Alien: Romulus may not have the edgy feel of the original Alien, nor the rollercoaster ride we got with Aliens, but it's arguably the best entry in the franchise in over thirty years.

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.

Good One, a lesson in minimalist storytelling from first-time feature writer-director India Donaldson, is a movie that sneaks up on you.

The problem is the execution. As directed by Justin Baldoni (who also stars as the husband), the film feels lacklustre and slapdash, never doing anything to rise above the basic storytelling beats.

One hopes Sugarcane will be shown in schools all over North America.

An hour and 40 minutes of noise without any tension or sense of purpose, Borderlands would be Exhibit Z in the conventional wisdom that video games don’t transfer well filmically – that is, if recent efforts like The Last of Us or Fallout hadn’t proved otherwise.

I was ultimately less enthralled with the final film than I was with some of the performances in Cuckoo. Stevens and Schafer are amazing, and Bluthardt makes an excellent oddity, a convenient ally with his own mysterious agenda. But Cuckoo can’t quite bring all its disparate elements together into something cohesive and coherent.

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.

Fast, funny and entirely forgettable, The Instigators is an entertaining if shopworn heist story.

Trap is simply M. Night Shyamalan’s silliest movie since The Happening.

What holds it all together is a superbly understated performance from Wang, who is fully three-dimensional as Chris — a decent kid trying to figure it all out. Absent here are all the usual cinema cliches and exaggerations about teen life, thank the goddess.

Atmosphere will only take you so far, and it soon becomes apparent that Starve Acre is 10 liters of helium in a 20-liter balloon. The result is limp and never fully takes flight.

RTA is a strictly volunteer program, with no academic requirement to enter or good-behaviour code to remain. Sing Sing, while not an advertisement for the program, does seem to capture what makes it special, and what its participants get from the experience.

Only the River Flows — based on the novel Mistakes by the River by Yu Hua — runs a tight 102 minutes but crams a lot of atmosphere into that time, moments of high drama interspersed with bizarre humour.

Kneecap is one of the most likeable films this year. Turn up the volume and enjoy.

Compassionate and original, Crossing is an odd couple road movie about friendship and acceptance of differences that demonstrates rather than preaches its theme.

Even with its slender premise, sporadic laughs, and abundant clichés, The Fabulous Four is entertaining and unapologetically — almost aggressively — sweet-natured, promoting friendship and female camaraderie while spotlighting a demographic underrepresented on screen and widely considered to have the kinds of dilemmas presented here all figured out by now.

Deadpool & Wolverine is enjoyable on its merits: R-rated, horribly violent juvenile fantasy loaded with nostalgic references from the glory days of comic reading that fans, new and old, will thoroughly enjoy as it drags you down to its irreverently funny level.

Plenty happens in Exhuma, which branches out from its home base in South Korea, briefly touching down in America, with added references to Japan. It can make for a crowded narrative, launching several storylines of unsettled spirits and ghostly miscreants. Yet Hyun's story is told efficiently enough not to seem convoluted or aimless.

What National Anthem lacks in spectacle it more than makes up for in quiet moments of beauty, tenderness and heartache.

As a summertime popcorn film, it’s fine. But Twisters lacks the breathtaking je ne sais quoi oomph a film of this scope should have. We get spun alright, but the landing feels very safe and predictable.

It may not sound like a big deal, but it’s actually very satisfying to see game-changing historical women having their stories told on a major platform and having them told well, with emotional intelligence.

If you know Stalter from HBO's Hacks then you know the general territory. In this case, the whole movie is Stalter and while her bizarre charm is formidable, it’s not quite enough to carry everything — a stronger script might have helped.

Watching this film is a lesson in history. It’s detailed, accurate and meticulous in its presentation of a human drama that realistically could have happened. When you hear about Viggo’s attention to history, this is a western story that becomes and grittier and accurate look into the past and a lesson in history.

Valley of Exile is a slow, closely observed and very personal story that distils the terrible cost of conflict and presents it on a relatable human scale. While the film celebrates the women’s resilience, it also shows the gradual, inexorable unravelling of family as all things familiar fall away.

It seems to be about a lot of things — a kinder, gentler America, early feminism, truth in advertising, an impartial media. But above all, it’s a pleasant few hours at the movies with charismatic actors Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum.

Touch is a film that moves at its own Icelandic pace to savour its own tragic, but ultimately hopeful story.

The interesting thing about the remarkably intense, violent police-procedural/occult-drama Longlegs is that it doesn’t overplay the Cage card.