Alpha aims to be not just a story but a transporting visual experience, which is one area where it over-reaches.

Nicchiarelli’s film makes a case that Nico’s instability and bleakness was no pose.

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 most compelling performance here belongs to the Indonesian actor and martial artist Iko Uwais, who became famous in The Raid movies. Here, he plays the “asset” who must be taken out of the country. Uwais’ hand-and-foot battles are genuinely explosive and when he’s not fighting, he doesn’t say much, which is a welcome relief from all the rest of the babble.

The characters of Rachel and Nick are charming but their relationship feels backgrounded by numbing amounts of money porn, stilted melodrama, and often-strained comedy.

City-dwellers may go their entire lives without realizing that the greatest movie screen of all is above their heads, telling billions of stories.

Dog Days moves along, mostly pleasantly and at its worst is a somewhat-forced good time.

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.

As a movie for adults, Christopher Robin has rewards, but needn’t have been so antic. The schmaltz would have sufficed. As a movie for children, well…

Reiner’s attempt to create Spotlight-like docudrama of newsroom courage and stoke fresh outrage about government lies is undermined by clunky old-fashioned filmmaking and Joey Harstone’s exposition-clotted script.

Blindspotting is a first film, a busy jumble of thoughts and urgent feelings: The humour is sometimes corny, the surreal fantasies strained and the dramatization of racial privilege unsubtle. Yet the level of ambition here, the commitment to try to say so much, is fresh and exciting.

For a film where every single scene is rigidly contained within a screen — framed by an iPhone FaceTime chat, a laptop exchange, TV image, home movie or security camera surveillance — Searching has a surprising sense of momentum.

It’s hard to imagine The Darkest Minds becoming the franchise it was intended to be. The plot is murky confusing and unengaging, and the entire genre may just be worn out by now.

The movie that can contain McKinnon, or the movie where she’s willing to be contained, has yet to be made.

Given all the on-screen risk-taking, Mission: Impossible - Fallout plays it pretty safe. What you get is essentially an action movies greatest hits package.

In both its light and dark phases, Three Identical Strangers comes across as almost too calculatedly entertaining, as Wardle carefully deals out the critical information, with the odd red herring, for maximum effect. In its defense, the film is consistently compassionate and fair-minded. Ultimately, the film confirms its investigative legitimacy by refusing to offer easy answers.

Crucially, Macdonald (see also The Last King of Scotland, Marley, State of Play) doesn’t stint on the train-wreck aspects of her career: the infamous Diane Sawyer interview, disastrous, flabby late-career performances, and yes, those tabloid images of a gaunt, wild-eyed, and clearly tripping Houston. Whether audiences feel greater insight into her dreams and demons as a result is somewhat less certain.

It’s a roiling mix of wry race comedy, economy-grade dystopian sci-fi, and Silicon Valley satire. Also, it's as funny and as caustic as hell.

Callahan, who died in 2010, understood the emotional venting behind his work and talked about it. As moving as it often is, we get a lot of the venting in Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot, but not enough of the work, or the man behind it.

Though Under the Tree falls firmly into satire, it is not a comedy with a lot of laughs. It is more an absurdist tragedy, with cringe-worthy moments.

Burnham’s debut is a little gem that feels true and is surprisingly tender.

Despite committed performances all around, Boundaries stays firmly rooted in the meh. Much as we want to root for Laura, her constant whining about her unhappy childhood wins no empathy and drags things down.

The First Purge has a lot of narrative and unsubtle subtext to cram into a movie that’s barely 90 minutes long. In fact, its big, violent finish notwithstanding, a lot of it is quite dull and its pacing inconsistent.

Ant-Man and the Wasp moves, mainly on the strength of snappy repartee and visuals. Ignore the plot and live in the moment – kind of a quantum concept right there – and it’s entertaining enough.

You can’t come away from Love, Cecil without appreciating how much of Beaton's aesthetic outlived him.

What gives Hearts Beat Loud its life is the father-daughter interaction and chemistry between Offerman and Clemons. Their original jam session makes the audience sit up and take notice.

The triumph of a film like Upgrade, an unapologetic B-movie, is that it aims low and exceeds expectations.

Uncle Drew is a goodhearted broad comedy, one where you don’t have to know the players (under all that latex) to enjoy the game.