The film is too long for the non-enthusiast. And we don’t learn much about the brothers’ personal lives – it’s as if they exist for the band and nothing else. But even if the music isn’t your thing, it’s hard not to admire the duo’s commitment to their creative impulses.

Despite the heavy material, the film manages to imbue the story with heart and even breakthrough moments of joy.

Bravo’s style echoes King’s own: It is fun and whimsical, formally playful, sometimes bordering on the fantastic but always grounded in the real and the intimate.

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.

If you’re going to make a movie in which a psycho slices away at both campers and counsellors in direct homage to the age of Jason Voorhees, you need to go scuzzy or go home. A proper slasher movie should make you want to take a shower. Here, I felt sparkling clean.

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

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.

Sound the alarm, hide the children and lock the doors: another Purge movie is here. And it’s deadlier, and dumber, than ever.

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.

The thrills here are both cheap and oddly, comfortingly captivating. Of course nothing can ever kill Liam Neeson, but it is a whole lot of no-brain-necessary fun to watch everyone and everything try.

F9 is a welcome blast of fizzy action glee. You won’t come out of it a better or smarter person – quite possibly dumber! – but you will leave satisfied that your summer movie season wasn’t a completely life- and joy-less bore.

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

The challenge of watching Fatherhood is that it’s tough to make out what sort of a narrative it’s trying to tell.

As you get immersed in the story, you’re also entranced by a lovely escape to a nostalgic Italian summer that’s inspired by visits to real-life places and rendered in a style akin to that distinctive Miyazaki aesthetic. I also want to get my hands on the original score – the music soars gorgeously.

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.

Akilla’s Escape recasts the monolithic narrative of gang involvement as one that rejects a trope of Black peril in order to tell a multi-dimensional story of resilience – one where keen strategists are developed through unsolvable situations, where the enduring love of Black mothers demonstrates what it means to walk into the line of fire and where, amidst abject tumult, moments of tenderness and triumph persist against all odds.

New Order might go down as the most uncomfortable watch of the year. Sadistic and ugly and crushingly depressing. But also demanding of your engagement. The reward? A master-class in high-anxiety cinema, and enough fodder for a thousand uncomfortable conversations.

So for those asking the obvious: Yes, Awake should put you to sleep rather quickly.

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.

As with every summer – even this supremely strange one – there are a ton of horror movies coming down the pike. But no matter how scary the new Conjuring or how disgusting the new Saw may be, I can guarantee that you won’t see as soul-shaking a film this season as The Amusement Park.

Regardless of whether Undine is working at a level of allegory or actual fantasy, it is an expansively rich film.

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

Despite the predictable plot, there are moments of genuine delight – and they all come from the fresh talent.

In recounting the protests and sit-ins against the institutionalized racism of a past era, it offers a visual field guide to what activism looks like in a community that, for some, is not traditionally associated with speaking truth to power.

A lot of things are said; a lot is not. It was a dark and stormy night. An audience walks into a film – and stays for the whole 90 minutes, because it is worth it.

One reason The Outside Story works is that it doesn’t follow an established template. Nozkowski pre-empts speculation by divulging Young’s backstory at a steady pace. And while the script is laudable for its gentle laughs, it is Henry’s portrayal of Young that holds our attention.

Even those familiar with the legacy of the show will discover new and fascinating things about the history of Sesame Street throughout the film – and anyone who watches Street Gang will come away moved by everything its cast and crew managed to accomplish.

It’s ultimately difficult to wade through the muddled plot line, or plot lines, rather, as there are so many disparate storylines contending for top billing in this movie.