Liam Lacey

The 11th Green is presented in a deadpan, naïve tone of a fifties’ B-movie or a low-budget X-Files knock-off. The smeary sci-fi effects are deliberately hokey, in contrast to the authentic home movies and newsreel footage. Indeed, the sci-fi story is a kind of feint.

While there are a few credibility hurdles here (including a lot of butter-fingered gunplay) Patton’s authoritative performance keeps things honest.

There’s a risk of overselling a modest movie like The Rest of Us, which feels a little pat and self-congratulatory in its resolution. But it’s generous spirited and, at 80 minutes, doesn’t overstay its welcome.

If you can unshackle the film from its creaky thriller frame, Mr. Jones is a well-intended history lesson and one-dimensional inspirational reminder of one reporter’s moral clarity in the fight against totalitarian deception.

Unfortunately, Da 5 Bloods’ impassioned civics lesson is grafted on to a slapdash B-movie action plot.

As the movie travels from country to country over Fisk's career, it's not always easy to follow the chronology. But overall, Mike Munn's editing is astute, covering decades of work and complex multi-party conflicts with as much clarity as could be reasonably hoped for.

A good-natured and well-acted small-town drama about midlife renewal, Gary Lundgren’s Phoenix, Oregon is the opposite of topical or urgent. That’s why it can be recommended as a distraction and a slice of comfort food.

While she’s not running up Billie Eilish-like social media influence, we understand that Collè is a kind of lightning rod for sexually-anxious, McJob-holding, roommate-sharing, millennial types. We also get the not-so-deep message, writ large and underscored, that sometimes transparency may be the best disguise of all.

Some scenes in The Painter and the Thief feel stagey, including a couple of delayed dramatic reveals. And the characters certainly seem aware of the camera’s presence. Seen in its best light though, The Painter and the Thief is a kind of Rorschach test: Do you see a tale of improbable friendship and compassion, or a story of trespassed boundaries and compulsion? Or, is this one of those “bistable” optical illusions, like the vase and the face, where different things are true, moment to moment?

The Dalai Lama is, no doubt, intellectually curious. But the argument that Buddhism’s mental practices are consistent with scientific thinking has been around for more than a century. We also know that hosts of people, scientists included, swear to the mental and physical benefits of meditation.

Director Nadia Hallgren’s Becoming gives us a good impression of hanging out with the First Lady without really getting us past the surface, although we get some sense of her drive.

You may want to see Capone — a film so stylized and perverse it makes Todd Phillips’ Joker look like Downton Abby — but not for insight or amusement.

At its best moments, it provides a warm contemporary take on intergender friendships and almost lives up to its philosophical pretensions.

Bolan's film is essentially a home movie, that fantails into a larger cultural narrative of post-war North American culture. Shot on video between 2013 and 2018, mostly in intimate indoor settings, the film begins as fly-on-the-wall style cinema verite.

A movie with as generic a title as Enemy Lines can’t really be called a disappointment, but it is a missed opportunity.

There’s little sense of jeopardy, which makes the parade of violence nothing more than a detached spectator sport, with implications that are not good.

Credit goes to Gibbs for the courage to question the comfortable consensus. But to present a crisis with no resolution feels like a job half-done.

Fans of cynically funny children's entertainment in the vein of Roald Dahl or Lemony Snicket’s Daniel Handler should glean some fun out of the new Netflix animated movie, The Willoughbys, an energetic and semi-imaginative comedy about an appalling family.

The film — set over the course of one wedding day — rates as no more than a passable distraction, though those can be useful.

As an ersatz arthouse pastiche, Tigertail is crafted with care. Nigel Buck’s cinematography effectively registers the different time periods and locations, and Michael Brooks’ plaintive score balances Pin-Jui’s taciturnity. On the negative side, the film’s hopscotching flashbacks can be confusing and there’s a lot of stylistic spin for what amounts to a prosaic family drama.

The set-ups and sight gags are deftly handled, though the after-effect is more dispiriting than cathartic. Like Bong-Joon Ho’s Parasite, it’s a film that feels of the moment, that leaves us with the question. And after all this is through, then what?

Clocking in at a brisk 88 minutes, Coffee & Kareem doesn't provide much comic relief, though it is a relief when it's over.

If you have trepidation about the juxtaposition of “Holocaust orphans” against “mime,” be assured they’re justified. Venezuelan writer-director Jonathan Jakubowicz’s wartime thriller is so ambitiously misjudged, it holds a bizarre fascination.

To put Uncorked in wine terms, it’s not complex, but only a philistine would dismiss what’s easy and pleasing as flawed.

It's always presumptuous to refer to a slice of history as "little known" simply because you didn't know about it, but it's probably safe to say that Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution — a rousing look at disability rights — will tell a new story to a lot of people.

The lack of clear identification of interview subjects and amorphous shape of the film can be frustrating. A segment on the history of book-burning, for example, feels gratuitous but, for the record, everyone in the film is against it.

While you can admire the “House of Mirrors” structure of The Whistlers and its ironic mix of glum and glamorous, there is little emotional purchase here. This is a flatter, more arch experience than Porumboiu’s devastatingly absurd earlier films, and the entire exercise feels more about ingenuity than art.

Within the frame of an old-fashioned stab-and-splatter exploitation flick, The Hunt is consistently smartish.

The mostly non-professional cast do a credible job of depicting a family growing progressively more anxious under increasing pressure.

Beanpole makes you feel its two-hour-plus running time, with drawn-out scenes full of off-centre framing and claustrophobic close-ups, but there’s an exhilaration in the audacity of the filmmaking, as the boldness of its portrayal of the survival drive.

There’s enough of Austen’s generous social vision and her character-revealing dialogue to make this watchable but Emma. takes a long time to connect emotionally.

A solid, if not revelatory portrait of contemporary Russia through the story of exiled oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

The Traitor is a pleasure to watch. Working with cinematographer Vladan Radovic, Bellocchio blends sweeping camera work and flurries of action with painterly lighting and often ironic musical cues. The story itself is somewhat over-stuffed — the time-jumping narrative (Bellochio and three other writers are credited) and an onscreen counter of murder victims — but this is still a welcome chance to see a great old school European auteur at work.

We’re gripped by the tension of Greene’s tautly calibrated performance, as a mother performing a daily high-wire act, trying to keep her family together and her children from harm.

The subject alone should ensure that it gets lots of attention from film reviewers and despite a jumpy, hodge-podge style, should be generally enjoyable to anyone interested in the seductive, contentious cultural phenomenon of The New Yorker’s famous critic.

Reservations aside, Clemency has moments of shivering gravity. Almost all of them involve complex emotions registered in Woodard’s extraordinary face, her dignified resistance to a turmoil of emotions within her, and her agonized need for forgiveness.

A family movie with lots of CGI-talking animals and star Robert Downey Jr. hiding his charisma, Dolittle is a tiresomely chaotic concoction.

The film is kinetic and elliptical, with clips from different eras juxtaposed in panels, moving back to a single frame of dancers’ feet, or artfully posed in instants of euphoria. This is a film that makes you want to absorb the language of dance or, at least, immerse yourself in more Merce, which makes this an exemplary introduction to a major twentieth century artist.

Apart from the overall endorsement of women’s friendships — and the credible warmth between the two likeable stars — the script’s feminist message is hopelessly muddled.

The project is a unique social experiment which we can all participate in, in a way, dipping back in time to connect with old acquaintances and, inevitably, measuring our own ups and downs in the interval.

Terrence Malick’s latest, A Hidden Life, is one of the year’s most ambitious films and an arguable masterpiece, though, admittedly, your receptivity to it depends on your capacity to experience three solemn hours of waving fields of wheat, theology and Nazi cruelty. c

A stylish melodrama and feminist lament.

To quote Bill Murray’s song again, “Star Wars/ those near and far wars” checks the boxes of a lot of the audience’s base, while seeming unburdened by real gravity.

While Dark Waters is something of a let-down for a Haynes film, it’s otherwise sturdy enough. One can admire the commitment of Ruffalo, who plays the role of the modest, decent, semi-accidental hero without vanity or trite psychology.

Charm, humanity and a passel of filmmaking insights are all here, rewarding both the dedicated fans and newcomers to Varda, who achieved a new level of public profile in her last decade.

A magic realist fantasy, a ghost story, a love story and political allegory, Atlantics packs a deceptive amount of complexity in a gauzy, slender film.

This is the sort of film that will divide audiences between those who will have their hearts torn out… and those who will want to tear out their hair.

Synonyms free-wheeling episodic structure can grow a tad wearying, but Mercier’s aggressively kinetic performance and Lapid’s take-no-prisoners dismantling of the Israeli macho mystique — or French hypocritical superiority — are, in the best way, outrageous.

The result is a work stiff with pointed talk and chance encounters, little of which feels original. The acting, while variable, often has a stilted, recitative quality, as if the characters, rather than family members, recently met at a script readings.

This is some of De Niro’s most moving work in years. His performance full of anxious misfit energy, where his often-parodied grimaces, tics and haunted gaze feel entirely correct.

Norwegian director Joachim Rønning (who co-directed Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales) offers nothing unexpected here, in what amounts to a complicated exercise in paint-by-numbers movie-making.

Ozon’s film evolves less as a procedural story than a character study.

As the movie flips through familiar Bourne/Bond tropes, the dialogue by David Benioff, Billy Ray, and Darren Lemke, feels clichéd to the point of parody, with lines like “It’s like The Hindenburg crashed into The Titanic!” Or, “I think I know why he’s as good as you. He is you!” Only, let’s be honest, not as good.

For the fans, Us + Them offers a meticulously constructed concert experience for a fraction of the price of a live ticket and a chance to join a chorus in yelling back at the TV. For the casually curious, be forewarned: While Waters still burns with righteous zeal, at an often repetitious 135 minutes, the film will leave your backside feeling uncomfortably numb.

Sometimes, the script is very funny; always, it tries too hard to please; and it never lets you forget that it has been calculated down to a smirk and a teardrop.

The Laundromat consistently feels as if it’s intended to be funnier or more poignant than it actually is.

Typical of a certain kind of Sundance feelie comedy, Before You Know It is both promising and exasperating enough you’ll probably leave the cinema thinking of ways it could be improved.

While Chadha includes a few gritty nuggets about the psychological cost of immigration, the problems are mostly smothered in a warm jelly of sentimentality, a surfeit of stock characters and an exhausting succession of feel-good breakthroughs.

If you’re already on to the more sinister stuff, this is probably an unnecessary retreat into mild ickiness.

Cold Case Hammarskjöld is likely to be divisive; I’m divided myself. Brügger’s awkward juxtaposition of clowning with real-life horrors is off-putting. In a time plagued by conspiracy theories, the film is an example of an acutely timely uneasiness, reminding us how conspiracies can be simultaneously toxic and compelling.

The sharks are disappointingly not scary but they’re interesting-looking with their plastic torpedo heads and serrated-saw smiles. When they leap out of the dark to dismember bodies, they bloody the waters in swirling lava lamp patterns that feel almost peaceful. Or perhaps I’m just trying to find a nicer way to say dull.

While the characters and events are real, the artful design of this film and its allegorical resonances seem to put Honeyland in its own genre – that of a real-life fable.

For anyone who has endured a long bus journey with strangers, it will be no surprise that there was more conflict among the Americans than between them and the Egyptians

Deft in its playful mockery of the broad acting and absurd plot twists of the soap genre, it somehow maintains a genial tone, despite references to terrorism, war, and daily humiliations of the occupation.

Wistful, funny and complicated in interesting ways, Quentin Tarantino’s new movie, Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood, may be his warmest film since Jackie Brown - which may not be what you expected to hear about a movie set against the background of the 1969 Manson murders.

At best, it’s no more than a puny version of David Fincher’s Fight Club.

There are a few problems with Giacomo Durzi’s documentary, Ferrante Fever. The worst is that it’s mundane in the making, a talking heads and clips assemblage with a constantly breathless tone. The second is that betrays the entire idea of putting the work ahead of the literary cult: The film gives us neither the author in person, nor her writing, except in brief clips, read in voice-over by an actor.

Apparently intended as a gateway movie for future horror movie fans, Annabelle Comes Home is a sex-and-death-free haunted-house tale about adventures in demonic baby-sitting.

Dogman is essentially one long, twisted fuse burning toward an inevitable explosion. If the results are too conspicuously manipulated to feel cathartic, there’s no denying a certain dark poetry to this old-fashioned film with its whiplash of modern violence and bitter futility.

The subject may be glum but there is something consistently pleasurable about Mouthpiece, a film that is both audacious in execution and relatable, even for those of us who don't live in women's bodies.

The results are what might be best called “solid” journalism, with the occasional eye-brow raising surprise (Nixon wanted to firebomb the Brookings Institute?) There’s a wealth of archival, often familiar, television clips along with fresh interviews with some of the first-hand witnesses and participants.

The confrontations involve a lot of prolonged, quasi-slapstick bullet-spraying firefights, which are hard on windows… and on viewers’ patience.

Despite its grand-sounding title, The Fall of the American Empire is another trifle, a familiar harangue against human perfidy wrapped in a creaky farce.

While most romantic melodramas and rom-coms play with the idea of destiny, the bittersweet Japanese oddity Asako I & II makes it something of a central character.

The loss of two-dimensional artistry of the original has some compensation of human warmth.

To some extent, the performances elevate the script.

The movie rattles through ninety minutes of episodic jolts, the visual style is jumbled. Distinctive only in having a better effects budget than your average demons-in-the-attic quickie. While the super-parody elements offer a few snorts of amusement, the movie avoids taking on more complex ideas about Superman as an American ideal, though the filmmakers are obviously aware of the Bizarro context.

A first-person documentary about a Los Angeles couple’s decision to move to the country and start a farm overcomes its excessively preciously start to become a genuinely insightful meditation on agriculture, nature, and our precarious relationship to the planet that feeds us.

Because the potential is extraordinary, it’s a surprise that the film, co-directed by Herzog and Andre Singer, is so conventional and enthusiastic, bordering on adoring.

Watching the teen romance The Sun Is Also a Star, starring the splendid-looking young couple Yara Shahidi (Blackish) and Charles Melton (Riverdale’s Reggie)), is something like wading through fields of pink candy floss and suddenly finding a speck of grit.

While the thematic scheme may be ancient and remote, Zhang’s poetic compression and technical pizazz feel as fresh as a splash in a mountain stream.

The White Crow is really “Nureyev before Nureyev,” and it’s a struggle to sort out its purpose.

If you want to dramatize a real-life celebrity fraud tale, you can’t settle for the superficial. Either go for psychological truth or camp it up to the level of the superduperficial. There’s not much of either quality in JT Leroy, a film that offers colourful performances by Laura Dern and Kristen Stewart but fails to find any urgency in retelling the tale of an early 2000s literary fraud.

Though it occasionally gets a little repetitive in its use of archival devil movie and tabloid television clips, Lane’s film is mordantly funny and certainly persuasive in making the case that religion should be kept out of politicians’ dirty hands.

In a less careful movie, with a less relatable performance, this kind of narrative clumsiness would be ruinous. Here, it’s more like a permissible flaw in someone you care for too much to give up on.

Anyone expecting a crowd-pleasing crossover movie from the French director of modern art-house landmarks like Beau Travail and 35 Shots of Rum may be ill-prepared for this perplexing, repellent/fascinating vision of bodies in tight spaces.

Perhaps the only scary thing about the new horror movie The Curse of La Llarona is the fear of mispronouncing the title.

The studio set recreation of Hong Kong’s famous Bar Street, along with the gaudily delectable costumes throughout, give Master Z a dreamy heightened artifice. More than once, the film seems on the verge of breaking into a vintage Hollywood musical.

If you think Little sounds like something a 10-year-old might come up with after seeing Tom Hanks’ Big, you would be entirely correct.

No doubt, it’s pretty great to watch and listen to Franklin, 29 at the time and at the height of her powers, demonstrating her mastery in the genre of music she grew up on.

Yet another stilted comic thriller.

The Brink, director Alison Klayman’s year-long cinema verité portrait of Steve Bannon, is unlikely to change anyone’s mind about Donald Trump’s political strategist, who helped connect the candidate to white nationalists before falling out of favour.

Apart from the relief of seeing a conclusion to a long story, there’s scant pleasure to be found in the long-winded and jumbled The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.

Somehow, within this roiling pot of fancy costumes, class hatred, vicious misogyny and official corruption, we are supposed to discern the poisonous seeds of the violence that would wrack Europe. The connections are somewhat fuzzy.

Neither version of the film — the talking-heads documentary or the period drama — has the depth to achieve much impact.

Mann’s laidback, dramatized-reality approach to the subject is to treat Carmine Street Guitars, at 42 Carmine Street, as a village general store from another era, a place for friendly gossip and home-made goods.

Apart from a few eye-roll moments, Giant Little Ones is redeemed from coming across like a progressive after-school special by the authenticity of performances, particularly of the young actors and a refreshing open-endedness about the fluidity of sexual behaviour.

The craft of the re-enactment is more impressive than the script, which defaults to hackneyed dramatic moments, reminiscent of a generic disaster film, with its stock upstairs-downstairs tropes, young lovers, the cynic-turned-hero, and the dutiful subalterns showing courage above their pay grade.

What we have is a solidly crafted reworking of some familiar Western tropes by director John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side, Saving Mr. Banks), a Texas native who shows care for the period details, with handsome cinematography on the original Lone Star State locations.

Ash Is Purest White — constantly dislocating and unpredictable moment by moment — feels all of its 135-minute running time but long after, the individual sequences hang in the memory.

Except the real Nazis, every character in The Aftermath has good intentions, marred by some moments of poor impulse control. And they are a little dull.

The filmmaking is taut and skillful and Petzold largely succeeds with his double-track gambit: As a nightmarish but somehow comfortingly familiar thriller about fear, persecution, and mistaken identity. It also disturbs as a prophecy of the consequences of Europe's resurgent neo-fascist politics and anti-immigrant politics.

The deliberate pacing, cinematographer Tómas Örn Tómasson's images reminding of the vulnerable human scale against the landscape and the skeletal narrative, bringing a refreshing purity to a classic predicament.

Coherence was hard to establish but the memory prompts, the lurid colourization and off-beat editing held the attention.

Hale County, in the best sense, is the kind of film that asks more questions than it provides answers for.

We can see Cold War as a look back on recent history, not through the lens of realism, but as a Hollywood fantasy, a kind of romantic protest against a political nightmare.

The movie, with its misfit ensemble of kids, is an ‘80s throwback and a fitfully clever update on the King Arthur story.

At first so-bad-it's-good, then merely it’s-so-bad, Replicas’ source of interest is primarily forensic. How did director Jeffrey Nachmanoff and writer Chad St. John (London Has Fallen) think they could get away with it?

Well-observed and gently amusing.

No doubt, there's a certain theme-park appeal to this use of technology to reconstruct a facsimile of the past, but it's shockingly immediate, seeing those old monochrome images of anonymous men in mushroom-cap helmets turned into images of pink-cheeked youth staring back at us through the camera lens.

Thematic issues aside, Eastwood is noted for a high level of economic craft and The Mule is no exception.

Mortal Engines, which is produced by Peter Jackson and written by the team behind the Lord of the Rings films, is grandly, majestically, epically inert, a high-concept fantasy with a wide chasm between the money we see up on the screen and poverty of the story.

As a leading feminist voice in post-War German cinema, Von Trotta’s devotion to Bergman, the archetypal self-absorbed male genius, seems unfashionably but refreshingly forgiving.

The charm and the limitations of this modestly budgeted, good-hearted trifle, set in a middle-class Scottish village, are its youthful energy and anxiousness to please. Along with the mechanically efficient tunes from the team of Roddy Hart and Tommy Reilly, the entire film feels as if it could have been written and produced by a group of bright theatre students.

The movie bridges the traditional Restoration comedy to the political satires of Armando Iannnucci (Veep, The Death of Stalin). Comedy also entwines with tragedy here, and bold touches of absurdism and iconoclastic revisionism.

There’s one illuminating segment in Alexis Bloom’s documentary, Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes, which might have made a fascinating stand-alone short doc.

At three hours without much obvious plot, the movie is, no doubt, a bit of a butt-number, though there’s enough wry humour, visual delight, and psychological insight here to more than reward an open-minded viewer.

The real achievement of Roma is Cuarón’s bold conception of a memory movie, blending childlike detail and adult detachment, and the rich visual and aural design that make this one of the more sensually pleasurable films of the year.

Director Alister Grierson, an Australian with numerous television and feature credits, does a decent job with the crowd and lively ring action though it's not nearly enough to make us forget that Tiger is a movie struggling to punch way above its dramatic weight class.

After the success of Ryan Coogler-directed Creed, an inventive series reboot, Creed II is a familiar disappointment though the "familiar" part will probably outweigh the disappointing part for audiences who enjoy the films as adult bedtime stories.

It’s extremely watchable, packed with curios and contrasts and narrative twists, filled with the sincere and the ersatz, the stupid and the clever, the grotesque and the goofy.

The premise feels so quaint it might as well be framed by Cinderella-like animated bluebirds.

In the end, Hill is inclined to land closer to the heartfelt teen dramas of S.E. Hinton (The Outsiders, Rumblefish) than the docudrama grittiness he affects.

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.

With Incendies, Villeneuve attempts to balance moment-by-moment authenticity and operatic emotional impact. Much of the time, he succeeds.

Unlike Griswold vacations past, the peril in which the family finds itself isn’t leavened by anything funny.

Jeunet’s major achievement is to capture the book’s complicated museum clutter and hothouse-flower sensitivity.

With its episodic stream of slapstick gags, Minions has moment of piquant absurdity, but mostly it’s shrill-but-cutesy anarchy works as a visual sugar rush for the preschool set.

Jurassic World never breaks out of its own confines of homage and imitation. The movie ends up as an awkward, ungainly hybrid: large, but inconsequential.

The night scenes are particularly resonant, mixing humour, suspense and textured visuals. This is the kind of film dream from which you feel reluctant to wake.

Feels like a missed opportunity to do a country romantic melodrama in grand style.

Whedon can’t quite work the same miracle twice. Age of Ultron also bears the familiar stretch marks characteristic of middle movies in franchise series.

Ex Machina is a clever film with one indelible performance from Isaac.

Occasionally a movie comes along that’s such an awkward compilation of ideas it fascinates: The Forger, a Boston-set melodrama involving cancer, Impressionist art and deadbeat dads, is only about half that good.

This mannered, muddled drama about journalistic lapses and worse, crimes, stars comic buddies Jonah Hill and James Franco (This is the End) in a decidedly unfunny story.

The story of the colony’s exile and return feels like a dull sermon, but the animals themselves, with their expressive faces and Moe Howard hairdos, can switch from slapstick to pathos faster than Charlie Chaplin.

Eventful, polished, and knuckle-bitingly dull, the 10th film adapted from a novel by Nicholas Sparks, combines fate, bull riding and some powerful Hollywood bloodlines among its young cast.

Familiar in its outline but unusual in the details, Last Knights feels like a year’s worth of post-midnight cable TV viewing run through a blender and served warm for your viewing amusement.

While We’re Young is more commercial and less innovative (or whimsically self-indulgent, depending on your tastes) than Baumbach’s last feature film, 2012’s "Frances Ha," though it shares some common ground.

Hackle-raising in its intensity.

There’s a flicker of déjà vu seeing Max Irons step into the role of a posh Oxford University student in The Riot Club. Irons has inherited the cheekbones and silky voice of his father, Jeremy Irons.

Riding that fine line between misjudged and deliberately anti-p.c., Get Hard is lewd, crude and rude but, despite its disastrous reception at SxSW, not entirely unfunny.

Sean Penn smokes, glowers and shows off his knotty naked torso in this vain, risible misfire of a thriller about a reformed killer, from "Taken" director Pierre Morel.

In the battle between dystopian science-fiction movies about butt-kicking young heroines, the new Divergent movie, Insurgent, is actually slightly more believably glum than the third Hunger Games movie, "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1."

The French director’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning silent movie comedy, "The Artist," is everything "The Artist" was not: long, unoriginal and heavy-handed.

The Hunting Ground’s film’s biggest journalistic “get” is the first on-camera interview with Erica Kinsman, the Florida State student who accused star quarterback Jameis Winston of drugging and raping her.

The film is visually bland, with only a couple of bookending outdoor sequences around a handful of interior sets.

An overqualified cast (including Vincent D’Onofrio and an uncredited Nick Nolte) brings more gravity than required to repeated “this is me staring you down” confrontations.

What really distinguishes it from the art-film crowd is that it’s also food-spittingly funny.

A movie about a robot policeman given a childlike conscience, Chappie is one of those incongruous Franken-films that’s simultaneously bombastically brutal and treacly. Like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial crossed with Transformers, or RoboCop starring Jar Jar Binks, it’s a recipe guaranteed to produce aesthetic indigestion.

Once again, a first-rate cast helps slightly elevate this sentimental Britcom.

Sciamma (Water Lilies, Tomboy) gets unaffected performances from her non-professional cast.

Focus, which was co-written and directed by "Crazy Stupid Love" creators, Glen Ficarra and John Requa, is drunk on its perfume-ad cinematography and doesn’t know when to quit with its double-double cross plotting.

Josue’s film is not consistently effective in bridging her personal story with Shepard’s well-known legacy, but there are striking moments that explore the limits of forgiveness.

Simple but engrossing.

This bare-bones adaptation is more of a sop to the musical’s fans than a fully imagined movie musical.

Sissako’s point, while never heavy-handed, is hard to miss: Traditional Muslims are among the world’s biggest victims of Islamic militarism.

Torching “witches” is the one part of the story that has some historical basis, and adds an uncomfortable edge of misogyny to this otherwise empty fantasy.

Like that camel-hair coat Abel wears, A Most Violent Year is classy and commands respect, but a stronger pulse under the lapels would make us care much more.

Call it what you like – a modern Russian epic, a crime drama, a black comedy or a scream in the dark – Leviathan is a shaggy masterpiece.

Still Alice is being called a career performance for Moore, and although it may be one of her most poignant roles (it has earned her a fifth Oscar nomination), the part barely scratches the surface of her ability.

Between a string of post-Friends dismal rom-coms, Aniston has succeeded in these kinds of grownup roles every few years. Here, she negotiates the character’s quirks and contradictions competently, but nothing short of a rewrite from scratch could make Cake palatable.

While the movie is narrow, it has a deep, melancholic resonance.

Faithful to Chekhov, Ceylan spells out nothing except that unhappiness unrecognized is unhappiness compounded, and despite the film’s wintry chill, there’s a thrilling warmth in this struggle to shine a light on life.

Taken strictly as a movie, though, Selma is an uneven yet generally skillful effort that has probably drawn more praise and criticism than it warrants.

Performances are still the heart of Leigh’s work, and at the heart of this film is an extraordinary performance by Leigh’s frequent collaborator, the British actor Timothy Spall.

A beautifully shot, well-acted, and worthy-to-a-fault Second World War survivor story that only intermittently achieves the kind of emotional impact for which it aims.

Full of post-hippie fatalism and cynical macho barroom existentialism, the original film feels very much of its era, and the remake anachronistic.

While the pale skin tones (bronzer is selectively applied) and haphazard mix of American and British accents is distracting, it barely scratches the surface of Exodus’s ungainly artificiality.

The triumph of Foxcatcher is not in the subject but in its art. The clear-eyed compassion and moral intelligence of Miller’s film brings sense to the senseless, and finds the human pulse behind the tabloid shock. It’s not a movie to make you feel good, but, at moments, it reminds you what goodness is.

That makes Mockingjay – Part 1 an experience to be endured, like a prison sentence, rather than enjoyed. By all means, bring on the revolution: It has to be more exciting than this.

Over all, the movie is just funny enough to make you wish it were much better than it is.

The documentary of the year may also be its most hair-raising thriller.

The pitch on Dear White People is that it’s “Do the Right Thing for the Obama generation,” which is both an oversell and a disservice to Justin Simien’s witty satire about race relations on a fictional Ivy League campus.

While it’s technically eye-popping and intricately structured, Interstellar is at its most fascinating when it struggles hard to communicate those things we human beings call “emotions”. Instead, we get something like a freeze-dried approximation of Steven Spielberg at his most sentimental.

Throbbing musical crescendos and flickery flashbacks abound but apart from some outlandish plot machinations, nothing here is good or bad enough to be memorable.

The trouble is that absolutely nothing about the movie feels like news.

Yes, at its best, Birdman soars, swoops and flutters with life and invention, but it parrots more than it speaks. You long for a writer as reliably, elegantly witty as Tom Stoppard, whose dramas are typically “backstage,” or if not Stoppard, at least a verbal speed-puncher like Armando Iannucci, or if not Iannucci, someone as relentlessly inventive and obsessive as Charlie Kaufman to make you feel like somebody is trying to say something, rather than a writing team filling in the intelligent-sounding words to support the boisterous performances and the virtuosic camera dance.

Barnaby puts a mythic frame around a grim history, shaping it in a way that feels always like a creative adventure, not a duty.

The title comes from prosecutor Ferencz, who compares his work to that of the 16th-century astronomer Tycho Brahe, who said he watched the sky so future generations could use him as their foundation.

Here’s how good an actor Bill Murray is. He does such a bristly, entertaining turn as a boozy curmudgeon in St. Vincent, that he saves first-time director Theodore Melfi’s obvious dramedy from sliding into a burbling sinkhole of schmaltz.

The movie’s compromised tone, wavering between emo introspection and rom-com cuteness, is awkward in all the wrong ways.

Sparks’s preposterous approach has crystalized into cliché.

Director David Dobkin, best known for comedies such as "Shanghai Nights" and "Wedding Crashers," demonstrates his serious intent mostly by paint-by-numbers psychology and a ponderous pace.

A resonant journalistic cautionary tale gets packaged as a hokey thriller in Kill the Messenger, a movie with a message that isn’t nearly as urgent as it needs to be.

Both cautionary and comforting (yes, some kids today prefer conversation to cybersexting), Men, Women & Children is as anxious to seem contemporary as any after-school special.

Here’s another word for Gone Girl: “meta.” It’s a word Flynn uses, which means it’s a thriller about thrillers, and a narrative about narratives, especially the form of domestic violence relished by current-affairs television shows.

Bring on the sequel please, because, as fine as Denzel is, director Antoine Fuqua’s The Equalizer is not so good – a self-consciously stylized, stop-and-start hodgepodge of Death Wish street vengeance, Bond-style Russian villainy, and moodily shot Boston locale.

Although overplotted and underexplained, the movie is rich in memorable lairs.

As with so many movies where the script constructs experiences that are contrived and off-putting, you hope the actors can capture the emotional truth of some scenes, even if the entire apparatus feels bogus.

The interest here is about watching Hardy, bouncing off Gandolfini and the other cast members, as a quiet man who has turned being underestimated into his primary survival skill. And all the while we wait for the moment when Bob the puppy grows into Bob the pit bull.

Without a thin tether to credibility, this fussy, morbid fantasy simply slides off into the void.

All this is more amusing in theory than practice, partly because Leonard’s world of wiseguys and slapstick violence has become so familiar – the caper-movie default mode.

The November Man is one of those thrillers that grows progressively more incoherent, and it simply isn’t fast enough to glide over its gaping narrative holes.

While Wojtowicz’s shape-shifting character is the major source of fascination here, the archival footage, including with is terrifically effective in evoking the tumultuous era and occasionally providing a reality check to the Dog’s boastful version of his life.

The confluence of poverty, dysfunctional parenting and poor educational prospects makes the oft-idealized small-town life look like an incubator for failure, no matter how high and spectacular the Fourth of July fireworks fly.

Everything about Are You Here feels like a bottom-drawer script idea that was put together too casually and carelessly.

It’s less startling than it was when the first Sin City was released in 2005, maybe even quaint, like a black-light Jimi Hendrix poster from the ’60s.

21 years later, in the wake of "The Hunger Games", "Divergent" and "The Lego Movie," another movie about a kid rebelling against socially imposed “sameness” is a case of the same old, same old.

Is The Trip to Italy the second Godfather of comedies, or a retread? Neither, exactly. The concept is no longer fresh, but the scenery on the Amalfi and Sorrento coasts is more transporting, and their convertible Mini Cooper is a more amusing vehicle. Finally, the fact that the only singalong CD for the drive is Alanis Morissette’s 1995 album Jagged Little Pill is an unexpected master stroke.

The latest iteration of Sylvester Stallone’s aging warrior franchise, The Expendables 3, is proof that sometimes even your low expectations can be far too high.

Land Ho! is both loose (shot over 18 days, with an improv quality to the acting) and overcalculated in its series of encounters, small revelations and life-affirming beats. The movie is pleasant and mostly forgettable, except for the character of Mitch.

Calvary is an unsettling concoction, abstract and brutal, morally serious and too ghastly in its flippancy to be simply comedy. When you stop gasping at the shocks and jokes, there’s a profundity here, in the struggle to find the balance between outrage and forgiveness.

One distraction is that everything feels smothered in an extra helping of déjà vu sauce: another movie featuring a middle-aged misanthrope with a dewy younger woman; another film with stage magic as a theme.

Too loud, too long and too busy but – here’s the good part – also wonderfully silly.

A Master Builder really doesn’t work, hampered by odd casting, theatrical performances and a reductive interpretation of Ibsen’s play.

Lucy, you may have twigged, is named after our 3.2-million-year-old hominid ancestor.

Although the film and the actors keep on looking good, this solemn, soppy, fantasy has nothing to say about science or faith.

A sweet and sloppy jumble of fantasy, sentimentality, comedy and soul-searching that feels like a sitcom that never got past the pilot stage.

Linklater’s film is very much its own hybrid creature. While the dramatic scaffolding is lightly drawn, it becomes apparent that Linklater has organized his material along certain themes, most notably that of the passage of time and the dream life of childhood.

When it came to describing what was happening to him, Ebert was forthright, clear-eyed and admirably free of neurosis and self-pity.

All this is initially fascinating, and then progressively less so. The problem is the usual serial-killer issue – things, no matter how weird and kinky, get repetitive.

The combination of Hardy’s almost androgynous features and powerful physique evokes a young Marlon Brando, and while it’s premature to say he has a talent to match, he has emerged as one of the screen’s most versatile and compelling presences. Locke is what you might call his sedentary tour de force.

Rogen’s always a dominating presence, but the doll-like Australian actress, who showed her comic chops in "Bridesmaids," comes close to stealing the movie here, in an uncorked performance full of volatile, liberating mischief.

Less “amazing” than persistent.

Firth gives the performance his all as a man trapped in a vortex of grief, shame and hate, but as in Scott Hicks’s "Shine," which the film occasionally resembles, there’s an overtidy relationship between trauma and catharsis.

Only Lovers is so fluidly edited and thinly plotted that it feels almost off-hand; yet, it’s also made with great care, beautifully lit and set-designed to an eyelash.

Apparently intended as a blend of "Bridesmaids" and "The First Wives Club," it’s often oddly engrossing, almost despite itself, largely thanks to the performances and the free rein the director gives his stars.

Brick Mansions is a non-starter: It chokes on its déjà vu, the hyperactive Mixmaster editing is exhausting and the characters’ banter is so leaden it might violate federal emission standards.

Instead of a message movie, Gabrielle is a romance and an unusual kind of musical that seamlessly integrates special needs actors with the other cast members.

After a while, it begins to feel like a confused comedy: How to explain to the neighbours that your dead husband has moved back home?

Some of the most striking moments in Bears are during the film’s closing credits, when we see how alarmingly close the camera crew was to the animals. We’re reminded us that while the movie Bears is both sweet and humane, the real bears are neither.

Apart from Mychael Danna’s portentous orchestral and electronic score, Transcendence simply lacks oomph: Shots don’t overwhelm, scenes don’t pop and nothing on the screen gets under your skin.

The movie is no religious fringe event. It’s from a major studio (Sony), with an Oscar-nominated star (Greg Kinnear), adapted for the screen by "Braveheart" screenwriter Randall Wallace.

The superiority of the musical sequences, and laziness of the writing, creates a dynamic where you find yourself wishing the characters would shut up and dance.

As a story about a war that is unresolved, it seems better suited to a provisional “To be continued” than the certainty of “The end.”

Volume 2 picks up the story with an older Joe, now played by Gainsbourg, with her watchful sad face showing the character’s unsatisfied hunger. It seems more von Trier’s script than any great social taboos that cause Joe to go into free fall in a world that becomes more kinky and sinister.

Easily the best scene of Nymphomaniac occurs in the first two hours, when Joe finds herself the other woman in a marriage breakup.

At almost 21/2 hours, Divergent is repetitiously brutal and drab, with sets that resemble warehouses and industrial junkyards; the action rarely emerges into the daylight before the climactic gun battle.

The crimes and Gervais and Fey’s performances get stale quickly, though the song-and-dance numbers are fairly clever.

A spring-autumn romance that comes with side helpings of local colour and melodramatic backstory.

Every stage of the race and chase is announced on a webcast conducted by the secret impresario of the illegal De Leon race, a billionaire car enthusiast known as the Monarch, who “nobody knows.” Actually, the Monarch is clearly visible in a corner of the computer screen and he’s played, with jive-spouting brio by Michael Keaton. Hey, the movie isn’t called Need for Logic.

Over all, A Field in England aims to confound. The filth-encrusted characters aren’t easy to keep apart, and the narrative is too fragmentary and freakish to grasp (the sun turns black, a character vomits rune stones).

From the start, it’s clear Anderson is working with a new sophistication both in the vocabulary and structure of the film’s voiceover narrations.

Their excitement is infectious and the entire endeavour both mind-bending and tremendously human: Near the end, Peter Higgs, the recent Nobel Prize-winner and one of the scientists who first predicted the particle back in 1964, is seen in Switzerland watching the data results come in, while a tear trickles down his cheek.

Parents will get the historical jokes but are unlikely to be amused; kids won’t get them, but might laugh anyway.

Overall, Stalingrad is a bizarre concoction, part Putin-era patriotic chest-thumping and part creaky war melodrama, all set in a superbly recreated ruined city.

Whether Omar will ultimately serve to change or harden hearts remains ambiguous, though it’s a movie that’s entertaining enough to appeal to the kinds of ordinary kids we see in the movie.

Actor Liev Schreiber’s voice-over narration is filled with sonorous urgency, but as the film’s commentators acknowledge, some ideas are a hard sell: How do politicians and regulators convince the public on the benefits of a financial diet when a spending spree sounds much more fun?

The work is more muted than Miyazaki’s more fantastical films, but visually complex and gorgeous, from the rustic mountain scenes to the urban scenes and soaring aerial views.

No doubt the audiences in the Coliseum would offer a thumbs-up to the scale of the destruction, though even they might have had some quibbles about the special effects, which, too often, resemble a very large pile of melting crayons.