Allan Hunter

Hailey Gates’ ambitious debut feature Atropia is full of comic potential that is never quite realised. The mixture of war games satire, deadpan farce and sweet romance provides amusement along the way without cutting as deep as it sometimes promises.

Lurker is sometimes a little too on the mark.

A restrained production favours story over splatter but eventually delivers a fair amount of gloopy, tentacled creatures and exploding host bodies. That should be enough to satisfy Adams aficionados.

Cottontail does not hold any great surprises and, while understanted and full of grace, also lacks bite.

[A] charming, quirky, dramatically inert new feature.

Initially intriguing, Ashkal grows less satisfying as it struggles to do justice to the disparate elements of the personal, the political and the supernatural.

The film itself has a commendable logic and credibility, but perhaps lacks a little of the pulse-racing intensity that might have made it a more obviously commercial proposition.

Plays like an unnecessary revival of the provocative cat and mouse thrillers that were once a speciality of screenwriter Joe Ezterhas.

Jump, Darling travels along predictable roads as family secrets are revealed, ghosts of the past confronted and separate generations discover the strength to be true to themselves. What makes the journey worthwhile are the performances.

The material may be slicker but the novelty of the format has faded.

The slick assurance of Bakhshi’s approach makes for an accessible, pacey melodrama but one that can also seem to trivialise the life and death matters at the core of the story.

In the end, Wild Mountain Thyme fails to make the most of its cast or fairytale story and feels slightly misbegotten.

Full of interesting concepts and accomplished animation, Children Of The Sea is less than the sum of its many parts and just seems to lose its way after a very promising beginning.

The overly busy story provides countless opportunities to create imaginative worlds and strange characters, but it also tends to feel like a string of set pieces rather than something that builds dramatic tension or momentum.

It is a manic, hit and miss affair complete with slapstick antics and wisecracking one-liners.

The abiding impression is of an intermittently fascinating film that is a minor work in the ever burgeoning Herzog canon.

The film is hugely impressive in the scope of those interviewed.

Skin is a little pedestrian and obvious in its early stages, skirting with the feeling of a television production. It is the nature of the story and the scale of the mountain that Widner had to climb that finally makes it into something more compelling.

There is a mixture of styles in Dead In A Week that never quite gels.

The feature debut of Vladimir De Fontenay is an accomplished piece with a committed central performance from Imogen Poots, but the emotional impact is lessened by an air of predictability and the sense that every bit of fresh hope is destined to end in disappointment.

Some of the wit and emotion strikes home and the longer we spend with individual characters the more their story resonates.

One of the issues with Where Hands Touch is that whilst some of the details and specifics feel fresh, the drama often feels desperately hackneyed.

Elements of craft and performance are very persuasive but the slight storyline and recourse to awkward flights of fancy make it a film that never quite gels.

You have to admire the sheer giddy enthusiasm of filmmaking friends who are fizzing with ideas and able to make a modest budget stretch a long way. The film has a certain visual allure in its gaudy colours and low-budget special-effects. Yet you also long for them to put all those energies into a more focused, far funnier project.

It achieves stray laughs and some clever moments, but not enough to render it more than a strained curiosity.

The film almost works as a love letter to a seemingly ageless, bikini-clad Stone who invests her character with endless energy and enthusiasm. If she is engaged in a losing battle with the lack of originality or spark in the material, then nobody seems to have told her.

Galloping across the decades, the film becomes increasingly sketchy and superficial. There is so much detail and substance in the 1970s stretch of this epic that the twists of fate and rueful reflections of later years inevitably feel less authentic and closer to soap opera.

No matter what Oplev throws at us, the film refuses to catch fire and just grows sillier and more contrived as it unfolds. It never feels distinctive and often has the air of just another entry in the Final Destination series.