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.