Jim Slotek

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.