Liam Lacey

Behind the shell game of motives between the three main characters, there are subtle perceptions about class, youth alienation, and disposable people in contemporary Korea.

Pretentious, which might be defined as a showing an excess of ambition, is a modifier that clings to Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria — a remake of Dario Argento’s 1977 Day-Glo horror classic — like a wet leotard.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this greatest-hits patchwork approach or the correct racially diverse, girl-power script from Ashleigh Powell. There’s also nothing new or necessary about this jumbled, pretty mess of a movie, which barely covers the seams between its varied pilferings.

Assembled by first-time French director and Callas devotee Thomas Volf, this adoring clip reel has both pros and cons.

The topical issue of gender indeterminacy is examined, not through the lens of moralizing or academic theory, but from one person’s vulnerable experience.

Only by stepping back is it possible to see how peculiar and relatively original the movie is: A politically radical black youth drama for mainstream consumption; dissonant entertainment for fractious times.

While this is an autobiographical story about a young aspiring filmmaker and his skateboarding crew, it also speaks volumes about contemporary rust-belt USA, masculinity and abuse, weaving its themes and characters around scenes of the boys sailing through the near-empty streets.

Something of an intriguing curio (the first feature film about a subject treated in song, poem, television and theatre), Lizzie has some memorable pluses and significant minuses.

Roth, in restricting himself to the polite requirements of a kid-friendly movie, keeps his darker instincts in check, making this more a movie about set design than emotions.

For the old fans, there are a few splashes of Moore’s caustic levity.

One of the pleasures of Support the Girls is that it explores the constant fender-benders of sex, race, class, and age without ever coming off as preachy or lecturing.

As fresh as the female perspective is, as Skate Kitchen circles and swoops through the Manhattan twilight toward its conclusion, there is a sense of missed potential, that the film could have been much richer than it is.

Alpha aims to be not just a story but a transporting visual experience, which is one area where it over-reaches.

Nicchiarelli’s film makes a case that Nico’s instability and bleakness was no pose.

The most compelling performance here belongs to the Indonesian actor and martial artist Iko Uwais, who became famous in The Raid movies. Here, he plays the “asset” who must be taken out of the country. Uwais’ hand-and-foot battles are genuinely explosive and when he’s not fighting, he doesn’t say much, which is a welcome relief from all the rest of the babble.

The characters of Rachel and Nick are charming but their relationship feels backgrounded by numbing amounts of money porn, stilted melodrama, and often-strained comedy.

Audiences looking for a so-bad-its-good bit of kitsch catharsis will likely be let down. The Meh – sorry, The Meg – is so calculatedly flattened out for international markets, especially its Chinese financiers, that even the dialogue feels as though it’s in translation.

Reiner’s attempt to create Spotlight-like docudrama of newsroom courage and stoke fresh outrage about government lies is undermined by clunky old-fashioned filmmaking and Joey Harstone’s exposition-clotted script.

Blindspotting is a first film, a busy jumble of thoughts and urgent feelings: The humour is sometimes corny, the surreal fantasies strained and the dramatization of racial privilege unsubtle. Yet the level of ambition here, the commitment to try to say so much, is fresh and exciting.

The movie that can contain McKinnon, or the movie where she’s willing to be contained, has yet to be made.

Given all the on-screen risk-taking, Mission: Impossible - Fallout plays it pretty safe. What you get is essentially an action movies greatest hits package.

In both its light and dark phases, Three Identical Strangers comes across as almost too calculatedly entertaining, as Wardle carefully deals out the critical information, with the odd red herring, for maximum effect. In its defense, the film is consistently compassionate and fair-minded. Ultimately, the film confirms its investigative legitimacy by refusing to offer easy answers.

It’s a roiling mix of wry race comedy, economy-grade dystopian sci-fi, and Silicon Valley satire. Also, it's as funny and as caustic as hell.

The triumph of a film like Upgrade, an unapologetic B-movie, is that it aims low and exceeds expectations.

Here’s yet another incident-packed, steroid-pumped, dumb airport novel of a movie, with a few flourishes of Spielberg-inspired titanic imagery (though the director is J.A. Bayona) and a wall-to-wall John Williams-like orchestral score (by Michael Giacchino), with scenes that echo from the previous Jurassic Park movies.

The crude if silly humour of the movie’s first 90 minutes is followed by a dollop of sentiment at the film’s end, resulting in a case of tonal whiplash... like a slap with a wet fish followed by a forced bear hug. No doubt Tag means to be a rude but heart-warming trifle, but it just isn’t funny enough to get past its awful taste.

Though it can’t match the Michael Mann-level menace and poetic rapture it aspires to, the new Atlanta-set Superfly is certainly watchable. Along with its set-piece fantasies of lavishness and violence, it features a flavourful cast of drug dealers, and stars the charismatic baby-faced Trevor Jackson.

All in all, it’s many prayers short of a revelation.