We’re watching Buckley electrify the screen today. May her voice rattle in your head for the rest of the year.

Anna relies on a time-shifting structure that is laughably exhausting.

An exercise in naive commentary and globe-trotting magical realism, the film dares viewers to take it seriously.

Still, once the end credits rolled – including superfluous “bonus” scenes wrapping up various narrative threads – I couldn’t help but empathize with that talking spork. Freedom, sweet freedom! For now.

The new movie is dumb, pointless and completely bereft of laughs. It wastes a talented cast and all of your time. Worst of all, though, it is unconscionably lazy, starting with its generic title (again, who is naming these things?) and ending with its shrug-of-the-shoulders climax.

In its neediness to be liked, the new Shaft – the third of five films in the series to be titled, simply, Shaft – says everything and nothing.

The best thing about Late Night, a new comedy about modern office life, is that it could be set in almost any workplace and still feel mostly sharp and entirely necessary. The worst thing about Late Night is that it’s set in the world of late-night television.

For its slightness and silliness, its concerns are grander. Here, the undead ghouls represent nothing but the cold prospect of death itself. “This isn’t gonna end well,” Driver’s omniscient copper keeps intoning. And it never does.

Who needs original stars Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones when you have, um ... well, what does this new Men in Black Cinematic Universe offer, exactly? As evidenced by MiB:I, absolutely nothing of value.

For those entering grade school, there is likely no better and more concise primer on the scandal. For everyone else, well, you know the story.

The entire production entertainingly coalesces into part concert doc, part cultural artifact, part “gotcha!” stunt, and part meditation on the fickle, fleeting nature of creativity.

A film so dull, flat, and totally joyless that, in the absence of anything compelling unfolding on screen, one’s mind may be forgiven for turning to the corporate machinations grinding behind it.

The message of the film is that life throws surprises. While that is true, this predictable film itself is not one of them.

The quirky romantic comedy The Tomorrow Man relies on the believability of their late-in-life love in order for the film to work. Which it does, to some degree – that degree being small-story preciousness and the simple pleasure of eating popcorn while watching Blythe Danner and John Lithgow watching television as they eat popcorn.

It’s a sweeping story, but for those already enamoured with “the people’s tenor," Pavarotti is unlikely to offer any new insights into his life.

Framing John DeLorean is a film that delights in stretching the truth, so maybe its constant ignorance of Hamm’s work is just part of its whole meta-narrative shtick.

Shannon, who has a great face and a criminally underused talent, gives it all she’s got. You’ll be Googling the Dickinson canon and rethinking all your literature courses the minute it ends.

The music’s evolution and crisscrossing pollination is explained well – Mr. Tambourine Man inspired Rubber Soul which influenced Pet Sounds which begat Sgt. Pepper’s – but why are we watching the randomly selected couch full of Cat Power, Regina Spektor and a catatonic Beck sift through old LPs?

The director’s semi-autobiographical, 1980s-set story may be small – it mostly focuses on the turbulent relationship between Julie and Anthony as the former struggles to find her artistic voice and the latter battles various addictions – but her impulses and vision are grand.

In revealing Cassandra’s interior life, Rozema lays bare the modern female condition in an epic battle that is by turns lacerating, soothing and heartbreaking.

The journey here, over all, is still worth it, full of Asians making jokes, talking dirty and getting it on – like any good rom-com.

There is the overwhelming sense that Domino was not directed by any one person at all, but rather spliced and diced by committee into something barely watchable.

Unfortunately, more often than not, Ma settles into its lack of a refined generic vision and stalls out just before it’s able to hit most of its horror talking points squarely on the head.

The Mumbai-set Photograph is a gentle romance cleverly told, and not without humour.

“I have a theory that less becomes more,” Halston purrs in one early interview. The opposite may well be true, and the same could be said for this documentary.

Rocketman is Broadway razzle-dazzle of the best kind.

When Dougherty is able to keep these intelligent-ish impulses at bay, King of the Monsters is stupendous stupidity.

Wilde’s smart directing choices and the bravery of her two fearless leads transform a series of comic set-pieces, usually seen in fare such as "American Pie," into iconic character moments.

The film is not nearly as strong as its villain. It is, however, just as immature.

Most everyone who watches The Perfection will instead be staring at the screen slack-jawed, dumbfounded at the gory silliness they endured.

Unfortunately no amount of self-confidence can sustain All Is True, Branagh’s stab at filling in the blanks of Shakespeare’s retirement, about which there is little officially known.

Each frame is drowning in vibrant colours and packed with so many decked-out extras that Aladdin’s environment seems less like a typical CGI-enabled sound stage, and more like a tangible, if bombastically stylish, world of its own.

Perhaps it’s the film’s predictability (and delightful corniness) that contributes to its charm.

Heartstrings are pulled like a puppy’s leash; nothing much unpredictable happens.

All right, there are bits and pieces of new material in Chapter 3, but they come in the form of gobbledygook world-building. What’s worse is that all this blather about the underground assassin economy arrives gussied up with characters uttering needlessly intimidating Latin phrases.

When the bloody finale does eventually arrive, though, you’ll be thankful that Leigh is at the helm. Once again, the director proves himself to be a master of basic human conflict, on whatever scale is necessary.

Defining a politician’s titan legacy in a singularly unexpected way, Meeting Gorbachev meets its expectations.

The film’s harmless pro-nature message is replaced with a drippy sense of self-congratulatory idealism, turning the film into a home movie by way of humble-brag. And then, by the hour mark, it’s merely a giant commercial for the couple’s 200-acre Apricot Lane Farm in Moorpark, Calif.

Yet while last month’s Claire Denis drama "High Life" will go down as one of the year’s ultimate masterpieces, the Swedish soul-crusher Aniara will likely be remembered as an ambitious if ultimately weaker curiosity: the "Antz" to Denis’s "A Bug’s Life" (a sentence I never thought I’d be able to employ, but here we are).

Crucially, Ask Dr. Ruth shows us a renegade ahead of her time.

Detective Pikachu is unrelentingly weird. Thankfully, unlike Mario Bros., it’s also breezily watchable, if slightly insubstantial beyond its strangeness.

It is a sadly out-of-touch tactic that recalls an old man yelling at the clouds (or, more accurately, cloud computing).

If "The Great Wall" felt like Yimou was turning his greatest hits into something dispassionately bland, then Shadow takes the familiar and makes it feel startlingly new.

The Hustle should’ve been a comedy that served equal parts wit and social commentary – otherwise, why gender-swap? It should’ve given Wilson and Hathaway a means through which to shine. These are talented, seasoned, capable women. And for their experience to be wasted in a production that is below them, below their director’s filmography and below the original material is tragic.

As a stoic and weathered middle-aged ballet teacher, who lives in a cramped apartment and maintains a tender and dignified devotion to his craft, Fiennes gives the film’s best performance.

It makes no sense that this fun, feel-good movie about senior citizen cheerleaders should waste so much precious screen time on miserly Keaton hacking up her Metamucil or whatever. If you’re going to make a movie about elderly cheerleaders, bring some brio and physicality to it.

Firecrackers is not as casually joyful as its title suggests – but it is absolutely as incendiary.

Stately, handsome and ferociously romantic, the new biopic of British high-fantasy writer J.R.R. Tolkien won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, though there is some excellent tea drinking to be had.

Young Joan is played by Sophie Cookson, magnetic in the role. Dench is underused, though. The film’s suspense is waiting on the world-class actress to bust out some chops. It never happens. The spy who bored me, rather.

To watch Charlie as merely a character in a film is maybe not enough. His overwhelming encroachment on the lives of the Russell family is, however repetitive on screen, a physical embodiment of the agony of knowing something that other people refuse to see, of knowing too much and not being believed.

As usual, Levine rounds out his supporting cast with a suspiciously stacked roster of comic actors – Randall Park, June Diane Raphael, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Bob Odenkirk, and Andy Serkis, the latter taking his love of heavy makeup a bit too far this time – and keeps the story moving with a breezy briskness that should be studied by any aspiring rom-com director.

If there’s a glaring oversight in Hail Satan?, it’s in the film’s singular devotion to the Temple of Satan. There’s little-to-no mention of other Satanic cults.

Yet despite the efforts of its stars and the inherent juiciness of its source material, the film falls flat when it should bounce with surreal glee. Perhaps it’s because Kelly is only telling half a story here.

The new animated film UglyDolls is a lazy flip, its main intention to foster the toy-aisle bond between kids and its quasi-hideous title characters.

The well-acted Clara lacks clarity, and there’s nothing worse than an out-of-focus telescope.

The reason Diane (the film) exists is not to propose and then solve a mystery, but to engage with Diane (the person).

Nearly everyone in this movie, and nearly everything that happens in it, is awful. Vile. Nasty. But it is a nastiness that sticks.

The Public is writer-director Emilio Estevez’s grand, well-meaning and extremely dumb vanity project/tribute to the public-library system.

It’s a shame the Morrises don’t include more of Nureyev’s performance footage and opt, instead, to use long segments of contemporary dance reconstructions choreographed by Russell Maliphant. The segments look a bit garish and out of place, not necessarily because of their poor choreographic content, but as they have little aesthetic or conceptual continuity with the rest of the film.

Even if I could muster the strength to defy studio marching orders on plot details, there is no point. There is little in Endgame that is worth spoiling, given how its core is spoiled rotten to begin with.

The film is graceful visually and beautifully harrowing; its worry for a planet and hope for humanity is reasoned and well-explained.

Puzzling out the reality and meaning of Long Day’s Journey into Night’s second half is as involving and absorbing an experience as watching the thing itself. And by the time Luo makes his way to what seems like the end of his journey, it is hard to not similarly feel transformed, or at the very least shaken.

Teen Spirit is a dizzying exercise in the "Bohemian Rhapsody" school of nonsensical editing. Perhaps it is fitting that Teen Spirit is badly made. It would be more disappointing if a work of such lazy sexism were a formal triumph.

There is an occasional sense of self-awareness that this is all pointless and silly, but 139 minutes is a long time for a film to forgo even delayed gratification.

Educating young audiences as it entertains just about anyone, Penguins features the droll narration of Ed Helms and some great Antarctic cinematography.

For the already faithful, believing in John’s miraculous recovery demands not a leap of faith, but a small hop. The film tells them absolutely nothing that they don’t already presume themselves to know. So what, then, is its point?

Luckily, Henson finds just enough in this thin movie to chew on, and every moment that the actress is on screen feels like we’re glimpsing the promise of a better, different movie to come.

Hellboy forces audiences to detach and glaze over because it is hateful and lazy and was made by awful filmmakers who probably don’t like movies very much. For anyone who manages to see this movie in the theatre – I’ll see you in hell.

The cast has chemistry, but Little is marred by plot holes, a strange fixation on donuts and at least one inexplicable scene.

A delightful and polished stop-motion adventure-comedy and droll comment on colonialism.

Yes, hallelujahs are in order.

Whenever it promises to spin into madcap nonsense, Budreau asserts a kind of tortured primness, as if chastened by the realization that this all actually happened to real people. And they seem to be having more fun than we are.

Sure, the film’s a bit of a hit job. But hey, as Bannon himself tells us, “There’s no bad media.” Sadly, he’s probably right.

Mary Magdalene is ultimately an unnecessary cinematic resurrection.

This film, about a French war correspondent and the Kurdish Amazon with whom she is embedded, has the worthy intention of telling the story of the women’s battalions in Kurdistan, but it’s formulaic and melodramatic.

Perhaps Nemes was hoping to let the precision of his intricately staged images artfully clash with the absurdity of a chaotic plot. But the result is more tedious than tense.

Next time, don’t ask indie directors who will work for cheap to tackle the King. I would’ve loved to see the Pet Sematary Lynne Ramsay would’ve made instead.

The ironic twist at the movie’s end is a nice touch. The Invisibles, about humans as living ghosts, needs to be seen, and believed.

Nothing much happens in this pleasantly casual 80-minute conversation of a documentary. It doesn’t come to you; you must come to it – like a Jim Jarmusch film, particularly his "Coffee and Cigarettes" from 2003.

That’s what Shazam!, and all these endless superhero action epics, amount to: hollow toys smashing against other hollow toys.

The Beach Bum feels like a similar display of prized possessions – only that one of you (Matthew) is taking us on a tour of his bongo- and bong-filled bedroom, while the other (hi, Harmony) is just leading us to his toilet.

Filmmaker Anthony Maras has made a chilling thriller, using extreme violence and high-wire tension to impressive effect, but it lacks deeper characterization.

All of which is to say that Dumbo feels totally consistent with Burton’s late-period slump. Abysmally scripted and hammily acted – and not, for the most part, in an interesting or ironic way – Dumbo recasts Disney’s animated classic in the trappings and suits of Burton’s pinstripe-and-pinwheel upholstery.

More entertaining than a dozen Major League Baseball games stacked on top of one another.

Us is the work of a gifted director who seems to be compensating for having less to say by overstating how he says it.

It is the cinematic equivalent of crying after sex, cathartic yet wholly awkward for everyone involved.

There are so many missteps that Hancock and screenwriter John Fusco make here, but to list a few briefly: The dialogue is 85-per-cent clumsy exposition, the heroes are given exactly one character trait each (Gault’s a drunk, Hamer’s a jerk) and the film’s politics read as MAGA-esque vigilante evangelicalism (the movie is perpetually on the verge of having Hamer say, directly to the camera, something along the lines of, “the only good criminal is a dead criminal”).

Rock 'n’ roll biopics can be mindless fun, but they never deserve to be this empty-headed.

And so you will get no Scorsesian tracking shots of firecracker trading floors, no giddy frat boy Champagne-shaking antics; this is a slow-boil thriller coursing with melancholy.

The strong cast keep their heads down and offer all the obligatory rhythms – if you hire Bruce Dern as a crabby horse-trainer, you are going to get exactly what you paid for – and the film eagerly embraces the purely filthy dullness of prison life.

Côté has a reputation of being something of a punk filmmaker. But if there is anything transgressive about Ghost Town Anthology it is its optimistic vision, where instead of having characters remain alienated and separated, they come together, find themselves and form a community.

The look of the film is sterile and monochromatic, as is the acting and the mood. And while fans of the genre will absolutely appreciate the surreal gloom, for most others Level 16 will come in at a level below an average "Twilight Zone" episode.

Five Feet Apart is an infuriating and unenjoyable take on first love.

To Dust’s humour is of the one-trick kind – an odd couple on an odd mission – but there is soul and small pleasures to its fly-by 92 minutes.

Moore leads this fresh and loving English-language take by Chilean director Sebastian Lelio of his own 2013 film "Gloria," but is well supported by other loves in her life, present and past: Brad Garrett, Holland Taylor, Rita Wilson and others.

While Wonder Park starts sweet and shallow, it develops into something more robust. Sometimes it’s a bit too precious, and despite its attempts at comedy, it isn’t all that funny. But as a nuanced young character, June is a refreshing creation. She shines through the glittering theme park.

This shiny and progressive and golly-gee packaging misrepresents how Captain Marvel made its way into the world, and what it is actually about. Namely: money, the easy exploitation of intellectual-property, artistic conformity and queasy politics that undermine whatever liberal notions it’s peddling.

Mostly, Chandor, working with a screenplay co-authored by Zero Dark Thirty writer Mark Boal, engages in drive-by subversion, smoothly twisting his way through the obligatory genre steps until he arrives in the territory of a morally fraught neo-western: more The Treasure of the Sierra Madre than Sicario: Day of the Soldado.