed by Justin Baldoni (who also stars as the husband), the film feels lacklustre and slapdash, never doing anything to rise above the basic storytelling beats.

I was ultimately less enthralled with the final film than I was with some of the performances in Cuckoo. Stevens and Schafer are amazing, and Bluthardt makes an excellent oddity, a convenient ally with his own mysterious agenda. But Cuckoo can’t quite bring all its disparate elements together into something cohesive and coherent.

Atmosphere will only take you so far, and it soon becomes apparent that Starve Acre is 10 liters of helium in a 20-liter balloon. The result is limp and never fully takes flight.

RTA is a strictly volunteer program, with no academic requirement to enter or good-behaviour code to remain. Sing Sing, while not an advertisement for the program, does seem to capture what makes it special, and what its participants get from the experience.

Only the River Flows — based on the novel Mistakes by the River by Yu Hua — runs a tight 102 minutes but crams a lot of atmosphere into that time, moments of high drama interspersed with bizarre humour.

What National Anthem lacks in spectacle it more than makes up for in quiet moments of beauty, tenderness and heartache.

Returning director Chris Renaud, co-director of parts one and two, knows his way around the characters, and he knows what his audience wants: cartoon mayhem, mild naughtiness from the Minions, social awkwardness from Gru.

It’s one of those movies where, short of any actual existential terrors to throw at the audience, the sound engineers merely crank up the volume from time to time so that a door closing sounds like a cannon going off. Our Lady of Jump Scares preserve us!

It’s never a good sign when the Wikipedia page is more interesting than the based-on-a-true-story movie it references.

The Watchers is not a perfect movie, but it is an excellent start, heralding the arrival of a bold new talent.

It’s wonderful for its restraint, and for the things it doesn’t do.

It’s all freakin’ fantastic, a real all-night rave of a movie. But could we maybe just dial the whole thing down just a smidgeon? Could Challengers perhaps have given merely 100 per cent instead of 110?

It brushes up ever so lightly against Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And there’s a little of early-ish Yorgos Lanthimos (Alps, The Lobster). Except, you know, more heart. Much more heart.

Civil War is both premium entertainment and a cautionary tale.

There’s violence aplenty, which is another reason the John Wick reference has proven so sticky.

If The Old Oak is indeed the last film of the master, it’s a fitting sendoff for a director whose work will continue to echo for at least as long as Durham Cathedral has been standing.

What shines through in all these performances — and in recollections by Wilder himself and others — was a man dedicated to his craft and excited about the creative process.

There’s a smidgeon more humanity than in the braindead Godzilla vs. Kong, but nowhere near the wit and spirit of Skull Island.

Director Michael Mohan, who also directed Sweeney in 2021’s The Voyeurs, creates a wildly uneven tone here, with a film that starts out promising to be a supernatural horror before segueing into something far more prosaic.

Ultimately, what sinks the story is a combination of miscasting and bad writing, regardless of its language. Braff tries too hard to be likeable, sometimes coming off as almost creepy. Hudgens leans the other way.

This fourth film, featuring the same writers as two and three, but new co-directors Stephanie Stine and Mike Mitchell, isn’t a bad movie, but it does feel like it’s going through the motions.

Concrete Valley is a loving, lovely portrait of a corner of the city that, unless you live there, is probably either a blank spot on your map or a region you drive through to get somewhere else.

Sometimes I Think About Dying dares to ask the question: What if The Office wasn’t trying to be funny? And what if Pam was painfully shy, and Jim damaged from two previous marriages, and no one ever made a raised-eyebrow face at the camera?