As the central characters, Helms and Harrison play their parts with empathy.

Spiral too often gets in its own way and reveals its internal machinations before they’re due.

Much like the heroes of this story, The Retreat manages to defy expectations. And while some gory clichés still abound, it makes for a gruesome, gritty thriller that lets its leads shine.

This dandy foreign feature from Anders Thomas Jensen is only posing as a revenge film – clickbait for the violence junkies and the popcorn crowd. Yes, leading man Mads Mikkelsen plays a brooding killing machine out to avenge the loss of a loved one. But Riders of Justice, in Danish with English subtitles, is actually a pitch-black comedy about questions, coincidences and ideas that pile up faster than the body count.

While the film has all the makings of something that could easily be overly saccharine because it’s so predictable, Blue Miracle manages to be a rather charming family-friendly affair.

It is mighty impressive, in a stupefying way, just how close Cruella’s filmmakers get to pulling the dang thing off. This isn’t to say that the movie is a success – it is embarrassing on many levels, and seems to be frequently at odds with its presumed family-friendly audience – but as far as movies that have no business existing outside sketch-comedy land go, it could’ve been worse.

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.

The Woman in the Window isn’t sure whether it’s a thriller, a drama, a psychological study or a slasher. Each Big Moment™ succeeds in eliciting a reaction, but that just leads to a new state of confusion. Confusion that’s spurred on by questions that aren’t answered.

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.

The Water Man myth feels incomplete. What is magical, though, is the chance to root for a young Black male hero as he navigates a family crisis that’s both specific and universal, and not based on race.

Ritchie pulls together an impressively determined thriller that sticks. Ideal for both a certain generation of viewer who gets excited when hearing the line, “We’ve got eight weeks of recon” and for those who will watch absolutely anything starring Statham (hi!), Wrath of Man is the best, bloodiest surprise of the year so far.

Yes, The Father is a familiar story and a universal one. Yet Zeller has been uniquely inventive in the way he evokes the unreliability of memory and the subjectivity of experience in the senile – and the healthy.

While there are the requisite number of jump scares and red-herring narrative fake-outs, Berman and Pulcini – who are odd fits in the first place, given their decidedly non-genre filmography – zig where you expect them to zag.

At least Without Remorse gets one thing right: casting onscreen dynamo Michael B. Jordan as the out-for-blood hero.

It is all very, very stupid, But first-time director Simon McQuoid regrettably refuses to embrace that stupidity.

Whenever the story’s central tension threatens to get interesting and complicated, the filmmakers deflate it in the most obvious of ways.

When Ben Wheatley is having a laugh, he can make for a perversely pleasant genre tour-guide. When he starts to get high off his own supply, though, it’s best to hike back to civilization.

Chaos Walking is, in its own way, a masterclass in everything that contemporary filmmakers should avoid doing.

The jokes arrive fast and plentifully, knowing just what will tickle both younger viewers and adults.

The plot could have benefited from some sort of subversion – something to make the familiar trope of a dysfunctional family wedding a little less predictable.

Tender, topical and well-crafted, No Ordinary Man is no ordinary film.

Sugar Daddy will be gripping viewing for anyone who wonders what it takes to make it – and whether it’s all worth it in the end.

With the exception of a few demented scenes teleported over from a stranger, better comedy . . . Thunder Force is as sloppy and disappointing as the label “A Ben Falcone Film” previously suggested.

It’s all too common for history to remember victims as numbers, but Quo Vadis, Aida? counters this, offering instead an eye-opening and deeply felt personal portrait of tragedy.

The film is scary not in its extraordinary imaginings but in the mundane familiarity that underpins those imaginings.

Simply put, I didn’t care for a single person or situation on-screen, and Jacobs’s curiously unconfident and drab direction, which is in desperate need of tighter editing, only hastened my growing annoyance.

Eventually, The Unholy reveals itself not to be an entertaining ride to Hell but an earnest sales pitch for the power of Christ. Fair enough. But for Easter 2021, I was hoping for something a little more enjoyably demonic and less been-there-redeemed-that. Let us pray.

The photography is elegant, but nothing else is. With action that is standard and not at all tense, the melodrama is much higher than the reward.