Jim Slotek

Hovering over Together Together is the expectation that two people who enjoy each other’s company as much as Matt and Anna do will eventually end up together. Beckwith plays with this trope nicely.

Considering the (pardon the expression) glacial pace of much of the lead-up, Hold the Dark’s eruption into massacre-level violence is jarring. Once it takes hold, it is relentless and grueling.

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.

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.

The Cleaners is a doc of remarkable access and a feast for thought.

Sims-Fewer clearly follows her vision, and paints an unsettling picture with sure strokes. I look forward to more.

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.

Roh is a simple story, fueled entirely by atmosphere.

Green Book is not the deepest depiction of racism, but it is a funny and heartwarming depiction of a friendship, forged in a car.

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.

There are good reasons for an action film to be two-and-a-half hours long. Having to devote dozens of extra pages of dialogue to constantly explaining itself isn’t one of them.

Having finally honed the most enjoyably human superhero in the Marvel Universe, it seems “off” to want to ramp him up with tech.

Though it kind of loses track of its marquee title character mid-movie, Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love is a must-watch for Cohen fans, with copious concert and backstage footage. It is also a snapshot of a time, and of hedonistic artistic idealism.

The First Purge has a lot of narrative and unsubtle subtext to cram into a movie that’s barely 90 minutes long. In fact, its big, violent finish notwithstanding, a lot of it is quite dull and its pacing inconsistent.

So, when all is said and done, this is definitely not Larry Charles’ Borat. It put me to mind more of the later seasons of All in the Family, when Archie Bunker’s bigotry inevitably softened.

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.

As stark a manifesto against rush-to-judgment as his story is, one can’t help but think how much worse Richard Jewell’s ordeal would have been in a social media-driven world.

Not the most profound movie in Laika’s catalogue. But Missing Link is an entertaining 90 minutes, with glib dialogue that may skew a little old for younger viewers, but with maybe enough realistic physical comedy and terrific stop-motion animation to make up for it.

Sorting out what’s true and what’s not becomes so convoluted that the abrupt ending seems a case of either running out of money or ideas. Still, Come True is a movie that you’ll likely remember for the images it burns in the brain, more than for its story.

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

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.

Given the accelerated pace of a 90-minute movie whose main narrative happens in one night, Williams gives a powerfully controlled performance, creating a character whose awareness level is high.

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.

As with Carpenter, build-up is the thing (Michael is mostly talked-about for the first half-hour), and producers Blumhouse’s trademark jump-scares are a nice stylistic fit.

A kind of gothic, ghostly mash-up of Downton Abbey and Grey Gardens, The Little Stranger is as mannered, tattered and morose as that marriage of premises suggests.

With winks at the cheesiness of a previous generation’s entertainment and a razzberry directed at contemporary blockbusters with a thousand times its minuscule budget, Psycho Goreman is an entertaining exercise in low-tech sci-fi camp.

At an hour and a half, Gretel and Hansel shouldn’t be a slog. But at a certain point in the last act, it definitely labours for its chills - and all that feasting eventually leaves the audience more hungry than scared.

Static… low energy… no spark to speak of. A weak biopic of Nicola Tesla, the man who defined our electric lives, practically begs for shameful puns. For that, I apologize.

Callahan, who died in 2010, understood the emotional venting behind his work and talked about it. As moving as it often is, we get a lot of the venting in Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot, but not enough of the work, or the man behind it.

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

An odd, sweet, dryly funny, existential and slightly blasphemous buddy-movie, in which an Orthodox cantor, grieving his wife’s death, seeks the help of a pot-smoking college professor to understand what becomes of a corpse.

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.

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.

My feeling is that Rupert Goold’s Judy is as good as it needs to be to stand as a framework for Zellweger’s incandescent performance. Parts of the plot are A-to-B, a lot is unsubtle and a climactic scene involving her most famous song is pure-Hollywood schmaltz. But the worst of Judy is worth the price of admission for the one bravura performance.

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.

Effectively the Ripley of this flight, Moretz makes a good case – again - for her ability to work an action film. Shadow in the Cloud is a fun ride through enemy territory, both human and demonic, and Moretz wields her weaponry with aplomb.

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.

Let it be known that The Way Back – in which Ben Affleck plays a drunk who once walked away from basketball glory and is offered a chance at redemption when his old coach has a heart attack – is possibly the most melancholy sports movie ever made.

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.

Like the characters it portrays, Mine 9 simply does its job as best it can with the resources at hand.

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.

Everything about The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part feels like a corporate obligation fulfilled.

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.

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.

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 only thing that feels new about Captain Marvel is its protagonist’s gender. And as with Superman, I wonder about the dramatic limitations of such a godlike superhero.

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

While I already miss the experience of seeing these films in a theatre, Vivarium does evoke TV precedents, most notably Twilight Zone in the cleanness of its premise and the parsing out of dark details on a need-to-know basis.

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.

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.

It’s an unoriginal, budget-conscious and hardly brain-taxing race against time. But that doesn’t negate its entertainment value or its often heart-pounding pace.

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.

What’s interesting about the lifelong war-buff’s approach to this movie is that Hanks has been absolutely ruthless with Forester’s novel, paring it down to 91 minutes of pure tension sandwiched by bursts of action.

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.

Canadians already made the definitive young-woman-turned-werewolf movie, with 2000’s Ginger Snaps, which is a bar to clear if Bloodthirsty is to make an impression on veteran horror fans. But the pop music angle, an LGBT angle, and a studio Svengali who lives in a mansion in the woods, gives Bloodthirsty some points for fresh twists.

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.

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.

Let Him Go doesn’t reinvent the wheel. It is a genre thriller, where the good guys face impossible odds against cartoonish bad guys. But it plays out with style, violence that doesn’t strain credulity, and a consequence for every action taken.

The Last Suit has its narrative flaws and leaps of faith. But the sheer force of its central character’s untethered voyage of discovery – and the acting behind it - overcomes all.

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

The interconnected Irish anthology Lost & Found – about lives that intersect in and around a small-town train station - starts at an interesting, pleasant hum, and pretty much stays there, avoiding high drama. The result is something like an Irish-accented Coronation Street with more locations, fewer confrontations, and beer, which, to my mind, isn’t a bad way to spend time in a theatre.

What keeps the movie from being simply a series of lurid events is the relationship between Mía and Euge, played with an easy grace by Gusmán and Bejo. Their chemistry is so comfortable, you have to remind yourself they aren’t actually sisters.

For a film that’s about decades of interstellar aimlessness, Aniara seems hopelessly rushed and superficial.

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.

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

This story about stories is best absorbed if you’re not in a hurry. The Oak Room is not long (88 minutes), but the words demand attention.

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.

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.

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.

Motherless Brooklyn is the sort of risk-taking effort that deserves kudos whether it works or not. As it happens, this lengthy film-noir labour of love by writer, director and star Edward Norton, is well worth the ride.

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.

As a movie for adults, Christopher Robin has rewards, but needn’t have been so antic. The schmaltz would have sufficed. As a movie for children, well…

As empty of purpose and overlong as it is, Hobbs & Shaw is at least a more entertaining machine than the last F&F film.

While stopping short of camp, and giving the movie all the visual aplomb it deserves, Godzilla vs. Kong isn’t ashamed of being light entertainment writ large. The dramatics are few, the quips just about right, and the booms are bombastic.

In some reality where it came without baggage – and where it didn’t have to be a bloated two-and-a-half hours to accommodate its relationship to a classic – Doctor Sleep could stand on its own as a decently stylish popcorn thriller.

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

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.

Despite its winks at its source material, Cruella is very much a fun, stand-alone movie that lets two formidable actresses fly while everyone else stands back.

In between the long patches there are some scary turns, though with diminishing returns, and director Andy Muschietti and screenwriter Gary Dauberman frequently turn to fears first cousin, humour, by wise-cracking through their peril. This too gets tired. But almost anything would after nearly three hours.

As a first-time filmmaker, Barinholtz is on training wheels, shooting almost entirely in closed-space interior, the better to concentrate on his words. To that extent, The Oath is (at first anyway) a scarily realistic depiction of the argument feedback loop that seems to be ripping society apart. But the denouement allows him to slip away without a realistic premise for how one would leave that loop.

The horror film Come Play, the feature debut of writer/director Jacob Chase, is in many ways derivative. But it’s derivative of some pretty effective predecessors.

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.

The inexorable pace of this marital disintegration is masterfully dictated by its leads, Nighy (whose granite expression remains fairly unchanged whether unhappy with Grace or newly-alive with his new love) and Bening (without whose energy there would be no movie).

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

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.

With Pet Sematary, it seems like the remake was ordered, and the filmmakers tried unsuccessfully to come up with a reason. Sometimes less is better too.

I’m not sure why director Ricky Tollman would take a real story that practically writes itself and write something else. It’s hard to follow what he’s trying to say with Run This Town, but it’s said awkwardly, without much regard to reality. The cast are all engaging and terrifically talented. But the story they’re given is a narrative straitjacket that even the best actors couldn’t save.

Uncle Drew is a goodhearted broad comedy, one where you don’t have to know the players (under all that latex) to enjoy the game.

Minghella’s directorial debut is awash with mean girls, pretty boys, seizure-inducing club scenes, headache-inducing auto-tune, and a thin plot that unfolds (and ends) dizzyingly quickly.

There’s a kind of wannabe-hip quality to it all, but by the end, we’ve been so hammered by quirk (and numbed by bloody deaths) that we’ve forgotten what motivated this glib daisy-chain of revenge in the first place.

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.

With random elements of Bollywood, Western musicals and unlikely episodic plot contrivances, it is made to please everybody. The result is inoffensive.

Though Korine (Spring Breakers) doesn’t figure out how to make his protagonist breathe (at least smokelessly), he does do a commendable job of making the Florida Keys come alive with sunshine, pastel colours and partying.

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.

A big dumb acid-trip of a super-hero movie, Aquaman is relentless, noisy, entertaining nonsense – particularly in 3D IMAX - as overlong as any of them, but not boring, and as I say, at times trippy.

What distinguishes Knuckleball from other thrillers involving children is the seeming reality of the peril portrayed.

There isn’t a moment in Zombieland: Double Tap that takes itself the least bit seriously. The gags often seem made up as it goes along, but they have a high “hit” ratio and the looseness of the whole affair means there’s no pressure to impress.