Tim Grierson

Even when The Novice stumbles, Hadaway hits on something disquieting about a culture that places such a burden on young people to be great that they put themselves through punishing extremes.

Director Dan Trachtenberg delivers gripping suspense sequences, complete with agreeably gruesome kills, which juxtapose the landscape’s rugged beauty with this extraterrestrial hunter’s brute savagery. Amber Midthunder gives this sometimes cheesy affair welcome grit, staring down the Predator with compelling ferocity.

As appealing and likeable as The BFG is, the movie doesn’t seem particularly groundbreaking or daring when it comes from Spielberg, who is revisiting his major themes here without necessarily reinventing them.

Ultraman: Rising lacks sophistication in its storytelling, but the film nevertheless achieves a quiet poignancy.

For all its showy excesses, sophomoric humour and strained gravitas, Ambulance is often riveting, the film speeding along as recklessly as that ambulance. This popcorn thriller certainly is not brainy, but its escapism has a muscular precision.

There’s a B-movie purity to how this franchise conducts its business, eschewing the flash of modern blockbusters for a more pummelling, elemental approach to its shootouts and hand-to-hand fight scenes. On top of that, The Accountant 2 has added a winning sense of humour to the equation.

If the film cannot entirely shake the suspicion that the creative peaks of this franchise are in the past, the depth of feeling in the performances suggests Marvel still has compelling tales to tell.

A Ciambra may be a conventional tale of a young man trying to find himself, but the writer-director’s attention to detail enriches that setup.

Aster’s bold flourishes occasionally fall flat, but Florence Pugh holds the film together — especially when its plotting stumbles or its shocks grow predictable.

A melancholy character piece about a man who senses his run is nearly over, Jockey rides Clifton Collins Jr.’s gentle central performance to modest glory.

Although a touch too precious and slight, 20th Century Women is lit from within by its endless curiosity about its evolving characters.

The sci-fi horror-thriller Ash makes the most of a minimal budget, casting Eiza Gonzalez as the lone survivor on a distant planet whois unsure how she got there or who she is. With Aaron Paul playing a fellow astronaut trying to help jog her memory about a massacre that occurred at the base, the film quickly establishes an aura of paranoia and bad vibes, paving the way for deft twists and an appreciably gory finale.

Singer-songwriter Ben Dickey is affecting as Foley, assisted ably by a supporting cast that fights to transcend the drunken-angel clichés of the man’s legacy.

Writer-director Elijah Bynum’s second feature is often riveting, its heartbreak and pain amplified by Jonathan Majors’ brilliantly anguished performance. But just as its subject risks imploding at any moment, this confident drama eventually starts to unravel, fumbling its final third while trying to find the right ending for such a damaged, raging soul.

For all the gambits that end up feeling like gimmicks, My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock never stops churning with ideas and ambition. The film pays Hitch the highest compliment by trying to follow his example and never do the expected thing.

Jean Dujardin is quietly excellent as the French officer whose growing conviction that Alfred Dreyfus (Louis Garrel) is innocent of treason puts him on a collision course with his superiors. The Oscar-winning actor provides the film with its soulful centre, despite the familiarity of the material and its procedural tone.

Not every emotional beat lands, and some action scenes merely repeat past strengths. But between Brolin’s continued excellence as Thanos, a moral monster who believes in the righteousness of his cause, and the filmmakers’ effortless popcorn-movie poetry, Endgame is a muscular send-off to this series of comic-book extravaganzas.

Unavoidably uneven but fairly engaging throughout, Manifesto is a cavalcade of provocative ideas, arresting visuals and fabulous wigs.

An air of wistfulness imbues the proceedings, building to a resonant climax that’s hard to resist, despite some legitimate reservations about this uneven sequel.

Although Wakefield’s ending leaves open the possibility for multiple interpretations, the filmmaker removes the sting from her story’s tale, which keeps its insights from cutting as deep.

If ultimately Maudie doesn’t have much new to say about love or art, at least its two misfits provide an insight into something deeply true about long-term commitment.

This affectionate hoot hardly breaks new ground with its film-within-a-film structure, but the South Korean auteur attacks the material with such good cheer, populating the story with a collection of daffy dreamers, that it’s easy to root for these characters as they reshoot the ending of a picture some of them are convinced is this close to being a masterpiece.

Mikhanovsky mixes different styles of comedy, but he binds them with a realist approach that grounds everything in an offhand, absurdist tone.

A Faithful Man seems to be content playfully ruminating on how matters of the heart consume people — and how, sometimes, pursuing someone can be more fulfilling than actually possessing them.

Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie are both superb in muted performances and, while the film’s palace intrigue gets a bit dense, the story never loses sight of its deep compassion for these characters and their shared plight of being held hostage by conniving, belittling, power-hungry men determined to usurp their authority.

Generously mixing comedy, nostalgia, pathos and misanthropy, Christmas Eve In Miller’s Point embraces its brood’s rambunctious spirit, resisting the temptation to let any character become the central protagonist.

Ultimately, though, Everything Everywhere is best appreciated for its grandiose ambitions, bombarding the viewer with its frenetic style while telling a poignant story about an older woman trying to make peace with her not-so-wonderful life.

This overstuffed adventure-comedy barely takes a breath while bombarding the viewer with spectacle, special effects and one-liners — but what ultimately makes the film so likeable is the flirty rapport between Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt as a mismatched pair in search of a magical tree somewhere deep in the Amazon.