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.

The Watchers is not a perfect movie, but it is an excellent start, heralding the arrival of a bold new talent.

If you are someone inclined to head to the theatre specifically to see the new Jennifer Lopez rom-com, you will get exactly the movie you hope for. And you will be happy.

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.

The film is long and slow, but never boring. There is, however, a sense that the various storylines are not woven together completely.

Black Water is an entertaining enough film, although one based on an overused premise that’s been done better.

There are too many cute influences, too many perfect musical numbers and even the physical rendering of the characters themselves belie the gritty human struggle that has remained at the core of this story for this to render the true story of Ebenezer Scrooge.

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.

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.

Uncharted once again confirms my belief that video games make for bad to mediocre movies. At least Uncharted scrounges up enough fortitude to be mediocre.

DogMan is kind of an idiotic movie built on a ludicrous premise. This does not prevent it from being eminently watchable.