If that wasn’t enough, there is something even more dispiriting about Doctor Strange beyond its halfhearted visual and narrative ambitions – an issue that made a brief blip on the cultural radar when the film was first announced but has distressingly gone unheard of since: This is a movie that revels in whitewashing.

Some of these passages, especially a visit to North Korea, are fascinating in their own right but the film does risk getting sidetracked by tangential stories. Nonetheless, this intersection of nature and culture is filled with insight.

Happily, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has in Moonlight exactly the kind of small, smart film that the Awards should be recognizing more often. Whether it will actually win is another matter: Jenkins’s script and his direction are bracingly free of the sentimentality Oscar so loves.

Park’s Handmaiden is a great big chocolate box of a movie in which a rich and satisfying narrative is enlivened by some piquant erotica and the sharp tang of politics.

The film is as much about Hokusai as it is about the titular protagonist, and so she defers to her father here as she apparently did in real life.

Perhaps Howard’s dutiful obligation to Brown’s treasure-hunt oeuvre will end here, with the temperate Inferno sparking a resurgence to follow. Dante wrote that “The poets leave hell and again behold the stars.” Here’s hoping that Howard has some shine left in him.

By the time we make it to the present, oddly represented by a towering digitized city and a handful of white children playing in an idyllic American setting, it becomes clear Mallick has little space for the multifaceted human race in his gorgeous cosmos.

The movie’s moral centre, is the island’s doctor, who in one of the film’s most powerful moments reflects on all the autopsies he’s performed. “It’s the duty of every human being to help these people,” he says. That’s about as close as director Gianfranco Rosi gets to a political message.

But hey, at least Zwick and company carve out some time for Tom Cruise to run, with Reacher dashing across a busy avenue for about 18 seconds or so. It’ll make for a great supercut one day.

Mottola’s film is the unfortunate result of too much talent met with a clunky script – and the movie crumples under the weight of the cast’s star power.

This is a prequel superior to its predecessor – we’re not bored with board-game ghoulishness yet.

For the conquering Sacha, no pack ice can prove too crushing nor hardened sailor too obdurate: It’s only the unusual setting and subtle animation that raise this adventure above the formulaic.

Hall creates a fierce, uncompromising portrait of a woman who was prescient enough to see the dark places her culture was headed – the logical end game of our “if it bleeds, it leads” obsessions – but also damaged enough to succumb to them.

Complete Unknown is the perfect case study of what happens when bad movies rope in good actors. In this case, it’s Rachel Weisz and Michael Shannon, two of the most talented performers working today, who get sucked into writer-director Joshua Marston’s vortex of nothingness.

The documentarian Victor Kanefsky paints a vivid picture of an entertaining rogue, one who finally gets his due with this film. Then again, Cenedella might refuse to accept the recognition. There’s no bastard like a principled bastard.

Animation seems an odd means of addressing such a grim tragedy, but it gives Maitland the creative freedom to effectively tell a suspenseful, harrowing and moving story.

It’s bold, captivating cinema, with a soundtrack that threatens to never leave your head.

I won’t presume to understand what passes for popular taste. But seeing an audience in the tens of thousands lose their mind for Hart’s jokes about hating his family and the hypothetical perils of dating a woman with only one shoulder, I can’t help but feel skeptical.

The victory of The Accountant is in the tone. The title character isn’t presented as a superfreak – this isn’t "Rain Man," in which autistic gifts are presented as powers for parlour tricks – but as a prototype and a beautiful mutant, maybe even a superhero.

Like those who live up there, viewers have two choices: Give yourself over to the experience, and you’ll be transported; stand back, and you’ll feel nothing but chill.

As her adversary, the ghastly Irving, Timothy Spall is excellent, creating a man of great insecurities hidden behind blustering self-confidence. The actor is happily willing to manufacture a thoroughly oily and dislikeable figure as he and Jackson successfully balance their villain on the knife edge of caricature.

Whatever the locomotive power of the novel, this film adaptation only limps into the station.

The director’s pedestrian tactics are most evident in his command, or lack thereof, over his cast. While Parker knows how to expertly play to the camera – he all but winks at the audience, so confident is he in his admittedly captivating lead performance – he abandons his fellow actors, allowing them to exploit their worst instincts: hammy accents, wild gesticulating, uneasy line readings.

Ironically, Middle School’s message is about encouraging kids and grown-ups to think outside the box and yet, the filmmakers themselves do precisely the opposite.

The film never weaves together its various strands as tightly as the soundtrack does, and it’s unlikely that those unfamiliar with the cultures of the Caribbean will understand where everyone is coming from.

In short, his film asks that an audience listen to a fair amount of ugly racism without offering much enlightenment or even entertainment in exchange. Words may build bridges but people have to cross them: Imperium remains safely outside the unexplored region.

Based on the picture book co-authored by Power of Now superstar Eckhart Tolle, Milton’s Secret carries a powerful and important message, but the film feels ham-fisted, clichéd and overearnest at times, especially for adult viewers.

It’s a fantastically bonkers story told excitedly in The Lovers and the Despot, a stranger-than-fiction yarn that would make a hell of an opera.

For those looking for a brash new entry in the cinematic landscape, Operation Avalanche is an almost otherworldly gift. The best part of all: No one had to die. I think.

The overall product is so tightly assembled, and so emotionally satisfying, that any complaints end up being inconsequential.

Galifianakis grounds the film with a guileless sensitivity and bursts of ingenuity beneath his character’s buffoonish nature. Wiig and Wilson struggle at times with the offbeat tone, but the stacked supporting cast pick up the slack. Kate McKinnon shines as Galifianakis’s dead-eyed fiancée with all the personality of fresh roadkill, and Jason Sudeikis’s pencil-moustached hitman and Leslie Jones’s FBI agent steal their scenes.

Very much a superhero film – "X-Men" as imagined by Edward Gorey. But it’s not populated with the sorts of characters we’ve come to expect – tormented anti-heroes or wisecrackin’ daredevils or noble demi-gods. Rather, it’s a film about a group of broken children, not off saving the world but being saved from the world.

Malin Buska – the Swedish Kirsten Dunst? – is highly watchable as the Descartes-loving ruler, but Canada’s Sarah Gadon as the sheet-warming lady-in-waiting is given little to do but look naive and dumbstruck.

Directed by veteran "Chariots of Fire" filmmaker Hugh Hudson, the semi-compelling Finding Altamira is let down by ordinary acting, way too many scholarly adages and a perplexing level of inaction.

This quirky dramedy promises little and delivers even less.

As the young hero at the centre of the tale, Guillory displays astonishing depth and heart. To summarize: Run, don’t walk.

The song playing sombrely over the tail credits is Afraid of Everyone, which is a hell of a way to die, but an even worse way to live. There is no cheer to Transpecos.

Pure blockbuster gloss – perfectly fine for a Saturday afternoon matinee, but instantly forgettable once you’ve emerged from the dark of a multiplex.

Every joke here hits its target, and while many of them will soar over the heads of youngsters, it will still send everyone home happy and satisfied.

The script is loose; the acting is natural and nuanced. Over the credits plays an acoustic song about lives in the how-did-we-get-here stage. If you do not leave this Netflix movie asking questions about your own paths, the failing is yours, not Duplass’s.

A thrill ride that’s as terrifying as it is no-nonsense.

So despite the conventionalism of the film’s final minutes, I’d like to raise a glass of Chardonnay and toast Bridget Jones’s Baby on its (mostly) hilarious, and long-anticipated, homecoming.

It’s dreadfully boring to anyone over the age of 4, but at least it isn’t trying to sell kids anything. I guess that’s a plus.

Thrilling when we’re on and around the plane (seeing that giant CGI bird splash down, especially on an Imax screen, makes you realize how improbable the whole enterprise was) and too often thudding when we’re not.

Though Zoom skillfully weaves together animation and live action, I was not stoned when I watched it, and I’m not a fan of plot-plot-plot. So it left me meh.

The result is an intriguing but uneven thriller that doesn’t fully establish the tone and style that would be needed for an audience to accept its supernatural plot.

This isn’t to say Scott doesn’t occassionally rely on classic scary-movie thrills – but, mostly, it concentrates on developing its intriguing narrative and believable characters.

What the protagonists do is simply wrong, and their attempts to fix it are first tepid, then unpleasant.

Dujardin and Efira are both charming and beautiful, and the film glistens in its breezy cobblestoned scenery.

A simple film only designed to charm.

A cheeky black comedy and worthy Norwegian successor to "Kill Bill."

A home invasion story that is as artfully terrifying as "Home Alone" was entertainingly hilarious.

Brody plays opposite Yvonne Strahovski, whose femme fatale is less like Lauren Bacall and more like Sharon Stone. Unfortunately, Strahovski’s flat portrayal lacks the basic instincts of Stone, though she does uncross her legs, and that is central to the curve-balling, sex-tape plot.

Unfortunately, the actual confrontations this project must have caused happen off camera, but the story of a determined quest is always enlivened by insights into the clawing animals, bizarre monsters and sinful humans that populate Bosch’s fantastical visions.

Bathed in dusty hues and rain-forest greens, Ixcanul is gorgeously shot and skillfully frames Maria’s curbed sexuality (look to a scene where she waits for her younger crush in the evening shadows).

Gripping and thrilling, Nanfu Wang’s debut documentary is a raw look at women’s-rights activism in China.

The Israeli author’s melancholy work might on the surface be an odd choice for Portman, but as writer, director and star, she takes to it with a fierce sense of devotion and even protection, creating a Hebrew-language drama about the tight, complex bond between a mother (Portman) and her son (Amir Tessler).

Don’t Blink is a friendly film by a friend – honest and historically aware, but almost unfailingly affectionate and attuned to the “spontaneous intuition” that, 92 years after his birth, still seems the governing principle of Frank’s life.

Kinnaman, a Swede, is good in small doses – say, as Mireille Enos’s sidekick in the TV series The Killing – but he’s no leading man. He gives us zero insight into Elliot, so he never makes us care about him. This film will be remembered (if at all) as one of the things Holland did before he was Spider-Man.

Cancer, ironically, turns out to be a hard subject to dramatize. We spend the majority of the doc accompanying Jones to doctors’ appointments and chemotherapy sessions. As compelling as this is to the person going through it, it’s not fascinating to watch.

As the new Ben-Hur unspools into insignificance and sentimentality, there are fleeting moments that suggest someone behind this $100-million movie was actually thinking hard about how to replay a schlocky biblical epic for a secular audience in 2016.

Phillips delivers a mostly by-the-book rise-and-fall saga of two bros in way over their heads, complete with ostentatious title cards that, instead of subtly addressing the film’s themes of greed and jealousy, only hammer the moral lessons with the grace of a rusty Kalashnikov.

Scenic, well-paced and rich in dialogue and character, the film is Coen brothers for the squares, and maybe the best middle-of-the-seat drama of the summer.

Normally, this would be an easy way to undercut a documentary, but the powerful filmmaking duo of Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker somehow turn Wise’s quest into a compelling and noble tale, no matter what your thoughts are on the views presented.

In a smartly written, evenly wrought drama, the newly discovered wunderkind Rod Paradot stunningly portrays a troubled youth who makes Eminem’s 8 Mile protagonist look like a boy scout in comparison.

The characters feel underdeveloped, to the point where it’s sometimes difficult to remain invested in their triumphs and failures.

As Herzog spirals from the achievements and dangers of the Net to topics such as communication with space colonies or the likelihood that solar flares will reduce the world to flood and famine if they knock out all connectivity, it is hard to know how much of this futuristic stuff to believe.

The key problem is the figure of Naomi, clawing her way to the top and desperate to stay there. Gunn plays her as mightily determined and potentially abrasive.

Some of these scenes are masterful – and sometimes difficult to watch. But the real horror – mass revenge killings by the Nazis, including the obliteration of the entire village of Lidice – takes place off-screen.

It’s a tough watch, but inspiring.

Unfortunately, the script is held together with something much less adhesive than, say, Amy Adams’s "American Hustle" blouse tape.

As fine as Streep is, however, it’s Grant’s movie.

A surprisingly effective work of family entertainment that hits all its marks, and then some.

If Mel Brooks went insane, he would make Sausage Party.

Although its two lead actors are strong – and Meyers affords them a generous number of scenes where they can bare raw emotion – the film stumbles toward the end, and the central duo don’t develop all that much.

And therein lies the difficulty of adapting Indignation for the screen; remove Roth’s prose from the equation and you don’t have much left. Writer and director James Schamus turns Indignation into a minor period piece, a precise but seemingly pointless evocation of the stultifying conventionalism of an American university campus in the 1950s.

By the end, Sachs has raised urgent questions about immigration, classism, gentrification, loyalty, family and nascent sexuality – but he’s done so utterly organically, via 10 square feet of city. Lovely.

Regrettably, the film’s place-setting opening lays the scene for a different, more exciting film that never really unfolds.

Both Page and Wood hand in tough yet delicate performances as, over the course of a year, adversity shapes their characters.

Gorgeously shot by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who takes much delight in exposing the blinding sunlight and dusky interiors of old Hollywood, the film is lightly entertaining but largely pointless.

Adults should get a kick out of Phantom Boy’s sly humour but the story and the action is for the kids.

The film is poetically structured and Lear is a spry, emotionally involved participant in a lively bio-doc that succeeds eulogistically and contextually.

Although all these actors prove the shrewd casting choices of Bad Moms, it is Hahn who makes this unassuming summer blockbuster something close to stellar.

While Jason Bourne isn’t half-bad as an action movie, it is a nakedly hollow exercise in resuscitating brand loyalty.

Nerve looks fabulous and the pace is evenly adrenalized, which makes up for clichéd characters, a concocted premise and commentary that is a bit on the nose.

It’s subdued, at times even too leisurely, but the film and its characters are luminous, especially lead Ayase Haruka.

Finding deep meaning and satisfaction from this story will be difficult, but if it’s style over substance you’re after, then you’ll revel in the comedic chic.

It manages to be heartwarming and heartbreaking all at once.

Best of all, it’s tight at 81 minutes, which means a 7 p.m. screening gets you out of the theatre while it’s still light out, thank God.

Toddlers will dig the shenanigans, but bewildered adults should root for the annihilation of this tapped-out series.

Happily, Star Trek Beyond is much more than a mere refresh. Thanks to Lin’s steady directorial hand and knack for visualizing improbable set-pieces, the new film is bold, breathless and propulsive, a distillation of the action movie to its purest elements.

It’s shocking and troubling, but it doesn’t add much to the reality we already know cruelly exists.

The scenes between Stewart and co-star Nicholas Hoult tend to be long and lingering, even bordering on dull, and the melodramatic music grows bothersome. By the time it reaches its abrupt ending, the only emotion audiences might be left with is boredom.

Dunn’s work is a far more fantastical feat, one that mixes slow-burn drama with a welcome Cronenbergian sensibility. Oh, and Isabella Rossellini plays a talking hamster. Just try to top that.

The Innocents is a powerful, brave film that will stay with you for days.

We’re primed to expect that the culture clash, when it comes, will be powerful and dangerous. Instead, the film suddenly backs down, and the resulting learning and growing feels like chickening out.

Paul Feig’s female-led reboot of the long-dormant franchise is thrilling, hilarious, lovingly crafted and the wild, colourful, giddy blockbuster this otherwise staid summer movie season so desperately needs.

This unrealized focus is not to say that The Music of Strangers is not worth seeing. It is, for many reasons, not the least of which is Neville’s pacing and the beautiful camerawork, as well as the many fine performances.