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.