Two hours witnessing the agony of a guilt-ridden pill addict doesn’t exactly have “good times” written all over it. To make it an experience worth enduring requires something more.

Within the frame of an old-fashioned stab-and-splatter exploitation flick, The Hunt is consistently smartish.

Bolstered by actors with serious chops, and a secondary cast of seriously talented singers — including some with Eurovision contest experience — the Netflix movie is sweetly affectionate. But your enjoyment will likely be directly proportional to how you feel about Ferrell and his familiar man-boy character.

For the first two acts at least, Jungle Cruise is reasonably good fodder for a family outing, very much a theme park ride of the cinematic kind.

As a valentine to influential 80s alt-rockers The Smiths, Shoplifters of the World is unbeatable, propelled by original Smiths music along with archival footage of band interviews and performances, vintage posters, magazine covers, album sleeves and just about every other bit of era-specific ephemera you can name.

Despite committed performances all around, Boundaries stays firmly rooted in the meh. Much as we want to root for Laura, her constant whining about her unhappy childhood wins no empathy and drags things down.

There are, however, three things that elevate Shelter above a C average score. The first is Statham himself, an actor who knows how to stay in his lane (all those driving movies!) and do what he does best, which is to be brusque and to kill people. Second is director Ric Roman Waugh, one of those stuntman-turned-filmmakers, which means he knows his way around an action sequence better than most.

The cast is made up of some of the finest and most interesting actors working in film today. And for the most part they’re doing thoughtful work. Unfortunately, there’s only so much they can do. The film doesn’t go emotionally deep enough to pay off.

The cardboard scenery look of the 1952 original is replaced with a big cast, drama and lingering closeups.

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.

While it may be almost impossible to hate the well-meaning, audience-pleasing charm-fest that is Champions, that doesn’t mean I have to like it. Even a heart-warming story can leave you cold if it’s poorly told.

So, Ticket to Paradise… see or skip? Easy. See as there’s lots to enjoy. Bouttier as the wise-beyond-his-years Gede is absolutely rubberneck-worthy, the scenery and backdrops are gorgeous if out of reach for most of us, and the film crackles with energy. But you’ll be watching movie stars at work, and you’ll never forget it.

The film certainly does not ignore O’Connor’s attitudes and fictional treatment of race. It just doesn’t make it particularly central to her reputation.

There are remarkable and rewarding moments in the film despite its lack of bite.

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

The Violent Heart lies somewhere between a chasm that divides soft-peddled melodrama and Young Adult fiction. It's unlikely director/writer Kerem Sanga intended the story to be categorized as either melodramatic or Young Adult.

Ana de Armas is magnificent as Norma Jean, her every expression and movement embodying the late star and suggesting countless hours of research and rehearsal. But the movie surrounding this possibly career-best performance is an overheated dud save also some genuinely novel camera work, notably in a threesome scene where intertwined bodies melt into a rolling taffy wave.

So, points for shoe-string filmmaking on several fronts. But however open-minded one might try to be, it’s hard to imagine how high, or how low, you’d have to be to recognize human beings in this grungy geek fantasy.

Running a long 145 minutes, it’s bleakly cartoonish polemic with few laughs or dramatic peaks, despite a climactic mad-as-hell speech from DiCaprio, some ineffectual pantomiming from Streep, and some third-act forced solemnity.

If there is a cinematic cliché not marshalled into service during What Men Want, it’s not easily identifiable.

With Breakdown 1975, Neville isn’t asking us to consider whether the year was pivotal. He’s making the case that it was.

It moves, it’s entertaining, Ryan Gosling is as buff as he’s ever been and all-in as an action star. And who knew all it would take was a porn ‘stache to turn Chris Evans from Captain America into a psycho mercenary?

Picturesque and genuinely heartfelt if a smidge corny, the Irish-set dramedy The Miracle Club serves mainly as a showcase for its trio of talents, Laura Linney, Kathy Bates, and Maggie Smith, billed in that order.

You will not see a more perfect and imperfect rock and roll biopic than Bohemian Rhapsody, which does many things extremely well, other things sort of average, and one thing flawlessly: capturing the immense charisma and panache of Queen singer Freddie Mercury. Jamie Foxx’s full-body inhabitation of Ray Charles just got some competition at the top.

It’s a mess of a plot and a literal trainwreck of a denouement. No faulting the destruction scenes, since they’re in Leitch’s wheelhouse, and as they say, every dollar is on the screen in that regard. But to paraphrase a quote from the late character actor Edmund Gwenn, killing is easy, comedy is hard.

It tries to mine humour and a bit of horror from the era but fails to make much of an impact in either genre.

Amsterdam is full of quips, cocked heads, characters peeking around doorway frames, and a cast of single-purpose characters. It’s a rapid-fire onslaught of scenes, dialogue, and characters. Russell fans will cling to the belief that there is something at the end of this mess; others will likely give up early on.

If you think Little sounds like something a 10-year-old might come up with after seeing Tom Hanks’ Big, you would be entirely correct.

None of it makes any sense, alas, and you’ll stop caring about what happens or who it happens to, fairly early on. There seems to be a lot of pseudo-Freudian yammer in the middle of this crime drama, or perhaps there’s a lot of drug-trade-related violence in the middle of a psychological family study; either way, it’s mystifying as hell.

A good-natured and well-acted small-town drama about midlife renewal, Gary Lundgren’s Phoenix, Oregon is the opposite of topical or urgent. That’s why it can be recommended as a distraction and a slice of comfort food.

If brevity is indeed the soul of wit, at a tidy 90 minutes, Venom: Let There Be Carnage is on point for what it largely is - a violently slapstick domestic sitcom.

The “beats” in the story where hearts are supposed to swell are so telegraphed as to render The Best of Enemies emotionally flat. There are no surprises, no change-ups, no setbacks in this collision of sensibilities.

A parade of pulled punches, there’s not enough of anything in The Tomorrow Man to make it stick as drama or even a believable romance.

Chapter 1 of this undertaking is imperfect, at times meandering and once or twice confusing, but it is never boring and never feels over-long. And it is spectacularly beautiful to look at.

Fast, funny and entirely forgettable, The Instigators is an entertaining if shopworn heist story.

Nattiv is aiming to redeem her legacy with this film. To that end he unfolds the story like a thriller, where we get a sense of the day-to-day tensions of a war that posed an existential threat to her country and the immense pressure she was under. He has cast it well. And yet, despite the tension, Golda is disappointingly flat.

Director/co-writer Shane Black, indulging his tendency towards glibness, brings an outright comic touch that turns the latest interaction between humans and these dreads-wearing extraterrestrial big-game hunters, into something of a bloody romp – as inappropriate as that sounds (and often is).

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.

Six Minutes to Midnight shifts focus between classroom drama and war thriller without allowing time for either genre to take shape.

Joyride is terrific, a storytelling and acting gem bursting with heart yet never saccharine.

It’s visually lovely. But there’s a hollowness at the core of Jeanne du Barry, despite the obvious talents of its writer, director and star, the almost absurdly watchable French performer Maïwenn, who approaches this tragic-comic 18th century fact-based story with a sympathetic view towards its protagonist without probing too deeply into anyone’s motivations.

A dull piece of off-season horror flotsam, Underwater suffers from two kinds of genetic drift. It is the umpteenth movie about messing with the ocean bottom (DeepStar Six, Leviathan, The Meg, etc.), where, apparently, there be dragons rather than blind albino shrimp...It is also the latest, and most blatant, of God-knows-how-many Alien rip-offs that have taken up space in the multiplex in one critic’s lifetime.

The result is a surprisingly entertaining, gory delight. Even hard-lined horror abstainers can comfortably enjoy the film’s grim humour and excessively over-the-top carnage.

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.

Approached with a casual regard for logic, period thriller The Secrets We Keep is entertaining enough to recommend though it never feels quite as original or shocking as the filmmakers — working with a plainly Hitchcockian roadmap — likely hoped for.

If you can accept its modest aims, Tolkien is quietly enjoyable on its own merits.

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.

There's a predictable mix of fan, fun, and family vibes in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, but it's a mix that's stirred a bit too long.

As utterly derivative action films go, Jolt has definite energy, and it’s not pretending to be original. As a time-killer, that may be enough for some.

Dasha Nekrasova’s bored gamine onscreen presence is quite funny (she suggests a jaded Emma Watson). But much of the acting here is atrocious and the slash-and-splatter ending disappointingly conventional.

The Call of the Wild is aiming to be an old-fashioned adventure movie for family viewing, and it delivers the requisite big warm cinematic hug. And more than being the story of a dog finding his inner wolf and fulfilling his destiny, it’s also an homage to the natural world. And that, wrapped in the adventures of a dog, is a pretty wonderful thing.

If it’s not original ground, Don’t Worry Darling is a visually arresting mash-up of The Stepford Wives and Pleasantville, with its plot about an idyllic artificial ‘50s with pampered suburban housewives religiously dedicated to their husbands and their cocktails, and hints of the decade’s dark side.

A compelling story that’s well-acted, well-written, and beautifully shot is its own reward. The female perspective is pretty neat, too.

I accept the onscreen explanation that this Godzilla is simply on atomic steroids. It’s the movie that’s fat.

At a little more than two hours (about the length of the line to get into the actual ride), The Haunted Mansion sometimes strains to keep up its frenetic pace. But the fun tone is on point, and younger family members in the audience are in little actual danger of being traumatized by fear.

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

If cute was the selling point of this spin-off series, it’s practically out of stock in Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, a movie that has traded in its charm (and, for the most part, its fantastic beasts) for an extended Nazi metaphor.

Dog Days moves along, mostly pleasantly and at its worst is a somewhat-forced good time.

If our planet should collapse into some colossal cyber-punk afterworld, we can take comfort knowing that Milla Jovovich has our back.

Lisa Frankenstein can be fun, but there is a mean-spiritedness to Cody’s script that doesn’t fit with the film’s premise. It comes mainly at the hands of the creature whose victims are far from charming but don’t necessarily deserve the extreme comeuppance that’s dealt to them.

Know from the start: Halloween Ends has some of the best kills in the franchise.

As a study in mutual traumatic grief between doctor and patient, Marionette has some resonance, but the emotional core of the story is smothered by its irritating intellectual pretensions and altogether too much wood paneling.

On the sliding scale of war movies, Emmerich’s Midway is obviously no prestige film like The Hurt Locker or Saving Private Ryan. It belongs more to the school of the original Midway, with Tora! Tora! Tora! as its exemplar. Tell the story of a battle, offer up some sketched-out characters, played with aplomb, add a dash of soap opera and fire when ready. On that scale, for what it’s worth, Midway is a much more solid piece of entertainment than the Pearl Harbor directed by Emmerich’s fellow master-of-disaster Michael Bay.

While it has charm and an interesting twist or two, it lacks bite.

Mohr appears to be in control even when the film takes wild swipes from the absurd to the dramatic. Still, Boy Kills World works.

Reiner’s attempt to create Spotlight-like docudrama of newsroom courage and stoke fresh outrage about government lies is undermined by clunky old-fashioned filmmaking and Joey Harstone’s exposition-clotted script.

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

An undercooked ‘70s-style blaxploitation revenge fantasy with a reverse-Shyamalan plot (the “twist” is up front), Alice is an objectively bad movie wrapped around one great, all-in performance.

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.

Dahl’s work demands darkness and an edge, but instead there’s a bright Hollywood-y antic sense to Zemeckis’s The Witches, and the overused and unconvincing FX only serve to trivialize what we’re seeing.

It’s an entertaining fantasy from a kid’s perspective that hearkens back to the days of reading a stack of comics on your bed for an afternoon that never seemed to end.

Until Dawn is a gleeful reimaging of the classic slasher film, modifying the tropes enough to turn the familiar into something fresh.

The violence in Medieval is fast, frequent and fierce and could possibly be the film's biggest draw. History might be the film's initial hook, but it's the movie's grisly depictions of military violence that the film will likely be remembered.

Still, it’s a fascinating psychological thriller, a ghost story with (as Dickens would say) more gravy than grave in its construction.

Self-assured kid actor Coleman and the always-funny Schaal give My Spy some personality, but can we please retire this worn-out idea?

As is often the case with a not-so-great film, I can report that I wanted to like it more than I did. But I just couldn’t.

This is one of those animated features that veers way towards adult references for the parents in the room, while creating occasional mayhem in the pursuit of short-attention-span theatre. The latter fails.

Wheatley gives us one grotesque dream sequence of guests at a masquerade ball, but the rest is palely conventional. Like the character who gives the film its title, the adaptation is pretty much dead in the water.

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!

To be clear, Book Club: The Next Chapter is not a good movie by any standards except for its appeal to audiences old enough to fondly remember every cast member in their prime (I’m raising my hand here). Anyone born after Murphy Brown will see a predictable, forgettable series of non-adventures.

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

With the right combination of nostalgia and novelty, it’s spot-on for families looking for fun on movie night.

Reminiscence doesn’t leave us much to remember it by, apart from those mournful CGI vistas of water-logged Miami.

Working from a script by Neil Forsythe, Marsh has created a superficially experimental if tame take on an artist of grim truths and dark comedy.

Though much of it is glum and muddled, it does find an anchor in Hugo Weaving (Lord of the Rings, The Matrix) as a gravely wise, ailing crime boss named Duke.

I will give The Nun this, it has an utterly outrageous ending that pretty much brought the house down at the advance screening I attended.

At its least, Level 16 ranks as a very good episode of Black Mirror but at its best, it succeeds as a hybrid of the kind of dystopic paranoia we get from Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale with touches of sanitized malevolence from Stanley Kubrick.

A reality-based hillbilly thriller that can’t decide what flavour of noir to serve up, Above Suspicion is one of those curious failures that the current appetite for home streaming often rescues from theatrical limbo.

Ultimately, Shotgun Wedding seems like something from a different time, a time-waster full of tropes that exists to only to fill time with the odd boom and an occasional chuckle – and falls short of even that.

You may want to see Capone — a film so stylized and perverse it makes Todd Phillips’ Joker look like Downton Abby — but not for insight or amusement.

Audiences looking for a so-bad-its-good bit of kitsch catharsis will likely be let down. The Meh – sorry, The Meg – is so calculatedly flattened out for international markets, especially its Chinese financiers, that even the dialogue feels as though it’s in translation.

To repeat, Folie à Deux is not “canon.” It’s a writer/director realizing a vision with something sincere and clever, which you can accept or reject. Superhero fans will get their fix soon enough. But this is not that.

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.

While entertaining, The Upside lacks the original film’s fizzy spark, the prickly charisma of its co-stars, and the tantalizingly sense that this incredible story — which is actually true — happened on a planet we would recognize as our own.

The Public, which played at TIFF last fall, is the kind of movie you want to like and that probably needs to get made and seen. But needing to see something and wanting to see it are different things.

IF is a delightful escapist fantasy that reaches deep into the hearts of the audience by invoking childhood memories.

Exit Plan works. At times hallucinogenic; at times tranquil. Despite a growing consensus that the film is undermined by its determined and plodding pace, it is by no means ineffective.