Jim Slotek

I get a sense that Five Nights at Freddy’s and this week’s inevitable salad of a sequel Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, marks a turning point in how Hollywood approaches the visual medium that has been eating its lunch for decades. The lesson: Stop trying to make video game film adaptations that appeal to a general audience. A giant in-joke of a movie can pay off bigtime if the target audience is big enough. Screw the rest.

There is a meanness of spirit to all of this, an uncomfortable awkwardness that seemingly can’t end well.

A non-stop action movie with just enough plot to stitch together more action scenes, Red One is as soullessly fast and furious as you’d expect from scripter Chris Morgan of Fast & Furious franchise fame.

In the end, all Beetlejuice Beetlejuice did for me was make me want to see the singular version again.

Trap is simply M. Night Shyamalan’s silliest movie since The Happening.

In Iain Reid’s source-material novel, there are literary tricks that spell it out more clearly. But the script and execution here fails to launch, with too much ”Why?” holding it down.

Expend4bles is an endless pyro/bang-bang show, with actors not mainly known for their acting (also including 50 Cent and UFC champion Randy Couture), sticking to the story as well as they can.

As an artistic design challenge, Elemental has triumphant moments (which may be good enough eye candy to keep kids occupied). But as a story, it doesn’t appear to aspire to much beyond a standard star-crossed romance.

To be clear, Book Club: The Next Chapter is not a good movie by any standards except for its appeal to audiences old enough to fondly remember every cast member in their prime (I’m raising my hand here). Anyone born after Murphy Brown will see a predictable, forgettable series of non-adventures.

Two hours witnessing the agony of a guilt-ridden pill addict doesn’t exactly have “good times” written all over it. To make it an experience worth enduring requires something more.

Technically, Supercell is not a bad movie. But it’s dragged down by the economics that insist a low-budget movie needs some minor celebrity voltage. It’s at its best when people aren’t talking.

Ultimately, Shotgun Wedding seems like something from a different time, a time-waster full of tropes that exists to only to fill time with the odd boom and an occasional chuckle – and falls short of even that.

Ultimately, Spoiler Alert is earnest, emotional, good-hearted and edgeless.

For a movie that’s supposed to take D.C. in a new direction, Black Adam sure seems like something we’ve seen plenty of times before.

There are moments where director Bell seems to be positioning Esther as an anti-hero, which would have been interesting. But it’s not a path to which he commits, and it’s back to bloody business as usual. The fact that this is a prequel drains even more suspense from the movie’s resolution.

It’s a mess of a plot and a literal trainwreck of a denouement. No faulting the destruction scenes, since they’re in Leitch’s wheelhouse, and as they say, every dollar is on the screen in that regard. But to paraphrase a quote from the late character actor Edmund Gwenn, killing is easy, comedy is hard.

Fourth of July is meant to be a comedy, but isn’t in the sense that there is nothing funny enough to laugh at. It is a domestic car crash with no edge or purpose.

Director Martin Campbell (Casino Royale) seems to be directing by template, never stopping to let us get to know anybody – least of all Neeson’s Alex, who for the most part is only there to kill people. Some things never change.

If cute was the selling point of this spin-off series, it’s practically out of stock in Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, a movie that has traded in its charm (and, for the most part, its fantastic beasts) for an extended Nazi metaphor.

You do get the sense that Swedish director Daniel Espinosa really wanted to make a horror film instead of the usual super-hero origin-story-punctuated-by-carnage.

Despite Oh’s solid fear-filled performance, Amanda’s inevitable possession seems to take forever in an 87-minute movie, and the inevitable maternal-love-powered dispossession seems rushed.

An undercooked ‘70s-style blaxploitation revenge fantasy with a reverse-Shyamalan plot (the “twist” is up front), Alice is an objectively bad movie wrapped around one great, all-in performance.

Esthetically perched somewhere between a low-budget TV biopic and a soap opera - with occasional flourishes of bonkers-cheesiness worthy of cult status - Aline is the Celine Dion hagiography no one could have dreamed up except its director.

Here Today is the movie Crystal directs, a genial, monotone of good-heartedness that isn’t as funny as it wants to be or needs to be, but hits some truths about the subject of age and dementia, while maintaining its mild smile.

As utterly derivative action films go, Jolt has definite energy, and it’s not pretending to be original. As a time-killer, that may be enough for some.

With echoes of Starship Troopers (minus the pointed satire), The Tomorrow War, starring Chris Pratt, is the second noisy “temporal war” movie of the pandemic era, after Christopher Nolan’s Tenet. To differentiate between the two, this is the one Nolan would have written if he’d suffered a head injury.

A reality-based hillbilly thriller that can’t decide what flavour of noir to serve up, Above Suspicion is one of those curious failures that the current appetite for home streaming often rescues from theatrical limbo.

Dahl’s work demands darkness and an edge, but instead there’s a bright Hollywood-y antic sense to Zemeckis’s The Witches, and the overused and unconvincing FX only serve to trivialize what we’re seeing.