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.