Chris Knight

Back in the 1950s the cars were little more than cockpits on wheels, without so much as a seatbelt. There might be a few hay bales by the side of the track. And then as now, there was a morbid fascination in the notion of a crash taking a driver and car out of a race. But be careful what you wish for.

A solid follow-up from the director/star team of Allan Ungar and Josh Duhamel (2022’s Bandit), London Calling takes road/buddy movie tropes and turns them, if not quite on their heads, then at least disarmingly and sometimes even hilariously askew.

Something about its proportions felt a little off. There was a touch too much flashback, an excess of cutaway, and a slight oversupply of innuendo in the early going that made the big emotional climax feel like it hadn’t quite earned its emotional beats.

Sacramento is a well-made, well-acted comedy drama that does just about everything right and almost nothing unexpected.

Clapin uses animated interludes to flesh out his human characters — his previous feature was 2019’s Oscar-nominated animated film J’ai Perdu Mon Corps (I Lost My Body). It’s an effective and beautiful way of turning emotions into visuals.

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.

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?

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

The series still has lots of heart, but its quality is moving in the wrong direction.

If Logan’s Run and The African Queen had a baby, it might look something like Brazilian dystopian sci-fi drama The Blue Trail. If that’s too much of a narrative stretch, then imagine a close cousin to 2024’s Can I Get a Witness? Except, sadly, not nearly as good.

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

The film, alas, feels far more emotionally conniving than its title character.

Disney’s Lilo & Stitch is about a dangerous alien lifeform that escapes from its creators, arrives on a backward planet and charms the inhabitants. Which is not a bad metaphor for Disney itself. It continues to remake hand-drawn animated classics as bloated live-action spectacles, hoping a nostalgic moviegoing public will continue to greet them with open arms and wallets.

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.

It’s your typical mistaken-identity love story, in which one pretty person must decide between two pretty people, with the choice heavily influenced by who looks best when wet.

There’s not enough under the hood, and the screenplay sometimes strains to tell us (rather than show us) the complexities of the reality it’s creating.

This newest concoction gets a lift from its cast but falls to Earth thanks to a leaden script. It’s more exploding chocolate than everlasting gobstopper and, I’m sorry to say, more bitter than sweet.

As written by Italy’s Paolo Sorrentino (who also directs), there is precious little going on beneath that alabaster exterior. One can only have characters ask each other “What are you thinking?” so many times before it feels as though the question is being begged.

Werewolves is of the small-movie variety, and I wish it were better. Alas, it’s not quite stupid enough to be a guilty pleasure, and not quite good enough to be an innocent one.

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.

Rebel Moon isn’t a terrible movie, but it pales in every comparison to the Star Wars universe.

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.

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

Neither big nor bold nor beautiful. Though I suppose it does count as a journey. Well, one out of four ain’t — no, wait, one out of four is terrible!

The Boys in the Boat is a by-the-numbers story that does little to distinguish itself from other underdog tales. The boys may be trying to take home gold, but this boat is taking on water.

It has the potential to be a cracking good comedy, and the trailer suggests as much. But in the end, all this proves is that you can distill two minutes of hilarity from 96 of meh.

Argylle is not as dreadfully unwatchable as the Kingsman movies, but it is dolefully derivative, as if The Manchurian Candidate and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty had a baby, then abandoned it to be raised on The Planet of the Apes.

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.