Radheyan Simonpillai

Boyle, who won the Best Director Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire, has often let his sentimental side get the best of him. But here there’s a maturity, gracefulness and elegance to how he hits those notes, though they’re nearly undone by a goofy but admittedly fun coda setting up the series’ next installment.

When In Flames premiered at Cannes last year, I compared it with Ari Aster’s Hereditary, but suggested Kahn’s film has more heart and conviction. I stand by that.

The Fantastic Four is here for a proper reset – a buoyant and frequently dazzling one at that, which sort of makes up for the failed movie adaptations of Marvel’s first family from the past.

If Anderson fits like a glove in the new Naked Gun, it’s because her durability is as pleasantly unexpected as this franchise that’s refusing to heed the memo that reboots suck and studio comedy is dead.

Daley and Goldstein aren’t here to reinvent. They love the tropes too much. It’s that fondness for what they mock with so much silly and snappy humour that makes Honor Among Thieves so charming. That affection is obvious especially when they punch up the familiar beats with inventive action and uncommonly stylistic direction.

Mutant Mayhem is a giddily fun and relentlessly eye-pleasing rebranding for the Turtles, which, like the Spider-Verse movies, mixes up daring and inventive animation styles while embracing visual imperfections as part of its soulful artistry.

Clint Eastwood is still making movies at 94. That’s amazing. What’s more shocking is that Juror #2 is not just pretty good but arguably the Unforgiven director’s most satisfying work in well over a decade.

Pharrell’s rags-to-riches story is a familiar tale re-energised not just with his unique sound but the basic decision to animate his life so that it can thrive with his imagination and hit so many visual grace notes.

Liman makes the most of what most would assume are flaws. He leans into the simplicity and familiarity of Road House’s premise, keeping the space open for big personalities to make it cartoonishly good fun.

The film is a fun and unsettling showcase for Kravitz, who proves herself to be an intentional and provocative filmmaker, putting jarring edits, precise framing and a sensational ensemble cast led by Naomi Ackie, Channing Tatum, Adria Arjona and Geena Davis to great use.

Things play out as sentimentally as expected, while scratching the surface at something deeper, exploring the relationship people have to music, and how that can either change or stay frozen in time.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple doesn’t quite live up to the earlier film’s promise. At best, it’s an ambitious and compelling enough staging ground biding time, with cruel violence more stomach-turning than ever, as it sets up the already-in-the-works final chapter in a planned trilogy

Guadagnino’s film feels small and overwrought in comparison; satisfied to drag things out within the bubble of faux academia (and cinephilia, with a pointed nod in Woody Allen’s direction). But it does have its pleasures, specifically where the actors speak less and make us feel so much more in performance and action.

it’s a cheeky post-Deadpool comedy – irreverent to a fault – with grindhouse aesthetics that tend to feel inspired by Quentin Tarantino rather than the movies that inspired Quentin Tarantino.

The movie takes its time to get going, which can be frustrating given how thin the material feels along the way. But that patience also works in its favour during a lovely final act that doesn’t come off as maudlin and forced as this sort of melodrama usually tends to.

September 5 splices together its thoroughly researched dramatic recreations with the actual programming ABC aired, an initially nifty back and forth that quickly wears thin.

Thunderbolts can be messy, sure. Pugh is the kind of star who can thrive in such mess.

The movie reduces Kelley’s psychiatric insights into soundbites, manages to whittle down the proceedings at the Nuremberg trials into the familiar tropes and cliches from classic courtroom movies, and even lets Crowe’s performance surrender its nuances to hammy villainy, all for the sake of reliable entertainment.

Fixed gets as much mileage as it can out of gags that largely centre on Bull’s gonads, with its entire narrative built around a wild night out when he discovers his owner’s plan to finally give him the snip. But that humour, and its shock value, wears thin in less time than it takes for Bull to satisfy his urges.

As sincere and sentimental as his approach is, Whannell struggles to marry the emotional beats to the schlockey thrills the genre demands. Instead, these two competing modes tend to cancel each other out, but not so much as to disregard what the ambitious director is going for.

Breezy, comically self-referential and totally likable. But its charms nevertheless feel like they came off an assembly line – one that has been engineered to deliver Marvel-like results, in animated form of course.

If we’re ranking those films, the latest lands somewhere between the ‘80s-set prequel Bumblebee and Michael Bay’s 2007 original, which is pretty much as good as it gets. Rise of the Beasts splits the difference between the former’s Steven Spielberg-light likeability and the latter’s alternately thrilling and mind-numbing spectacle.

It’s hard to stay mad at a movie for refusing to add things up, or resolve its mysteries in any traditionally satisfying ways, when getting lost with Qualley can be such a pleasure.

Elvis is of course a tailor-made subject for Luhrmann, the Moulin Rouge director’s trademark bombast and razzle-dazzle so in tune with the singer’s rattle and roll, which comes through in both his biopic and now EPiC.

Unlike its subject, The Apprentice largely sticks to documented facts. Most of the cheating, lies, greed, vanity and misogyny on display are hardly new or shocking, and rather mild compared to what’s to come.

For all its gestures toward trending conversations about our warped relationship with technology, and the entitled boys weaned on it, Companion is ultimately just a fun genre mash-up that pales in comparison to the superior movies it tends to pay homage to but elevated by its cast.

Where Bloodlines excels is in the clever and often diabolical storytelling craft and visuals. There’s a decadence in the film-making that isn’t at odds with the campy nature of Final Destination but instead realizing its full potential.

At two and a half hours, Oppenheimer’s strange and ambitious deconstruction of human behaviour – with its bleak but adorning visuals and its novel spin on ideas we’ve seen in The Hunger Games and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth – can also be draining. Maybe that’s intentional.