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.

Banks is good at handling the action sequences; they are genuinely fun and well-executed, and Stewart gives the movie one of its better performances as Sabina, the unfiltered, bad-ass Angel. Sadly, Scotts’ turn as Elena, the adorable, somewhat blundering Angel is less affective, edging close to annoying.

Pokemon Detective Pikachu doesn’t quite manage to create a coherent story out of its convoluted mythology, and its playful winks at the detective genre feel misplaced.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Ritchie is looking back to the Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and RocknRolla roots as if nothing has changed since. The Gentlemen is simply those movies with extra everything except inspiration. And sometimes more is less.

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

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.

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.

For a movie that’s supposed to take D.C. in a new direction, Black Adam sure seems like something we’ve seen plenty of times before.

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.

As it is, The Art of Racing in the Rain won’t disappoint anyone with basic expectations of a dog movie. It’s full of aww, if not wonder.

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.

It's harmless fun, enough to achieve a place among music movie curios like Ringo Starr/Harry Nillson's unwatchable Son of Dracula (1973) and the equally cringe-worthy Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park (1978). For what it’s worth, Studio 666 is leagues better than both of those efforts.

Say what you will about this movie, at some point you will say, “Awww.”

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.

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.

Moon Manor is in a middle ground, a fiction that claims to be “true-ish”.

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.

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.

The best way to appreciate The Affair is to sidestep its pot-boiler pretentious and think of as an exceptionally elegant episode of House Hunters International.

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

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

Apart from the overall endorsement of women’s friendships — and the credible warmth between the two likeable stars — the script’s feminist message is hopelessly muddled.

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.

A movie with a sincere social message and an exploitation movie sensibility, Antebellum is a clumsy cousin of Jordan Peele’s Get Out, an allegory of racism in a horror film about entrapment that goes wide of the mark.

Where the Crawdads Sing is recommended, and part of me liked it. But I confess to feeling a bit bored and, surprising even to myself, a bit disappointed that the filmmakers, in the quest to honour Owens’ book, created something without a single surprise in casting, setting or anything else.

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.

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

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

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.

Beyond the premise though, Held is pretty much stale ginger ale, not fresh, no fizz, thinly acted and tepidly paced. While it’s passably interesting, watching co-directors Travis Cluff and Chris Lofing (The Gallows) explore the antiseptic house as if watching a a real estate video, the accompanying thin drama drifts into episodic genre violence and doubtful logic.

It would be swell if there was a way of describing Bloodshot that unscrambled its plot while making it sound staggeringly cool but… well, we can’t all be superheroes. Neat effects though, which maybe are the most important thing in a sci-fi actioner?

Yet another stilted comic thriller.

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.

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.

Writer-director Florian Zeller is aiming to go deeper here, and brings a lot of emotional and psychological complexity to the story. The film has depth and sincerity. Despite that and the excellent work of its cast —led by Hugh Jackman in a fine performance — the film stalls and falters midway through.

At two hours of repetitive heists and costume changes, Bandit grows bloated and progressively tiresome.

There’s enough promise in The Happytime Murders for it to possibly work as a short-lived, gimmicky Comedy Network series. But the effort that’s put into stretching this gag over the length of a feature film is more painful than funny.

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

I imagine it's possible to enjoy Paradise Cove. Going in with low expectations is a good start. Accepting the film's dated approach to demonizing the less fortunate helps. Relinquishing any hopes of credibility in plot or character is essential. Manage that, and Paradise Cove might have a campy, if not tawdry, appeal.

For all its cinematic bell and whistles, something about Dumbo feels hollow (I wrote that word three times in my notebook during the screening) as if it’s mouthing the proverbial words phonetically without knowing their meaning. Perhaps I walked into the theatre with too-high expectations. I slinked out with shoulders bowed.

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.

Unfortunately, the director who came in too early for the superhero craze may now be revisiting it too late. The genre now monopolizes the multiplex, and it seems as if everything about comic books and superpowers and misanthropy has already been said. But Shyamalan still says it, in an unfocused movie with some interesting ideas, and so much expositional dialogue in place of action, it’s sometimes more of a lecture than a thriller.

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.

Enter the Fat Dragon is thin on plot and without any real belly laughs.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It plods along with improbable turns that get less interesting as we wait for the inevitable dance sequences.

Jason Reitman’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife, a sequel to his father Ivan’s hit 1984 comedy about paranormal exterminators, is an exercise in family homage and over-familiar exorcism.

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.

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.

Grindelwald is a movie that seems to want to recreate the Potter universe and does it in the most plodding way, crowding it with characters and plot points, many of which go nowhere.

It’s entertainment as fast food, though perhaps slightly less objectionable than the horrors perpetuated by KFC.

With echoes of Starship Troopers (minus the pointed satire), The Tomorrow War, starring Chris Pratt, is the second noisy “temporal war” movie of the pandemic era, after Christopher Nolan’s Tenet. To differentiate between the two, this is the one Nolan would have written if he’d suffered a head injury.

Director Alister Grierson, an Australian with numerous television and feature credits, does a decent job with the crowd and lively ring action though it's not nearly enough to make us forget that Tiger is a movie struggling to punch way above its dramatic weight class.

Taken in micro-doses, Peter Rabbit 2 has clever moments and a relentless eagerness to please. But the movie trips over itself when it attempts to satirize what it practices.

In theory, it should be possible to have a comedy about a competition between an elderly man and a child to injure and humiliate each other, but it would need to be substantially sharper than The War with Grandpa to make the case.

A movie with as generic a title as Enemy Lines can’t really be called a disappointment, but it is a missed opportunity.

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

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.

There’s some reward in watching good performers working to bring veracity to these awkward and artificial scenarios.

The good in the movie is overwhelmed by its by-the-numbers approach to its story. There’s not enough in Bigger to make a fan out of non-fans of body building, and there’s enough wrong to turn off the real fans.

Returning director Patrick Hughes and screenwriters Tom O’Connor, Phillip Murphy, and Brandon Murphy count too much on star charisma and action set-ups to carry the narrative. The result is that the smirks are mild and scattered while the bloodshed, gun fights, and explosions are relentless.

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.

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.

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.

There’s a sense that the film is attempting to navigate a sort of Atom Egoyan-like exploration of the ripple effects of trauma but it stumbles over a mishmash of a screenplay — the clumsy fragmentary flashbacks, the rushed climax and time-jumping, cross-cutting wind-up — none of which are improved by David Fleming and Hans Zimmer’s generic thriller score.

A conceptual mess if a somewhat engaging one.

Visually drab, tonally flat, and with precious few sympathetic or relatable characters, Brothers by Blood reduces the high-minded concept of filial loyalty across multiple generations to a paint-by-numbers power play.

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 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.

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.

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.

There’s nothing here that sparks surprise. The film remains mechanical and stilted, like some grim combination of taxidermy and ventriloquism.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This Hellboy looks like the real Hellboy, but its heart and soul have gone AWOL.

Norwegian director Joachim Rønning (who co-directed Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales) offers nothing unexpected here, in what amounts to a complicated exercise in paint-by-numbers movie-making.

Yakuza Princess is a passable actioner with a few memorable scenes, the highlight of which is a fight in a karaoke bar (yes, MASUMI gets the chance to sing). But it’s unable to get beyond a level of mediocrity, and MASUMI’s performance fails to resonate with the sufficient conviction required of her role.

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.

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.

The Dalai Lama is, no doubt, intellectually curious. But the argument that Buddhism’s mental practices are consistent with scientific thinking has been around for more than a century. We also know that hosts of people, scientists included, swear to the mental and physical benefits of meditation.

The confrontations involve a lot of prolonged, quasi-slapstick bullet-spraying firefights, which are hard on windows… and on viewers’ patience.

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

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.