Jim Slotek

If Lorne really is “the most boring” doc of the Oscar-winning Neville’s career, it’s only because his career bar is high. As it is, Lorne is a terrific backgrounder for devout fans of Saturday Night Live. Fairweather fans, on the other hand, might find it like an overlong sketch.

For a movie that lazily spins its wheels, Fantasy Life is oddly amiable. The only wholly dislikable character is David, and he’s so great at being dislikable, you almost like him for it.

A sweet and uplifting documentary twist on the horror genre, Silver Screamers is, as they say in Yiddish, a “mitzvah” on the part of director Sean Cisterna, and a gift that keeps on giving.

Unfortunately, in Cold Storage, the first act sets too high a bar to maintain, and the rest, though watchable, is busy-ness punctuated by green splatter.

With its dark palette and atmosphere, Honey Bunch could have been a simpler, more disturbing and pointed story. There’s enough there to suggest as much.

It’s a new apocalyptic pallet to paint upon, and I look forward to where it goes next.

I’d almost recommend seeing the first act of Song Sung Blue and then heading home in high spirits. But it would be wrong to whitewash real life (rewrite it a bit, sure).

Well shot, well acted and with locations that vary from brutalist factory sites to beautiful nearby forests, No Other Choice is both believable and absurd as it unfolds. But its social relevance remains spot-on.

It’s, ironically enough, a terrific, serious performance by Will Arnett, arguably the best of his career.

It’s a decent, eye-catching, stay-the-course addition for Cameron, who has pretty much turned his entire career to this franchise, a la George Lucas with Star Wars.

Hamnet is a sensitively told, beautifully realized pastoral tale, driven by Buckley’s magnetism, and a well-placed cast.

Christy is ultimately a redemptive story, complete with the discovery of an actual loving relationship. But the road to redemption is rough on the character and, at times, the audience. Still, it has a certain NASCAR charm (particularly in the early scenes), and characters who effectively carry it forward.

Bugonia is not Lanthimos’s best, but it is likely off-kilter enough for fans, or maybe introductory-weird for newcomers to his genre.

In the end, del Toro has created an impressive piece of entertainment that manages to retain the existential thoughts that inspired Frankenstein in the first place. Ultimately, it’s one of his best films.

Orwell: 2+2=5 is food for thought for sure, practically an all-you-can-eat buffet of thoughts. As a statement, it is all over the map. But as an experiential representation of Orwell’s warnings-come-true, it is worth seeing.

The fight scenes are initially impressive and artfully filmed, but eventually repetitive. As a selling device for UFC, The Smashing Machine falls a little short. Still, even if it seems like we’ve seen this movie before, Johnson does sell his character, no gimmicks, raised eyebrows or phony theatrics. He is believable, even if we never really discover who he is.

Lots of it doesn’t make sense, but a fever-dream doesn’t have to. There’s a disparity in the talent-level of the two leads that weakens the (ultimately-predictable) “surprise.” But what plays out is a fair allegory for a sport where men trade their well-being (bones, brain, etc.) for glory. Tipping even (over)uses an x-ray effect during scenes of violence, as if to underscore the injuries beneath.

We get it. This is their entry ticket into the MCU. And the space-age ‘60s vibe does add a little bubblegum to soften any attempt at over-seriousness (it brings to mind the use of ‘50s kitsch in the game-based series Fallout).

The Scottish green hills and forests make for an intriguing change of scenery for the series, with nighttime given that added edge of dread that comes with unseen menace and glowing eyes.

In short, Ballerina is as close to a John Wick 5 as you are going to get without calling it that.

This is not a rousing movie that people are going to come away from energized. Still, it’s an interesting approach to an extended ad for an album.

Their creative process in action is just one of the cool archival treats in Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie, a jam-packed two hours of pop cultural hindsight that is part extended sketch, part couples therapy, and part traditional documentary.

It would help if you were a deep-dive fan, hungry for ephemera and eager to hear stuff Young has rarely, if ever, played for an audience.

There are not many films on the release schedule with good writing and plotting, wit and solid acting. That’s an exceptional combination in a quick bite of the spy movie genre.

As a turn-your-brain-off, tech-heavy action movie, Captain America: Brave New World succeeds well enough. As a Marvel movie that connects with other Marvel movies in any meaningful way, or charts a new direction (other than that vague suggestion of a “New Avengers”), it’s little more than a space-filler.

In real life, what happens in the Vatican generally stays in the Vatican. But as cinematic guesswork goes, Conclave is as good as it gets.

To repeat, Folie à Deux is not “canon.” It’s a writer/director realizing a vision with something sincere and clever, which you can accept or reject. Superhero fans will get their fix soon enough. But this is not that.

Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night is a representation of 90 eventful minutes of TV history as tightly packed narratively as a neutron star. It is about that tightly wound as well. For a movie about the debut of Saturday Night Live, the show that changed comedy, the experience is more anxiety than humour.

Still, as a premise it’s irresistible. And Megan Park’s funny and touching My Old Ass brings a fresh twist to a mystically-assisted two-way generational life lesson that, in the movies, has usually involved switching bodies.

Touch is a film that moves at its own Icelandic pace to savour its own tragic, but ultimately hopeful story.

The interesting thing about the remarkably intense, violent police-procedural/occult-drama Longlegs is that it doesn’t overplay the Cage card.

Kinds of Kindness is certainly a display of disparate kinds of weirdness. But unlike Poor Things, which was both provocative and told with absurd clarity, this anthology is a mixed bag of wannabe profundities.

In one way or another, every Planet of the Apes movie except the first has been a part of a longer narrative towards how this planet went ape. And for much of the screen-time, it does look like Kingdom is moving us there.

A film that wants to be a metaphor for something, the French film The Animal Kingdom is like an edgeless, absurdist high school version of The Island of Doctor Moreau.

The movie unfolds with what seems like a series of random left turns, which, in some cases, may have been written on the day of shooting. But Qualley and Viswanathan are a likeable odd-couple, in a dumb movie rendered smartly enough to not overstay its welcome.

Fitting In is kind of on-the-nose in the way it portrays the transference of attitudes.

However closely it does or doesn’t hew to reality (Durkin’s script is “inspired by” the Von Erichs, rather than “based on”), The Iron Claw is an emotionally resonant movie about a profoundly dysfunctional family with an unescapable gravity-well of connectedness, one that dates to when they all grew up in a house on wheels, going from bout to bout.

The lighter moments are the best reason to catch The Marvels. Getting a reprieve on the running time is a close second.

Add a bit of road movie misadventure, a la Payne’s Sideways, and you have a Christmas movie with spirit and wit, with a minimum of mawkish sentiment.

There are counter-intuitive plot-turns to be sure. But like the best science fiction, The Creator is more about us than about The Other. And it has an emotional core that you seldom find in other action films of its size and budget.

If it’s not exactly a documentary, Dumb Money offers up enjoyably anarchic glee as the little guy wins for a minute.

Overall, The Last Voyage of the Demeter is a middling entry in the Dracula canon.

At a little more than two hours (about the length of the line to get into the actual ride), The Haunted Mansion sometimes strains to keep up its frenetic pace. But the fun tone is on point, and younger family members in the audience are in little actual danger of being traumatized by fear.

Oppenheimer is three hours of testimony played out as drama. There are no action scenes as such, besides pyro played on the quantum and city-destroying level. It is the opposite of escapism, but it’s real history worth telling.

In this feature debut, De Filippis paints an utterly believable picture of the kind of immigrant/children-of-immigrants family where emotions fly and can turn from rage to love on a dime.

If Renfield were a serious movie, all the gory fight and slaughter scenes would seem overindulgent. But judging from the audience laugh-meter at the screening I attended, the right decisions were made for the material.

Air is enjoyable, engaging, sprinkled with some of the ‘80s sprightlier hits (including Sister Christian and Money for Nothing), and good for some laughs.

Amanda Kim’s admiring documentary Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV, makes a case that Paik may not have merely been one of the most influential of the avant garde, he may have been one of the most influential artists of the 20th Century - period, one who invented a new visual canvas.

A circus of violence, it’s a noisy, non-stop combination of dance and Loony Tunes-worthy manic cartoonishness.

An unusual blend of a travel show and those MTV staple Unplugged specials, Bono & The Edge: A Sort of Homecoming, with Dave Letterman on Disney+ isn’t exactly a deep dive as far as travelogue goes. But it does offer a glimpse into U2’s soul.

Creed III has the fights, it has a story, and it has a heart. For Jordan, it’s a feature directing debut with punch.

You could think of it as a 98-minute ad for the Super Bowl, opening as it is a week before this year’s edition. These words do not sound like the description of the GOAT of movies. And 80 for Brady is not that.

Far from being mysterious and confounding, it rings utterly true as it captures both the beauty and fragility of young boys’ friendships, amid the storm of growth and social pressure.

Nighy performs a considerable character arc with only the smallest of emotional reveals, as if tentatively exercising unused muscles of humanity and even joy.

The parade of post-punk artists and artistic legends is entertaining for anybody who’s ever followed that era’s art scene.

Door Mouse isn’t exactly noir for the ages, and it has story problems. But it moves, and as played by Law, Mouse is a dead-pan heroine I’d like to see again, backed by a bigger-budget.

Despite what redemption there ultimately is, The Whale is a feel-bad movie. But in a movie marketplace saturated with homogeneity, at least it inspires you to feel something.

While The Way of Water could have easily lost an hour from its three-hour-plus running time, it would have been a shame to lose its most magic moments, the stuff that makes it different.

A slave-on-the-run movie that uses every bit of its star’s modest acting ability and ticks all the award boxes, Antoine Fuqua’s Emancipation would be a shoo-in in a world where Smith was not banned from the Oscars for 10 years.

She Said is about cracking the code of silence, and the flood that follows when it breaks.

Deeper, darker, mordant, with a definite horror movie vibe, it is what you might expect from del Toro, a filmmaker who gave us Pan’s Labyrinth – essentially a dark fairy-tale wrapped in real-world fascism, as this is as well.

In its rambling pace, Causeway at times is reminiscent of Winter’s Bone, the 2010 movie that introduced Lawrence to film fans, and may still be her finest performance. In Causeway, the doctors aren’t the only ones wondering what’s going on inside her head. The audience does too, and she reveals it as slowly as she needs to.

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story is a platform for comedy as a burlesque of drama, with enough winks, pop references and silliness to keep the premise going. Funny stuff.

If Decision to Leave is indeed intended as an homage to a genre, mission accomplished.

All Quiet on the Western Front exists to make the viewer uncomfortable – infinitely preferable to what the characters endure.

A rom-com it is. A typical rom-com it isn’t.

If it’s not original ground, Don’t Worry Darling is a visually arresting mash-up of The Stepford Wives and Pleasantville, with its plot about an idyllic artificial ‘50s with pampered suburban housewives religiously dedicated to their husbands and their cocktails, and hints of the decade’s dark side.

Complications of history aside, The Woman King is Black Panther minus the vibranium and with more women warriors, an empowerment tale fueled by kickassery, with battle scenes, ear-splitting ululated war cries and sword fights.

With its themes of the superficiality of arena-sized hallelujahs and the worship of riches, Honk for Jesus: Save Your Soul is a terrific platform for some solid actors to strut their sanctimonious stuff.

There is enough right and apparently painstakingly accurate about Prey – the Predator series prequel in which the now-familiar species of extraterrestrial hunters sets sights on a tribe of 18th Century Comanches – that hearing the characters speak an actual indigenous language would have taken it to a whole other level. Instead they speak jarringly modern English.

Vengeance is a movie whose dry humour carries its message well and even has its sweet moments. The desolate desert location hangs over everything, sometimes suggesting another planet peopled by humans. But given the movie’s suggestion of the emptiness of city life, it may also suggest just another kind of desert.

Nope is an eccentric vehicle for some of Peele’s favourite themes – the movie business, Black social history, and character-over-plot.

It moves, it’s entertaining, Ryan Gosling is as buff as he’s ever been and all-in as an action star. And who knew all it would take was a porn ‘stache to turn Chris Evans from Captain America into a psycho mercenary?

Its pace, at least in the early going, is breathless.

The odd golfball-centric bit of whimsy aside, The Phantom of the Open is straight-ahead storytelling (complete with a pat family crisis that is neatly resolved) that can only be as good as the actors in it.

Clocking in at under two hours, virtually every word of prosaic bro dialogue, every dramatic exchange, every turn of events, is designed to do one thing: get us back in the sky twisting and turning at several times the speed of sound, narrowly avoiding crashes with other planes and with the ground.

Director Simon Curtis and writer Julian Fellowes deliver the dual comedies of errors with cheer, sprightly/stately music and the lightest of drama. The scenery, both at Downton and in France, is worthy of Rick Steeves’ Europe. If this is a goodbye (and there are plenty of signals that it is, barring unexpectedly huge box office), it ends on a note of smiles, tears and no hard feelings.

Producer-director Jonathan Keijser’s debut feature is a fish-out-of-water tale that softens the edges in the story in favour of eccentric character comedy and mild family conflict. Oh, and it does a pretty good job of portraying Antigonish as one icy-cold but warm-hearted town.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is a mostly joyless exercise whose only saving grace is the mordantly silly touch of director Sam Raimi, who delivers ghouls, demons, necromancy, imaginatively surrealist backdrops and at least one rampaging monster that looks like it escaped from an episode of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. For many, this is entertainment enough.

The movie is both an exercise in self-mockery and a spoof of both Hollywood and the kind of movie Cage might take to pay the bills.

It’s a fact of life that a novel about the right to die can’t be represented in depth in 105 minutes. But a compelling essence remains in this story about two sisters from a Manitoba Mennonite community - one with a mess of a life who nonetheless wants to live, the other, blessed with a seemingly perfect life, who wants the opposite.

With DNA largely spliced from the movie Speed, it’s a carnage-filled action film that is essentially a single extended car chase. Ambulance is a movie that is nothing if not focused.

There is no pretension in what The Lost City is or what it’s trying to do, other than entertain an audience for slightly under two hours. It has one job, and it does it well.

Double Walker’s story is feverishly imaginative, though its internal logic often doesn’t hold up. But the star and co-writer Sylvie Mix is committed to her story, playing a mostly silent, seductive (often nakedly so) phantom who “can only be seen by believers and sinners.”

Batman as a straight-ahead film noir anti-hero – just psychos and murder, no end of the world scenarios - is an idea that’s overdue. It was the tone the original comic book set way back when. And for long stretches, The Batman gets it.

The dialogue is clunky at times, and the forced four-narrative format means no character is really fleshed out. But the movie finds its heart and its footing in the last act with Danny’s story and a redemptive finale.

Oscar-nominated Iranian director Asghar Farhadi (A Separation), with his powerful and perceptive tale A Hero, shows us universalities, from the complexities of human nature to the modernized way we’ve manipulated right and wrong.

Spider-Man: No Way Home is a comfort-food present to long-time fans, like a cross-over episode of one or more beloved TV series, with winks, call-backs, trivia, cameos, super-villains and copious destruction.

This West Side Story retains its ‘50s feel, while polishing this venerable gem of a musical to a greater gleam.

I was worried King Richard would come to resemble the platitudinous The Pursuit of Happyness, which earned Smith an Oscar nomination, but is not one of my favourites of his films. I was pleasantly surprised thereafter.

The largely interior cinematography by Claire Mathon is stark, cold and beautiful, backed by a soundtrack that ranges from funereal chamber music to discordant jazz-noise meant to inspire dread. If that sounds uncomfortable, well, that’s the point of being her.

Roh is a simple story, fueled entirely by atmosphere.

I’m a fan of Wright’s work, so I’m disappointed that Last Night in Soho doesn’t hold up on both halves. But the parts that work, work terrifically.

This might be a Dune that could even be appreciated by someone unfamiliar with Dune.

I’m Your Man is certainly a metaphor for our increasingly intimate relationship with our own technology. Some have seen it as a direct reference to our intimacy with personae on social media, virtual relationships that exist at the expense of our connections with people in the real world. Whatever it is supposed to be, it is a smart and often witty take on a not exactly new sci-fi premise.

If brevity is indeed the soul of wit, at a tidy 90 minutes, Venom: Let There Be Carnage is on point for what it largely is - a violently slapstick domestic sitcom.

An audacious and demented film, tailor-made for its recent Midnight Madness slot at the Toronto International Film Festival, Julia Ducournau’s Titane also has intimations of profundity - quite a claim for a film about a woman who is impregnated by a car.

There’s an entertaining commitment to the story and its references in Saint-Narcisse (a real place that may be impossible to photograph badly, such is the natural beauty that surrounds this demented tale). And La Bruce knows a striking leading man when he casts one.