Much as I had hoped to love it given its cast and source material, Midwinter Break just never took flight. Not all great books make great movies.

The ironic thing about Ella McCay, James L. Brooks’ surprisingly slight politically themed comedy, is that it’s an aggressively feel-good movie that may leave you feeling bad.

I get a sense that Five Nights at Freddy’s and this week’s inevitable salad of a sequel Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, marks a turning point in how Hollywood approaches the visual medium that has been eating its lunch for decades. The lesson: Stop trying to make video game film adaptations that appeal to a general audience. A giant in-joke of a movie can pay off bigtime if the target audience is big enough. Screw the rest.

It’s a clever conceit but bungled in the delivery.

Every so often, though, a film like Bau: Artist at War comes along which is so off-balance it feels, not just flawed, but embarrassing, an unintentional parody of the ethically entangled genre.

By the time the narrative decides where it’s going, the audience has already decided not to care.

Neither big nor bold nor beautiful. Though I suppose it does count as a journey. Well, one out of four ain’t — no, wait, one out of four is terrible!

Freakier Friday is a corny, tepidly enjoyable, thematically recyclable, narratively entangled cinematic situation — sort of like watching four people trying on the same style of sweater in different sizes. And it’s nuanced.

The Home has neither haunting atmosphere nor paranoid madness to recommend it; it’s just a weak story, badly executed and dragged along until it launches into a blood-spatter bonanza in the last five minutes.

Whatever you do this summer, watching this reboot shouldn’t be one of them.

Hot Spring Shark Attack is a broad spoof of Jaws, related monster movies, police procedurals, contemporary culture (think influencers) superhero sagas and other things. And it is initially quite a lark.

Bang operates in its own category: so bad, it’s almost watchable. And in the crowded deluge of disposable entertainment, that’s almost a compliment.

Push feels like a long joke waiting for a punchline that never lands. Or worse, one that makes you feel stupid for not getting it, even though the setup was never quite clear to begin with.

The humour is scattershot, the themes undercooked, and despite some high-tech window dressing, M3GAN 2.0 ultimately feels more refurbished than a technical evolution.

For all its proclamations of authenticity, The Ritual feels no more grounded than a message from a Ouija board. And that, perhaps, is the real possession at work here: truth, struggling to be a spectacle.

It has the potential to be a cracking good comedy, and the trailer suggests as much. But in the end, all this proves is that you can distill two minutes of hilarity from 96 of meh.

It's clear the formula for the last film is the expectation for this one, but what’s missing is the believability behind it.

Disney’s Lilo & Stitch is about a dangerous alien lifeform that escapes from its creators, arrives on a backward planet and charms the inhabitants. Which is not a bad metaphor for Disney itself. It continues to remake hand-drawn animated classics as bloated live-action spectacles, hoping a nostalgic moviegoing public will continue to greet them with open arms and wallets.

Not to put too fine a point on this or anything, but Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is an interminable slog.

There are a lot of moments that are quirky, but the film never quite finds the right comedic rhythm. Things that should feel funny rarely rise to make us chuckle, and too often the film, which does have a genuine warmth, falls flat.

Despite the presence and performances of the likes of Mira Sorvino and John Cusack, Fog of War fails to deliver what it promises: a war-time mystery filled with suspense and intrigue.

Typically, action films benefit from a standout villain in an unexpected role. But with A Working Man, Ayer, along with Stallone and Chuck Dixon as co-screenwriters, dilutes the role of the villain so much and so often, that it becomes challenging to determine whom to harbour a grudge against and to what extent.

That the movie also inspires more wholesome feelings is entirely thanks to Ferreira (Euphoria), whose character communicates enough warmth, energy and emotional fragility to make even a doubtful curmudgeon soften a little.

Geremy Jasper’s O’dessa is a dystopian rock opera lacking the essential elements of soul, rhythm, and the rebellious spirit characteristic of rock ‘n’ roll. It’s a tone-deaf attempt at greatness that ultimately falls short.

While there is pleasure to be had in watching De Niro play opposite De Niro, an overly detailed plot gets in the way, making it a listless and frustrating watch.

Fighting giant robots - even though they are so freakin’ cool - aren’t enough to make a great film, and I know after forty years, this won’t change.

As written by Italy’s Paolo Sorrentino (who also directs), there is precious little going on beneath that alabaster exterior. One can only have characters ask each other “What are you thinking?” so many times before it feels as though the question is being begged.

Thick with dank atmosphere and well-acted with a cast that includes Colm Meaney and Barry Keoghan, it’s a drama about angry men with mommy issues that starts with a slow burn and ends up to its ears in gore.

The good news is that the whole shebang lasts just 83 minutes, stem to stern. The bad news is that you can only coast along on your love of Quan’s natural charm and screen presence for 60- or 65-minutes tops.

Even Discovery fans will have to admit this spin-off is just simply a weakly told story. The characters are contrived and even a talent like Michelle Yeoh can’t save it.

Despite being top-heavy in themes, Whannell’s Wolf Man is a plodding, uninspired tale that discards folklore—there are no full moons or silver bullets—and squanders the talent of its cast.

There is a meanness of spirit to all of this, an uncomfortable awkwardness that seemingly can’t end well.

Their physical relationship seems highly unlikely in every element. It is weirdly mechanical and not remotely erotic, and worst of all, you never forget that you’re watching a movie.

A cinematic version of this story definitely wasn’t needed. But then again, neither was the hero.

Werewolves is of the small-movie variety, and I wish it were better. Alas, it’s not quite stupid enough to be a guilty pleasure, and not quite good enough to be an innocent one.

With the one-off low-budget Nutcrackers, Green says he wants to pay tribute to the rough-edged adult-child comedies of his youth, films like The Bad News Bears and Uncle Buck. The result is a film that often feels, beat by beat, like you’ve seen it somewhere before.

A non-stop action movie with just enough plot to stitch together more action scenes, Red One is as soullessly fast and furious as you’d expect from scripter Chris Morgan of Fast & Furious franchise fame.

There’s not enough under the hood, and the screenplay sometimes strains to tell us (rather than show us) the complexities of the reality it’s creating.

The film’s various elements do not quite meld, and despite a few strong performances, none of the characters feel fully three-dimensional.

Watching the movie Here is a bit like eating a Big Mac — it’s all fine and inoffensive in the moment, but you don’t want to look too closely or think about it too much afterward.

Smile 2 is a freakshow that will likely delight those willing to go all in, seeking a chaotic experience while others will be left to wonder not only where this is all going to but where did it come from?

Frankie Freako isn’t the film you’re going to rave about to friends. It will, however, be an excellent subject for conversation about how much films got away with in 1986. If you can watch this film through that lens, it’s definitely a freaky film you can appreciate.

New Rome wasn’t built in a day, and we don’t always get the film we want. I doubt even Coppola did with this one. Megalopolis is what it is. You probably wouldn’t want to move there. But it’s worth visiting as a tourist, if only to gape at the locals.

In the end, all Beetlejuice Beetlejuice did for me was make me want to see the singular version again.

Reagan the man may have been known as The Great Communicator, but Reagan the movie delivers its message stridently and with little nuance or room for debate.

You Gotta Believe is billed as family entertainment. Whose family, exactly, they never specify.

Forced and contrived, it makes one miss the ‘90s.

For sure, the film is heartwarming, and it is fun to watch Dindim waddle around and engage with the human world, adopting Joao as a family member. But that’s not quite enough to overcome the film’s problems.

I was ultimately less enthralled with the final film than I was with some of the performances in Cuckoo. Stevens and Schafer are amazing, and Bluthardt makes an excellent oddity, a convenient ally with his own mysterious agenda. But Cuckoo can’t quite bring all its disparate elements together into something cohesive and coherent.

Trap is simply M. Night Shyamalan’s silliest movie since The Happening.

Atmosphere will only take you so far, and it soon becomes apparent that Starve Acre is 10 liters of helium in a 20-liter balloon. The result is limp and never fully takes flight.

Even with its slender premise, sporadic laughs, and abundant clichés, The Fabulous Four is entertaining and unapologetically — almost aggressively — sweet-natured, promoting friendship and female camaraderie while spotlighting a demographic underrepresented on screen and widely considered to have the kinds of dilemmas presented here all figured out by now.

While the film prompts a mildly interesting inquiry, in the end, it’s simply nostalgia that is the draw.

It’s one of those movies where, short of any actual existential terrors to throw at the audience, the sound engineers merely crank up the volume from time to time so that a door closing sounds like a cannon going off. Our Lady of Jump Scares preserve us!

I'll admit that The Strangers had me on the edge of my seat, mostly because I wasn't sure if I planned on staying.

The First Omen is nunsploitation disguised as religious horror bordering on art house. And while individual snippets from the film qualify as genuinely eerie, the overall impression is of a tale told twice-too often.

DogMan is kind of an idiotic movie built on a ludicrous premise. This does not prevent it from being eminently watchable.

Someone Like You is essentially a 30-minute Hallmark-like film stretched into two hours of romance novel fluff via playful-lovebird music videos and other visual padding.

There’s a smidgeon more humanity than in the braindead Godzilla vs. Kong, but nowhere near the wit and spirit of Skull Island.

Director Michael Mohan, who also directed Sweeney in 2021’s The Voyeurs, creates a wildly uneven tone here, with a film that starts out promising to be a supernatural horror before segueing into something far more prosaic.

Ultimately, what sinks the story is a combination of miscasting and bad writing, regardless of its language. Braff tries too hard to be likeable, sometimes coming off as almost creepy. Hudgens leans the other way.

Imaginary is far too long, at one hour, 44 minutes. The build-up has a few exciting moments. But the climax, intended as the film's centerpiece, is a dull repetition of hallways, locked doors, and unimpressive jump scares. Anyone who has toured a makeshift haunted house at a charitable event has experienced worse scares.

This fourth film, featuring the same writers as two and three, but new co-directors Stephanie Stine and Mike Mitchell, isn’t a bad movie, but it does feel like it’s going through the motions.

That it falters under the weight of its earnest ambitions doesn’t mean that we don’t get its heartfelt healing message. But that earnestness, and a distracting plot device never quite takes off.

Madame Web is a strange and quickly forgettable entry in the superhero genre. It falls apart entirely in the third reel with an unimpressive final battle and an odd, but not wholly uninteresting, Buñuel-like expose.

Argylle is not as dreadfully unwatchable as the Kingsman movies, but it is dolefully derivative, as if The Manchurian Candidate and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty had a baby, then abandoned it to be raised on The Planet of the Apes.

On the plus side, production design is superb, and the sets look like they were built from NASA blueprints. I’ve spent some virtual time in the I.S.S. (thank you IMAX and VR headsets) and it does look a treat. But that’s still not enough to tether this problematic product.

Performances are, predictably, strong with the 85-year-old Hopkins, bouncing about like a bantam-weight fighter, and Good, in the more restrained role, calmly watching the phenomenon as much as responding to it, eventually wearing down his opponent with compassion.

If I was a teenage girl, I might love it. But as an adult reviewer, I can’t help but feel weary about this earnest but mostly needless retread of a smart and engaging teen comedy, a genuine stand-alone classic.

Night Swim is another title to add to the increasingly unreliable canon of films from Jason Blum and James Wan. Not every new project has to be greenlit, gentlemen.

The Boys in the Boat is a by-the-numbers story that does little to distinguish itself from other underdog tales. The boys may be trying to take home gold, but this boat is taking on water.

Rebel Moon isn’t a terrible movie, but it pales in every comparison to the Star Wars universe.

This newest concoction gets a lift from its cast but falls to Earth thanks to a leaden script. It’s more exploding chocolate than everlasting gobstopper and, I’m sorry to say, more bitter than sweet.

Silent Night is not the second coming of Die Hard that we might have hoped.

Despite some interesting action scenes, the movie is far too long at two hours and 40 minutes. Worse yet, you’re always aware that you’re watching a movie.

Dubious, predictable, and short on character development, this B-movie cheesefest is nonetheless watchable thanks to a spirited performance from Odeya Rush (Lady Bird).

The film’s view is simply too narrow to be comprehensive on such a startling and potentially life-altering/life-ending subject. That said, it’s a chilling surface look into yet another unanticipated side effect of our ostensibly great wired society.

If Five Nights at Freddy’s has anything to offer in the way of entertainment, scares, and authentic memorabilia, it was buried beneath the determined pandering to those addicted to being on the inside of the joke.

The film is broad, campy, audacious and arrives with high expectations. But Dicks ultimately disappoints — and the inherent joke that goes with that line should not pass underappreciated. The title is the joke. But it’s a joke that doesn’t get as much play as it should.

Pain Hustlers waits until very late in the game to really drive home some of the horrors behind the opioid epidemic. For too long we’re complicit with its characters. And maybe that’s what it’s going for; but if so, it left me with a mildly unpleasant aftertaste. Not quite what the doctor ordered.

In Iain Reid’s source-material novel, there are literary tricks that spell it out more clearly. But the script and execution here fails to launch, with too much ”Why?” holding it down.

The film is, in a word, ostentatiously odd. Whether one finds it insightfully askew or laboriously quirky will be a matter of taste.

There are many reasons why The Exorcist worked and still does, and why The Exorcist: Believer doesn’t and never will. But to explore the difference between the films too profoundly would be to legitimize Green’s film as a worthy successor to William Friedkin’s masterpiece. It isn’t.

The intersection of Hollywood and Pandemic provided ample lessons in how NOT to respond to terrible real-world happening. To wit: Don’t make a quick, inexpensive, exploitative “inspired by true events” movie just to capitalize on tragedy.

The film has a lot of promise, but in the end, it simply just doesn’t deliver.

Expend4bles is an endless pyro/bang-bang show, with actors not mainly known for their acting (also including 50 Cent and UFC champion Randy Couture), sticking to the story as well as they can.

The Italian characters in The Equalizer 3 tend to speak more slowly than usual, almost as though waiting for the subtitles to catch up. If you can handle that pacing, interspersed with short bursts of intense violence, then The Equalizer may yet hold your attention. But at the tail end of a summer that delivered exciting new chapters in the Indiana Jones and Mission: Impossible franchises, that may be asking a lot.

Ultimately, if Gran Turismo were a car, it would have shoddy brakes, little pickup and bad cornering. If you’re looking to get from narrative point A to point B by the most direct route possible, it’ll suffice. If you want something more engaging, you may want to choose a different ride, one with a little more under the hood.

A bawdy comedy about male strippers that lives up to mediocre expectations, Back On the Strip is directed and co-written by Chris Spencer who has previously worked with the Wayan Brothers comedy team.

There are enough dream sequences infiltrating the action to confuse even devoted fans, while Insidious newbies and part-time dabblers are left to wonder when Freddy Krueger might arrive on scene. Wilson’s first stab at direction is not entirely a failure, but neither does he push the franchise to any new heights.

As an artistic design challenge, Elemental has triumphant moments (which may be good enough eye candy to keep kids occupied). But as a story, it doesn’t appear to aspire to much beyond a standard star-crossed romance.

Even with its decent performances and polished production values, Persian Lessons never clears the hurdle of its improbable premise, an idea that could serve as the setup for a bad-taste Mel Brooks’ sketch.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that I enjoy violent films, but The Wrath of Becky is an example of a film that disappoints its audience with a failed promise. Given the extreme violence of the last film, we aren’t just shocked enough by the battle between her and the group of antagonists who have a veritable arsenal in their barn to start a small war.

Aside from a few cleverly executed jump-scares—which are to horror what tickling is to comedy—The Boogeyman drags with G-rated scares and an appropriately dreary atmosphere, but dreary nonetheless.

Director Laura Terruso overlooks several comedic opportunities in About My Father. It’s as though she’s working from a script that’s been edited by someone who got the situations but not the jokes.

Kandahar is standard entertainment that pushes for more than what they can deliver. Slight entertainment is the best it can be.

Fast X dials in every living character (with some post-mortem appearances) to wrap up the decades-long franchise. If you’re not caught up on your F&F history, you are liable to find yourself reaching for a GPS to guide you through the plot.

The writer-director behind The Card Counter and First Reformed makes a misstep here, courtesy unlikely characters and sometimes mystifying plot changes. Luckily, stars Joel Edgerton and Sigourney Weaver are in top form, which is enough to keep a viewer happily occupied for the first hour.