There’s a little more room for characters to breathe. This is not to last, however. The whole thing must ignite into a final act of fights, car chases and general destruction (and Snake Eyes’ discovery of honour). The battle scenes are often darkly lit and confusing (though it is a change of pace to see so much swordplay as opposed to gunplay), and the attempt to fuse the Joes and Cobra into the plot in the last act is not exactly smooth.

Beans is an ambitious film that, for the most part, works. It extends its efforts to reach a larger audience, but the story it tells is easy to admire.

A poetic drama about the lives of three Maori girls from the 1950s to the 1980s, Cousins is a heart-breaker, tempered with hope.

None of this is helped by Platt’s performance, with a petulant eye-roll to every impediment, as if he were the fussbudget Felix of The Odd Couple and Cindy his disaster-prone Oscar.

As utterly derivative action films go, Jolt has definite energy, and it’s not pretending to be original. As a time-killer, that may be enough for some.

Director Nick Moran gets the temperature of the era mostly right, and effectively weaves this extraordinary source material into a watchable if formulaic two hours.

Even those resistant to Gunda’s vegetarian message would be hard-pressed to describe these creatures cavalierly having witnessed these exquisitely framed, highly meditative moments. We see life within these beings, and we witness their undeniable will to live. And it’s beautiful. Gunda is truly one of a kind.

Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain is a carefully made film, a wonderful homage to a flawed hero. It will lift you up, it will potentially break your heart. But it will remind you that you’re not alone. We’re in this together.

The fast pace is attention-span theatre for the young’uns, and the adult-aimed quips are entertaining for a while.

If this seems like a bit of a deep dive when the subject is trendy restaurants in Portland, Pig is a serious movie with heady themes that just happens to come at you from oblique and unexpected angles.

The Loneliest Whale is gripping and highly persuasive, blending hard science with real-life action/adventure sequences, talking-head interviews, and — sorry, sorry — a whale of a true story that has been headline news for years.

In sum, we have a silly Hollywood-style action movie with a Robin Hood theme, serving the ideology of an elitist authoritarian regime. In other words, a real misfit.

When the creepy conflux of the title occurs, it’s terrifying because its conclusion is unforeseeable. Like life you might say: impossible to predict but nevertheless captivating.

It's an understandable impulse for a film of this sort to hold off on divulging secrets, content to fill the story with ambiguity rather than rush to reveal anyone's agenda. But directors Martín Blousson and Macarena García Lenzi's tight clench on the film's secrets feels more like an exercise in prying out a reveal than a steady unraveling of clues and discovery.

Meander, by director Mathieu Turi, uses the device of the escape room, or tunnel in this instance, as a way of negotiating the story of a woman’s perilous journey through a debilitating sadness. It’s allegorical, no doubt. But it’s an allegory that makes excellent use of an incredibly intricate and claustrophobic set piece.

Shortland has given us a fast-paced movie with action sequences, character depth, and very subtle social and political subtexts about the way women are seen, treated and exploited in the world.

Although Let Us In is billed as a science-fiction/horror for young adults, it’s hard to imagine anyone identifying as a teen or tween finding much interest beyond a rudimentary curiosity of an online urban myth getting the feature-length film treatment.

And though you can sense the influences of Mad Max, Escape from New York, and even a few influential forces from Walter Hill’s The Warriors, The Forever Purge remains an uncinematic thriller unworthy of breaking a lengthy stay away from the theatre.

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.

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.

There is a bristling, neon energy to Zola which, given its provenance as a series of real-life tweets from waitress and exotic dancer (and now executive producer) A’ziah “Zola” King, seems about right. This is a road trip movie straight outta weirdsville.

Impossible odds and a furious deadline have propelled many great and not-so-great action films. Those factors are very much at play in The Ice Road, which stars Liam Neeson, several big rigs, and the province of Manitoba in a thriller that, though by-the-numbers in execution, boasts a watchable enough premise.

Traditional horror fans are likely to find the effort tiresome despite a few intense scenes. But those who like their horror films laced in a philosophical debate will find plenty to enjoy.

Like so many recent documentaries that focus on cultural icons, Wolfgang isn’t a deep dive but more of a profile, and an appreciation.

The emotional tone here is sympathetic and elegiac, and since both men have a way with words, often absorbing. Though there is little here that won’t be known by fans of the writers, the format of the interviews is striking.

Censor is an off-brand horror treat that walks the distance between artistic freedom and the scrutiny of morbid excess to which the title refers.

When the movie abandons the memoir’s story of grief and joy it becomes less interesting.

For better and worse, the script has a clear depiction of contemporary good and evil and an efficient movie-of-the-week purposefulness, to the point where you half expect to see a helpline number before the closing credits.