At more than two hours, Blaze is a meandering tale of genius and futility, tender, but overlong and wallowing, given that we know how it ends.

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.

The film is full of lovely images, macro close-ups and time-lapse photography mixed in with some inspirational politics...But by the end, this gentle meandering film about a man who loves forests feels at least half-nonsensical.

Johnstone knows his way around dark comedy, and camouflages much of the film's humour in whimsical, sometimes uneasy, encounters between M3GAN and Cady. But in directing the film's most comedic characters — an overtly judgmental childcare worker, a nosy neighbour (Lori Dungey) with an unruly dog, and a schoolyard bully—he sets a tone that feels incompatible with the rest of the characters.

From very early in the film, we have a sense where it’s all going. With no real narrative surprises then, the movie becomes all about the characters and the journey. Aster’s playing out of the journey is problematic.

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.

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.

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.

Tyrnauer’s film doesn’t seem to trust its material enough to allow the power of the stories to unfold without a constant hammering of a B-level-journalism music soundtrack — the kind best-suited for tabloid news programs. And the film’s unwavering criticism of Cohn (however warranted it might be) reduces an otherwise gripping biographical story into a sensationalized television-ready expose.

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.

Late Night is a light-hearted comedy with something to say and an excellent cast, that is unfortunately hobbled by a storyline that doesn’t quite add up.

The movie looks pretty good, given that it’s small budget effort, and it achieves a sense of tension. But beyond that, the result is frustrating.

Penguins is the latest of DisneyNature’s wildlife documentary features, and in many ways among the best. There’s much to admire in it, but its devotion to a family-friendly tone is often at odds with the astounding footage onscreen.

There’s a list of pros and cons for this stop-motion animation collaboration between Jordan Peele and Henry Selick that merit the attention it got at TIFF this past September. But sadly, Wendell & Wild is just not wild enough.

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.

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

Again, this is Cronenberg, and I would expect nothing less than an obscure narrative and underplayed emotions. But the bleakness Cronenberg plies onto the landscape, whether it's a child playing by the seaside near the wreck of a fallen ship, or well-dressed socialites chatting over cocktails, weighs too heavy to be appreciated.

If you want to see what it means to a film when an excellent actor fully commits to a role, look to Adam Driver’s performance in Leos Carax’s award winning musical Annette. He breathes life into what is an otherwise dry and emotionally disconnected film.

Static… low energy… no spark to speak of. A weak biopic of Nicola Tesla, the man who defined our electric lives, practically begs for shameful puns. For that, I apologize.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

The ideas are there. You can see why Baumbach would take this on. In the end, what we’re left feels like more of a sincere and heartfelt attempt than a successful movie.

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.

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.

Even I found the film’s 90-minute running time draining, its story needlessly, maddeningly convoluted. I also lamented missed opportunities for in-jokes, sly sub-references, even guerilla fourth-wall demolition hijinks.

Everything about The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part feels like a corporate obligation fulfilled.

The documentary, Goodnight Oppy, is the sort of film you expect to see at your local museum or science center for school-age children. It’s a real-life Wall-E story, that’s easy to follow, full of emotion and Hollywood budget, and intended to elicit wonder and admiration for the National Aeronautics and Space Association.

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

There is a lot of subtlety in this film, but too much of the plot is left to ambiguity or weak implication. The UFO theme is almost completely sublimated in favour of the relationship between the two fringe dwellers.

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.

Please Baby Please has one thing going for it: A chance to watch gifted actors do some daredevil freestyling. In moments, it’s almost enough.

Traditional horror fans are likely to find the effort tiresome despite a few intense scenes. But those who like their horror films laced in a philosophical debate will find plenty to enjoy.

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.

What starts out as a promising comic thriller deflates quickly as it becomes clear we’re just here for the gore.

Clumsily told yet intriguing because of its singular subject, Halston — director Frédéric Tcheng’s knock-kneed documentary on the pioneering American fashion designer ubiquitous in the 1970s, who made haute couture both aspirational and accessible — offers a trove of pop culture trivia.

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 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.

It’s a heartfelt film that seems to be aimed at the strength of familiar love in spite of difficulties. The elements are all there, but the film’s repetitive structures render it frustratingly flat.

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 Matrix Resurrections is an incoherent, narratively sloppy mess.

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

Plane is a mild diversion that carries more baggage than necessary, a forgettable thriller pieced together from a collage of other films and ideas.

The film suffers from the over-interpreting mental “glitch,” eagerly connecting coincidence, mental illness, drug experiences, religious awe, computer gaming, and science fiction movies in an over-arching pattern.

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.

For a film that’s about decades of interstellar aimlessness, Aniara seems hopelessly rushed and superficial.

Ambitious in the sweep of history that it chronicles, it’s a sometimes entertaining, often sordid movie about movies in the earliest Hollywood era. At a running length of just over three hours, it both makes its point, and overstays its welcome.

Ultimately, Spoiler Alert is earnest, emotional, good-hearted and edgeless.

Respect, the new movie starring Jennifer Hudson as the late soul singer Aretha Franklin, proves once again that musical biopics have become the tribute mediocrity pays to talent.

The film is blessedly short, which does allow for its quirky pace and oddball plotting to play out without exhausting the viewer’s curiosity, even if it is just a series of head-scratching WTF? scenes leading to nowhere.

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

Purcell’s performance and ambition in reframing this foundational Australian tale are admirable. But her version of the story would be more resonant if it held more mystery and less message.

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

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

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.

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 trouble is not that the movie is exploitative but that it’s out of its depth. This tone-jumping jigsaw of a narrative (written by McCarthy and Marchus Hinchey along French screenwriters Thomas Bidegain and Noé Debré) amounts to several movies in one.

As a movie for adults, Christopher Robin has rewards, but needn’t have been so antic. The schmaltz would have sufficed. As a movie for children, well…

You want to escape? Well, there’s a couple of hundred million U.S. dollars up on the screen for action and special effects, and retro amusement provided by pastel-coloured shopping malls, big shoulder pads, and Sony Walkmans.

Unfortunately, despite these juicy elements, a star-studded cast, and a star director in Ridley Scott, House of Gucci is tepid and underwhelming.

While limited by a weak script, the film has beautiful locations, an over-qualified Australian cast, and a novel companion.

In some reality where it came without baggage – and where it didn’t have to be a bloated two-and-a-half hours to accommodate its relationship to a classic – Doctor Sleep could stand on its own as a decently stylish popcorn thriller.

To give Noé’s credit, he used the Saint Laurent fashion money to practice the split-screen technique which is employed far more movingly in Vortex. He also made the only fashion ad I won’t instantly forget.

What works as edgy comedy is determined by what you can get away with. Having introduced depression and virtual incest, I Love My Dad just isn’t adroit enough to find a credible happy ending escape hatch.

Despite Parker’s apt depictions of the atrocities of war, including but not limited to misogyny, harassment, abuse of power, and crimes committed without accountability, it is a story weakened by allowing the audience to know more than the characters. Careless reveals render a potentially suitable thriller into a merely passable one.

A little distance — and considerable trimming — would have served the story better.

In between the long patches there are some scary turns, though with diminishing returns, and director Andy Muschietti and screenwriter Gary Dauberman frequently turn to fears first cousin, humour, by wise-cracking through their peril. This too gets tired. But almost anything would after nearly three hours.

Jenkins’ performance is the reason to see The Last Shift. But, not even a stellar performance from Jenkins can rescue The Last Shift entirely from its underdeveloped premise and an earnest need to be appreciated.

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

As a first-time filmmaker, Barinholtz is on training wheels, shooting almost entirely in closed-space interior, the better to concentrate on his words. To that extent, The Oath is (at first anyway) a scarily realistic depiction of the argument feedback loop that seems to be ripping society apart. But the denouement allows him to slip away without a realistic premise for how one would leave that loop.

Both the Arctic survival story and the spaceship drama are derivative, and while action sequences are well done in isolation, they never develop a convincing momentum.

These images tantalize, but without satisfying, like a trailer for a narrative that would work better as a long-form series.

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.

Jumanji: The Next Level is a diverting disappointment that does something I don’t think I’ve seen a film do before: It’s an unnecessary two-hour film that struggles for the first 90 minutes, only to find itself in the last 30. But I suppose that’s what we should expect from a film where unexpected inversion is its strongest ploy.

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.

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.

The Hummingbird Project is a fun enough ride though one with significant logic bumps that may prove as intractable as the terrain its characters hope to traverse.

The praise for the film — a one-man show by a Korean-American filmmaker at a time of heightened anti-Asian racism and a focus on unjust immigration policies — is understandable. But the film itself is a disappointment, a message film that relies far too much on artless, melodramatic contrivances for its emotional impact.

Kawase’s attempt at a healing, nature-loving cathartic conclusion comes across as campy, as if a scene from The Blue Lagoon was accidentally attached to a Japanese nature documentary.

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

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.

With Pet Sematary, it seems like the remake was ordered, and the filmmakers tried unsuccessfully to come up with a reason. Sometimes less is better too.

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.

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.

I’m not sure why director Ricky Tollman would take a real story that practically writes itself and write something else. It’s hard to follow what he’s trying to say with Run This Town, but it’s said awkwardly, without much regard to reality. The cast are all engaging and terrifically talented. But the story they’re given is a narrative straitjacket that even the best actors couldn’t save.

Minghella’s directorial debut is awash with mean girls, pretty boys, seizure-inducing club scenes, headache-inducing auto-tune, and a thin plot that unfolds (and ends) dizzyingly quickly.

There’s a kind of wannabe-hip quality to it all, but by the end, we’ve been so hammered by quirk (and numbed by bloody deaths) that we’ve forgotten what motivated this glib daisy-chain of revenge in the first place.

Both a heist film and a revenge story, Ritchie’s Wrath of Man is the cinema equivalent of a hollow-point bullet. It’s not weighty, but it causes a lot of destruction.

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.

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.

No doubt Henrik Kauffmann (Ulrich Thomsen), the Danish ambassador to the United States during Nazi-occupied Denmark, was good. But The Good Traitor, the pseudo-docudrama depicting his life is sadly not.

There is a terrific movie to be made about the trial of Han Van Meegeren, one of the most successful art forgers in history, who made millions selling his paintings to rich and prominent Nazis during the Second World War. Unfortunately, The Last Vermeer isn’t it.

I struggle to find the point in this exercise, although I know one exists. I think it might have something to do with the breakdown of privilege and the importance of opening up to other equally unfortunate rich people.

Although Let Us In is billed as a science-fiction/horror for young adults, it’s hard to imagine anyone identifying as a teen or tween finding much interest beyond a rudimentary curiosity of an online urban myth getting the feature-length film treatment.

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.

With random elements of Bollywood, Western musicals and unlikely episodic plot contrivances, it is made to please everybody. The result is inoffensive.