Benjamin Lee

What should be wickedly cutting in-the-know dialogue is soft and uninventive, what should be a seat-edge string of escalating circumstances becomes increasingly tiring and hard-to-buy and while the cast is game, they mostly struggle to find the right level for Yan’s admittedly difficult-to-match zany energy.

We should be on the edge of our seat but every should-be set piece falls flat, the choreography always feeling a little off and the editing never works as tightly as it should.

What’s crucially missing is detail, both in the characters themselves and the weight of what they’re going through.

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.

The chillingly unanswered questions of the story are all given the most obvious answers imaginable and relatability is carelessly tossed aside, along with logic and investment.

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.

Gavras leaves them and us stranded on the way to his out-there ending.

As an unpretentious and unashamedly mainstream romantic adventure, it’s a solidly entertaining diversion, old-fashioned in its no-frills brand of storytelling and direction.

There’s a slicker, more coherent and ultimately more thematically audacious film to be made from the disparate elements that make up In the Shadow of the Moon but what we have is a lovable mess nonetheless. Its ambitions are easy to criticise but hard not to admire, a mad little movie with big ideas on its mind.

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 a film with too much yet somehow so very little.

Cronin, an Irish film-maker who has made just two films to date (The Hole in the Ground and Evil Dead Rise), is an undeniable visual talent but his Mummy is also absurdly, watch-checkingly overlong (134 minutes is an unacceptable length for a genre film as thin as this), tonally unsure and, fatally, not all that scary. It’s also, for something so clearly attributed to just one person, a film so deeply influenced by the work of many, many others. It might not feel like a Mummy movie you’ve seen before but it’ll feel like a great deal else.

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.

This is a ferociously well-made film right through to the bitter end.

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.

The film is a tonally uneven, genre-shifting hurricane of a thing, wildly careering off the rails and smashing into everything in its view.

To its credit, Lisa Frankenstein wears its inspirations on its black lace sleeves, never feigning true originality but there’s only so much looking back we can handle without things being pushed at least a little bit forward. In bringing a subgenre back from the dead, Cody and Williams could have used a little more life.

Watching all the tried-and-tested elements fail to coalesce just makes us nostalgic for the classics instead. Let us all wish Disney can find that magic again.

While Dauberman manages a handful of effective moments (a morgue scramble with a homemade cross and a drive-in movie light trick are particularly good), he’s never able to capture the slow, escalating dread that a story such as this demands.

The film is a mildly diverting yet strangely dated caper, a watered-down Tarantino rip-off without a soul of its own.

It all has the distinctly cheap whiff of something that should have gone direct to the small screen – hammy acting, stilted dialogue, chintzy effects, tinny score, Halloween costumes – but without the raucous fun that should come with it.

It’s a still fun yet far sloppier outing, a second round that’s less of a win for us and more of a draw.

If The Blair Witch Project signalled a new dawn of horror, Blair Witch is the loud death rattle of a once exciting sub-genre, disappearing into the darkness.

The graphic novel-inspired world of Gunpowder Milkshake isn’t unique, but it’s admirably committed and Papushado edges his film away from the danger of pastiche thanks to an equally committed cast.

A to-the-point two-hour slab of pulp that slickly glides above a very low bar.

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.

It’s held together by Sandberg, a director who has mastered the art of totally competent studio horror with slick, equally forgettable films like Lights Out and Annabelle: Creation and he again shows himself to be a crisply efficient commercial film-maker again let down by a far less effective script. For a film all about repetition, one viewing will suffice.

It’s by no means the worst of Allen’s later films (Cassandra’s Dream remains unrivaled in that department) and the flashes of brilliance from Winslet and stunning visuals do lift it but there’s an overwhelming, existential pointlessness to it all.

While some of the nastier lurches in the third act will appease genre fans, the guff that surrounds them will probably confuse and ultimately alienate them, the film’s moving parts never really moving in unison.

Ballad of a Small Player ends up a little too slight, a sketchy look at a familiarly doomed character.

While Something from Tiffany’s is unlikely to rise to the higher regions of any genre fan’s best-of list (it’s too frothy to even rise to the middle), there’s something engagingly earnest about its relative lack of meta self-awareness and robust attempts to look and feel like the studio meet-cutes so many of us were raised on.

Thinly etched topicality only gets the film so far (the script is very “I read an article once”) and when the action mechanics kick into gear, it’s yet more of the same with very little to distinguish it from the pack.

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

[Miller] is a far better director than he is a writer though, and the film is crisply, thoughtfully made, at the least looking like it belongs on the big screen.

If you need a charming film headed up by a skilled comic actor about a family going through troubling times then watch Rose Byrne in Instant Family instead because it’s a big no for this one.

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.

Don’t Breathe 2 is not only struggling for air but it’s struggling for purpose and meaning and hopefully this weekend, audiences too.

If Damsel doesn’t exactly rewrite the storybook, it makes for a competent rework of it, a rousing revenge saga that provides a thin yet encouraging message for its younger female audience and a balm for those older viewers who grew up being spoon-fed the same old gendered cliches.

There is of course more here to remind us of Lohan’s unwavering charm but that’s not quite enough to distract from just how tired and limply written the whole thing is and how depressing it is to watch her still stuck here.

As it stands, the mostly rather rote Back in Action is best seen as just an excuse to watch Diaz act again, and she’s as charming as she always has been, especially alongside Foxx, with whom she shares a comfortable chemistry.

While we’re compelled along by an urge to know the film’s secrets, convinced that like-father-like-daughter, a twist is on the way, it’s clear from the outset that we are being guided by far unsteadier hands.

The pair share an easy, spiky chemistry and Reeves in particular shows himself to be surprisingly skilled at delivering such bile-filled dialogue.

Life of the Party’s predictable and lethargic box-ticking of scenes (accidentally getting high – check; dance off – check), gives it the unremarkable stench of something you’ve half-watched on cable before.

It’s a fresh spin that feels awfully stale, a Samaritan less good and more mediocre.

There are tasty moments here, but genre fans looking for a full meal might leave a little hungry.

The difficulty with black comedy is avoiding overkill and Kill Your Friends is a dictionary definition of the word.

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.

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.

Sobel’s direction feels a little lesser when compared with his leading lady, relying on dream sequences to push us to the edge, never getting anywhere close to the iciness of the original or finding anything distinctive enough to separate the aesthetic of his take.

With a touch of Training Day, a smidgen of Eagle Eye, a dash of Eye in the Sky, a pinch of Ex Machina and an extra generous serving of all the Terminator films, Outside the Wire is losing every available award for originality, yet another Netflix creation born from its algorithmic cauldron, but taken on very basic low-stakes terms, it’s a competent enough January time-filler.

As a comedy, it stops being funny and as a horror it never starts being scary with Johnson’s direction far too drab and lifeless for something so cartoonish and schlocky. Big swing, bigger miss.

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.

As an inevitable plot twist leads to an inevitable showdown which leads to an inevitable makeup which leads to an inevitable, and unbearable, all-cast song-and-dance number, you’ll be left wondering how bringing together fabulous women has left us all feeling so utterly unfabulous.

It might drift out of the memory just as easily as it drifted in, but there’s a goofy likability to Pacific Rim: Uprising, a primal thrill to be had, and a confident slickness behind it that means, despite a nearly two-hour running time, it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

Gal Gadot leads the streamer’s latest ambitious franchise-starter that delivers just about enough dumb summer fun to have us curious for more.

It’s made just-about-watchable by Sandler and Aniston again, whose combined movie star charm proves magnetic enough to carry us through the flatter moments, both nailing some effectively chaotic physical comedy and maintaining a warm, relaxed chemistry.

It’s a film that’s good enough that you want it to be better, a rare genre example of less not proving to be more.

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.

The film is a shoddily made and strikingly unfunny attempt to tell an interesting story in an uninteresting way.

It’s all just too sanitised and safe, a journey that stumbles as it takes us from the unknown to the familiar, a film that plods when it should stride. How did a bracing idea about rebellion, sexual awakening and lawlessness turn out so boring?

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.

It’s not as if some b-plot threads are left dangling but instead, the entire film is left shoddily unfinished.

A silly and dated new attempt to transport the classic fighting game to the big screen is a late-night drunk watch at best.

This is carelessly made trash but worse, it’s carelessly made trash that thinks it will spawn not just a franchise but a cinematic universe.

Kerry Condon follows up her Oscar nomination with a thankless piece of Blumhouse schlock that tries, and fails, to make swimming pools scary.

[Toby Meakins] doesn’t quite take enough advantage of his reality-shifting game sequences (the Englund voice cameo serves to remind us just how wild Wes Craven made those nightmares way back when) but it’s a cut above the average Netflix genre guff.

There are imperfections here, especially near the end, but it’s the work of someone striving to stand out, to do something that will linger in the memory rather than fade into the over-populated homepage background.

It’s watchable enough but let down by a strange lack of interest in presenting Salander as anything but an engine to propel a plot. More female action heroes is by no means a bad thing but forcing Salander into Bond’s shoes feels like a misstep, her intellect and survivalism suited to far more interesting pursuits.

The director, Renny Harlin, is a competent and experienced hand, so there’s a sturdy workmanlike quality here but, more typically associated with bombastic action movies, he just doesn’t have the patience required to build real, clammy suspense or the awareness of the smaller specificities that are needed to immerse us in an intimate story such as this.

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

It’s refreshing to see a genre film-maker do more than rely on simple tricks and although his knack for dialogue might be questionable, he’s more than capable of constructing a nifty set-piece.

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.

At a time of nostalgia overload (Clueless, Legally Blonde and Urban Legend are next), Robinson finds a way to make her attempt not exactly necessary but unpretentiously pleasurable enough for that not to really matter. There might not be a next summer but this makes for an entertaining last hurrah.

A head-smashingly redundant waste of time, talent, energy and resources, a shockingly early yet entirely convincing contender for worst film of the year.

It’s a slight movie at times, unfocused at others, even plodding in parts, and I didn’t leave the cinema entirely convinced that it was the most satisfying way to tell this particular story but I did leave feeling confident in both Jackman’s prowess and Finley’s promise, yet to be fully realised.

While The Ice Road might not be quite as cut-and-paste as some of the others (there’s less revenge-taking, skill-listing and name-taking than usual), it’s still familiar enough for it to feel like we’ve seen him do this exact thing before.

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.

An inoffensive time-filler that’s hard to love but easy to like.

Night Teeth isn’t quite as dreadful as its truly dreadful title but it’s just as forgettable.

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 speaks to the extremely low bar set by Falcone and McCarthy’s previous films together that something as forgettable and unfunny as Superintelligence won’t be filed as a total disaster. Instead, it’s just another regrettable waste of her talent and another reminder that the best marriages can lead to the worst movies.

It’s quick and brash and seemingly aware of how goofy so much of it is but it’s also awkwardly overstuffed.

The film’s drunken lurch into earnest romance near the end, after leaning on bawdy humour for the most part, requires us to see these characters as something other than farcical chess pieces, an uphill battle for all involved.

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.

It’s imperfect, sometimes frustratingly so, but also just about fun enough for yet another tipsy Friday night locked down indoors, its sun-drenched setting proving alluring and yet cruelly out of reach.

Curiosity might bring you here but boredom will drive you away.

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

Even in an oversaturated genre of increasingly diminished returns, Shelby Oaks is about as dispensable as it gets.

A film like Falling for Christmas doesn’t try or need to break the mold, it doesn’t even need to be that good, it just needs to be low-level competent and as these films go, it’s just about passable enough for those who tend to start getting excited about the festive period at least two months early.

Anna is not quite pedestrian but it never really feels like the work of someone with anything to say or prove. It’s competent and even complacent at times, a million miles from what one would expect from the director of The Fifth Element.

It’s all so hard to define not because it’s too brave and original to fit into the system, but because it’s never all that clear that anyone involved knows what the hell they’re making. Whatever their answers might be, I’m positive that Nathan and Cage didn’t aim to deliver something quite so dull.

Even outside of the script’s aggressively repetitive bigotry, the shambolic Scooby Doo plot struggles to grab even the slightest amount of attention.