Chris Knight

Harlin has had a long and uneven career leading up to this. Though he isn’t quite old enough to have tackled Deep Water back in 1979, he did make Cliffhanger and Die Hard 2 in the 1990s, and this feels like a kind of spiritual successor to those star-driven action movies.

Writer-director Genki Kawamura keeps his camera angles tight, the better to maintain tension at a boil, and makes the most of his minimal and repetitive set. Fans of the Canadian horror classic Cube should enjoy.

It’s your typical mistaken-identity love story, in which one pretty person must decide between two pretty people, with the choice heavily influenced by who looks best when wet.

If Logan’s Run and The African Queen had a baby, it might look something like Brazilian dystopian sci-fi drama The Blue Trail. If that’s too much of a narrative stretch, then imagine a close cousin to 2024’s Can I Get a Witness? Except, sadly, not nearly as good.

The AI Doc is visually pretty standard — lots of talking heads, B-roll of robots, and cutesy animation to make it more personal — but it’s also a grand primer on the topic, skipping the standard news headlines of Will It Take My Job? (maybe) and Does it Espouse Suicide (tragically, sometimes yes) in favour of a kind of point-counterpoint-synthesis setup.

If you want proof that hell hath no fury like an angry mom, look no further.

The President’s Cake remains a lovely tale, with some sweeping, almost touristic views of Baghdad, and a slightly ambiguous downbeat ending.

If you’re not at all familiar with the originals, but you know and/or love Back to the Future, that should be enough to guarantee you a good time at this almost-lawsuit-worthy homage/parody to the 1980s time travel classic. And if perchance you already love both Nirvanna and BTTF, then strap in, because when this movie hits 88 kilometres an hour…

It’s energetic, bonkers, and very funny. It’s also two-and-a-quarter hours long, and I didn’t begrudge it a single minute.

For an animated character, Scarlet feels remarkably real.