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.

The two biggest questions I had going into Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny were: will it be fun and will the film stay true to the character of Indiana Jones. The answer, I'm pleased to say, is yes on both counts. It's a ton of fun. I had a blast.

I daresay this one was worth the wait. Though darker, visually and emotionally, than part one, and shorter — two hours and 18 minutes, down from two-forty — Wicked: For Good is still a rollicking good time.

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.

It’s a well-made, witty movie that manages to send up some of the tropes of organized religion while simultaneously signaling that it is firmly on the side of the believers, and also managing not to annoy any atheists in the house. Jesus, it’s good.

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 Laundromat consistently feels as if it’s intended to be funnier or more poignant than it actually is.

For this viewer, always on high alert for emotional manipulation, Ezra is an engaging movie that works because of sharp writing and terrific performances.

This is Spinal Tap is now a movie classic. I wish I could say the follow up Spinal Tap II: The End Continues is as good. But, alas, it doesn’t really touch the beloved original.

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.

Visually, Antlers is stunning as a portrait of a town dying. And there are plenty of gruesome, hide-behind-your-eyes scenes to satisfy most genre fans. But it's Cooper's commitment to his characters and the performance of the film's two youngest leads that make Antlers more than just a movie about killer—well, you'll have to see for yourself.

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.

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.

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.

Land of Bad is an atypical war film because of the contrasts that reflect the different style of modern warfare.

Anniversary is a political thriller. No, make that an apolitical thriller. Directed and co-written by Jan Komasa, it’s a hot-button story where all the buttons have gone cold. I’ve been in airport elevators with more pep.

After 28 films, it’s incredible that Marvel studios has anything new to say, never mind the ability to be fresh and entertaining.

The Burnt Orange Heresy is more mysterious than mystery. Still, there are reveals best kept secret until the moment when they are intended to be dropped. Capotondi’s film requires patience, which may be problematic for those who don’t find discussions about art, truth, and the symbolic use of flies scintillating.

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.

Roth, in restricting himself to the polite requirements of a kid-friendly movie, keeps his darker instincts in check, making this more a movie about set design than emotions.

Anchored by a solid performance by Tom Hanks, Finch, is a small-scale drama, that is ultimately — and please forgive me for being cliché — about the beauty of being alive. I mean that in the best way possible.

If Lorne really is “the most boring” doc of the Oscar-winning Neville’s career, it’s only because his career bar is high. As it is, Lorne is a terrific backgrounder for devout fans of Saturday Night Live. Fairweather fans, on the other hand, might find it like an overlong sketch.

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.

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.

A lot of genuine heart and goodwill has been poured into Jules, a slight, gentle comedy with a sci-fi edge. Heartfelt as it might be and despite a strong cast led by Sir Ben Kingsley, an unfocused storyline undermines the film, making it a frustrating watch.

Havoc is a frenetic action movie with tons of in-your-face violence and it’s kind of fun to watch — the carnage is so exaggerated that it becomes cartoonish.

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.

It’s the antic humour set against the retro décor that acts as a common meeting ground for youth and adults to enjoy Minions: The Rise of Gru together. It’s funny on both age levels.

For an animated character, Scarlet feels remarkably real.

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.

The crude if silly humour of the movie’s first 90 minutes is followed by a dollop of sentiment at the film’s end, resulting in a case of tonal whiplash... like a slap with a wet fish followed by a forced bear hug. No doubt Tag means to be a rude but heart-warming trifle, but it just isn’t funny enough to get past its awful taste.

The series still has lots of heart, but its quality is moving in the wrong direction.

The film’s star Amy Adams balances relatable comedy with dramatic empathy. In practice though, Nightbitch fails to converge their talents, resulting in a film of interesting moments that drifts to a tepid conclusion.

Deadpool & Wolverine is enjoyable on its merits: R-rated, horribly violent juvenile fantasy loaded with nostalgic references from the glory days of comic reading that fans, new and old, will thoroughly enjoy as it drags you down to its irreverently funny level.

Spinster adds up to more than the sum of its parts, even if its primary takeaway — a woman doesn’t need a man to be happy and/or successful, yada yada — is hardly ground-breaking.

The movie unfolds with what seems like a series of random left turns, which, in some cases, may have been written on the day of shooting. But Qualley and Viswanathan are a likeable odd-couple, in a dumb movie rendered smartly enough to not overstay its welcome.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wright may have made The Running Man the way he and King always wanted — just not necessarily the one we expected.

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

Though Korine (Spring Breakers) doesn’t figure out how to make his protagonist breathe (at least smokelessly), he does do a commendable job of making the Florida Keys come alive with sunshine, pastel colours and partying.

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.

Without having spent enough time to establish the background of the characters and their conflicted motives, Hunt leaves us bystanders to the mayhem.

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.

If you want to dramatize a real-life celebrity fraud tale, you can’t settle for the superficial. Either go for psychological truth or camp it up to the level of the superduperficial. There’s not much of either quality in JT Leroy, a film that offers colourful performances by Laura Dern and Kristen Stewart but fails to find any urgency in retelling the tale of an early 2000s literary fraud.

I have not read the graphic novel Sandcastle upon which Old is based so I can’t vouch for its faithfulness to the source material. But it’s hard to believe anyone would call this a winner.

Despite its grand-sounding title, The Fall of the American Empire is another trifle, a familiar harangue against human perfidy wrapped in a creaky farce.

Not only is this Boyle's gentlest film since the under-seen and underrated Millions (2004), it's also his most improbable, imperfect, and delightful work.

With DNA largely spliced from the movie Speed, it’s a carnage-filled action film that is essentially a single extended car chase. Ambulance is a movie that is nothing if not focused.

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.

It’s a clever hook, and the film milks it for some genuinely inventive, well-executed set pieces. As a delivery system for imaginative deaths, Whistle does its job with a certain professional pride.

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.

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.

Ignore the nay-sleighers. Violent Night is the counter-Christmas B-movie that ditches the ho-ho-wholesomeness of the season for a damn good, bad Santa.

What distinguishes Knuckleball from other thrillers involving children is the seeming reality of the peril portrayed.

While the movie motors along with admirable pacing for most of its lengthy running time, it stumbles in the final act, which is marred by even more bad special effects and a maudlin reunion.

There isn’t a moment in Zombieland: Double Tap that takes itself the least bit seriously. The gags often seem made up as it goes along, but they have a high “hit” ratio and the looseness of the whole affair means there’s no pressure to impress.

The trouble starts with the script, which wobbles between an investigative thriller and a psychological study.

Butcher’s Crossing is a decent western, with decent performances. It’s a film that delivers what’s expected. But for a story that could give Captain Ahab a run for his money, getting the expected is a bit disappointing.

It’s creepy as hell, watching these kids with no purpose and a desperate need to be doing something important become sucked into notions about self-control and salvation.

The Prom, as it progresses from camp to earnest messaging, is like a sermon you believe, but still find too preachy.

The visuals are impressive. But looks aren’t everything. In spite of the obvious care and affection that has gone into this remake, the movie itself is emotionally flat.

The result is a work stiff with pointed talk and chance encounters, little of which feels original. The acting, while variable, often has a stilted, recitative quality, as if the characters, rather than family members, recently met at a script readings.

A preposterous mess of romance-with-secrets, generations-old closet skeletons and revenge, The Good Liar is the kind of fragrant dramatic cheese that Sidney Sheldon would have squeezed an ‘80s network mini-series out of. But the never-before-paired screen couple of Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren consume this cheese like so much scenery. There’s nothing like actors with gravitas slumming, all bemused smiles and droll delivery, even as the material descends clunkily into unintentional comedy.

There’s not even a useful exploration about the gap between ideologues’ shoddy personal ethics and big picture rationalizations. What’s left is pantomime, a Halloween costume movie about characters who are far too simple-minded to explain the Bakker’s extraordinary, dubious success.

It’s high minded stuff, but Iñárritu, has a knack for wrapping these ideas in movies that are well crafted and exciting to watch.

A bittersweet dramedy about an exceedingly fraught mother/daughter relationship and the ties that nevertheless bind, Tammy’s Always Dying is buoyed by a superb cast and a palpably stark setting (mostly Hamilton, Ontario with forays into Toronto) that combine to elevate the film above its more predictable aspects.

The decision to avoid having the characters speaking Chinese saves the trouble of subtitles but it also makes the drama feel generic, another pulpy sub-Scorsesian urban nightmare with episodes of spastic violence, the constantly throbbing soundtrack, the use of slow motion, and wide-screen, colour-saturated camera work.

A dark movie, but also a funny one.

You won’t find much ambiguity on these subjects in the documentary Ithaka, directed by Ben Lawrence and produced by Assange’s half-brother, Gabriel Shipton. Unsurprisingly, it’s totally Team Julian.

There is no question that Gyllenhaal packs her film with so many ideas that it can become dizzying. The themes sometimes pile up, the tonal shifts arrive quickly, and the story occasionally feels less like it’s unfolding than tangling itself into elaborate knots. Some viewers will likely bail when the plot begins tripping over its own ambitions. But the film also has an undeniable boldness. A willingness to be strange. To be excessive. To be gloriously weird.

Assassination Nation may be empty calories as social satire, but it’s a dark, wry, of-the-moment story of run-amok panic that will entertain horror fans.

Viewers are better served by submitting to the immersive thrill of it all, in the context of a film that doesn’t ask us to ask too much of ourselves.

If there’s one thing that Beast does well, it keeps its audience on the edge of their seats.

Its script is undercooked and veers in random directions from its simple premise. But it has a heart, and two likeable leads who work well together.

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

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.

While the performances are heart-warming, the characterization of Reddy feels reductive, overlooking the real-life contradictions, flinty humour, and eccentricities that might have made the performance less generic.

All in all, this is probably the best production of the litany of Tolkien pre-Ring stories I’ve seen on the big screen and I’d count The Hobbit in that estimation. There is a part where it drags a little, and some moments that are campy (I blame those on the anime elements), but all in all, this is definitely something that I would recommend seeing on the big screen.

Yet another stilted comic thriller.

Krymalowski brings a vivacious energy to a movie that would otherwise be one long trudge to safe haven.

If you’ve seen the red-band trailer for Strays, you know the dog-centric, live-action new comedy is profane and outrageous, slapstick and amusing in that distinctly stoner-friendly way.

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.

The First Purge has a lot of narrative and unsubtle subtext to cram into a movie that’s barely 90 minutes long. In fact, its big, violent finish notwithstanding, a lot of it is quite dull and its pacing inconsistent.

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.

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.

As much a showcase for Kristen Stewart and the fabulous frocks of the 1960s as a glimpse at a very low moment in U.S. governmental history, Seberg is an entertaining if simplistic drama that would have benefited from more grit and less gloss.

Psycho Therapy is a charming return to form for the adult comedy—dialogue-driven, character-first, and delightfully absurd. A smart and silly piece of narrative chaos that earns every word of its unwieldy title.