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.

As a consumer, it is simply your responsibility to see it, just so that many more Love, Simons can be made. There are worse things to spend your money on than this adorable teen gay comedy whose worst quality is its boring straight man.

Sometimes an outsider’s perspective is a breath of fresh air. In this one, you feel the director holding his nose.

Foxtrot is an admirably precise yet dreamlike film, probing the trap in which contemporary Israel finds itself. It is deliberately designed, superbly filmed and affectingly acted by Lior Ashkenazi and Sarah Adler as the stricken Feldmanns.

This pretty movie feels convenient rather than meaningful.

There are some small-time twists in this small-time thriller and, naturally, McHattie does solid work as one of the more slippery characters Saxon encounters in his quest for justice, but DiMarco just can't sustain enough tension or drama to power the film through a plodding 105 minutes.

The film is a technical wonder, especially the sound design. There's also an excellent incongruity at work: Happy faces drawn in blood, viscous killers in playful masks and cheesy eighties music as the soundtrack to savagery.

If someone somehow convinced somebody somewhere to turn the screenplay for Gringo into a real-life motion picture with real-deal actors, then, hell, it could happen to anyone.

There is a Hitchcockian creepiness in Finley's mad-as-hell teen drama.

Only a few of the characters are well-developed enough to sustain the movie's interest, while the rest speak in obscure, poetic dialogue that repeats the central thesis ad nauseam.

With its claustrophobic unity of time and place, the disintegrating party feels highly theatrical and, of various classic screen adaptations from the stage, this wonderfully performed black-and-white film recalls in particular Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf." Yet also, Potter's comic dissection of the London intelligentsia's personal and political angst is completely of the moment.