Materialists is fun and satisfying and, thanks its wonderful cast, full of tender sweetness.

Endless Cookie is a treasure. It’s a fantastic family story — you will fall in love with Peter’s creative offspring — but also a disheartening look at the realities of Indigenous life in Canada.

DeBlois elevates a beloved cinema memory and creates a spectacle, a mythical fairy tale—Game of Thrones lite—with enough DreamWorks Animation magic to warrant its own theme park ride.

It is engaging, warm, touching, and sincere without being cloying or manipulative.

It’s all very sobering stuff and the film does a good job of capturing the kaleidoscopic awesomeness-slash-weirdness of being inside a tiny, agile vessel dipped to heretofore unimaginable depths.

In the end, The Phoenician Scheme has a warm and beating heart.

For all its proclamations of authenticity, The Ritual feels no more grounded than a message from a Ouija board. And that, perhaps, is the real possession at work here: truth, struggling to be a spectacle.

The stunts are super-human, the combat is exhilarating, and definitely in the realm of the unrealistic. But that’s the joy in watching an animated show and suspending disbelief. The audience wants to be entertained and this film certainly does that with its detailed explanations of how these technologically-backward heroes are even able to stay in the fight.

With Sir David as our guide, it’s a theme well worth plunging into.

It’s all claustrophobic and terrible and … wildly entertaining.

In short, Ballerina is as close to a John Wick 5 as you are going to get without calling it that.

It has the potential to be a cracking good comedy, and the trailer suggests as much. But in the end, all this proves is that you can distill two minutes of hilarity from 96 of meh.

Ultimately, Bring Her Back is a film of contradictions: intimate and epic, bloody and cerebral, empathetic and terrifying. It’s the kind of horror that might take until long after the credits roll before its full impact lands.

Two Women, for all its entertainment value, is silly and shallow, though deeper than porn, it must be said.

It's clear the formula for the last film is the expectation for this one, but what’s missing is the believability behind it.

Disney’s Lilo & Stitch is about a dangerous alien lifeform that escapes from its creators, arrives on a backward planet and charms the inhabitants. Which is not a bad metaphor for Disney itself. It continues to remake hand-drawn animated classics as bloated live-action spectacles, hoping a nostalgic moviegoing public will continue to greet them with open arms and wallets.

Although the film gets the mood and feeling right, the story is maddeningly spotty. Its arrow is in the bow, but it feels like it’s one rewrite away from neatly hitting the mark.

Not to put too fine a point on this or anything, but Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is an interminable slog.

Final Destination: Bloodlines doesn’t completely reinvent the wheel. It realigns the tires and tightens a few bolts. And for a franchise that is built on inevitability and expectations, that’s as close to cheating death as you could hope.

This is not a rousing movie that people are going to come away from energized. Still, it’s an interesting approach to an extended ad for an album.

Geriatric killers are nothing new at the movies — think of John Wick, Red or Taken — but The Old Woman with The Knife has a lot more than exhilarating action scenes going on. The way the elderly are regarded and treated underlies much of the storytelling, and there’s an emotional element that’s unexpected for the genre.

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

It’s conceptually unsettling and bold, but there are some hiccups with the execution.

With its elliptical, patched-together structure and multi-year duration, Caught By the Tides can be a challenging film to follow but, by the end, it achieves something both original and rewarding.

In short, there is much to enjoy in Bonjour Tristesse, but the film as a whole never quite rises to the level of its best parts. And that’s a little sad.

Viewers are better served by submitting to the immersive thrill of it all, in the context of a film that doesn’t ask us to ask too much of ourselves.

Don't expect high heroic drama, but definitely be prepared for some laughs and even a bit of MCU canonical continuity, believe it or not.

Their creative process in action is just one of the cool archival treats in Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie, a jam-packed two hours of pop cultural hindsight that is part extended sketch, part couples therapy, and part traditional documentary.