Unlike many of his action-cinema contemporaries, McQuarrie excels at creating clear lines of sight for his set pieces, and cutting them together to ensure maximum tension.

Euthanizer shocks from the outset, and nauseates by the conclusion. Exactly what fans of this gut-churning genre sign up for.

Van Sant has some fun with the briefly time-jumping narrative, but otherwise it’s shocking how little interest he seems to have in his subject. At least the director helps his star by filling out the supporting cast with performers who do their best to match Phoenix’s dedication, including a wonderful Jonah Hill as Callahan’s skeptical AA sponsor and Rooney Mara as the cartoonist’s off-and-on love interest.

Apologies to Eugene Levy, but the award for best supporting actor in the role of an adorably well-meaning father goes to the superb Josh Hamilton.

Nasty in its narrative and nifty in its aesthetic, Stephen Susco’s new film is a solid argument against doing anything remotely illicit online.

The film essentially disintegrates before your eyes, with Koreeda displaying little of the quiet elegance he’s built his entire career upon.

The key to the franchise is that Mamma Mia! never takes itself seriously: This time out, the joy is giddy but the sentiments are cloying; the musical scenes are mainly delightful, but quieter moments often fall flat.

I’m not sure audiences are getting what they deserve with this plodding, so-so action-thriller, but they’ll get what they’ll pay for: Washington as a relentless old-man on a moral-code mission of setting things right (and sometimes setting things on fire).

This film moves from black satire to a horror-thriller so smoothly you don’t even realize it’s happening – like the proverbial slow-boiling frog. Grim stuff, gloriously so.

Once the euphoria passes, director Tim Wardle takes his audience on an engrossing, heartbreaking journey into the lives of three innocents whose lives became experiments for scientists on a quest to unravel how identity is shaped. Sadly, in their zeal to figure out if nurture or nature wins, they forgot the human beings in the middle of the mix.

The no-contest wildest comedy of the season, will keep your mind busy for weeks.

The deal with the new Hotel Transylvania animated comedy is that Count Dracula needs a vacation, but, really, it’s the creative team behind the franchise who could use the time off.

The film is somewhat amusing – especially Tom Sturridge, who turns Lord Byron into poetry’s version of Jack Sparrow – but immediately forgettable.

The film is a sad calamity of conflicting narratives as those closest to Houston work through varying stages of honesty and denial.

Jarecki picks up all sorts of celebrated people and thinkers – probably too many. I would have liked to hear more from Elvis’s Graceland cook and less from Alec Baldwin.

What doesn’t go in Skyscraper is watching Sawyer and his family face staggering calamity and danger with barely a concern raised or a sweat broken. As for the actors portraying them, they’re the brave ones. And if they were scared, they didn’t show it.

Unfortunately, because filmmaker Miele also places value in discretion, his snazzy documentary is celebrative – not investigative.

In some ways, it’s almost a silent film – characters only speak when necessary, with Foster and McKenzie (a remarkable find, who is bound to generate Lawrence comparisons) telling the story with their eyes. But Granik’s attention to family dynamics, and the pained feelings of those living outside America’s rigid expectations, speak louder than words.

Filled with lovable eccentrics, Boundaries tries too hard to avoid the commonplace as its jolts erratically down the well-travelled, heavily signposted route that is the big-hearted road-movie.

Felt like it was missing something. Something fun. Something small.

Inside The First Purge is a scrappy little indie fighting to come out. Although this is the fourth installment in the Purge franchise, it’s a prequel to the other three, a chance to be born anew. A missed chance, as it turns out.

Facial prosthetics, Inside Hoops humour and "Barbershop"-styled trash talk ensue. Pepsi is one of film’s producers, but painkiller Aleve gets better product placement. Spare some for the arthritic plot, please.

Leigh Whannell’s new film is exactly the kind of pure trash that feels suited to spaces that are dirty, neglected, a little bit worse for wear. But this is no insult.

Director Mouly Surya’s unwavering conviction in her material (co-written with Rama Adi and Garin Nugroho) and her star – Marsha Timothy plays Marlina as fearful and indignant but ever composed – create a film that is simultaneously charming and grisly.

This is a much more conventional film with fewer pretensions to high art. Violence exploited for mere entertainment is so commonplace it hardly seems worth noting.

The film hums to tepid indie-pop and is sentimental to a fault, but the cast is a soulful bunch (including Toni Collette and a wonderful Ted Danson) who breathes life into a film that is all heart.

When Keoghan and Peters are onscreen, their performances are compelling enough, as is most of Layton’s narrative script – adding in the doc footage feels less revolutionary, and more like easy filler. It’s enough to feel, well, a bit robbed.

Like almost every other major studio film this summer, Fallen Kingdom plays dumb, and happily.

The hardship of it is immediate, but it never feels forced or exploitative. Hepburn cares for her characters too much to force matters in such a way

A film that is touching in a clumsy, boyish way that adults will understand and may even applaud.

The charming Johnny Flynn ultimately struggles to find the right tone for the boyfriend, not helped by a director who hasn’t quite mastered the rhythm required for his surprise ending.

Big, annoying, and mostly pointless.

Employing the unapologetic pomp of rap videos and enough heart to transition stereotypical characters into complex, dynamic subjects, Superfly is a visual treat that embellishes Director X’s signature kaleidoscopic visuals with an uncanny knack for storytelling.

Foodies will enjoy the window into fancy restaurants but, without any interviews other than Ducasse, the documentary never questions the evolution of the chef into a peripatetic artistic director rather than an actual cook, nor the realism of professing environmental frugality in a three-star setting.

Film critic Roger Ebert described movies as “empathy machines,” in that they allowed people to understand the lives and stories of others. Empathy was a big part of what Fred Rogers taught. In this film and with others, Neville, who grew up in the entertainer’s neighbourhood, has demonstrated himself to be an A-plus student.

Bullock is firm as the preternaturally self-assured Debbie but little more than that; her performance as the con artist is reined in so tightly that she only finally appears to be having some fun when she gets to don a blond updo and German accent on the night of the ball.

A terrifying, pitch-black kind of horror movie that takes up residence in your mind for days, even weeks later – but it is also a family film.

Writer-director Drew Pearce’s Hotel Artemis, however, manages to make the most intriguingly bonkers premise a boring and flat exercise.

Mozhdah empathetically charts Nisha’s despairing acquiescence and fitful rebellions, but it’s Adil Hussain’s work making her father not entirely unsympathetic that really stands out.

If it weren’t for Binoche’s warmth, the film might easily sink beneath the stereotype of French culture as overly talky and sex obsessed.

Like "Everest," Adrift is a movie throbbing with an audience’s anxiety – and yet it is not particularly dramatic.

First Reformed may well be the ultimate auteur object for Schrader apostles. But ultimately its sheer archness reveals Paul Schrader as a gifted and deeply persuasive evangelist of the transcendental style – if not quite a canon saint.

The whole cast is capable. The comedy doesn’t pop, though, and even a nifty late-film reveal can’t save this film from failing to live up to its potential.

The film’s most insightful moments come when the documentary reconnects Talley with his past as they revisit his hometown and oldest friends.

The heavy Star Wars legacy sits lightly on Ehrenreich’s shoulders in a Disney-Lucasfilm movie that is finally having fun.

The lead actors are both marvellous.... Yet the film’s most impressive performance might come from director Dominic Cooke, who has delivered an assured, wistful debut.

Grown-ups will find it painful to watch a clearly embarrassed Arnett go through the motions, muttering his lines as he internally wonders why he never became the next Kevin Costner.

So where the hypocrisy, didacticism and inaction of previous popes righteously roused our anger and indignation, Francis stands as a palliative cure-all for anti-papal sentiment. Likewise, Wenders’s documentary seems to yearn to excite the viewer’s passion, to ignite a desire to take meaningful action against the very real social problems the Pope so clearly diagnoses.

What’s admirable about the film is how Driver gives the cross-pollinating forces of music, media, fashion and art such concise, firsthand exploration.

In RBG, a lionizing biography of the U.S. Supreme Court judge, Ginsburg emerges as a woman of remarkable intelligence and fortitude – who can get by on very little sleep.

The whole thing feels like a late-night, dorm-room gab fest, except that the four women in question are well over 60, which is the gag.

Never before have the demands of my inner man-child been so stirred, though, than while experiencing Deadpool 2, a movie that feels scribbled in pencil crayon, drenched in Jolt cola and coated with the dust of a thousand discarded bags of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.

A truly gifted comedic actress, McCarthy is wasting her talents with this vanilla-flavoured story.

The doc drags a bit by the end, but the film's message is sent: "Man's wish to be first induces forms of insanity."

There is a familiarity to its characters and story, which doesn’t do much at all in terms of reinventing the genre, but very much meets its own expectations.

As film, the results are often fabulous. They begin with a deft use of flashback from the action’s dark conclusion; they continue with wonderfully detailed and lively camera work that catches the sparkle in Annette Bening’s eye as she plays the actress Irina dominating her many dependants, and follows the seduction of the ingénue Nina (Saoirse Ronan) as it moves out onto a rowboat in the middle of a lake.

There are good intentions lurking here, especially in star Louis Garrel’s performance, but the film consistently fails to engage on an even basic level.

From beginning to brutal end, this is Fargeat’s uncompromising creation, but Lutz is at the centre of the terror, and acquits herself well as a person never to be dismissed, or crossed, again.

It is a love story, as beautiful as it is devastating.

At times, it approaches self-parody, but that’s just Woo having some much-needed fun.

Journeys more often than not are not what we expected. And neither is Cook's unpredictable and reflective work, set to a brooding solo-cello score and filled with whatever metaphors you need. We are alone on this trip – take it, and this marvellous film, at your own pace.

Poor genre efforts like Backstabbing for Beginners hurt cinema’s chance to survive and thrive as the greatest medium for storytelling.

A few plot contrivances aside, the unspectacular Bad Samaritan is tense and disturbing enough, and worth its weight in popcorn.

Cody’s third-act twist threatens to unravel Theron’s hard work; yet, somehow, the power of Tully remains firmly in Theron’s skilled and capable hands.

Zhao’s artful look into the American West is a lightly brooding winner. Clearly this isn’t her first time at the rodeo.

Even by Marvel’s own standards of serviceable mediocrity, Infinity War fails.

The audience is left, then, submerged in two very different movies where the protagonists are going to sink or swim – but unsatisfyingly – not together.

Zama is a disjointed watch that is both challenging and mesmerizing.

Coming soon to a screen in hell’s multiplex is Super Troopers 2, a sequel that sets back Canadian-American relations to an 1812 level and retroactively awards an Oscar to "Porky’s II" and a Pulitzer citation to 1995’s "Canadian Bacon."

I Feel Pretty paints the most garish and unflattering portrait of contemporary female culture.

The documentary is an inspiration to women – not just in the Middle East – who are determined to rise to the top of their professions, despite the odds being stacked against them.

The plot is cursory, the dialogue is repetitive and the psychology is cheap. Hanging in for the wanton violence may prove too much for anyone not seriously addicted to the guilty pleasures of cheesy sci-fi.

The effortless richness of character that so thoroughly grounded Haigh’s Oscar-nominated "45 Years" and his critical darling "Weekend" is half-heartedly formed in Pete. There is a disquieting sense that the director has fallen prey to the poetics of space at the expense of the lives within it.

The whole thing should be harmless enough – the actors are such old hands, they can pull off this plucky stuff in their sleep. Except for one ruinous thing: The dance sequences are unforgivably awful.

Set against the high-tension strings and jarringly funky synthesizers of Greenwood’s score, the film is transformative and transfixing.

The result is a stylish, watchable film, but one with a slow pulse. Game, set and almost a great movie.

The film has its moments and some things to say about honesty and selflessness, but the plot is manipulated and the ending is not an ending. Truth be known.

Beirut is as solid a film as Hamm is a performer. The movie is not a flashy affair, but it does hit in unexpected ways and uses its pretty faces (Hamm, but also Gone Girl’s Rosamund Pike, another performer who should be ruling the world) to deliver something you will likely expect, but nonetheless appreciate.

You’re so tense you’re almost nauseous, but it’s fun – that’s the place this smart new thriller will put you in.

The Miracle Season is a simple movie of straightforward sentimentalism and gung-ho, against-all-odds inspiration.

For all its loud signalling of raunch ahead, Blockers is funnier that you might expect: It’s a reliable laugh machine that features enough jabs at contemporary mores, alongside a discreet social conscience and some successfully female-centric comedy, that it rises above the inevitable chug-and-vomit jokes.

The rare biopic of a visual artist that considers the dilemma of the art more seriously than it considers the drama of the life.

Jason Clarke is excellent as the complicated Kennedy, an unsure, insecure and not entirely decent man daunted by his brothers’ shadows and eager to earn a father’s respect that is not forthcoming. The supporting cast is top-notch, particularly Kate Mara, who portrays the doomed Kennedy loyalist Kopechne with a warm humanity.

The drama is memorable but often feels grimly unpleasant rather than moving. And, as always, it’s frustrating to see Montreal cast as some anonymous and unilingual North American city.

It’s in his cozy kitchen — wallpapered with photos of his five kids, grandchildren and his wife of a half-century, Toby – that we get to know the man: the jovial grandfather, the joke teller, the dedicated husband, the patient teacher and loyal friend, who is as excited as a child as he makes his famous “garbage” soup for his long-time pal, Alan Alda.

Cabot's meticulously and ambitiously designed Les Quatre Vents in bucolic Quebec is the star attraction, but Luc St. Pierre's score is magical and the interviewees are in their best chatty grooves.

The story is both fresh and archetypal; the landscape both hard and delicate – and beautifully observed. Memories and premonitions are intriguingly inserted into the action and the performances...are note perfect.

The actors are superb at impressing some humanity onto this ugliness. Their civility is in the details: a morning shave, a cheerio and “one small pipe” before jumping the trench and heading into the German line of fire.

In horror movies, monsters often lose their power to terrify once they come fully into the frame. But as Rothstein reveals the full shape and size of an ogre that has slipped into our financial markets, just try to calm your growing dread.

So much of Ready Player One is assembled from the detritus of our past that it is less a film and more an overstuffed cultural recycling bin. A shiny, expensive, well-cast and professionally assembled recycling bin, sure, but a trash heap all the same.

The heavy-handed score, narrow performances (Nicole Munoz as the repeatedly terrified daughter; Laurie Holden as the dense mum) and weak dialogue all fail to justify a provocative ending that overturns the exorcising conventions of the genre.

With all due affection, del Toro is the fantasy world’s Quentin Tarantino – his originality rests in how meticulously and enthusiastically he repackages the work of others. DeKnight has no such goals; he can’t even be bothered here to ape del Toro’s imitation game.

Anderson once again creates a uniquely whimsical visual environment; this time, it’s inspired by the classic Samurai movies of Akira Kurosawa and the stop-motion Christmas specials of Anderson’s childhood.

Everyone here is simply a mismanaged thing to be moved around an isn’t-that-shocking storyboard as needed.

The so-so film’s soul and saving grace is Rossy de Palma, the Picasso-esque muse of filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, who steals the show and, as the family maid, the heart of a British art dealer.

Unsane culminates in a nauseating crescendo of violence, with women sexually assaulted, their necks snapped and their bodies chucked into garbage bags and trunks. After #MeToo, this stuff is feeling not just unpalatable, but suspect.

Padilha is trying something noble here: to give every side its due. Unfortunately, he gives us a lesson in moral complexity instead of a movie.

The emotional underpinnings of the story feel incomplete, to the extent that the film is too busy with death-defying survival scenes and pointed guns to truly reckon with Lara’s abandonment as a child.