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.

Perkins’s version of The Monkey is an annoying, snarky and slight endeavour that just about kills itself in its bid to satisfy all the many cinema-starved sickos out there.

The Gorge is half a smouldering romance, half a zombified venture into overkilled horror-movie tropes.

This is a movie of pussyfooting and sidestepping, unconcerned with race, history, heroism or really any idea at all beyond “Hulk smash.”

The plot and most action sequences here are as cookie-cutter as the community homes Quan’s Gable is selling.

For all its gestures toward trending conversations about our warped relationship with technology, and the entitled boys weaned on it, Companion is ultimately just a fun genre mash-up that pales in comparison to the superior movies it tends to pay homage to but elevated by its cast.

I’m Still Here is a timely, exquisite masterpiece.

Thanks to Lee’s smooth construction and her performers’ carefully calibrated performances – Beirne is particularly engaging in a role that doesn’t automatically earn sympathy – it all clicks together.

A C-grade thriller that is further dumbed down to dunce-cap calibre, Flight Risk might have worked as an enjoyably grimy piece of genre trash had Gibson not made every single wrong directorial decision along the way.

Deeply playful while never falling for the more hoary tendencies of the genre – remarkably, Soderbergh seems to have invented a new way of filming a “jump scare” here – Presence keeps its audience close and tight, building to a finale that forces you to reconsider the entire experiment.

Universal Language is a film flooded with sorrow and spirit, discombobulating surrealism and comforting sentimentality.

The sentiment of being thrown to the margins of an industry that seemed predestined to carry you is certainly an interesting point of departure, but the resulting film often feels stagnant, unable to square its romantic impulses – as a frustrated Shelly puts it in one scene, “this is breasts and rhinestones and joy!” – with the fraught realities of these characters.

As sincere and sentimental as his approach is, Whannell struggles to marry the emotional beats to the schlockey thrills the genre demands. Instead, these two competing modes tend to cancel each other out, but not so much as to disregard what the ambitious director is going for.

It plays out like that rare piece of art capable of capturing the individual agency inherent in both resistance and compliance. An entire history of oppression isn’t needed here – that is beyond the scope of any one film and a waste of this one.

It’s hard to describe Nickel Boys. It seems like an injustice to call it, simply, a film. It’s a remarkable piece of art, even more impressive when you consider that it’s photographer and filmmaker RaMell Ross’s debut feature film – in fiction.

Pantera mixes its many influences into a smooth spectacle so confident and patient in its assemblage that it instantly wins you over.

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.

Ultimately, it all becomes too strained to take seriously.

Vengeance Most Fowl is a cozy return to form that plaits together its own laboured conception and our mechanized conditions in order to enliven its signature duo among the youth of today.