Despite all the wonder that Strange World has going for it, the film cannot help but land with the softest of thuds.

Unfortunately, Demonic often lacks the substance and energy needed to back up its narrative originality and hybrid genre form. While it is refreshing to see the groundedness with which the director approaches his newest project, his larger-than-life ideas still seem to have trouble finding their exact footing.

It is an overstuffed, manic, exhausting piece of instant movie-meme catnip – likely impenetrable to all but the hardest of hardcore genre devotees.

Bruised is a well-directed debut: Berry understands how to make a competent sports drama complete with all the emotional training montages and passion that viewers expect. Plot-wise, though, Bruised doesn’t offer more than the genre has delivered time and time again, which is a shame because the film contains some remarkable performances.

The director fumbles frequently, but at least he is confident enough in his uneven vision to push through all (warranted) doubts and deliver a story that is every bit awful as it is uncompromising.

Once we’re in the story proper . . . Black Widow quickly turns into another rote exercise in Marvel house style.

Ultimately, Fear Street is a shiny and expensive super-cut of callbacks and needle-drops. It is cool but empty horror worship.

Russell, Plemons and especially the young Thomas excel at highlighting the emotional and spiritual fissures that can result from living in an easy-to-ignore, easier-to-disdain community. But there is a ultimately a hollow sickness to Antlers – a film intended to provoke gasps and gags, but at the same time so superficially produced that it chokes on its own ambitions.

While Dosa has a talent, and perhaps a fascination equalling her subjects, for illustrating the hidden beauty of the natural world, she ultimately crafts a film that is too neatly packaged.

We Have a Ghost is a desperate mix of feel-good sentimentality, watered-down surreality, and comedy as transparent in its hackiness as the film’s title spook.

What could have been a layered, insightful portrait of the most complicated, significant figure in pop-culture history has been reduced to a supersized music video slash concert documentary, the man in its mirror more of a faded reflection than anything else.

While his character is intended to be lost and powerless, Pine seems adrift in another way, too – a star without a proper star vehicle.

The Color Purple arrives as a confused byproduct of the industry’s best intentions and worst habits.

By the time the deep dark truth about the mysterious case is revealed – in a series of twists that are more “agh” than “aha” – even the hardest core of Christie fans won’t be itching for a fourth Poirot go-round from Branagh. Which will not only benefit audiences but also the filmmaker himself.

With Men, the British filmmaker is stubbornly needling his audience with a never-ending barrage of pointy-ended questions that he has neither the inclination nor intention of vaguely addressing or even thinking through on his own terms. Men is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, all scrawled in crayon.

After watching the film twice in quick succession – a futile attempt at catching a glimpse of what usually makes a Falardeau film so immensely watchable (see the Quebecois filmmaker’s Monsieur Lazhar, The Good Lie, My Internship in Canada and Chuck) – My Salinger Year ultimately lands as a mere footnote.

Ultimately, Yes Day doesn’t commit to either being a full-out family fun movie or a family drama.

An ambitious but ultimately sloppy time-travel epic, Good Luck wants to deliver an incendiary critique of artificial intelligence and our reliance on big tech. Yet it ends up being so exhausting and weirdly dull that it will force audiences to pull out their phones out of sheer restlessness.

The heart of the needlessly lengthy 140-minute film is Eilish’s support system, which is to say her family – a screenwriter mother, a construction worker father and her older brother/producer/songwriting partner Finneas O’Connell. They’re all grounded, thoughtful and dedicated to the protection of a self-loathing teen who is coming of age in front of the world.

The sequel to Twister – which pluralizes the title, while following the same beats as its predecessor – is serviceable. But it also misses what made director Jan de Bont’s disaster spectacle such chaotic fun to begin with.

The script, which has a “story by” credit from Stuckmann’s wife and fellow genre enthusiast Samantha Elizabeth, jumps all over the place in tone, from wild to solemn, with no real resting place in between.

A cheap, crass and ruthlessly sloppy skewering of celebrity culture that is barely a millimetre above the material it thinks it is so sharply satirizing, Gormican’s new film is the definition of disappointment.

It is a fool’s errand to imagine what someone like Verhoeven would have done with The Tomorrow War’s material – this is a movie made for the express purposes of delivering some lazy woo-hoo summer fun, not any kind of sneaky subversiveness.

Every single beat of The Alto Knights feels like an historical footnote from Goodfellas or The Godfather Part II stretched out to interminable feature length – musty, dusty, dry.

It is fast-food fantasy, artificially flavoured and quickly devoured.

Seven years is a long time to attempt a reheating of all the many ingredients that made the original film go down so easily, and Another Simple Favor simply tastes off.

The 86-year-old director could stand to at least polish the material, which in Rifkin’s Festival is so well-worn that it threatens to disintegrate into nothingness.

The star’s eager-to-please persona and overgrown puppy-dog physicality keeps the film from falling into complete shtick. It is all the more remarkable a feat given that Phillip is a complete cipher of a character.

Presented with every opportunity to say or do something remotely new or compelling, Wright, typically a talented stylist, elects to shrug his shoulders, delivering a wafer-thin confection that is aggressively disinterested in both ideas and action.

Similar to getting caught in the grip of a giant Amazonian snake, in which you have the privilege of hearing your bones break before the power of the embrace causes your veins to explode, the experience of watching Tom Gormican’s new action-comedy Anaconda is a painful one.

The film spins off into several tonally unsteady directions.

The Devil Made Me Do It is a resolutely pedestrian kind of horror.

No Hard Feelings tries so very hard to shock – to score that collective audience gasp – that it ends up clutching its own pearls.

The filmmaker assumes that aping the cheap aesthetics of the era are enough to establish style, and that making Enid a mystery amounts to layered characterization. It all leads to a climax that is nasty for all the wrong reasons.

There are several ways to make a serial killer movie, and in the sometimes compelling and sometimes repellent Holy Spider, filmmaker Ali Abbasi has chosen all of them. At once exploitative and contemplative, thrilling and disgusting, the film makes a bloody mess of itself before coming close to solving its own case.

The filmmaker is obviously toying with what horror films can be, with what audiences expect of both cheap thrills and high-priced performers. But I can’t admire, and don’t take much pleasure in, being tossed into Semans’s cinematic sandbox along with his well-compensated cast and crew.

This is flat, flaccid action that makes the wan green-screenery of the MCU look like the delirious highs of Mad Max: Fury Road.

This isn't a movie so much as a marketing strategy -- a moving poster loosely disguised as a motion picture.

Whom is this movie for, really? It's too tame for the whooping crowds of women who made hits of the "Sex and the City" movies and "Bridesmaids." And for sure it isn't for parents with kids. You can probably find them, diaper bags in the aisles and toddlers on their laps, watching "Dr. Seuss: The Lorax."

Belkin floats the notion that Wallace’s sharp-tongued style paved the way for the lying loudmouths who now populate our fractured media landscape (he flicks at Bill O’Reilly, Alex Jones and the U.S. President), but it feels like a half-hearted bid for contemporary relevance. At least his prickishness had purpose.

The fault in the film lies as much with Cretton’s script, which he co-wrote with Andrew Lanham, as it does with his direction.

A glum meditation on isolation and romantic malaise.

Vacillating between sappy and snappy, Stuart Little 2 is featherweight family fare, perfectly timed for viewers with short attention spans.

A redemption allegory so poker-faced you might forget that redemption is supposed to be a good thing.

As a 21st-century account of the soldier’s enduring alienation from the home front, Billy Lynn is highly effective. It’s what surrounds that account that doesn’t work.

Alec Baldwin, star of The Shadow, looks great in his tux, and maybe he can even act, but the script doesn't give him the chance. It can't decide whether it's in the humour department or the thrills business. [01 Jul 1994]

There are individual sequences alternately amusing and touching. [08 May 1984]

Ultimately, The Sinners would make for a better miniseries. With so much story to tell and so many characters to root for (or against), we could use a deep dive into the risks of unchecked misogyny.

Too wildly ambitious in its goal to unite two powerful TV tribes to serve a common goal, but its unsentimental music (hip songs by Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh) and visual delights will capture the imagination of young and old.

Both more and less of the same -- more of that hot-pink couture, a whole lot more of that diminutive doggie, less reason to laugh even if you're a tank-topped 16-year-old.

The Program makes passing references to the power of celebrity and the Live Strong narrative – the cyclist admits to telling people what they wanted to hear – but it never goes deep on what it was that produced the awfulness that is Lance Armstrong.

The result is infotainment dressed up as an art flick. Turkish society is fascinatingly complex and its East/West tensions give rise not to easy allegories but to hard ambiguities. To explore that truth, read any novel by Orhan Pamuk. To escape it, watch Bliss.

The best thing about Book Club: The Next Chapter is just seeing these remarkable actresses do what they do best. I hope Hollywood can make better use of them in the future.

For all these references to the fairytale, Sydney White soon takes an easier path, recycling familiar "Mean Girls" and "Revenge of the Nerds" scenarios.

That makes Mockingjay – Part 1 an experience to be endured, like a prison sentence, rather than enjoyed. By all means, bring on the revolution: It has to be more exciting than this.

The story is shockingly ordinary. The movie plays like an extended mediocre episode of the X-Files TV show or, for that matter, even a contemporary crime series such as CSI.

Should be a brilliant picture, one last testament to the intertwined sensibilities of two brave artists. Should be, but isn't.

Remember Me could have been a decent family drama, especially considering its setting, but that was not to be. Too bad, because the romance is highly forgettable.

None of this quite gets off the ground, and I found myself wanting to bid farewell to Yvan and Charlotte quite a while before the final credits rolled. Not every wannabe Woody Allen is Woody Allen.

Inventive and vibrant action sequences boasting exceptional 3-D effects and inspired voice casting (including Jackie Chan as a warrior mouse and Peter Stormare as a deranged exterminator) help to elevate this to something better than vaporous.

Max Manus (the title role is played by Aksel Hennie) feels so familiar that audiences watching it are likely to experience a numbing sense of déjà vu. Nothing seems particularly fresh or involving.

As flicks go, She's All That ain't very much. But as high-school flicks go, this thing is a trite classic. [29 Jan 1999, p.C3]

An entertaining, moderately irreverent comedy that launches the silly movie season on a sure foot.

This Means War is a Valentine's date dud: Think wilted roses, squashed chocolates and flat champagne.

In the end, Eagle vs. Shark represents a convincing triumph for Dumb.

Mescal and Pascal are both fine; though they often seem too overwhelmed by the tired plot machinations to really make an impression beyond how fine they both look in Roman garb.

Spenser Confidential makes far more narrative and visual sense than the incomprehensible "Mile 22," and carries less of an America First odour than any of the pair’s previous partnerships. But it also proves that it is finally time that Berg and Wahlberg explored a trial separation. If you really love someone, guys, set them free.

At least tries to disturb us, rather than shock us or gross us out, and that is admirable. But it doesn't pull it off, and the movie is indicative of the trouble Hollywood has these days making that most frightening kind of movie -- the kind that lets the audience frighten itself.

Its peculiar strain of anti-Americanism aside, Run, Fat Boy, Run tries to bridge the gap between self-deprecating Brits and self-aggrandizing Yanks, settling down somewhere between the two. Don't ask me where, exactly, but this mid-Atlantic meeting point is an ultra-neutral zone.

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”).

Promised Land is a low-budget effort, far too awkward and contrived a drama to change many hearts and minds.

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.

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.

Mainly bad, and a shockingly bland departure from a hitherto spunky guy.

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.

Altman shakes the camera like a two-bit horror director, and it seems a different sort of signature - less masterful than weary, less signed than resigned. Zero-sum, indeed.

For all its built-in cynicism and tired tropes, Red One is not as insufferable as you’d expect. At the least you can count on Evans and Johnson committing to the bit and selling all the broad gags they can, which should be enough to win over the elves in your family.

Parental Guidance is one of those intergenerational embarrassment comedies in the "Meet the Fockers" line, where children can enjoy seeing grown-ups looking ridiculous.

If you like your sentimentality sweet and sticky, then The Secret Life of Bees is definitely your jar of honey.

Apatow wants to be taken seriously. Funny People is the attempt to raise his game a notch – and it fails.

Okay, some of this is mildly diverting.

As long as it remains within the carefully constructed, peaceful and innocent cosmos of its opening, it's nonpareil. When it goes to war, it goes to hell. [18 Dec 1992]

If you like your archetypes writ large and your sentiment over easy, then Unstrung Heroes is the flick for you. [15 Sep 1995]

The truth is you can find more entertaining absurdities and thrilling nihilism from watching the average episode of Melrose Place or Beverly Hills, 90210 and, at least on those shows, they don't confuse dumb with doomed. [13 June 1997, p.C6]

Leatherhead's a comedy of stock setups and kooky digressions in which nothing really comes to a head, and running at close to two hours, it lacks the essential brevity of the form.

The ninth film in the franchise is competent enough but it won’t freeze the heart or fire the imagination.

Guess who sings tired old tune.

The unruly pack of subplots make The Shaggy Dog much more convoluted than it needs to be. But Allen's physical comedy as man-becoming-dog, and his non-stop monologue as man-dog, are definitely worth a trip to the matinee.

Cholodenko casts much better than she writes. Yet, alas, even a talented veteran like Moore can't sell a hoary line like, "Sometimes you hurt the ones you love the most." Maybe if she'd set it to music – nope, sorry, that's already been done.

Everything Terms of Endearment's detractors accused Terms of being: a synthetic, manipulative tragi-comedy with performances more appropriate to a proscenium arch - or to a drag show - than to the wide screen. And yet, there are moments in the movie of high comedy and sequences of searing truth. At its worst, Steel Magnolias is vastly inferior to Designing Women; at its best, it brings to mind (but never equals) Tennessee Williams. [20 Nov 1989]

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

Eating Raoul is often very funny, but it guns down its targets (hot tubs, taco stands) without revealing anything new about them - it's broader than parody, less pointed than satire - and it crudely manipulates the audience into congratulating itself on its own hipness. [15 Oct 1982]

While the world of competitive cycling can be extremely exciting, not every one of its events is captivating. A well-intentioned biopic about Scottish cycling maverick Graeme Obree, The Flying Scotsman is hampered by the fact that its hero earned his greatest renown for riding around and around on a velodrome … alone … for an hour.

Ultimately, Next is just the next Nic Cage vehicle, another quirky story that allows him to do his patented neurotic balancing act in an askew world. The problem here is not just that Cage's shtick is wearing as thin as his hair; the role is a bad fit.

Miss Sloane is a powerfully conceived thriller with something dead at its centre: there is no reason a female protagonist must be good or well-behaved, but she must at least be interesting.

First Blood is a gung-ho action flick fast enough and brutal enough to become Stallone's first non-Rocky hit; on the profound sympathetic levels it seeks to address, however, it is an emission of profound stupidity. [22 Oct 1982]

An inferior "Napoleon Dynamite." Call it Napoleon Firecracker. The film steals one of the best laughs of Jon Heder's surprise 2004 hit, the scene where Napoleon nosedives over a bicycle jump, and stretches the gag into an 86-minute movie.

Screenwriter Brian Helgeland (L.A. Confidential, Mystic River) is the real culprit here, creating a crude paint-by-numbers fiction that keeps yelling about the importance of the truth while hurtling in the opposite direction.