I’m a fan of Wright’s work, so I’m disappointed that Last Night in Soho doesn’t hold up on both halves. But the parts that work, work terrifically.

With its languid pace, rural setting, and natural beauty, The Long Walk is not your typical ghost story.

It’s predictable but entertaining. Unrealistic, but it doesn’t affect the story too much. The relationship between Braxton and Christian has changed from the first film, but it’s a welcome, feel-good change in a story with lots of guns and an epic battle.

Sting is ridiculous. Still, it's a better movie than it needs to be. A dramatic family backstory sets Sting apart from myriad other creature features.

There is a gentle, sad, sweet core to Between the Temples, though American indie director Nathan Silver seems determined to discourage any feelings of sentimentality in a movie that could easily have tipped in that direction.

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.

My Mother’s Wedding is a perfectly nice film. It’s tough not to think that it might have been much more.

Wuthering Heights is a sensual feast. But, while there’s plenty to admire and lots of passion and heat, the film doesn’t quite add up in a way that brings the feels.

The Last Full Measure stands as a fascinating document of how truly messed up every aspect of the Vietnam War was. It’s also a touching if occasionally syrupy rumination on the nature and provenance of valor.

The film is strong enough in performance and direction to survive any discrepancies between the social drama it begins as with the revenge thriller it becomes. Still, Rose Plays Julie's sudden turn of events feels like an intrusion on a better story.

In its eagerness to correct past wrongs and set the story straight, the film feels weirdly rigid, narratively predictable, and occasionally overstated.

An occasional brilliantly funny but exasperatingly chaotic, vignette-style examination of relationships, male rage, and female insecurities.

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.

If Renfield were a serious movie, all the gory fight and slaughter scenes would seem overindulgent. But judging from the audience laugh-meter at the screening I attended, the right decisions were made for the material.

The parade of post-punk artists and artistic legends is entertaining for anybody who’s ever followed that era’s art scene.

The Justice of Bunny King, which follows the story of a woman at odds with the system, is a showcase for the superb Australian actress Essie Davis.

Assembled by first-time French director and Callas devotee Thomas Volf, this adoring clip reel has both pros and cons.

While The Way of Water could have easily lost an hour from its three-hour-plus running time, it would have been a shame to lose its most magic moments, the stuff that makes it different.

If you’re willing to go with it, the Zellner brothers and their cast have delivered something that is by turns funny, sad, and, in the end, surprisingly poignant.

Freaky jumps to the top of a long line of genre films with one of the best horror/comedy concepts since Shaun of the Dead (2004).

Once again, [Pugh] brings a determined energy to her performance that almost compensates for the often unpersuasive, sometimes stilted, film built around her.

It feels unbalanced, a collection of often-compelling sequences stitched together in a way that is unpersuasive or sometimes simply puzzling.

She Said is about cracking the code of silence, and the flood that follows when it breaks.

Some jokes are a little on the cringeworthy side, but overall, they work. It’s a film that essentially hijacks the cuteness of The Little Mermaid and manages to successfully transfer it to a shy, math-loving awkward teenager who just happens to be able to transform herself into a 50-foot-tall sea-beast.

Palestine ‘36 is at its most moving in the scenes of archival footage, and most provocative as an illustration of how England’s imperial tactics of pitting national groups against each other and terrorizing civilians (characters refer to similar approaches India and Ireland) became the template for Israeli’s ongoing military domination of the Palestinian territories. The argument is unlikely to change fixed hearts and minds, but it is difficult to ignore how familiar it seems.

There is joy in seeing this gifted ensemble have fun with their broadly scripted characters with Los Angeles in all its trashy splendour backdropping it all. But this angel comedy doesn’t quite reach for the heavens.

The somewhat awkwardly titled documentary, The Return of Tanya Tucker: Featuring Brandi Carlile, turns out to be an accurate summary of a film that celebrates two women.

It’s a bit of a shaggy dog story. It’s fun to look at. The cast is good. It’s instantly forgettable.

A big dumb acid-trip of a super-hero movie, Aquaman is relentless, noisy, entertaining nonsense – particularly in 3D IMAX - as overlong as any of them, but not boring, and as I say, at times trippy.

The Spanish comedy/satire Official Competition plays on those clichés, and yet doesn’t really say anything new. But thanks to its A-list cast, led by Penélope Cruz and Antonio Banderas, it’s quite enjoyable.

Canadians already made the definitive young-woman-turned-werewolf movie, with 2000’s Ginger Snaps, which is a bar to clear if Bloodthirsty is to make an impression on veteran horror fans. But the pop music angle, an LGBT angle, and a studio Svengali who lives in a mansion in the woods, gives Bloodthirsty some points for fresh twists.

For a movie that lazily spins its wheels, Fantasy Life is oddly amiable. The only wholly dislikable character is David, and he’s so great at being dislikable, you almost like him for it.

Canadian writer-director Tim Brown captures a heady mix of action, bloodshed and comedy here, hitting all the high notes of a crime thriller even as he appears to be spoofing the genre — and who better to do that with than Cage, the meta master himself?

Starry actioner The Protégé is a filmic version of empty calories: irresistible if short on sustenance and of an ilk that’s best rationed carefully.

Eleanor the Great is a small-scale film with depth and relatable themes: grief, loss, identity, family among them. The film has some flaws that lessen its emotional impact but there is admirable work here all around.

It’s a fact of life that a novel about the right to die can’t be represented in depth in 105 minutes. But a compelling essence remains in this story about two sisters from a Manitoba Mennonite community - one with a mess of a life who nonetheless wants to live, the other, blessed with a seemingly perfect life, who wants the opposite.

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.

Director John Rosman’s debut film New Life is a simple but effective film that sits on the border between thriller and horror. Rosman straddles the line, keeping one foot in both genres and adding an element of apocalyptic drama. The result is a decent film despite the feeling that we’ve seen this before.

There is no pretension in what The Lost City is or what it’s trying to do, other than entertain an audience for slightly under two hours. It has one job, and it does it well.

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

Bottoms is absurd, ridiculous, often wildly inappropriate in the way of teen comedies and occasionally as exaggerated as a Looney Tunes cartoon. But everyone in the movie is giving it their all, taking the craziness seriously and clearly having fun. There are a lot of terrific performances.

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.

Eileen is a slender drama distinguished by strong performances.

Beauty and loss hold hands in Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel, an intimate and impressionistic documentary about New York’s storied Chelsea Hotel from Belgian filmmakers, Amélie van Elmbt and Maya Duverdier.

This is perhaps a kinder, gentler Amy Winehouse story? Maybe so, but there’s no opportunity for emotional investment, despite Marisa Abela’s wonderful performance. It’s all a bit like seeing a good cover band.

It’s jittery in its pacing, the characters thinly drawn, and the youth crime drama elements formulaic...At the same time, the film feels emotionally original in its discordantly tender moments.

Christian Bale leads a fantastic cast in The Pale Blue Eye, a twisty atmospheric detective yarn with supernatural overtones and, for those who enjoy such things, an actual historical touchstone.

It may not sound like a big deal, but it’s actually very satisfying to see game-changing historical women having their stories told on a major platform and having them told well, with emotional intelligence.

The Choral is a beautifully made film with a great cast and impeccable credentials, a collaboration between writer Alan Bennett and director Nicholas Hytner, as were The History Boys and The Lady in the Van. Alas, it’s a bit dull.

Some might find that No Time to Die, clocking in at just under three hours, is a long journey. But there are enough action sequences— some of the best since the crane fight in the opening scene of Casino Royale—to make time move quickly.

As a summertime popcorn film, it’s fine. But Twisters lacks the breathtaking je ne sais quoi oomph a film of this scope should have. We get spun alright, but the landing feels very safe and predictable.

At just under two-and-a-half hours and spanning three decades, The Eight Mountains feels thorough, as well as sensitively acted and moving. Its weakness is a tendency toward grandiosity, treating an anecdotal drama as though it were an epic.

The film is long and slow, but never boring. There is, however, a sense that the various storylines are not woven together completely.

Cronin doesn’t just show you something disturbing—he insists you sit with it until it becomes personal.

Like its characters, I Want You Back, is likeable but somewhat unambitious and complacent.

Director Nick Moran gets the temperature of the era mostly right, and effectively weaves this extraordinary source material into a watchable if formulaic two hours.

With the words, the coffee-table monochrome images of the aged troubadours hard at joyful labour, and the moody drone shots of the snow-covered New Jersey woods, Letter To You is an opportunity to listen to the new album at a bargain.

The story it tells — of environmental assault, mistreatment of Indigenous people, corrupt government and business — is woefully familiar. But the brutality of it all never ceases to amaze.

The film version of the multiple Tony Award–winning hit Broadway musical Dear Evan Hansen is a mixed bag and a wonky adaptation that doesn’t always quite scan. Yet I’d be lying if I didn’t say that despite its flaws, it’s also strangely affecting.

With its themes of the superficiality of arena-sized hallelujahs and the worship of riches, Honk for Jesus: Save Your Soul is a terrific platform for some solid actors to strut their sanctimonious stuff.

One More Shot is a film that’s quirky, but needs to be hilarious. It has flawed characters who could have made more mistakes, but in the end, you know you want them to fix everything. It has funny moments, and there is a welcome twist at the end. But all in all, this film, while cute, needed to be funnier.

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.

Callahan, who died in 2010, understood the emotional venting behind his work and talked about it. As moving as it often is, we get a lot of the venting in Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot, but not enough of the work, or the man behind it.

Dark Match, a recent addition to a growing line of stream-screams, combines the melodramatic tensions of a sports drama with 80s-style schlock horror.

Touch is a film that moves at its own Icelandic pace to savour its own tragic, but ultimately hopeful story.

Crucially, Macdonald (see also The Last King of Scotland, Marley, State of Play) doesn’t stint on the train-wreck aspects of her career: the infamous Diane Sawyer interview, disastrous, flabby late-career performances, and yes, those tabloid images of a gaunt, wild-eyed, and clearly tripping Houston. Whether audiences feel greater insight into her dreams and demons as a result is somewhat less certain.

Their creative process in action is just one of the cool archival treats in Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie, a jam-packed two hours of pop cultural hindsight that is part extended sketch, part couples therapy, and part traditional documentary.

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.

In a streaming universe glutted with accounts of bizarre and brutal crimes, Rosemead risks being just another example of the terrible things that people do and have done to them.

There are plot turns, double crosses and, appropriately for the online world, threats of live streaming torture and echoes of video battle games. But there’s at least a half-hour too much of it.

Wala doesn’t go deep enough, and the film stays on the surface. At the same time, the characters stick with you, enough to make us want to know what happens next for Ash and Claire.

In its rambling pace, Causeway at times is reminiscent of Winter’s Bone, the 2010 movie that introduced Lawrence to film fans, and may still be her finest performance. In Causeway, the doctors aren’t the only ones wondering what’s going on inside her head. The audience does too, and she reveals it as slowly as she needs to.

If His House doesn’t quite achieve the deeply unsettling tone that makes a good horror movie hard to shake, it still succeeds as an exploration of trauma, and the way it can shape and challenge the human psyche.

The horror film Come Play, the feature debut of writer/director Jacob Chase, is in many ways derivative. But it’s derivative of some pretty effective predecessors.

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.

There’s a sense of familiarity to The Prodigy, the latest in a half-century of “evil child” stories going back to The Bad Seed, and including The Exorcist and The Omen. It’s still effective, given the chills we get from a sweet-faced kid saying or doing something horrible in the dark.

Yeah, the movie does noticeably follow the formula. But still, it got to me. I rooted for the couple who didn't yet know what we knew from the beginning, and I even welled up towards the end, just when the film wanted me to. Predictable reaction. But then, it’s a rom com after all.

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.

This critic says The Critic is an imperfect film saved by a terrific cast. In particular, Sir Ian McKellen steals the show as a preening newspaper god in 1930s London.

SLAXX is tailor-made for anyone who has ever felt concerned for the mental state of the clothes they discard on the floor. For the rest of us who can abandon our wardrobe with no regard to its psychological well-being, SLAXX is a straight-off-the-rack farce.

Creed III has the fights, it has a story, and it has a heart. For Jordan, it’s a feature directing debut with punch.

A circus of violence, it’s a noisy, non-stop combination of dance and Loony Tunes-worthy manic cartoonishness.

It’s ambitious, but not as much fun as it wants to be.

This fictional recreation is wonderfully claustrophobic, but the storytelling does not include enough character development to leave a viewer fully invested.

There may be a lot of questions unanswered in Possessor, but there’s feverish imagination at work.

For a biopic about Maria Callas, one of opera’s most vivacious personalities, director Pablo Larraín’s visually sumptuous Maria is unusually downbeat.

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

With its first half a kind of post-mortem of this so-called accidental masterpiece and the second devoted to its cultural influence on everyone from drag queens to film scholars, You Don’t Nomi — its title a snappy riff on lead character Elizabeth Berkley’s name — is impressive for its breadth and depth.

It’s not reluctance that prevents Leiser from divulging the driving force of the film’s narrative but rather a self-assured and less defensive “take-it-or-leave-it” attitude. The “opera” aspect of the film will be highlighted in the review and press material, but for Leiser, Freydís and Gudrid, it is simply a good story told through music.

Once you get past the clinical mis-en-scène and the voyeuristic surprise, the story is the usual A Star Is Born showbiz rollercoaster of big dreams, success, and disillusionment.

There are some strong elements here.

The main takeaway here is that online abuse is not simply the ravings of twisted individuals, but often part of systematic campaigns of terror, designed to frighten and silence women in positions of influence and power.

Uncle Drew is a goodhearted broad comedy, one where you don’t have to know the players (under all that latex) to enjoy the game.

A kind of gothic, ghostly mash-up of Downton Abbey and Grey Gardens, The Little Stranger is as mannered, tattered and morose as that marriage of premises suggests.

A dynamite ensemble cast and a truckload of heart keep the sentimental new comedy POMS from crumbling beneath multiple well-thumbed clichés including (but not limited to) plucky underdogs can triumph, friends are really important and life is short so live it fully.

There is an emotional core to Priscilla, and in Coppola’s gentle way, we’re shown a portrait of an unusual relationship, and come away with a less flattering picture of Elvis, more of the fallible human, as opposed to the music icon, frozen in time.

What’s mildly interesting about The Beach House, the low-budget debut feature from Jeffrey A Brown is that, while human beings have their struggles and conflicts, the universe doesn’t much care.

Roh is a simple story, fueled entirely by atmosphere.