The animation also feels half-caught between inspired and derivative . . . Thank goodness, then, for the songs.

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

For all its aches and pains, the heart of You Can Live Forever doesn’t so much beat as skip, haltingly and disconcertingly, as it tries to keep its own lifeblood pumping.

Heartfelt in tone, imaginative in scope and rendered with a seemingly endless well of aesthetic wit, the romantic-comedy is a worthy addition to the Pixar canon … until the characters start speaking.

Foster is, as always, exceptionally compelling to watch as she tries to puzzle out Lilian’s motivations. And the actress is surrounded by France’s finest men of a certain age. Auteuil, Amalric and Vincent Lacoste do their due diligence as performers, even when Zlotowski’s screenplay asks them to abandon all pretenses of rationality.

Ford’s film cannot be entirely discounted – the director knows a star when he sees one, and seems to retroactively contort his screenplay around the talents of Plaza as much as he can. The actress makes Emily’s plight seem relatable, unrelenting and never ever precious.

Those Who Wish Me Dead is solid meat-and-potatoes fun – it knows its job, gets it done with minimal fuss and leaves its audiences full and satisfied.

As with other Miranda properties, In the Heights is designed to charm you into submission – and charmed you will be. You might even get up and dance. And whether that’s in the company of strangers at a theatre or in front of your indifferent pets at home, there is something to be said for a movie that can make you move.

Not much of Sam and Eric’s journey is all that compelling, or even makes sense . . . but at least they’re nudged along by Sam’s emotional support cat, easily the cutest MVP (Most Valuable Pet) since Messi the dog from last year’s Anatomy of a Fall.

The film works best when it is only Evy and her headphones on the screen, the character’s head (and ours) becoming overwhelmed by some truly impressive, singularly creepy sound design.

Broker too frequently goes broad and wide, resulting in a story that doesn’t earn the happiness that its flawed characters desire, and eventually achieve.

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.

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

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.

Through design or happy accident, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom closes out the DCEU on a mid- to high-water mark.

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 is an anthropological drama that never cracks its subjects open – an approach that might work on paper, but feels beset by engine troubles on-screen.

With a tongue-in-cheek title inviting audiences to immediately dismiss its supposedly intense fear factor, Damian McCarthy’s new horror film arrives ready to play with convention and expectation. The scary thing, though, is that the movie exhausts itself halfway through, revealing Hokum as something closer to hogwash.

Free Guy is here, it repeatedly reminds us, to have a good time, not a long-franchise time. But there is something so overwhelmingly corporate and safe about the thing that you can see the glimmer of a brand-new cinematic universe in every twinkle of Reynolds’ dreamy hazel eyes.

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.

Ultimately, it all becomes too strained to take seriously.

The Lost City believes it is a lot more fun than it actually is. The movie isn’t a guilty pleasure so much as a pleasure-lite guilt trip – a relentlessly and eventually exhausting middle-ground effort that is made all the more frustrating because it is so very close to reaching the platonic ideal of shlock.

Quotation forthcoming.

The Rise of Gru is the weakest entry by far. But with just enough semi-inspired moments of weirdness to skate by.

Come for Phoenix, stay for Phoenix and maybe also Norman and Hoffman, the latter of whom bounces off of both her co-stars with a nervy charm. But everything else? C’mon.

Most impressively, Lemercier manages to make Dion/Aline’s not-terribly-dramatic hardships – she has trouble conceiving with her husband, she misses her family while on the road, she feels exhausted by her Las Vegas schedule – feel relatable and compelling. Part of that is Lemercier’s full-throttle commitment to the bit.

With one foot in lighthearted romantic comedy and another in also-light political commentary, Gaza Mon Amour never takes a wrong step, exactly, but also feels ambivalent about its final destination. And if that tortured metaphor doesn’t work for you, then the essence of the film, directed by twin brothers Tarzan and Arab Nasser, might feel just as wobbly.

Posse wants to be a 'classic Western' but its definition of classic is consistently cliched. Yet it has such grace and such an abiding belief in its message that you can't help but smile approval. [14 May 1993]

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple doesn’t quite live up to the earlier film’s promise. At best, it’s an ambitious and compelling enough staging ground biding time, with cruel violence more stomach-turning than ever, as it sets up the already-in-the-works final chapter in a planned trilogy

Along the way, the narrative does drag at times, but mainly the film slowly and steadily impresses as two excellent reporters – and two excellent actresses, Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan – go about their work.

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.

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.

Boogie is, finally, Huang’s cinematic realization of his dream, a debut filmmaker’s warts and all.

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

A witty tale of deceit and betrayal, it’s an uncomfortable look at the values we tend to buy into and why.

There’s a zaniness to this film that feels refreshing, a going-for-broke energy reminiscent of an Adam Sandler movie at its peak.

In order to move forward, it’s imperative we look at the past. Black Ice is a worthwhile ice-breaker to that end.

Guadagnino’s film feels small and overwrought in comparison; satisfied to drag things out within the bubble of faux academia (and cinephilia, with a pointed nod in Woody Allen’s direction). But it does have its pleasures, specifically where the actors speak less and make us feel so much more in performance and action.

This is a small, sentimental and straightforward film that offers little in the way of surprises. Instead, it wins on heart and a simple message about the value in fighting to keep one’s dreams alive.

There is something magical in Sorrentino’s tender, flawed familial portrait that risks social taboos. I’d rather watch something beautiful and dumb vying for real emotional truth than the woke-est and most sanitized cinema, which only wants my approval. The Hand of God is a sprawling, gorgeous mess, but one you can’t look away from – and it might just break your heart.

It’s bloody, brutal, stupid fun – until it isn’t. Either running out of ideas or running into budgetary problems, Carnahan slows things down about halfway in, stopping the madness in its tracks to give Roy some humanity (not needed here, but thanks!) and to give audiences some yadda-yadda villainy from a bored-looking, here-for-the-paycheque Gibson (also, no thank you!).

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

The best way to approach it is not as a comedy but as a straight pirate movie with exceedingly odd twists. Certainly it makes better use of its sterling actors than The Hound of the Baskervilles (1978), also co-written by and co-starring Cook, made of its sultans-of-comedy cast. [30 Jun 2006, p.R25]

it’s a cheeky post-Deadpool comedy – irreverent to a fault – with grindhouse aesthetics that tend to feel inspired by Quentin Tarantino rather than the movies that inspired Quentin Tarantino.

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.

Perhaps Bird is best understood as a film about self-consciousness or perhaps it is just a self-conscious film, ironing out the flaws of these well-meaning characters to create a fairy tale or apologue.

In lieu of sensationalizing the persecution of these young women, Small Things Like These compellingly casts its gaze onto the complicity of the community and the social architectures which uphold abuse.

Originally titled Eight for Silver, the film from British writer-director Sean Ellis is brooding, uneasy and fog-filled, with an apprehensive soundscape. Werewolf mythology mixes with biblical allusions and ideas on payments for the sins of elders.

Untamed Heart is a gentle fable, a contemporary re-working of myths that will always cut close to the bone - myths about love and magic, about the silence that speaks volumes and the peace that surpasses understanding. It's certainly not a perfect film, but there's a sweet integrity to the writing and a stern refusal to compromise itself, to bow to the dictates of formula. [12 Feb 1993]

While Macdonald manages to come up with one of the most impressively brutal cut-to-black endings in recent memory, the rest of this feature cannot hope to match the power of his cast.

Dillard takes every opportunity to interrogate Hudner’s narrative and what it means to be an ally. Whenever Hudner speaks up for Brown or throws a punch on his behalf, we get a revelatory moment observing how self-serving those actions can be.

For the most part, it's simply a pleasure to watch a smoothly made and underplayed film about attractive, nice people without a hint of violence on their minds. [25 Apr 1997, p.D8]

Though the stately pace can be frustrating, its anti-war stance ultimately feels modern and urgent.

Regrettably, Theater Camp doesn’t have a wide enough scope to zoom out from its extremely specific landscape to turn its inside jokes outward, nor an ironic enough detachment from the material that it’s riffing on.

Where the horror of 2022′s Speak No Evil feels deeply, almost inescapably cruel in its final moments, Watkins’s film takes a relatively conventional approach, relying more on slasher tropes than producing a deep-seated sense of unease.

Not a masterpiece, but it's not negligible either. [14 Aug 1992]

Condorman, the new Disney Studios film, has the odd exploding car or boat in it, but it is sheer amiability. [18 Aug 1981]

Whatever the experts say, any viewer can observe the large gap between the damaged original and the perfect restoration. Perhaps the only definitive thing one can say about the most expensive painting in the world is that, regardless of who painted it in the 16th century, it is a creature of the 21st.

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

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 fun, serviceable, family-oriented exercise in reprise that counts on nostalgia as it brings history and present day together.

A superior sequel to an amusing original. A new batch of slapstick and satire. [16 Jun 1990]

As a filmmaker, Questlove utilizes his celebrity connections more than he does original directorial vision, trading instead in long-established, standard documentary structure and form. Summer of Soul is polished, but it pales in stark comparison to the raw footage and energy of the Harlem Cultural Festival.

While unable to fully deliver on the promise of its artistic potential, The First Omen remains, nonetheless, a fun, low stakes introduction for horror newbies to The Omen franchise and an enjoyable enough tribute to the original film (offering, also, a more contemporary take on visualizing the grotesque).

It’s saved, first by strong performances from Buckley, always effortlessly believable, and Colman, expert at laying bare the clammy soul of easily dismissible women. And second, by the letters themselves.

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.

While Trauma is a veritable stew of psychological motivation compared to so many of the director's other films, the prevailing motivation remains, just as it is with Argento's killers, technique. [15 Sep 1993]

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.

At its worst, the film is an homage to Dion’s presented indomitability. At its best, it serves as a compelling portrait of a powerhouse performer’s lifeblood love of stage and audience.

The most disappointing part is that the film is peppered with so many brief moments of comic flair and clear-eyed truths that they are collectively almost enough to convince you that it doesn’t matter what Baumbach’s intentions might’ve been. Unfortunately, those sharper-edged bits and pieces eventually become subsumed by a drippy sentimentality that sticks to you like the crisp white suit that Clooney is often wrapped inside of.

If Frankenstein is enough to shake the director of his creature comforts and push him to explore something new, then so be it. But don’t expect everyone else to devote themselves to such an exquisite corpse.

What remains is an interesting, if too often overly protracted, portrait of creative frustration, artistic ego and the ethics of storytelling in an overly saturated landscape. It’s Shackleton’s most personal film to date, even though it’s about something that doesn’t exist. Or maybe that’s why it feels personal – here he is finally interrogating not just formal convention, but his own desire to fit into it.

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.

Technically, the picture is a mess, but the ineptitudes in the editing and cinematography actually add to the charm, and the Bushman family is wondrous to watch. The Gods Must Be Crazy II is an old dog sans new tricks, but the friendly mutt's familiar repertoire is varied enough to fill a few hours with undemanding fun. [13 Apr 1990]

For anyone wondering why women don’t come forward to report sexual assault, Black Box Diaries offers a glimpse into the many indignities women can face when reporting the crime, and the amount of personal resolve needed to follow through.

While Janiak is able to easily tick off the hallmarks of the genre, and perhaps convince those actually alive in the nineties that the entire decade must have been backlit in aggressive neon, her film doesn’t quite scream (or Scream) out for two more films’ worth of context.

After almost two and a half hours, all of it glued together with plot-vomiting dialogue and characters that only vaguely resemble the ones Spielberg carefully built, Dominion becomes its very own Jurassic Park: Designed to thrill and enchant, it instead becomes a ride to survive.

Bullet Train’s biggest weapon, of the secretly funny variety, rests in the chiselled form of star Brad Pitt, who once again proves that he is as charming a buff-and-tough movie god as he is a wry, self-deprecating comedy star.

It’s not half-bad. I mean, don’t get too excited – this is still a bad movie. But it is the kind of better-than-it-should-be bad instead of merely bad-bad.

Megalopolis might be Coppola’s decades-in-the-making passion project, an epic of ambition and imagination, but it is also a magnificent mess of a masterpiece, as irredeemably silly as it is sincerely sublime.

Whenever the camera is on Hathaway, which is almost always, the film feels a hundred times more rich and substantive.

The lack of genuine slaughter in Badlands isn’t the film’s only problem. While it flips the franchise’s history by making the Yautja a hero instead of a villain . . . there is not nearly enough tension or world-building on display to become invested in this particular game of kill-or-be-killed.

Like the stock market itself, there are peaks and valleys.

Only Seyfried truly understood the assignment that Feig handed her, the actress oscillating between two modes – intense and freakishly intense – with finesse.

Army of the Dead is exactly the kind of uber-stylish, ridiculously muscular, exceptionally juvenile storytelling that he’s made his bones on. Some audiences will make a meal of it. Some will gag. You’ll know which viewer you are after those first 15 minutes, guaranteed.

It is tidy, it is easy and it is, by the end, far too flinty.

With some deft trimming, Being the Ricardos could be a fine HBO Sunday night movie “event,” as they used to be (or still are?) called. But as it is, this is less a cinematic thing and more an elaborate joke without a kicker. As Lucille Ball might say: waaaaaaaah.

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.

After all its blood is spilled – on perfectly white sheets of ice and snow, of course – Slash/Back still announces the arrival of a major talent in Innuksuk. Here is hoping that she gets to kill bigger and better Canadian actors for many years to come.

There isn’t enough raw drama, deep-felt emotion, or genuine artistry on display here to keep CODA from staring down its own obligatory end: a half-smile and a shrug.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a fun enough distraction.

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.

With its old-fashioned look, quaint unsophistication and self-consciously big heart, this film is Hoosiers meets The Longest Yard, with an Oliver Twist.

It’s glorious in some parts, stretches out your willingness to suspend disbelief in others. Nevertheless, a movie that leaves you with a Missy Elliott style grrrl power anthem as an earworm is totally worth a lazy summer afternoon sprawled in front of your TV – as you make mental notes to sign up your kids for musical theatre classes the minute you’re allowed.

While the tone and feel of Nope is wonderfully atmospheric and expansive, it also feels as if it comes at the expense of characters possessing deep interior lives or a story world that is well and evenly plotted.

More than any other MCU outing over the past three years, though, there is more to appreciate here than not. The performances are all filled with sorrow and spirit, a true melding of real-life emotion and whatever heightened reactions are typically required for an expensive play session in a superpowered sandbox.

Kranz can’t quite figure out a way to make his characters’ collective misery cinematically interesting. This is a serious movie, but not a searing one.

When the narrative knife is as dull as it is here, there is just no fun in bleeding out. If Caron and his collaborators don’t learn their lesson, though, at least we will. Work smarter, not Sharper.