Jim Slotek

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.

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

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

There may be a lot of questions unanswered in Possessor, but there’s feverish imagination at work.

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.

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.

Roh is a simple story, fueled entirely by atmosphere.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 script is undercooked and veers in random directions from its simple premise. But it has a heart, and two likeable leads who work well together.

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.

James vs His Future Self is a less abrasive and transgressive film than LaLonde’s previous The Go-Getters (an anti-romance about two street people conniving their way out of town). Consequently, it’s not as raucously funny. But it’s a decent enough time waster.

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

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.

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.

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.