Escape Room:

A cast led by two Canadians, Brampton, Ontario's Tyler Labine (New Amsterdam), and the female lead, Vancouver's Taylor Russell (Lost in Space) appear in this emotional thriller with a deathly edge as six completely unrelated people find themselves immersed in a game in which they have to escape a series of rooms.  Each has a puzzle that must be solved in order to get out ... but that just leads to another room, equally challenging, and increasingly dangerous.  What they didn't know going in, was that each room has a deadly trap, and once players start dying, it takes on a far more serious spin.  Unfortunately, a similar game in Poland led to the accidental death of several players over the weekend, which casts something of a pall on this movie.  It's a little like the later "Saw" movies, in that someone knows a lot about each of the participants, and their past sins are coming back to haunt them.  It’s a very serviceable thriller that will keep you on edge all the way to the end. Rated 14A.

Destroyer:

Nicole Kidman plays an LAPD undercover officer named Erin Bell, who, many years ago, was given an assignment to work her way into a gang in the California desert. The film opens well before that time when a wasted and used up Bell shows up at a crime scene, looks at the murder victim and the tattoo on his neck, and tells the detective on the scene that she knows who did it.  He tells her to leave as it’s his case and that of his unit. Bell begins to sift through her old files, but finds a new letter sent to her with the same tattoo configuration on some currency. We then flashback to her undercover work with a gang – undercover work that ends badly for everyone.  The results were disastrous and ruined Bell's life.  Now, many years later, one of the leaders of that criminal gang resurfaces, forcing Bell to confront not only the remnants of the gang, but her own past.  A gritty role for Kidman, but she pulls it off well. Rated 14A.

I Spit on Your Grave Déjà Vu:

40 years ago Jennifer Hills (Camille Keaton), and aspiring up-and-coming writer, was gang-raped, treated vilely, and was left for dead by four men in the California desert.  But Jennifer did not die, and the original movie, “I Spit on Your Grave,” from 1978, was a pure revenge horror-thriller as she hunted down the perpetrators one at a time, and dispatched each in a fashion in keeping with the terror she had been dealt.  Four decades later, Hill, now a successful writer, and a mother, faces the wrath of the families of those she killed, and finds herself facing a new horror as she and her daughter are kidnapped by an even more degenerate gang, worse, if possible, than her original captors.  Using the eye-for-an-eye philosophy, both Jennifer and her tormentors trade horrific jabs at one another in this violent and explosive film. Her daughter is a movie scream-queen played by Jamie Bernadette in this tale of revenge, reverse revenge, and more revenge. Rated 18A.

Someone Great (2019):

This Netflix original film is a romantic comedy that ticks off all the right boxes.  Jenny (Gina Rodriguez) is a music journalist in New York City who just acquired her dream job, on the West Coast, in San Francisco, with an iconic music publication.  By way of saying "congratulations," her live-in boyfriend of seven years, decides this is a good time to call it quits, and he leaves her.  Devastated, Jenny refuses to allow his behaviour to destroy her dream, and she teams up with her two best girlfriends to paint the town read before she moves west.  Rosario Dawson and Brittany Snow co-star.  Rated 14A.

Music Teacher (2019):

Another Netflix original, this one from India, tells the story of a small-town music teacher named Beni (Manav Kaul) who has always dreamed of a career in music in the big city, but has never had the courage to make the movie. One of his students, from whom he is now estranged, made exactly the same move a few years earlier, is now an accomplished Bollywood singer, and is coming back to the old home town to put on a show ... and Beni is still there dreaming about success while she lives it.  Rated 14A.