This is not a film to easily swoon over, but mournfully contemplate.

It all makes for an emotional send-off, with the reassuring familiarity of those heart-stirring strings cuing the final glimpse of the estate in silhouette at magic hour.

While Lawrence keeps the momentum steady – just like his contest’s most able-bodied walkers – and ensures that every few minutes delivers some kind of violent jolt, there’s just not enough meat to this particular roadkill story to keep one cinematic foot in front of the other.

There’s a kind of procedural nostalgia at work here. It’s not as newborn ridiculous, and certainly not as innovative, but the film knows the game it’s playing – or, in Tap’s case, the music it has to keep hammering out. It doesn’t hit eleven, but it doesn’t have to.

This is a remake built on equal parts care and admiration, a love letter to all the sickos out there. It’s nothing to simply wash your hands of. Or flush away.

The Roses is not nearly acrimonious, or funny, enough to justify its peculiar existence. If DeVito’s original was the cinematic equivalent of going through the divorce from hell, this new break-up feels more like a trial separation.

As the medley of violence continues, Stone’s mugging goes from giddily sinister to hammy and exhausting. Same goes for Nobody 2, and also the post-John Wick wave of action movies it’s part of.

Honey Don’t! attempts another go at a mock, low-brow outing reimagined through a queer lens, but suffers irrevocably from an uncompelling mystery, patterned by a series of gags that leads nowhere.

As nice as it is to see New York play itself or watch Ahmed and Worthington run circles around each other, the entire caper is rendered unsolvable by one big, meatheaded twist that undermines everything that came before.

Guts will be busted, and sides will be split. Heck, moviegoers might even learn to kiss and make up with comedies for good.

When Lee puts Washington in just the right scene, with just the right power dynamics and just the right nerve-rattling dialogue, the result is a thing of high art. Forget the film’s initial low points – just keep aiming toward the top. And keep watching King David’s throne.

If Anderson fits like a glove in the new Naked Gun, it’s because her durability is as pleasantly unexpected as this franchise that’s refusing to heed the memo that reboots suck and studio comedy is dead.

Quickly and efficiently, Cregger sets up his world and its impossibly high stakes with style to burn. Finally, we have a horror movie director who knows how to properly light a nighttime scene. But once Cregger’s narrative threads are laid out, the writer-director has a helluva time stitching them together.

By multiplying the number of body-swaps, the script seems to have accidentally increased its plot padding, too, resulting in a mushy mess that is only fitfully charming. But when the film does work, it delivers the kind of thank-goodness-it’s-Friday success story that will warm the heart of every long-time Lindsay Lohan fan out there (we are legion).

Whenever Rockwell’s purr comes on, which is often given Mr. Wolf’s central role, the whole affair sings, uniting both children who are naturally entranced by the actor’s delivery and adults who get Oscar-calibre work in an otherwise forgettable kiddie flick.

Together is such a sharp blend of the hilarious and the terrifying that it busts your gut at the same time it has you gritting your teeth.

Directed by Sophie Brooks and co-written by Gordon, it subverts both the rom-com and horror genres to produce an original story that thwarts predictability.

The Fantastic Four is here for a proper reset – a buoyant and frequently dazzling one at that, which sort of makes up for the failed movie adaptations of Marvel’s first family from the past.

While one-time teen dreams Hewitt and Prinze Jr. earn their paydays by lending a semblance of gravitas to the silliness, their brief on-screen presence only underline the lifelessness of today’s fresh meat.

By the film’s haunting finale – a gut-punch moment of reckoning that follows nearly half an hour of entertainingly amateurish gunplay – Kurosawa’s sentiments on the current state of e-commerce are clear. Whether emptor or venditor, capitalism is full of caveats.

If you can’t Smurf anything nice, then don’t Smurf anything at all. Such is the key lesson to be taken away by discerning parents this weekend after being dragged by their children to yet another big-screen adaptation of everyone’s second-favourite blue-man group.

The result is a magnificently off-the-rails poison pill of a film, one that skitters from paranoiac thriller to reactionary satire to something far more caustic and unnerving. It is the cinematic equivalent of long COVID – lingering, haunting, and demanding rigorous, skeptical investigation.

The band’s story should be a compelling one to tell. But The Kids in the Crowd glazes over the kind of story Simple Plan deserves, instead tending toward a superficial kind of fan service.

The problem is, while alluding to the depressing state of things, the gleeful fun Gunn insists on having, with his kitschy aesthetic and silly humour, can feel forced.

40 Acres is a top-tier genre film that Trojan-horses a flood of knotty, provocative conversations into multiplexes via the best kind of speculative fiction.

So many of Rebirth’s images and set pieces are lifeless, and no amount of on-location filming in Thailand – versus the soundstage green screenery so favoured by most of Jurassic’s blockbuster contemporaries – can hide the fact that very little in the screenplay makes logistical, narrative or emotional sense.

More often than not, Heads of State feels as if it is missing its own leader, as if the director was simply a package lost in the Prime delivery mail.

Nothing is exactly new in F1, yet at the same time it is all immensely, rewardingly renewable – a true blue box of recycled cinematic trash, compacted into something irresistibly bright and shiny.

Disney and Pixar’s latest outing delivers on some frontiers, but puzzles on others.

Boyle, who won the Best Director Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire, has often let his sentimental side get the best of him. But here there’s a maturity, gracefulness and elegance to how he hits those notes, though they’re nearly undone by a goofy but admittedly fun coda setting up the series’ next installment.

The real charm of Boxcutter is just how Dahya and his cinematographer James Klopko capture the city as Rome criss-crosses it. Without jackhammering the point home, the film’s vision of Toronto is one of a city shedding one skin to wear another, in the process forcing all the creative forces who make it so special further and further outside its boundaries.

The dragons are fine by today’s CGI standards. Toothless glistens, thankfully. Young audiences will be delighted.

More than likely, Flanagan’s film will leave you a sobbing mess. But there is a sense of betrayal, too – it’s almost too easy to wring those tears. Take this dance, sure, but bring the Kleenex, too.

Exploiting a mere sliver of story from John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, Ballerina concocts an especially dull origin story for an ancillary piece of Wickian lore.

Dangerous Animals is like a bowl of shark-fin soup laced with a dollop of vegemite: not exactly good for either you, your taste buds or the environment, but strangely compelling nonetheless.

While the performances are memorable (Gonthier-Hyndman especially), there is an indifference in the writing, particularly around Florence’s mental health, that feels off-putting while impersonating compassionate comedy. Here and there, some gags work, but one is liable to emerge from the whole exercise feeling weary rather than liberated.

The reboot is sure to delight the young ones in your care, especially over the summer. As for the older ones? There are enough throwbacks to reminisce – and then revisit the offbeat classic.

Bring Her Back feels less like a movie than a finely tuned instrument of doom. In the devilish hands of Australian filmmaking brothers Danny and Michael Philippou, evil has been concentrated into an exceptionally and impressively nasty 104 minutes.

All the magnificent little elements add up to a whole lot of not-enough this time around, resulting in a creaky and exhausting pastiche of Andersonia rather than the real deal.

Lamenting the loss of the arthouse rom-com often feels like pleading for dessert. Thankfully, Piani’s debut is sweet enough to nurse the craving.

Once Cruise and McQuarrie expunge all the Ozymandias from their systems, The Final Reckoning manages to deliver the goods. Or at least make a decent case that Cruise has earned the right to become his own biggest champion.

Much like its predecessors, Bloodlines joyfully relishes in its Rube Goldbergian kills and thrills, often trading on the absurd humour of its own fashioning.

It is a slow-moving, self-insistent and exhausting trip. The end can’t come soon enough.

The more queasy the film becomes – in both story and style, with the director preferring unusually moody natural light and nerve-rattling zooms – the funnier it gets.

It helps that Quaid is so good at landing every punchline, if not punch. His Nathan may not have any sense of pain, but Quaid gives him a great sense of humour.

Nothing in Shadow Force surprises, delights or even attempts to raise your pulse above a twitch.

Seven years is a long time to attempt a reheating of all the many ingredients that made the original film go down so easily, and Another Simple Favor simply tastes off.

Canadian director Jason Buxton crafts a sometimes tense and sometimes unsteady character study that isn’t so much laced with dread as it is slathered with it.

It becomes clear that there’s just not enough meat on the bones of Craig’s film to justify all the dismemberment.

What Chew-Bose gets so right about these characters is their very performativity, building a lifestyle where everyone is legible to each other despite a desire to remain unknowable.

The first Marvel film in ages to look, feel, and move like an actual feature film and not a slop bucket of CGI.

It genuinely wants to say something important and poignant about what we lose when we stop believing in the unreal, but it cannot quite make the leap into figuring out why anybody should be inclined to listen to such heartfelt pleas.

The easy back-and-forth chemistry between Affleck and Bernthal as they paint the town blood-red provides certain dividends.

With The Shrouds, the filmmaker – not only one of Canada’s greatest creations, but cinema’s, too – has delivered what might be his career-defining masterpiece.

If anything, Sinners is the freest that the Creed and Black Panther filmmaker has ever been: stitching drama to spectacle, folding the personal into the political, slipping past the limits of what studio films are supposed to do in favour of what they still might dare to try.

The Wedding Banquet’s endearing qualities largely outweigh its deficiencies.

Unfortunately, Opus isn’t able to keep up the tension of its cult-horror mystery, speeding through its reveals with a surprising laziness that feels counter to the care it initially took in building out its story.

If Minecraft is the game where kids exercise their creativity by building new digital worlds full of tunnels and fortresses, A Minecraft Movie is where that creativity goes to die.

It is respectful and smooth filmmaking that never loses sight of its one and only goal: keeping its audience hooked.

Director Christopher Landon injects the entire affair with so much stylistic verve and narrative propulsion that, like the best kind of first date, it whips by almost too quickly.

Alternately tedious, cacophonous and stultifying, the latest show of force from writer-director Alex Garland following last year’s equally frustrating Civil War just might be the most unnecessarily unpleasant cinematic experience you will endure this year.

Things play out as sentimentally as expected, while scratching the surface at something deeper, exploring the relationship people have to music, and how that can either change or stay frozen in time.

Freaky Tales has neither the patience nor the depth to imagine any one person or story with a legitimate hook.

A pharmaceutical-industry satire so flaccid that it’s in desperate need of Cialis, Death of a Unicorn is destined to fade into the mythical margins of cinematic history, with future moviegoers convinced that – like its title creature – the film never really existed at all.

Like Majors’s chiselled physique, which is almost a special effect all its own, Magazine Dreams takes unironic pride in flexing its themes so nakedly and frequently that there’s little left to the imagination.

With Misericordia, Guiraudie deftly strikes the balance between the playfully sacrilegious and the sociopathic, rounded out by a seductively bizarre cast of dwellers and clusters of puckered, corpse-fed mushrooms.

Coogan brings a delightfully sardonic deadpan to the role of the bemused bystander observing the antics of penguins, adolescents and … military dictatorships.

It’s a solid notch in Statham’s career, but nothing that will change anyone’s mind about the actor.

This new Snow White is neither a chore à la 2023′s The Little Mermaid nor an abomination on the scale of Robert Zemeckis’s ghoulish Pinocchio redo. Whistle hard enough, and it almost sort of works.

Every single beat of The Alto Knights feels like an historical footnote from Goodfellas or The Godfather Part II stretched out to interminable feature length – musty, dusty, dry.

Ultimately, We Forgot to Break Up’s broken social scene offers a lot of hum, but not enough rattle.

Blanchett, as always, is flawless as the seductive and secretive Kathryn, but it’s Fassbender who reveals a different side of himself.

Zoopocalypse’s bid to revel in the kiddie-macabre space is admirable.

More than anything, NTBTSTM is simply hilarious – a furiously funny roller coaster of a film whose energy never, ever dips. It is difficult to imagine a better, sharper comedy coming along this year. Or the next.

The entire spectacle is so unabashedly outrageous that you cannot help but side with its many excesses.

The underwater cinematography, orchestrated by Nick Remy Matthews, is often startling, destined to make the dark box of a movie theatre all that more engagingly claustrophobic. And the ultimate story behind Last Breath is incredible, verging on the unbelievable.

The most remarkable element is surely the way Egoyan has seamlessly integrated footage from previous COC productions, that he shot himself at the time, into his new film to give it the breadth of a genuine stage performance.

The film is, true to Sorrentino’s style, breathtakingly shot. It is a vibrant, arresting love letter to Naples complemented by the choices of costume artistic director Anthony Vaccarello for Saint Laurent. Every shot is intentional, every close-up serves a purpose. The problem, however, is that the purpose is as surface deep as the characters Parthenope consistently reckons with.

Perkins’s version of The Monkey is an annoying, snarky and slight endeavour that just about kills itself in its bid to satisfy all the many cinema-starved sickos out there.

The Gorge is half a smouldering romance, half a zombified venture into overkilled horror-movie tropes.

This is a movie of pussyfooting and sidestepping, unconcerned with race, history, heroism or really any idea at all beyond “Hulk smash.”

The plot and most action sequences here are as cookie-cutter as the community homes Quan’s Gable is selling.

For all its gestures toward trending conversations about our warped relationship with technology, and the entitled boys weaned on it, Companion is ultimately just a fun genre mash-up that pales in comparison to the superior movies it tends to pay homage to but elevated by its cast.

I’m Still Here is a timely, exquisite masterpiece.

Thanks to Lee’s smooth construction and her performers’ carefully calibrated performances – Beirne is particularly engaging in a role that doesn’t automatically earn sympathy – it all clicks together.

A C-grade thriller that is further dumbed down to dunce-cap calibre, Flight Risk might have worked as an enjoyably grimy piece of genre trash had Gibson not made every single wrong directorial decision along the way.

Deeply playful while never falling for the more hoary tendencies of the genre – remarkably, Soderbergh seems to have invented a new way of filming a “jump scare” here – Presence keeps its audience close and tight, building to a finale that forces you to reconsider the entire experiment.

Universal Language is a film flooded with sorrow and spirit, discombobulating surrealism and comforting sentimentality.

The sentiment of being thrown to the margins of an industry that seemed predestined to carry you is certainly an interesting point of departure, but the resulting film often feels stagnant, unable to square its romantic impulses – as a frustrated Shelly puts it in one scene, “this is breasts and rhinestones and joy!” – with the fraught realities of these characters.

As sincere and sentimental as his approach is, Whannell struggles to marry the emotional beats to the schlockey thrills the genre demands. Instead, these two competing modes tend to cancel each other out, but not so much as to disregard what the ambitious director is going for.

It plays out like that rare piece of art capable of capturing the individual agency inherent in both resistance and compliance. An entire history of oppression isn’t needed here – that is beyond the scope of any one film and a waste of this one.

It’s hard to describe Nickel Boys. It seems like an injustice to call it, simply, a film. It’s a remarkable piece of art, even more impressive when you consider that it’s photographer and filmmaker RaMell Ross’s debut feature film – in fiction.

Pantera mixes its many influences into a smooth spectacle so confident and patient in its assemblage that it instantly wins you over.

Long underutilized and certainly undervalued, Canadian actress Pill is a pure delight here as Charlotte, anchoring and then elevating every single scene that she is in.

Ultimately, it all becomes too strained to take seriously.

Vengeance Most Fowl is a cozy return to form that plaits together its own laboured conception and our mechanized conditions in order to enliven its signature duo among the youth of today.

Better Man is a triumph of cheek and imagination. Gracey attempts much but actually manages to accomplish all that he set out to do.

Despite the arid direction, Chalamet’s Dylan – described in the film as “a cross between a choir boy and a beatnik” – comes from the heart.