Jim Slotek

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.