Jim Slotek

Suffice to say, this is all getting explained when scary things could actually be happening. My “FUN-tasy” throughout was that the credits would roll.

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.

Ritchie is looking back to the Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and RocknRolla roots as if nothing has changed since. The Gentlemen is simply those movies with extra everything except inspiration. And sometimes more is less.

A dull piece of off-season horror flotsam, Underwater suffers from two kinds of genetic drift. It is the umpteenth movie about messing with the ocean bottom (DeepStar Six, Leviathan, The Meg, etc.), where, apparently, there be dragons rather than blind albino shrimp...It is also the latest, and most blatant, of God-knows-how-many Alien rip-offs that have taken up space in the multiplex in one critic’s lifetime.

The pieces are there for a profound piece of work, and The Song of Names’ high points are worth the occasional narrative slog.

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.

There are some very funny lines in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, much of it predicated on the outwardly ludicrous meeting of profound cynicism and hope. Lloyd’s character arc is well handled by Rhys (The Americans), and the denouement is one only a Scrooge could call humbug.

There’s a lot of dubious explaining in the last act, a sure sign that a movie hasn’t done a very good job explaining itself.

A preposterous mess of romance-with-secrets, generations-old closet skeletons and revenge, The Good Liar is the kind of fragrant dramatic cheese that Sidney Sheldon would have squeezed an ‘80s network mini-series out of. But the never-before-paired screen couple of Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren consume this cheese like so much scenery. There’s nothing like actors with gravitas slumming, all bemused smiles and droll delivery, even as the material descends clunkily into unintentional comedy.

It’s on the track where it finds traction. The events of the various races, reflected on the faces of characters whose lives revolve around the outcome, tell a story all by themselves.

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.

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.

A decent, fast-moving nod to the spirit that originally made the Terminator movies a permanent part of pop culture.

In evocative and understatedly emotional scenes, carried out with a mature grace by Banderas, we come to a connection of how we get where we are, and what holds us back from what we dream of becoming.

As entertained as the audience is throughout, you don’t leave the theatre undisturbed.

There isn’t a moment in Zombieland: Double Tap that takes itself the least bit seriously. The gags often seem made up as it goes along, but they have a high “hit” ratio and the looseness of the whole affair means there’s no pressure to impress.

This is one of those animated features that veers way towards adult references for the parents in the room, while creating occasional mayhem in the pursuit of short-attention-span theatre. The latter fails.

It occurs at a certain point that Ronstadt was kind of the Meryl Streep of pop music, capable of taking on any vocal role and making it sound like she was born to it.

Monos is an immersive, sweaty, almost hallucinatory experience of hormone-driven anarchy.

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.

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.

In between the long patches there are some scary turns, though with diminishing returns, and director Andy Muschietti and screenwriter Gary Dauberman frequently turn to fears first cousin, humour, by wise-cracking through their peril. This too gets tired. But almost anything would after nearly three hours.

An emotionally moving thriller that smoothly negotiates the horrors of the supernatural and real world evil with haunting imagery and tension.

Like the characters it portrays, Mine 9 simply does its job as best it can with the resources at hand.

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

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.

Though it kind of loses track of its marquee title character mid-movie, Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love is a must-watch for Cohen fans, with copious concert and backstage footage. It is also a snapshot of a time, and of hedonistic artistic idealism.