That the director is able to continue producing such creative and daring work while ostensibly under the thumb of the state is a true feat.

The Martian is nearly all things to all audiences: a ticking-clock drama, an intimate character study, a sci-fi comedy, a rollicking space adventure. It’s almost impossible to dislike, which is perhaps its only flaw. When a huge film reveals its eager-to-please intentions from the get-go, the stakes evaporate awfully quick.

As directed by Robert Zemeckis from a script he co-wrote with Christopher Browne, the film limps through its first two acts, putting in time until the big moment.

Villeneuve (Prisoners, Incendies) once again proves he can craft a gripping tale that never collapses under its own moral weight. Sicario is not an easy film to watch, but it is a riveting and essential one.

It’s only mildly entertaining, never funny enough nor smart enough to summarize the cultural moment in the manner of a "Working Girl" or "The Social Network."

While directors Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion want to have their laughs and horror, too, the film is something of a zombie itself: half-alive and bloody, but lacking any heart.

There is no tragic hero here; there is no overarching explanation, but a movie that offered either of those would seem pretty pat. Take it or leave, Everest is just there.

The faith-based War Room is so named because life is a battle to be strategized, with, in the case of God’s infomercial of a film, a large bedroom closet serving as scripture-plastered command centre.

The film's police-procedural action is unimaginatively presented, but Oyelowo is compelling.

On a thematic level, it remains wholly reprehensible and a fraudulent piece of entertainment. But at least it rips off some better films (Mad Max, Day of the Dead, The Matrix) with a good deal of energy.

It’s a genuinely fun affair – let’s not write it off as a cult classic just yet – with the smirking air of a confidant and mischievous filmmaker.

For all its high-speed car chases and extravagant stunts, director Camille Delamarre’s reboot of the Transporter franchise is as punctilious as Frank himself – glossy in finish but a little uptight.

Real insecurities live deep beneath the frenemies’ cringe-worthy obliviousness, though all credit to the filmmakers for allowing their comeuppance to contain none of the empathy the girls deny everyone else.

The film’s own unhurried pace might frustrate the popcorn crowd, but it is the blasé, blank-faced unconcern for expediency from judges, prosecutors and bailiffs that should prove much more infuriating.

Made for ironicists, Turbo Kid, in its endearingly goofy way, says good things about the power reserves of our childhood – an inner superhero we can call upon when needed.

The performances, the writing, the direction, Segel’s D.F.W. impression, everything is just fine. But The End of the Tour is disgraceful. It feels like it’s towing out the real Wallace’s ghost to perform some soppy parody of himself.

[A] soulful, fluently told, low-key comedy.

Fear is the anticipation of horror, and it’s this movie’s prime evil: not what happens inside the tent, but what might be making that noise outside.

Muylaert’s is attuned to matters of social stratification and economic mobility, and the manner in which Brazil’s leisure class is propped up by the undervalued exertions of domestic labourers.

Like its namesake prophet, Zobel’s film is about exile and return, but it’s also more simply about who we lust after. This simplicity is the film’s virtue rather than its sin, and a layered picture of right and wrong, faith and reason, emerges as the story unfolds.

Director Jon Watts is smart enough never to deviate from a narrow vision that he executes superbly.

The nature of this fantasy is boringly feel-good and aspirational.

If you suspend your disbelief for some of the weaker plot points and unnecessary use of the c-word, the film is palatable.

Whatever seeds of social justice and emotional nuance No Escape may be attempting to sow are undercut by the film’s melodramatic valorization of family values.

It’s tempting to think Hitman undermines any beauty it musters with its habit of ridiculousness.

For all its shocks and wannabe-disturbing imagery (trapped Bible-thumpers being mauled by rats etc.), nothing in Sinister 2 comes across as believably scary.

This is not a spoiler alert; it’s a tip: If you go to see American Ultra, stay for the credits, right to the end. They are animated and provide a mini fourth act for the film, a little action movie starring a super simian and a beautiful (human) damsel; they are an amusing addendum, but mainly they tell you a lot about where American Ultra’s heart lies, deep in comic-book territory.

The chipper tale is admittedly interesting, though not “fascinating,” as self-advertised.

Dark Places lacks the gloomy meditative quality that Gone Girl rode to success on, with none of the grace or subtlety necessary in making a convoluted thriller a watchable enterprise.

Whatever you think of Greenpeace’s less well-considered antics over the years, How to Change the World is a compelling story of one environmentalist’s remarkable combination of prescience, grit and timing.

Around the World is stuffed with charming moments, yet often feels disjointed or purposeless.

Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid (whose debut Policeman was a critical hit) keeps us guessing. His message seems clear even if his characters’ motivations aren’t always.

The film is not significant, but it is principled and sweetly subversive. And, like high school, if you’re not careful, you might just learn something from it.

If anybody should know how to make a good Lubitsch farce, it’s Bogdanovich. Luckily, he already has: You should just watch his classic What’s Up, Doc? instead.

That it’s unsettling not just because of the contentious moral context underlines just how radical any realistic depictions of female desire and sexual experience still are.

A bittersweet salute, appraisal and explanation of the early-nineties Saturday Night Live troupe mainstay.

Besides the movie’s weight in our contemporary, post-Ferguson historical moment, Straight Outta Compton may also be the funniest, most exhilarating and flat-out best Hollywood movie of the summer.

The spectacular Italian locations, jazzy score and vehicular action finally go somewhere in the third act, when Ritchie riffs a few stylistic conventions of the era. Mesmerizing and clever, but more style than substance.

Broadening the original script out to a cinematic thriller of the prey-and-predator variety, Dolan’s direction is not imaginative enough to carry the day.

This delightful stop-motion animated romp features no dialogue, which is as it should be – the beauty of animals is in their actions, not words, after all.

Regardless of its flimsy emotional interior, Ricki is a worthy addition in this year’s growing canon of strong female-centred films.

The film ends with a delicious question, an uncertainty that will linger long after the credits roll – no ribbon is tied on The Gift.

Apparently Fantastic Four doesn’t want to be another dumb superhero action flick, but try as they might to turn it into a movingly realistic drama, director Josh Trank and a pair of screenwriters never succeed, creating instead a comic book movie that is bizarrely short on humour and action.

Physically ripped, constantly engaged and possessing a quite possibly insane desire to do each and every one of his own stunts, Cruise is the platonic ideal of an action star. And thank god for that.

Unlike Griswold vacations past, the peril in which the family finds itself isn’t leavened by anything funny.

Jeunet’s major achievement is to capture the book’s complicated museum clutter and hothouse-flower sensitivity.

Not merely a bore, it’s excruciating.

American Heist, I want my 94 minutes back.

Fans expecting more than a routine coming-of-age story had better prepare for a paper movie.

The melodrama is uncomfortably high; the checked-box plot is manipulative.

Pixels is a movie without wit, without jokes, with nothing to say but plenty to regurgitate.

A modest, winning comedy that overtly sneaks in its wisdom about life, worries and what really matters.

Eerie and unpredictable, Strangerland holds attention, even if traditional suspense tricks are avoided like they were dingos at the daycare.

It would be easy to spend hours trashing The Galllows if it just wasn’t so disposable.

The narrative is schlocky and groaningly over-familiar, but the film is also uncharacteristically drab visually, with a washed-out colour palette and anemic pacing.

With its episodic stream of slapstick gags, Minions has moment of piquant absurdity, but mostly it’s shrill-but-cutesy anarchy works as a visual sugar rush for the preschool set.

What’s remarkable is that this fifth Terminator is worthwhile precisely because of its franchise cash-in excessiveness. It’s at once an eminently satisfying actioner, jackknifing tractor-trailers and vertiginous helicopter chases and all, as it is a passably thought-provoking comment on memory – headily engaging with the very nostalgia it intends to evoke.

It may be a meandering road trip movie about a group of emotive performers who fancy themselves therapists, but Magic Mike XXL is an ingenious revelation of a film.

Riklis, working from an adaptation of a popular novel by the Arab-Israeli writer Sayed Kashua, is wryly perceptive of the ways each side exoticizes and demonizes the other.

Winterbottom is not out to thrill, but to lecture on the truth, which, he believes, can only be found in fiction.

Writer-director David Hewlett probably had visions of a pocket-sized 2001: A Space Odyssey, but instead produces something closer to Cheap Space Nine.

Jurassic World never breaks out of its own confines of homage and imitation. The movie ends up as an awkward, ungainly hybrid: large, but inconsequential.

Although the film is raw, intense and even beautiful at times, the queasy knowledge of how it all came together constantly threatens to uproot any artistry. This doesn’t mean Heaven Knows What is a failure – just hopelessly complicated.

Even the emotional foundations of the Entourage franchise, those oaths of fealty, family and friendship, have rotted, hollowed out by the characters’ tendencies toward flippant sexism, homophobia and straight obnoxiousness.

The night scenes are particularly resonant, mixing humour, suspense and textured visuals. This is the kind of film dream from which you feel reluctant to wake.

Aloha is a marshmallow of a film: soft on the inside, soft on the outside and wholly devoid of substance.

Between its steroidic CGI and emotionally vacant plot line, the movie is all flex, no muscle.

Fontaine’s flirtatious pastiche stands on its own. For Flaubertians, however, it offers up even more droll entertainment. Though admittedly some of the laughs will be from recognizing their own cleverness.

Although it works well as an encore, the likelihood is that this thing isn’t over until the Fat Amy zings again.

Its true subject is the thrill of the chase and the means by which the movies express it, which is to say it’s one hell of a ride in the same direction taken by the characters: deep into a desert of vast and horizonless emptiness.

A thoughtful, unsurprising dramatic comedy executive produced by Jay and Mark Duplass. If you know the indie filmmaking siblings from their HBO show Togetherness, you will be comfortable with the wry, understated Adult Beginners.

With a riveting performance-within-a-performance of subtle physicality by Nina Hoss, the charade in which a woman plays her own doppelganger certainly borrows tension, look and conventions from postwar film noir.

It’s a chase film, it’s a buddy film, it’s a ridiculous, loud and often offensive romp. Witherspoon’s character is cornball and annoyingly adrenalized – what was she thinking?

A sloppy, unremarkable rockumentary drearily narrated by the nearly literate Police guitarist, who, perhaps at someone else’s insistence, reads passages from his 2006 memoir "One Train Later."

Feels like a missed opportunity to do a country romantic melodrama in grand style.

Whedon can’t quite work the same miracle twice. Age of Ultron also bears the familiar stretch marks characteristic of middle movies in franchise series.

Wildly energetic performances could perhaps disguise some of these problems – or at least keep an audience entertained during a slow ride – but Priestley does not draw from his performers the work we all know they can do.

Titular ball scene, fancy dress makeover and lost stiletto shoe notwithstanding, the chaste nominal romance is less interesting than the fun, family-friendly Shakespearean shenanigans are.

Ex Machina is a clever film with one indelible performance from Isaac.

But just as Anzac troops had quite a go of it in Gallipoli, Crowe (who also stars as the doggedly bereaved father and exceptional well-digger here) is in tough with critic-historians aghast at The Water Diviner’s pro-Turkish slant.

Occasionally a movie comes along that’s such an awkward compilation of ideas it fascinates: The Forger, a Boston-set melodrama involving cancer, Impressionist art and deadbeat dads, is only about half that good.

In time, we may look back at Lost River as a fascinating mess or a misunderstood miss. As for his promise, I’d be fine if Gosling promises to never make a film like this again.

In a wink to Canada, the most urgent emotion is a throwaway bit in the movie when they bicker on whether to call the board game’s plastic scoring piece a wedge, cheese or pie, an indelible argument for the ages.

This mannered, muddled drama about journalistic lapses and worse, crimes, stars comic buddies Jonah Hill and James Franco (This is the End) in a decidedly unfunny story.

Beyond the Reach, adapted from the same Robb White Deathwatch novel that spawned the 1974 Andy Griffith-starring television movie "Savages," is a deadly, desert-set game of cat and mouse that is tired and beyond plausibility.

The story of the colony’s exile and return feels like a dull sermon, but the animals themselves, with their expressive faces and Moe Howard hairdos, can switch from slapstick to pathos faster than Charlie Chaplin.

Perhaps Gabriadze has created a new genre here, but do we want to sit all day in front of an office computer and then go out and spend dollars to watch a small screen on a bigger screen for entertainment?

If you’ve already been to Fargo, or at least visited the place via movies or TV, you’ve got scant reason to go to Cut Bank.

Road Hard is funny enough, and if its hum is predictable at times, its humanness is a welcome zinger.

This much we know: The photographer takes the picture. Less clear is the reverse process – what the picture takes back. And this, to a large and illuminating extent, is the subject of Wim Wenders’s The Salt of the Earth.

Eventful, polished, and knuckle-bitingly dull, the 10th film adapted from a novel by Nicholas Sparks, combines fate, bull riding and some powerful Hollywood bloodlines among its young cast.

Life is the collection of memories, and Campbell is losing them. But there is solace in the reality that you will not miss what you cannot recall.

Familiar in its outline but unusual in the details, Last Knights feels like a year’s worth of post-midnight cable TV viewing run through a blender and served warm for your viewing amusement.

While We’re Young is more commercial and less innovative (or whimsically self-indulgent, depending on your tastes) than Baumbach’s last feature film, 2012’s "Frances Ha," though it shares some common ground.

Director Simon Curtis milks the predictable drama, thrills and heartache of the Holocaust-era story, but it’s a paint-by-numbers triumph, a copy of something we’ve seen many times before.

The reflection offered in the puckered muscle and polished chrome of Furious 7’s heroes feels like a cheery escapist distortion of a culture that more closely resembles the smashed steel, mangled bone and blood and vomit of a plain ol’ unsexy car wreck.

Hoffman’s role is an important one, but not a big one. He’s not called upon to bring a lot to the table, and, as a pro, doesn’t muscle up his part.

Hackle-raising in its intensity.