Thom Ernst

Kandahar is standard entertainment that pushes for more than what they can deliver. Slight entertainment is the best it can be.

The Starling Girl is a film that highlights remarkable performances in a story that travels down familiar territory.

Fast X dials in every living character (with some post-mortem appearances) to wrap up the decades-long franchise. If you’re not caught up on your F&F history, you are liable to find yourself reaching for a GPS to guide you through the plot.

A hybrid action/war/revenge film with enough octane to blast Michael Bay out of competition.

The humour remains, only now there is an added charm missing from previous installments. That charm is courtesy of the movie’s protagonists, a typically atypical family, and their equally quirky neighbours. Including a lovelorn teen boy and an old dude with a shotgun.

Without anything more than the heralding of a cult figure, Living with Chucky becomes a Chucky lovefest relying solely on reminiscing the good times; the kind of interviews that used to be added as a DVD extra.

Ruskin gives a fresh bend to the story of the Boston Strangler, and indeed to the true-crime genre. There are plenty of true crime films to entertain, but few that reach alongside the likes of Richard Brooks’s In Cold Blood (1967), in Fincher’s Zodiac (2007), and in his abandoned television project, Mindhunter. Ruskin’s Boston Strangler belongs on this list.

Pacifiction is a movie to experience. In the end, it’s all an analogy between politics and nightclubs and the assumption (fiction?) of power and persuasion. But that’s my guess. Your guess is as good as mine. And to that effect, ours is as good a guess as even Serra is willing to offer.

Knock at the Cabin doesn’t send you home with a clever epiphany that has you rethinking everything you just saw. What he gives you is an ending that you never have to think about again. And a film to match.

This is arthouse vacation horror. As such, Infinity Pool scrapes closer to Spring Breakers than Hostel. But it's also science-fiction, and it's the science fiction that moves the horror beyond shock.

If Everything, Everywhere All at Once causes concern about the direction cinema is heading—all flash and edits and quirky perspectives — then Missing might leave some hyperventilating. But if you can afford the paper bag needed to keep your breathing under control, then you’ll likely find plenty to enjoy in this Google-approved thriller.

Plane is a mild diversion that carries more baggage than necessary, a forgettable thriller pieced together from a collage of other films and ideas.

Johnstone knows his way around dark comedy, and camouflages much of the film's humour in whimsical, sometimes uneasy, encounters between M3GAN and Cady. But in directing the film's most comedic characters — an overtly judgmental childcare worker, a nosy neighbour (Lori Dungey) with an unruly dog, and a schoolyard bully—he sets a tone that feels incompatible with the rest of the characters.

Despite lacking the visual scope and timeline of Polley's earlier works like Take This Waltz, Away From Her, and Stories We Tell, Women Talking is her most accomplished film to date: An intimate portrayal of a group of people driven to the brink of rebellion lest they concede to defeat.

It’s possible to leave the theatre unaffected only to look back at Empire of Light with affection. And it’s the movie’s ability to linger unnoticed until surfacing with a revised and unexpected understanding that is at the heart of movie magic.

There is plenty of opportunity to embrace the film for its wanton display of Christmas gone wild and a bleak reminder that despite charity being its own reward, the reward is not always worth the effort.

Ignore the nay-sleighers. Violent Night is the counter-Christmas B-movie that ditches the ho-ho-wholesomeness of the season for a damn good, bad Santa.

The movie feels like a novel with well-developed characters weaved through the story without feeling like segmented excerpts from a more extensive work. The film's love story is made more palatable by casting two beautiful people as the leads. And Kajganich's script finds all the right words and tone to tell the story.

Is Glass Onion fun? Yes, it is. It's a lot of fun. More fun and more comedic than its predecessor. The twists resonate stronger than the original and are not as easy to see coming. Plus, the reveals (of which there are a few) resonate with the satisfaction of a game well played.

The Menu is the most entertaining ensemble film since Knives Out, and the most engaging horror-satire since Get Out. But no matter what comparisons and assumptions are made, The Menu will not be the movie you expect.

Wakanda Forever is far from a failure, except that where there should be excellence, there is a middling feeling of watching something spectacularly competent.

There is plenty wrong with Prey for the Devil, but despite cringy moments of profound seriousness around a rather silly conceit, I was on board. It’s been decades since an exorcism film left me feeling unsettled. Prey for the Devil’s tactics might be cheap, but they worked on me.

Know from the start: Halloween Ends has some of the best kills in the franchise.

Those living in Birdy’s fictional universe see her as an irascible (albeit endearing) nuisance, but in movie language, Birdy is a feminist out of time, and time is the device Dunham tinkers with most. Dunham faithfully recreates the era and then infuses it with an alt-mix soundtrack, presumably as a way of drawing the politics of then into the politics of now.

Amsterdam is full of quips, cocked heads, characters peeking around doorway frames, and a cast of single-purpose characters. It’s a rapid-fire onslaught of scenes, dialogue, and characters. Russell fans will cling to the belief that there is something at the end of this mess; others will likely give up early on.

Smile, the debut feature from director Parker Finn, twists the expectations of a common pleasantry into something grotesque. It's creepy but not new.

What begins as a weird tribute to The Wizard of Oz becomes a genuinely creepy horror. West chooses deliberate methodic movements rather than jump scares to terrify the audience, and the film is all the better for it. And he never lets loose of an underlying sense of humour that is as clever as it is demented.

The violence in Medieval is fast, frequent and fierce and could possibly be the film's biggest draw. History might be the film's initial hook, but it's the movie's grisly depictions of military violence that the film will likely be remembered.