A resonant journalistic cautionary tale gets packaged as a hokey thriller in Kill the Messenger, a movie with a message that isn’t nearly as urgent as it needs to be.

Alexander narrates with a rueful, put-upon worldly wisdom that instantly enlists our sympathy, and the young actor Ed Oxenbould may be the most appealing junior loser we’ve seen since Peter Billingsley wished for an air rifle in "A Christmas Story."

A parable that concerns the monstrous conduct of humans, Tusk is a salute to storytelling, a comic send-up of Canadiana – with awesome references to Degrassi and Duplessis – and a terrorizing vehicle for sharply conceived absurdity.

It’s all fun enough to watch for the sheer over-the-topness of the performances, and Horovitz does his level best at working around some heavy spatial limitations, but there’s no getting around the fact that, ultimately, My Old Lady feels as stubbornly stuck in that expansive and underlit apartment as Madame Girard herself, and you may find yourself bolting for a lungful of relief.

Both cautionary and comforting (yes, some kids today prefer conversation to cybersexting), Men, Women & Children is as anxious to seem contemporary as any after-school special.

A drama with honourable intentions that feels like a bit of a fib.

Here’s another word for Gone Girl: “meta.” It’s a word Flynn uses, which means it’s a thriller about thrillers, and a narrative about narratives, especially the form of domestic violence relished by current-affairs television shows.

The challenge for a filmmaker attempting to adapt the Agota Kristof novella The Notebook is how much of its startlingly amoral world can actually be shown.

It’s a felt, funny, bracingly sincere kids’ movie. And even more refreshing, it takes as a theme our social fixation with waste, salvage and repackaging.

The film is so incessant on bolstering Cave’s repute and noble struggle with the art of songwriting that it can’t help but seem bloated and self-important. Sometimes seriousness should speak for itself.

Even the worst homophobes are viewed as simply potholes on the highway to enlightenment, and Maggie herself appears on TV only long enough to get the channel changed.

Bring on the sequel please, because, as fine as Denzel is, director Antoine Fuqua’s The Equalizer is not so good – a self-consciously stylized, stop-and-start hodgepodge of Death Wish street vengeance, Bond-style Russian villainy, and moodily shot Boston locale.

Although overplotted and underexplained, the movie is rich in memorable lairs.

Throughout, Sachs is quietly observational – the film’s emotional power coming from its rich but unshowy performances.

As with so many movies where the script constructs experiences that are contrived and off-putting, you hope the actors can capture the emotional truth of some scenes, even if the entire apparatus feels bogus.

The interest here is about watching Hardy, bouncing off Gandolfini and the other cast members, as a quiet man who has turned being underestimated into his primary survival skill. And all the while we wait for the moment when Bob the puppy grows into Bob the pit bull.

This is Canadian cinema as defiantly ugly and mean as anything churned out from the bowels of callous ol’ Hollywood.

Without a thin tether to credibility, this fussy, morbid fantasy simply slides off into the void.

It is certainly possible that Baena is going for a deeper meaning, but even that feels like a case of indecisiveness.

All this is more amusing in theory than practice, partly because Leonard’s world of wiseguys and slapstick violence has become so familiar – the caper-movie default mode.

There’s something to be said for a movie that manages to baffle and dazzle in equal measure. If Daffy Duck had taken up political and media theory, his brain might look like this.

Port Dundas remains snoozy and depopulated even when throats are cut and stomachs thrown to the sheepdogs, and so does the movie.

The November Man is one of those thrillers that grows progressively more incoherent, and it simply isn’t fast enough to glide over its gaping narrative holes.

While Wojtowicz’s shape-shifting character is the major source of fascination here, the archival footage, including with is terrifically effective in evoking the tumultuous era and occasionally providing a reality check to the Dog’s boastful version of his life.

Still: the Soronprfbs may be the best fake on-screen punk band since the Stains.

Jim Caviezel, as coach Ladouceur, doesn’t get much to work with, the script reducing the man to a two-dimensional motivational speaker awash in “there’s no I in Team” platitudes.

Here’s a date movie that will neither cozily cheer you nor satisfyingly thrill you, but instead leave you scratching your head.

The confluence of poverty, dysfunctional parenting and poor educational prospects makes the oft-idealized small-town life look like an incubator for failure, no matter how high and spectacular the Fourth of July fireworks fly.