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.

The Marksman is a minor entry in the Liam Neeson Action Oeuvre, but it's unlikely to boost his genre status. Neeson puts in a valiant effort to give Hanson the edge of a man grown weary, not just by time but by the assumptions of his age and the disappointing belief that his country has let him down.

The loss of two-dimensional artistry of the original has some compensation of human warmth.

Expend4bles is an endless pyro/bang-bang show, with actors not mainly known for their acting (also including 50 Cent and UFC champion Randy Couture), sticking to the story as well as they can.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that I enjoy violent films, but The Wrath of Becky is an example of a film that disappoints its audience with a failed promise. Given the extreme violence of the last film, we aren’t just shocked enough by the battle between her and the group of antagonists who have a veritable arsenal in their barn to start a small war.

I get a sense that Five Nights at Freddy’s and this week’s inevitable salad of a sequel Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, marks a turning point in how Hollywood approaches the visual medium that has been eating its lunch for decades. The lesson: Stop trying to make video game film adaptations that appeal to a general audience. A giant in-joke of a movie can pay off bigtime if the target audience is big enough. Screw the rest.

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 problems with The United States vs Billie Holiday aren’t about Day’s creditable performance, but pretty much everything that happens around it. That includes Pulitzer-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks’ time-hopping, confusing script and Daniels’ direction, which is both feverishly pulpy and stilted and laden.

Kandahar is standard entertainment that pushes for more than what they can deliver. Slight entertainment is the best it can be.

McCabe-Loko substitutes erratic behaviour and raised voices for tension. But Stanleyville does seem to have something to say. Just because I cannot decipher any significant meaning doesn't mean you won't. Then again, in the words of someone wiser than me, some films are merely meant to be experienced. That could be the case with Stanleyville. I only wish the experience was a bit more enjoyable.

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.

Typically, action films benefit from a standout villain in an unexpected role. But with A Working Man, Ayer, along with Stallone and Chuck Dixon as co-screenwriters, dilutes the role of the villain so much and so often, that it becomes challenging to determine whom to harbour a grudge against and to what extent.

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.

The film — set over the course of one wedding day — rates as no more than a passable distraction, though those can be useful.

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

This is pure and simple filmmaking in the most precise use of the term: Pure in its unapologetic depiction of idealized romance, and simple in its uncomplicated belief of love’s easy resolutions. Let that be fair warning to anyone even mildly cynical of love’s all-conquering power; the jaded aren’t likely to find much to relate to.

The movie rattles through ninety minutes of episodic jolts, the visual style is jumbled. Distinctive only in having a better effects budget than your average demons-in-the-attic quickie. While the super-parody elements offer a few snorts of amusement, the movie avoids taking on more complex ideas about Superman as an American ideal, though the filmmakers are obviously aware of the Bizarro context.

A cinematic version of this story definitely wasn’t needed. But then again, neither was the hero.

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

Without anything more than the heralding of a cult figure, Living with Chucky becomes a Chucky lovefest relying solely on reminiscing the good times; the kind of interviews that used to be added as a DVD extra.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

While she’s not running up Billie Eilish-like social media influence, we understand that Collè is a kind of lightning rod for sexually-anxious, McJob-holding, roommate-sharing, millennial types. We also get the not-so-deep message, writ large and underscored, that sometimes transparency may be the best disguise of all.

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