Jim Slotek

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.

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.

An emotionally moving thriller that smoothly negotiates the horrors of the supernatural and real world evil with haunting imagery and tension.

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

As it is, The Art of Racing in the Rain won’t disappoint anyone with basic expectations of a dog movie. It’s full of aww, if not wonder.

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

At times, that slowness and steadiness in writer-director Shelagh McLeod’s tale is worth the wait as solid actors – including Dreyfuss and Graham Greene – do their thing. At others, it’s a source of consternation (particularly when events are moving at what should be a swift pace). But the “sad piano” soundtrack trope in the first act is probably the movie’s biggest hurdle. Stay with it, though.

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.

It’s an inspiring chapter in history, beautifully conveyed on the screen.

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

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

A parade of pulled punches, there’s not enough of anything in The Tomorrow Man to make it stick as drama or even a believable romance.

Call it Meh in Black. The pun is, I will admit, unoriginal. But then so is Men in Black: International.

I accept the onscreen explanation that this Godzilla is simply on atomic steroids. It’s the movie that’s fat.

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

While Stahelski is unlikely ever to be called upon to make a rom-com or coming-of-age movie, he and Reeves have taken the fluid action of the John Wick series to a point of “how are they going to top that last insane thing they did?” And there’s an imagination at work that’s straight out of Looney Tunes.

Cookson is engaging enough as Joan, mercurial politics and all, but it’s a prosaic tale considering its enormity. And it never really finds its feet as entertainment.

The Intruder is the sort of thriller where the audience is in on pretty much everything from the beginning, and spends the rest of the movie waiting for the dolts onscreen to catch up.

The level of sophistication in the storytelling is impressive, and Isaac’s attempts at Vulcan logic notwithstanding, it’s a movie that wears its heart on its sleeve.

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.

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.

This Hellboy looks like the real Hellboy, but its heart and soul have gone AWOL.

The “beats” in the story where hearts are supposed to swell are so telegraphed as to render The Best of Enemies emotionally flat. There are no surprises, no change-ups, no setbacks in this collision of sensibilities.

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.

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.

As standard a documentary as it is in presentation, Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes is cleverly assembled and edited, making the most of available archival material to flesh out the stories of Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bud Powell, Art Blakey, Horace Silver et al, and of Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, the two German-Jewish immigrants who escaped the war and redefined America’s music culture.

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.

His choice of shots is remarkable, from the mirror house to an institutional hallway chase that goes on forever, to static shots of possible entry points that double down on the suspense. Us is a well shot, artfully chilling movie, one awash in mood but which doesn’t fail to deliver the story.

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.

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.

Though the quirk is ladled on a little thick at times, Woman at War is a surprisingly crowd-pleasing film experience considering its subject matter. In style, Erlingsson evokes the playfulness of Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki, and it seems impossible to film anything in Iceland without being hypnotized by the landscape.

You don’t have to travel very far anywhere in Canada these days to see towns whose economic and social life-signs are so weak, you practically see ghosts yourself. Ghost Town Anthology merely brings that feeling to life – or death.

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.

Apollo 11 is ultimately the finest look back to the anniversary of this historic event you’ll see this year.

Huppert is an actress of great depth, so playing a monster in the shallow end of the pool is no great accomplishment. But she is great at staring with piercing intent. And she knows how to make a scene.

A hero from an era when we still had heroes, the diminutive Romanian-born, activist and lawyer fairly burns through the screen with passion born of witnessing the worst that humanity can do. And he still tours the world with the impossible dream of ending inhumanity.

Awash in colour and sunlight, the doc The Last Resort is both a modern cultural history of the confounding should-be-paradise that is Miami Beach, and a loving bio of a young, short-lived photographer who froze one of its moments in time.

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

There’s a sense of familiarity to The Prodigy, the latest in a half-century of “evil child” stories going back to The Bad Seed, and including The Exorcist and The Omen. It’s still effective, given the chills we get from a sweet-faced kid saying or doing something horrible in the dark.

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.

People expecting plenty of Laurel & Hardy style laughs will be disappointed, obviously, given the movie’s comedy-lions-in-winter theme. But this thoughtful portrait of a long-lasting professional marriage rings touchingly true.

Unfortunately, the director who came in too early for the superhero craze may now be revisiting it too late. The genre now monopolizes the multiplex, and it seems as if everything about comic books and superpowers and misanthropy has already been said. But Shyamalan still says it, in an unfocused movie with some interesting ideas, and so much expositional dialogue in place of action, it’s sometimes more of a lecture than a thriller.

Capernaum is a movie with a lot of dramatic ideas and plot-points, worthy of a miniseries at least, squeezed into a two-hour sausage of misery.

What can be said about series director Wes Ball is that he has a flair for noisy gun and air battles, pyro, fights, destruction, pursuit and escape. But it signifies nothing if there is no plausible reason for pretty much anything that happens.

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.

At more than two hours, Blaze is a meandering tale of genius and futility, tender, but overlong and wallowing, given that we know how it ends.

[A] crazily imaginative, hilarious and frenetic animated feature that’s practically a palate-cleanser for comic book earnestness.

As an impressionistic portrait of the man, it works, mainly because of the intense vulnerability Dafoe brings to the role.

It’s hard to imagine a lovelier fly-on-the-wall experience than Nothing Like A Dame – a documentary that basically intrudes on a regular, wickedly-funny get-together of four octogenarians who’ve been friends since they were barely more than precocious schoolgirls.

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

Ralph Breaks the Internet is everything that made Wreck-It Ralph enjoyable, painted on a canvas as big as the Internet itself. The satire is sharp and the pace is relentless, a can’t miss combination for a kid outing.

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

Grindelwald is a movie that seems to want to recreate the Potter universe and does it in the most plodding way, crowding it with characters and plot points, many of which go nowhere.

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.

In Sharkwater Extinction, we also get a glimpse of the sanguine approach Stewart brought to coming face-to-face with the extermination of the creatures he loves.

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.

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

The good in the movie is overwhelmed by its by-the-numbers approach to its story. There’s not enough in Bigger to make a fan out of non-fans of body building, and there’s enough wrong to turn off the real fans.

Colette is ultimately a feminist tale, but never one that wallows in self-pity or seriousness. It is also carried along lightly by a script with a streak of wit.

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.

Assassination Nation may be empty calories as social satire, but it’s a dark, wry, of-the-moment story of run-amok panic that will entertain horror fans.

Director/co-writer Shane Black, indulging his tendency towards glibness, brings an outright comic touch that turns the latest interaction between humans and these dreads-wearing extraterrestrial big-game hunters, into something of a bloody romp – as inappropriate as that sounds (and often is).

I will give The Nun this, it has an utterly outrageous ending that pretty much brought the house down at the advance screening I attended.

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.

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.

Even as a reboot, it remains both scenically beautiful and an ordeal at the same time.

There’s enough promise in The Happytime Murders for it to possibly work as a short-lived, gimmicky Comedy Network series. But the effort that’s put into stretching this gag over the length of a feature film is more painful than funny.

City-dwellers may go their entire lives without realizing that the greatest movie screen of all is above their heads, telling billions of stories.

Dog Days moves along, mostly pleasantly and at its worst is a somewhat-forced good time.

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…

It’s hard to imagine The Darkest Minds becoming the franchise it was intended to be. The plot is murky confusing and unengaging, and the entire genre may just be worn out by now.

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.

Though Under the Tree falls firmly into satire, it is not a comedy with a lot of laughs. It is more an absurdist tragedy, with cringe-worthy moments.