Jim Slotek

Krymalowski brings a vivacious energy to a movie that would otherwise be one long trudge to safe haven.

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.

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.

At its most basic level, Becky is a female empowerment/revenge movie. And a movie like this, with its de rigueur open-ended sequel-friendly ending, suggests Becky has plenty more empowerment left in her.

A decent, fast-moving nod to the spirit that originally made the Terminator movies a permanent part of pop culture.

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.

Though it’s a movie with an identity crisis, Rahim’s magnetic performance carries enough of The Mauritanian to make it a worthwhile watch.

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.

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.

It’s a lesser episode to be sure. But Wilson and Farmiga are both so accomplished and comfortable in their roles at this point, that they distract us from the movie’s flaws.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The pieces are there for a profound piece of work, and The Song of Names’ high points are worth the occasional narrative slog.

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.

Ritchie is looking back to the Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and RocknRolla roots as if nothing has changed since. The Gentlemen is simply those movies with extra everything except inspiration. And sometimes more is less.

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

There’s a lot of dubious explaining in the last act, a sure sign that a movie hasn’t done a very good job explaining itself.

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.

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

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.

For the first two acts at least, Jungle Cruise is reasonably good fodder for a family outing, very much a theme park ride of the cinematic kind.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

A dull piece of off-season horror flotsam, Underwater suffers from two kinds of genetic drift. It is the umpteenth movie about messing with the ocean bottom (DeepStar Six, Leviathan, The Meg, etc.), where, apparently, there be dragons rather than blind albino shrimp...It is also the latest, and most blatant, of God-knows-how-many Alien rip-offs that have taken up space in the multiplex in one critic’s lifetime.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

This is one of those animated features that veers way towards adult references for the parents in the room, while creating occasional mayhem in the pursuit of short-attention-span theatre. The latter fails.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Mostly, this is a look at how solid actors can carry a nuts-and-bolts, dramatically undemanding action film. Jordan is physically imposing, and handles the action choreography with style.

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.

Awash in good intentions and weighed down by its grim premise, Come Away is a fantasy that fails to inspire, despite its star power (including David Oyelowo and Angelina Jolie) and occasionally clever flourishes.

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.

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.

The ironic thing about Ella McCay, James L. Brooks’ surprisingly slight politically themed comedy, is that it’s an aggressively feel-good movie that may leave you feeling bad.

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.

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.

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

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.

The fast pace is attention-span theatre for the young’uns, and the adult-aimed quips are entertaining for a while.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.