Jim Slotek

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

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?

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

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.

With its dark palette and atmosphere, Honey Bunch could have been a simpler, more disturbing and pointed story. There’s enough there to suggest as much.

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.

There’s a little more room for characters to breathe. This is not to last, however. The whole thing must ignite into a final act of fights, car chases and general destruction (and Snake Eyes’ discovery of honour). The battle scenes are often darkly lit and confusing (though it is a change of pace to see so much swordplay as opposed to gunplay), and the attempt to fuse the Joes and Cobra into the plot in the last act is not exactly smooth.

The dialogue is clunky at times, and the forced four-narrative format means no character is really fleshed out. But the movie finds its heart and its footing in the last act with Danny’s story and a redemptive finale.

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

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.

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

As stark a manifesto against rush-to-judgment as his story is, one can’t help but think how much worse Richard Jewell’s ordeal would have been in a social media-driven world.

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.

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.

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.

A film that wants to be a metaphor for something, the French film The Animal Kingdom is like an edgeless, absurdist high school version of The Island of Doctor Moreau.

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

Unfortunately, in Cold Storage, the first act sets too high a bar to maintain, and the rest, though watchable, is busy-ness punctuated by green splatter.

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.

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.

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).

On the sliding scale of war movies, Emmerich’s Midway is obviously no prestige film like The Hurt Locker or Saving Private Ryan. It belongs more to the school of the original Midway, with Tora! Tora! Tora! as its exemplar. Tell the story of a battle, offer up some sketched-out characters, played with aplomb, add a dash of soap opera and fire when ready. On that scale, for what it’s worth, Midway is a much more solid piece of entertainment than the Pearl Harbor directed by Emmerich’s fellow master-of-disaster Michael Bay.

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.