The first Marvel film in ages to look, feel, and move like an actual feature film and not a slop bucket of CGI.

It genuinely wants to say something important and poignant about what we lose when we stop believing in the unreal, but it cannot quite make the leap into figuring out why anybody should be inclined to listen to such heartfelt pleas.

The easy back-and-forth chemistry between Affleck and Bernthal as they paint the town blood-red provides certain dividends.

With The Shrouds, the filmmaker – not only one of Canada’s greatest creations, but cinema’s, too – has delivered what might be his career-defining masterpiece.

If anything, Sinners is the freest that the Creed and Black Panther filmmaker has ever been: stitching drama to spectacle, folding the personal into the political, slipping past the limits of what studio films are supposed to do in favour of what they still might dare to try.

The Wedding Banquet’s endearing qualities largely outweigh its deficiencies.

Unfortunately, Opus isn’t able to keep up the tension of its cult-horror mystery, speeding through its reveals with a surprising laziness that feels counter to the care it initially took in building out its story.

If Minecraft is the game where kids exercise their creativity by building new digital worlds full of tunnels and fortresses, A Minecraft Movie is where that creativity goes to die.

It is respectful and smooth filmmaking that never loses sight of its one and only goal: keeping its audience hooked.

Director Christopher Landon injects the entire affair with so much stylistic verve and narrative propulsion that, like the best kind of first date, it whips by almost too quickly.

Alternately tedious, cacophonous and stultifying, the latest show of force from writer-director Alex Garland following last year’s equally frustrating Civil War just might be the most unnecessarily unpleasant cinematic experience you will endure this year.

Things play out as sentimentally as expected, while scratching the surface at something deeper, exploring the relationship people have to music, and how that can either change or stay frozen in time.

Freaky Tales has neither the patience nor the depth to imagine any one person or story with a legitimate hook.

A pharmaceutical-industry satire so flaccid that it’s in desperate need of Cialis, Death of a Unicorn is destined to fade into the mythical margins of cinematic history, with future moviegoers convinced that – like its title creature – the film never really existed at all.

Like Majors’s chiselled physique, which is almost a special effect all its own, Magazine Dreams takes unironic pride in flexing its themes so nakedly and frequently that there’s little left to the imagination.

With Misericordia, Guiraudie deftly strikes the balance between the playfully sacrilegious and the sociopathic, rounded out by a seductively bizarre cast of dwellers and clusters of puckered, corpse-fed mushrooms.

Coogan brings a delightfully sardonic deadpan to the role of the bemused bystander observing the antics of penguins, adolescents and … military dictatorships.

It’s a solid notch in Statham’s career, but nothing that will change anyone’s mind about the actor.

This new Snow White is neither a chore à la 2023′s The Little Mermaid nor an abomination on the scale of Robert Zemeckis’s ghoulish Pinocchio redo. Whistle hard enough, and it almost sort of works.

Every single beat of The Alto Knights feels like an historical footnote from Goodfellas or The Godfather Part II stretched out to interminable feature length – musty, dusty, dry.

Ultimately, We Forgot to Break Up’s broken social scene offers a lot of hum, but not enough rattle.

Blanchett, as always, is flawless as the seductive and secretive Kathryn, but it’s Fassbender who reveals a different side of himself.

Zoopocalypse’s bid to revel in the kiddie-macabre space is admirable.

More than anything, NTBTSTM is simply hilarious – a furiously funny roller coaster of a film whose energy never, ever dips. It is difficult to imagine a better, sharper comedy coming along this year. Or the next.

The entire spectacle is so unabashedly outrageous that you cannot help but side with its many excesses.

The underwater cinematography, orchestrated by Nick Remy Matthews, is often startling, destined to make the dark box of a movie theatre all that more engagingly claustrophobic. And the ultimate story behind Last Breath is incredible, verging on the unbelievable.

The most remarkable element is surely the way Egoyan has seamlessly integrated footage from previous COC productions, that he shot himself at the time, into his new film to give it the breadth of a genuine stage performance.

The film is, true to Sorrentino’s style, breathtakingly shot. It is a vibrant, arresting love letter to Naples complemented by the choices of costume artistic director Anthony Vaccarello for Saint Laurent. Every shot is intentional, every close-up serves a purpose. The problem, however, is that the purpose is as surface deep as the characters Parthenope consistently reckons with.