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Directed by the returning directing team Adil Bilall, this latest entry in Jerry Bruckheimer’s high-octane action-comedy series, starting nearly 30 years ago, delivers the goods. At one point in Bad Boys: Ride or Die, one of the leads exclaims: ‘This is some dysfunctional shit!’ With that kind of meta arthouse commentary, who needs critics? Not that reviews will matter to the genuine affection of viewers for the action-comedy buddy cop series that started three decades ago and whose lineage goes deep into 1974 (Freebie and the Bean and Busting; cite the others, if you want). It’s a format that works, even if this fourth entry is a little stretched. Seeing Will Smith’s Mike and Martin Lawrence’s Marcus go through their trademark bickering routines is like spending an evening with a long-married couple whose constant jibes have got downright boring. At the beginning, when Mike calls Marcus a junk-food junkie, you think: Not again. His worry is disturbingly prescient, as only a few months...

Story: One day after Caesar, an adolescent ape will strike out on a path that will lead him to refine his notion of a distant past – and reshape the future of both apes and humans. Review: Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024), directed by Wes Ball, deposes the veneration of the character Caesar and announced that his titanic story was complete. In its place, the film forces us empathise with Noa (Owen Teague), a young chimpanzee who survives a horrific attack on his village. A quest for vengeance and meaning leads Noa down a path that tells us more about his species’ controversial relationship with humans and its ruler’s taxation without representation – the fascistic Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand). Noa is joined in his journey by Mae (Freya Allan), a human girl beholden to a plot device with unexplored gravity; Raka (Peter Macon), an orangutan whose name signifies Caesar’s lost ideals of nobility in a new age of ape dominance; and Kaya (Laura Harrier), a gorilla who doesn’t believ...

The top prize went to Dark Cloud by director Guan Hu (The Eight Hundred, Mr Six); a darkly comic thriller about a taxi driver and released convict entangled in underworld politics, and starring the Canadian-Taiwanese actor Eddie Peng. Chinese director Guan Hu’s stylish new feature Black Dog opens in familiar mode: a former convict named Lang (Eddie Peng) has spent a decade in jail. Now, upon his release, he is attempting to re-enter normal life in his native, tiny city on the fringes of the Gobi Desert in Northwest China. But some old devils rear their heads. If you expect the story to resemble any number of prefab B-movies – or even the scenario of the Sylvester Stallone miniseries Tulsa King (2022) – you need to be told that Black Dog is, quite simply, not that kind of film. For one thing, who is the titular black dog? In any case, it’s not the total loser of a protagonist – a man who rarely speaks more than a few words of dialogue to any person throughout the entire film (including ...

Shot at a boomers reunion, it is another outing for writer-director Castille Landon, with Eugene Levy and Dennis Haysbert also starring. Should Hollywood want to lure older people – who have been among the most faithful friends of cinema and who patronise less than their younger counterparts these days – back to the multiplex by redoubling its attentions on the over-50 set, here’s a cipher – from the so-so to the seriously, erratically so-bad – as to what works (they cast Eugene Levy!), and more importantly, what most assuredly does not – efforts at wacky disorientation saturated in enforced thinness. Zipping here and there between strained slapstick and thoughtfully scripted tête-à-têtes, this boomer-centric reunion comedy finds a well-meaning and capable cast of septuagenarian professionals – Alan Arkin, Christopher Lloyd, Kenan Thompson, Sally Field – stranded in a mostly laugh-free zone of zip lines and trite setups. Summer Camp THE BOTTOM LINE Reunions should be more memorable tha...

Courtesy the Art Institute of ChicagoThe ’Star Wars’ and ‘Magpie’ actress in Joachim Ronning’s portrait of Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel. She adored the water: ‘To me the sea is like a person. A child I’ve known a long time,’ she once told reporters. ‘I never feel lonely when I’m out there.’ This unflagging determination fueled by that comfortable feeling of being at home in the water got this young German American swimmer (portrayed here by Daisy Ridley) within steps of the English Channel record despite a storm that churned up the channel and sexist notions that female swimmers were inherently less capable. When Ederle completed it in 14 hours and 31 minutes in 1926, she not only broke a world record (held by a man), she was widely credited with changing minds about the nature of female athletes. When she returned to New York, crowds threw her a parade on a scale the city had never seen before (or since). She was cheered home as ‘the Queen of the Waves’...