A critic needs only two words to dispense with The Grinch; the first one is bah.

Both leads fit their performances seamlessly into this destabilizing scheme, providing a provocative timelessness to the characters.

It’s an intense and sharp opening that would impress Spielberg, if he could hear the dang thing. Nearly the entire movie is torpedoed by its cranked-to-11 sound mix, with a good chunk of dialogue drowned out by whirring airplanes and myriad explosions.

It isn’t hard to find all the many ways in which this film exhausts both itself and Lisbeth. It is time, already, to give this Girl a rest.

Focused on one cocky white student’s foray into the world of California battle rap, Bodied is at times vile in its content and bananas in its execution. But Kahn is not a mere shock artist, and as the film progresses and twists its perspective, it’s clear the director is playing a much deeper, more complicated and extremely messy game.

The film is rich in such positive messaging, and its subjects quickly endear themselves to the camera.

For a film insistent upon getting the dramaturgically correct 1985 Pepsi logo into the frame, very little effort seems to have been applied to exactitude elsewhere. Freddie Mercury deserves better.

So the big question for the new Disney adaptation of The Nutcracker, sure to ride the wave of the ballet’s seasonal popularity: What’s to be done with the cumbersome story?

Although Von Trotta skips around Bergman’s filmography a bit haphazardly, and touches upon his romantic proclivities in a frustratingly brief manner, there’s little room to go wrong when a film is seemingly 50 per cent composed of Bergman’s own footage.

There are a lot of words that come to mind when watching Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Suspiria: beautiful, gross, overwhelming, frustrating, disturbing, powerful, long, gross, audacious, baffling, explicit, extravagant and did I mention gross?

The action, when it does arrive, is quiet enough to send the most insomnia-plagued of audiences to sleep.

Watanabe and Moore acquit themselves well (although the latter’s lip-syncing is questionable), but Bel Canto falls short of the operatic notes Weitz attempts to hit.

Coming out of the Toronto International Film Festival last month, critics were touting McCarthy as an Oscar nominee. Her work is nuanced and insightful, though it may not be showy enough for Academy voters.

Most refreshingly, Johnny English Strikes Again is the rare secret-agent film that feels wholly unself-conscious.

By exploiting the raw physical power of the Indonesian martial art called silat and then emptying buckets and buckets of fake blood upon your cast for kicks, filmmaker Timo Tjahjanto has birthed a monster of a movie, as brutal as it is hypnotic.

The acting is strong, but the uneven pacing means there is so much to absorb in the end, that it’s impossible to discern.

Cedergren excels at balancing Asger’s cynical cool with his desire to help (or perhaps simply help himself), and the entire endeavour will leave you with a new-found respect for 911 operators.

The cast is solid; Everett’s acting in particular is deep, indelible and award-worthy. We smell Oscar, one might say.

Shaping the rhetoric of black activism and black liberation into accessible and demographic-spanning prose is no easy task. It is work which must be undertaken with intelligence, care and, above all, experience. It is no surprise then that the adaptation of Angie Thomas’s debut young-adult novel, The Hate U Give, into a big-budget studio picture loses much of its import in translation.

Most of all, though, it comes off as unsure, even afraid, of just what it wants to say about America today, resulting in a sometimes amusing, sometimes stilted lecture that indicts everyone, and no one.

Stewart believed people would rally to the shark cause if only they knew the gravity of the situation. The film is now made, the word is out and Stewart more than did his part.

As sincere and entertaining as it is, The New Romantic makes the classic university mistake of trying to ace the exam by cramming the night before.

Touching, if by-the-books, documentary.

A rags-to-riches tale that is inspirational in the most sentimental and predictable of fashions, Bigger squanders most of the potential that comes with dissecting such an underexplored world as the nascent body-building industry. At least he nails the casting, with the intimidatingly fit Tyler Hoechlin and Aneurin Barnard as the Weider brothers, the charismatic Julianne Hough as Joe’s wife.

Stern pledges to just listen rather than argue, and though what he hears is often bonkers and wholly unsupported by facts, he has compassion, at least for those who are not nakedly racist.

The film ends with the mention of Schrager’s full pardon in 2017 by President Obama. If the discotheque was non-judgmental, so is the film.

All About Nina is a compelling, honest and occasionally messy middle finger to the expectations placed on female entertainers – or just simply women at all.

So, the safely scary and often amusing formula holds. Meanwhile, the movie’s conclusion includes enough plot about Stine’s fate to suggest Goosebumps 3 will feature more of the elusive Black and that can only be a good thing.