Benjamin Lee

The bizarro plot might help Candy Cane Lane stand out from the bland, busy crowd of new seasonal movies but it’s just as limp and lacking in spirit as the rest of them. Murphy and Ross deserve better, and so do we, and so does Christmas.

While the screenwriter, Brad Ingelsby, does root us in the minutiae of the trio’s day-to-day, it’s never in particularly interesting ways, and over an indulgent 135-minute runtime, we gradually grow tired of them, often questioning exactly why we need to know so much about their lives.

It’s a film entirely devoid of subtlety yet one that also fails to provide the grand emotion it yearns to deliver, despite the use of a sledgehammer.

There’s also not really enough fun here, the repetitive nature of the fight scenes – quip, laugh, injury, wince – growing tired fast.

You Should Have Left should have left our nerves frayed and our dreams haunted but instead, it leaves us cold.

Mara and Mendelsohn have a compellingly toxic chemistry together and their initial confrontation is intriguingly tense. But once we’re locked into the meat of the story, the film has nowhere else to go, at least anywhere that’s of interest and the pace becomes laborious as their discussions turn repetitive.

It’s an unsatisfying and head-scratchingly empty drama that in its final meaningless moments, as shreds of drab voiceover are matched with a dramatically overstylised rainstorm, starts to feel as creatively pointless as the sort of vapid, brand-commissioned film Jolie’s director was hired to make. It makes the fashion world seem deathly dull, as if Winocour dislikes it as much as her protagonist allegedly does.

It sleepily hits the beats we expect but without the emotion or passion required to make them land, a by-the-numbers exercise from someone with barely enough energy to count.

The crudest way to describe what transpires in John and the Hole would be Home Alone if re-envisioned by Michael Haneke or perhaps Yorgos Lanthimos in the broadest possible terms, a chilly atmosphere successfully evoked but without any of the thought or intellect that both film-makers would also bring to the table.

There’s a lived-in chemistry that’s missing from the pairing and the film’s great many awkward moments between them don’t feel quite as cutting or as uncomfortable as they should. It’s a dark comedy that feels too light.

It’s a very minor victory to report that rather than being bad, it’s merely bland, an adequate milquetoast time-waster for a very young and very undiscerning audience.

This isn’t Perkins’ first shot but it’s his biggest swing and ultimately his clumsiest miss, a grab bag of ideas and tricks that can’t be coerced into anything resembling a whole.

It’s a film about wanderlust and romance that should be a breezy sojourn for those of us who need it right now. Why then does it feel like such a slog?

Rather than a heartwarming family favourite-in-the-making, The One and Only Ivan is just a vaguely watchable cookie-cutter caper thrown together by people who should know how to make something far sweeter and substantial, a fleeting attraction for undiscerning young kids and a whelming waste for anyone older.

It’s difficult to fault a film for being over-ambitious given the low-effort nature of so many genre films but the sheer, two-joints-in bizarreness of Run Sweetheart Run needed a surer hand to guide us through. As it is, that run to the finish line ends up feeling like a crawl.

There’s a whiff of the plane movie emanating from ho-hum Paramount+ comedy Jerry and Marge Go Large, an acceptable half-awake diversion when one has run out of other, better options in the sky but something that’s a little harder to justify on the ground.

The cast all perform adequately, with Hendricks in particular proving effective, but it’s just difficult to really invest in what happens to any of them. Before long, characters are all making stock horror movie decisions, and there’s no amount of effective craftsmanship that can sell stupidity.

It’s solidly acted by Martell and Sutherland, although the latter seems as desperate as we are to let loose and have a bit more fun, and has a confident sense of place as King adaptations often do but it’s all rather unforgivably dull, a call to be swiftly ignored.

There are good intentions and good performances here, but they’re squandered in a movie that isn’t quite sure what it should be and how far it should go.

Try as writer-director Mike Flanagan might, there’s something coldly unmoving about it all, a disjointed and dry-eyed tearjerker that never rises above Instagram caption philosophy.

It’s oddly safe, given the subject matter, and the humour is similarly sanitised. What Waititi thinks is shockingly audacious is in fact frustratingly timid, he opts for a gentle prod when maybe a punch would do.

Paulson’s commitment is unwavering, and it’s refreshing to see her in genre material a little more grounded than what the various American Horror Stories have given her, but she’s an actor in search of better material and, sadly, Hold Your Breath means that search is ongoing.

If Jimpa itself pushes us away, Colman tries to keeps us close, a warm and astute performance of raw, red-eyed emotion remaining entirely real until the end. If only we could have joined her there.

While it’s nice to see Cardellini nab a rare lead (in the middle of an unusually fruitful time with turns in Green Book, Avengers: Endgame and Netflix comedy Dead to Me), the script fails to provide her with enough meat, despite her predicament, ultimately stranding her with a rather standard shrieking mother role.

A misfire not quite bad or powerful enough to undo Janiak’s great work but one that questions whether the world of Fear Street is one we need to spend much more time exploring. If the introductory trilogy started us off on a thrilling journey, here we’re brought to a sudden dead end.

It’s cheerily done and competently made but broadly sentimental to a fault, the strings being pulled too visible for the film’s many coerced moments of emotion to really work. For a film all about the importance of heat, it’s frankly lukewarm.

It’s an undemanding watch, easily digestible while on in the background, but even easier to forget.

There’s a cinematic slickness to the film (it was intended to be released theatrically until the pandemic) that separates it from its more noticeably shoddier fright night competitors but it’s mostly a familiar, if not entirely fruitless, trudge down a well-trodden path, one that takes us into, at times, questionable territory.

It’s competently made but utterly vacant, a forgettable indie fading fast.

James had impressed with her debut, the dementia horror Relic, but any of that film’s texture or creepiness has dissolved on a larger scale.

Bertino doesn’t need to give us another Strangers, and we certainly do not need anything else in that particular universe, but he needs to give us something more striking, and certainly stranger, than Vicious.

There’s little in the way of dramatic conflict or base wit to keep us hanging around to see what happens within each.

It’s a pulpy slab of exploitation masquerading as an important treatise on the struggles faced by the working class in rural America, thumping us in the face with its shallow viewpoint until we beg for mercy. Or at least the credits.

The script is sensitively handled and it’s unarguable that showcasing stories such as this is an important way of educating the masses about a difficult process. But while it’s hard to hate, it’s even harder to like.

For a film that wants us to stop worrying and love big tech, Atlas does an awfully good job of showing us why we should still be wary of it.

As a drama, it’s frustratingly insubstantial, failing to provide enough of an emotional centre or a convincing payoff.

The performers are left with very little to work with and while Hammer does find away of making the most of his haunted alcoholic, Johnson and Zazie Beetz, two wonderful actors, are stranded with hopelessly one-dimensional roles.

Before things go south, there’s an effectively clammy escalation of panic as Watts leaps from call to call . . . But the script, from Chris Sparling . . . isn’t quite ingenious enough to find ways to involve her in the drama.

Sorkin is spellbound by his subject, fascinated by the many details of her admittedly impressive life, but the magic he clearly feels fails to translate on screen.

There are some effectively nasty kills (this is no PG-13 reboot) and Green’s visual eye often results in some impressive imagery but both the look of the film and the script feel confused. Green can’t seem to decide whether he wants it to be gritty and lo-fi or slick and cinematic and so ends up awkwardly between the two, anything resembling an atmosphere sorely missing.

Even though the script might let her down, Schumer does still manage to sell a smattering of the comic moments (the opening scene has a promising knockabout tone), but when she reaches the more dramatic elements, she struggles to convince.

Annabelle Comes Home is hopelessly light on scares.

It all amounts to a passable second activity watch at best.

Dog lovers eager for a dog movie primarily about a dog will be reassured by the knowledge that Dog does feature plenty of dog but they might be a little surprised about what else the film has to offer, an odd and atonal ramble across the US where the dog comes first and plotting comes a long way after.

There might be just about enough competence to Polone’s film-making to ensure this won’t be the worst horror film of the year, but it’ll probably be the least necessary.

The Circle is all foreplay, playfully prodding without providing a satisfying payoff.

The word “messy” is bandied around by its characters but The Life List is far too clean.

Like Set It Up before it, Always Be My Maybe hits all of the beats we have come to expect yet fails to do so well enough, as if the mere existence of a technically well-structured romantic comedy is better than nothing.

When the traps begin, they’re as gnarly as ever, if not gnarlier, and with very little suspense about the outcome given how they tend to end, we’re reminded of what a Saw film is: a juvenile endurance test.

Within the first 15 or so minutes of Apple TV+’s Palmer, something clicks in, a feeling of overwhelming familiarity, an inner voice quietly realising, “Ohhh, it’s that movie.”

The novelty of a malevolent presence in the wholesome, brightly lit world of a kids TV show can’t quite sustain an engaging 95-minute feature, Kelly not knowing where to take his admittedly attention-securing setup.

There’s something lacking, a touch of the bizarre or the perverse, with just one particularly nasty death to serve as a reminder that you’re watching a Ben Wheatley film.

What frustrates me most about Underwater is just how very little it brings to the table. It’s a solid, competently directed regurgitation of an oft-told tale that never manages to justify its own existence

A competently made yet maddeningly dull attempt to bring the hit video game to the big screen makes for an instantly forgettable night at the movies.

There’s an absence of fun here, and for what is ultimately a chase movie, a severe lack of pace. Nichols doesn’t feel like a strong match for the genre or for the very specific type of fantasy movie he wants to make.

Trusty hands help in making the film feel grander especially when the emotion of the story, adapted by Dante’s Peak’s Les Bohem and Don’t Make Me Go’s Vera Herbert, can’t quite get us there.

It’s a slight cut above just how very bad these things can get, but not enough to edge it toward something that would deserve your full attention. So errand away, Mother of the Bride will be just fine playing in the background.

The big reveal, while illogically daft, does have a certain on-paper thematic novelty to it but it’s cursedly both over-explained and hard-to-really-understand, a “why are you doing this?” response that rambles into nonsense.

Director Patrick Brice is so distracted with trying to be of the moment that he forgets to make his film base-level fun or at times even base-level coherent, its thesis crammed into a laughably on-the-nose killer speech where buzzwords are clumsily crashed together, trying to make a point about something but ultimately saying not a lot about anything.

It’s hard to know how seriously we’re supposed to take any of this when it’s so unclear what the makers’ intention is and so the film’s deeper cuts fail to truly wound because so much of it is mired in silliness.

It’s at least a short film, clocking it at around 90 minutes, Serkis chopping off any extraneous fat, but it floats by and floats on without ever causing us to sit up and pay attention. Let there be no more.

It’s frustrating to see yet another first-time film-maker overstack their plate in such a way that feels less like the product of impressive ambition and more empty bravado.

When a writer-director of some undeniable talent throws so much at the wall, it’s inevitable that elements will stick and in Vengeance, there’s just about enough to make us curious to see what happens when Novak learns to tighten his focus. Vengeance is less the film we need right now and more the one he thinks we do but hopefully next time, he’ll figure out how to make something we want instead.

While a younger audience might be enthralled by the fast pace and bright colour palette, those understandably curious adults sitting nearby will find themselves watching in horror, a deep, sorrowful howl emerging.

The reminders of Inception become so distracting that the film starts to border on pastiche. ... It’s overwhelming, even suffocating at times, which is a shame because there are elements here that work independently, without the need for the Nolan playbook to be so obsessively followed.

Even before the dramatic left turn, all the way over the cliff and into flames, this ho-hum road trip comedy drama was already hard to like, an unspecific sitcom of eye-rolls and finger-wagging.

There are depressingly few pleasures to be had here, and one of them is at least, for a while, playing detective trying to figure out just what on earth is buried at its centre.

What none of the tonal shifts and story tweaks can do is distract us from his boringly flat direction, failing to justify why something so drab and cheap-looking would warrant the surprisingly wide theatrical release it’s receiving this weekend.

It’s Groundhog Day meets Scream, although lacking the first film’s novelty and the latter’s postmodern smarts.

Cry Macho is dogged by a slack pace and an inertness that overwhelms, scene after scene of nothing, not a funny line or a moving moment or an unresolved conflict, just nothing.

As the plotting falls apart and the wheels truly come off, there’s nothing that strong direction and a work-hard cast can do to keep Abigail from sucking. There’s a lot of blood here but very little else.

As a movie, Close to You feels too unfocused, a major win and a welcome return for Page yet an opportunity squandered.

As a film-maker, Larson shows promise, and as a comic actor she shows genuine talent. With a less affected, more genuine script, Larson could star in and direct a great comedy. Unicorn Store is not it.

Blunt remains committed to the end but even she can’t add a shine to the drab last act, the pleasure of seeing her on screen replaced with the pain of another undeserving project.