Ant-Man has been the much-needed comic relief in the Marvel Universe since his debut in 2015. With this sequel, the franchise serves as a palate cleanser from the dark Avengers: Infinity War. Ant-Man & the Wasp picks up in the time after Captain America: Civil War and before Infinity War, with the titular hero (played…

Somewhere around the midway point of Leave No Trace, you fall in love with internally tortured Will. He’s a strong, silent man with the desire to raise his teenage daughter Tom away from the stresses and constraints of a suburban life. The two forage for food, live in a makeshift shelter and start fires without…

Now that Blumhouse’s Purge franchise has had three films, they’ve gone the all-too-safe prequel route to try to mine more money from consumers. With the First Purge, they head back to the beginning, where the Founding Fathers of America have taken control in a difficult economic climate. They decide to use Staten Island for the…

Of all the spectacular, visionary films I’ve seen, nothing has hit me in the gut quite like Upgrade. This sci-fi/horror picture comes from Blumhouse, the studio behind The Purge and Happy Death Day. But while this one has the style of those, it has the wit of the Oscar-nominated Jordan Peele-helmed Get Out, also a…

There’s a softness and sentimentality to Uncle Drew that you just don’t find in mainstream cinema these days. Normally, when a bunch of stars dress in fat suits and makeup for a comedy, we get Norbit or an awful Tyler Perry movie. Here, it’s not about hitting the low-hanging fruit. These real-life basketball legends, in…

In formidable, brooding fashion, this tense follow-up to 2015 cartel smash Sicario is almost as good as the original. In fact, in many ways, it surpasses the ambitious original, making it one of my favourite movies so far of 2018. Sicario: Day of the Soldado continues the theme of a war on drugs, and uses…

With four predecessors, this sequel to the 2015 reboot Jurassic World is finally feeling a bit primitive. In 1993, the Spielberg original was a novel concept that unraveled in an interesting fashion, creating the “smart” blockbuster. But in 2017, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom seems to just be coming up with excuses over and over again…

I’ll say this right out of the gate. If this movie about a group of  man-children playing a decades-long game of tag wasn’t based on a true story, the concept writer at Warner Bros. would deserve to be canned. But here we are, with this (mostly) true story, which gained infamy as a story in…

Halfway through Hereditary, I started to wonder when the psychological slow burn would fade and the scares would begin. The trailer, the hype, the posters all strap viewers in for a supernatural, dysfunctional family horror film, akin to The Shining or Amityville Horror. What I actually got was a hell of a different path, and…

The ultimate weakness of this otherwise-slick gender-swapped reinvention of Ocean’s 11 is the lack of any real adversity. With a game cast, some great chemistry, a slick screenplay and sharp direction, Ocean’s 8 has the makings of a truly remarkable genre picture. The problem, however, is that there’s little conflict. There are no hoops to…