Jim Slotek

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.