Barry Hertz

Toy Story 5 is the must-have item of the summer: a poignant, beautiful, imaginative and massively entertaining adventure for anyone who either has children or retains a semblance of memories from their own youth.

There is something stubbornly singular about director Adrian Chiarella’s film that resists easy comparisons to the likes of Obsession and Backrooms.

Jackman, no slouch when it comes to playing men reckoning with the trail of dead they’ve left in their wake, is a godsend in the title role. Much like Cage’s sheer unpredictability elevated every moment of Pig, so, too, does Jackman’s eternally sturdy on-screen presence, even if his calm is meant to underline barely contained bloodlust, keep this version of Robin from becoming just another outlaw staring down fate.

There are enough holy-mother-of-god moments in the new martial-arts extravaganza The Furious during which your brain will melt so rapidly you’ll have to wipe your shirt of any grey matter seeping through your ears.

At its very best, which is not infrequently, Disclosure Day delivers the kind of eye-popping, heart-racing wonder that Spielberg has become synonymous with.

What is far more unsettling than the environment itself, though, is how tedious the excursion winds up being, going from freaky to sleepy in the span of an hour. Once you’ve seen one of the backrooms, which begin to resemble a Leon’s showroom rendered by M.C. Escher, then you’ve seen them all.

A ferociously slick and rhythmically entertaining heist thriller, the movie feels like a breath of fresh air not only for the independent film space, where genuinely new ideas are a bitcoin a dozen, but for a filmmaker who seems completely, utterly, blessedly incapable of sitting still.

This isn’t a movie of easy cynicism or a snide middle finger to horror-movie tradition – it is a finely calibrated shock to a system that Barker obviously grew up worshipping.

As interesting as reading the computer code that was used to create the original Mortal Kombat video game, and about as fun as getting your spine torn out.

It’s not half-bad. I mean, don’t get too excited – this is still a bad movie. But it is the kind of better-than-it-should-be bad instead of merely bad-bad.