Benjamin Lee

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.

The off-brand, bought down the market quality of Skydance animation is initially less of a problem here without the poorly realised humans of Luck and Spellbound to distract but there’s still no immersion or sweep to the world being created, just bright colours which might be enough for some toddlers.

Roommates might not rival the fizzy, formative teen films it both references (Clueless) and often directly cribs from (Mean Girls) but it still belongs in a different league to what we’re mostly served right now. Could someone possibly tell that to Netflix?

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.

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.

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.

Nothing here is to be taken very seriously at all but it is mostly devoid of the suffocating, and often nihilistic, smugness one has come to expect from modern action films.

It’s all too clumsily calculated to deliver the raucous two-drinks-in blast it so desperately wants us to have and in a year that’s already given us better, bolder B-movie examples than usual (Sam Raimi’s Send Help and monkey-gone-mad horror Primate), it creaks that much louder. It is film-making far too in love with itself to care if you love it too.

Like the film around him, [Ritchson] does what he needs to do, everything here just about serviceable for the moment yet never memorable enough for the moment after.

There’s just about enough here to show signs of life...but Williamson often feels like he’s treading water when he should be drawing blood.

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.

There’s also no real satire here either (moneyed folk are apparently bad, did you realise?) and at this stage of the rich-eating cycle, I just want it to be over. Forget a killing, Ford has made a real mess instead.

Even if much of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is in need of a rethink, it’s hard not to enjoy the scrappy, animated brainstorm taking place in front of us. The mess of it all is at least a very human one.

Frank & Louis is a solidly made drama, but Ben-Adir and Morgan are something special.

[Colman] knows how to oscillate between broad comedy and heart-wrenching drama but the film around her isn’t as adept. Like the dream husband at its centre, Wicker looks the part but there’s nothing underneath.

It’s carried through by an all-in Hawke who is really put through the wringer, arguably his most physically gruelling role to date (the upside of a low budget is that his hardships are made to look that much harder), a muscular and entirely persuasive performance that continues his winning streak.

There’s a swirl of creepy noises in A24’s new hyped-up horror Undertone – screaming, gargling, singing, banging – but nothing is quite loud enough to drown out the swirl of films it’s cribbing from.

It’s an earnest tribute to a lot of things – a city, a time, a genre, a mentality, an actor in Turturro – and while we’ve definitely been here before, it’s nice to come back.

In many increasingly overcrowded fields – trauma horror, curse horror, gay horror, Sundance horror – Leviticus stands tall.

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.

It succeeds in fits and starts – I laughed more than I have at many a comedy in the past year – but its wild, scattershot humour is so hit and miss, too many jokes going nowhere, that it’s not quite the rousing win I wanted it to be.

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.

If Union County serves as proof that Poulter deserves more substantive work and shines a light on people in a remarkable system, then it’s more than worth the choice to go docudrama over drama. But I still craved more of the real people.

As the jokes start to sour and the night shifts to something more serious, Wilde and her dramatically experienced ensemble are able to handle a difficult tonal descent without slipping.

It’s certainly a return to what many know him for – vibrant colours, unfettered sex, madcap plotting – but it’s also missing that same sense of infectiously boisterous energy. The parts are here but there’s nothing to truly animate them, just the vague hope that maybe nostalgia might be enough.

Lambert is too skittish to keep us in her character’s lives for longer than brief, often maddeningly flat moments.

A movie to be enjoyed on Friday night and forgotten all about by Saturday morning.

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?

Roberts, who also directed hit shark thriller 47 Metres Down and its superior follow-up, is mostly at his savviest and most ruthlessly efficient here, a confident leveling up for a genre film-maker finding his sweet spot. After a lacklustre year for horror, Primate makes for a wildly entertaining start to 2026.

In a genre plagued by a lack of effort, I’ll take a solid try.

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.

Nothing can distract us from a script that just doesn’t work, family dynamics we don’t believe, jokes we don’t laugh at and characters we don’t care about. Oh. What. Fun. is anything but.

It’s the problem faced when one of these films is raised just above the gutter-level norm, you end up wanting it to be that much better. As it stands, Jingle Bell Heist is as good as it’s getting for now.

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.

Silverstone’s easy charisma, and initial lived-in chemistry with Hudson, can’t overcome a script that isn’t witty or involving enough for us to care about another milquetoast Netflix family frantically hugging and grinning to show how close they are.

This is a little too slight and breezy to really make much of an impression, like a dream you’ll forget as soon as you open your eyes.

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

Horror director Michelle Garza Cervera opts for the muted slow-burn (it’s a convincing argument for more studio work) and Winstead gives an earnest performance, the film for the most part existing in a recognisably grounded dramatic universe. But the plotting is often laughably hokey and its flashes of violence so distractingly grotesque that it’s never quite clear how seriously we should be taking any of this, a campy good time masquerading as prestige drama.

At just under 2 hours, Black Phone 2, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a needlessly long and hugely unconvincing argument for the birth of a new franchise. The next time it rings, I recommend not answering.

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 really nothing to see here, just another synthetic simulation of a film and a genre we used to love, less maintenance required and more complete overhaul.

Minghella doesn’t seem confident in what he’s really trying to make, his film as plainly, ploddingly shot as a daytime soap with an equally rubbishy score. If he’s trying to do a knowing carbon copy of a bottom shelf VHS horror, then he hasn’t gone far enough into studied pastiche to sell it as such.

Even at a brief 73 minutes, Good Boy can feel stretched, a film that never quite convinces you that a short wouldn’t have worked better. Even though Indy is a remarkably expressive dog, there are only so many variations on dialogue-free scenes of him checking out a weird noise in the dark and the cycle soon gets repetitive, exposing a script that’s a bit on the thin side.

Obsession is satisfyingly slick proof that [Barker] knows just what to do when levelling up to a different platform, and while his debut might have been a film designed around a very modern form of horror, this time he’s looking back, his set-up using elements of a classic fable and the kind of grabby schlock you’d see in a video store back in the 1980s.

It’s a calm, crisply made film (one can again see how it matches the Apple aesthetic) but one about heartache and tumult, and I found myself craving something that felt as difficult and stinging as the feelings it was trying to stir up.

At a game-length 91 minutes, Saipan smartly comes and goes with speed (for all of its anger, it’s also a breezy, funny time) but it’s the rare football movie that’s worth a replay.

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

There are moments of creaky comedy and some bluntly emotional dialogue that one can more easily picture in front of a specifically catered-to live audience.

While there’s something engaging in how the film takes us to a place so, literally, far from where we started, how we get there is not as entertaining or propulsive as it should be with anonymously staged action, easy-to-spot twists and a crucial lack of suspense.

I admired a great deal here, though, especially Freyne’s attempt to transport us back to a cinema landscape before it was dulled down by streaming. That’s an afterlife I would happily choose.

The Christophers is a talky, at times incredibly funny, comedy drama with plot reversals that make it feel like it’s on the verge of a thriller. It doesn’t end up there, at least not strictly, but it’s unpredictable enough to never make us entirely sure just where it’s heading.

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

Another, more textured film might have tried to paint him as more than just lovable rogue but Roofman is too focused on making us feel good rather than bad. I would have settled for conflicted.

There are noble intentions to Good Fortune, in ways related to both the resurrection of the big-screen comedy and its of-the-moment through-line about the increasingly untenable class divide in America, but also not a lot of laughs, the idea of its existence more appealing than the experience of watching it.

It’s as twisty and stuffed with second and third guessing as one would want but its charmingly convoluted nature feels as elegantly composed as it felt in the original, building to a finale that leaves us with a satisfied smile.

The writing might be disappointingly inelegant but The Lost Bus is forthright and frightening regardless.

Christy Martin’s life was filled with devastating blows but in her biopic, we barely feel the impact.

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

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.

Night Always Comes tries to be both seat-edge action thriller and searing social issue drama and while Caron is able to squeeze suspense out of the early, frenetic moments, there’s not enough emotional weight to the more human final act.

Cregger might be expanding and improving his arsenal, using his skills more effectively than he did in Barbarian, but there’s still something crucial missing. Something sharper.

It’s all boringly plain sailing until it suddenly isn’t and the film takes a turn from romcom into something more dramatic.

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.

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

It doesn’t always work – a two-hour runtime that’s a little too long, world-saving stakes that are a little too big, funny lines that are a little too not funny – but it’s a mostly watchable second-tier event movie that, in a world of inconsequential sequels that fail to justify their existence, will do.

Films like Bride Hard, proudly recycling well-known popcorn plots without any attempt at originality, rely on heavy-lifting star power but there’s just none of that here.

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.

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.

Nonnas has a straightforward sincerity that makes it go down easily.

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.

Actor turned writer-director Jillian Bell’s naked, and sometimes literally naked, attempt to craft a new rewatchable comfort food favourite with notes of both sweet and salt is charming when it works but distractingly effortful when it doesn’t.

Buxton gains confidence as the film heads into the murky final stretch, neatly gliding around the, ahem, sharp corners that would have seen others crashing into the darkness. He leads his story to a knockout ending that’s both hauntingly downbeat yet crushingly inevitable without going to new, unnecessary extremes.

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.

The action is serviceable enough, enjoyment based less on deftly staged choreography and more on the catharsis offered to Davis, as president and actor (she has spoken in recent press about the pleasure and freedom the role has provided).

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

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.

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

The deaths here are neither funny nor scary or even gross enough to linger, we’re all rendered unshockable far too soon.

There are touches of above-average streaming craft here, distancing it from the standard Netflix equivalent – an indistinctive yet solid score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, some grand cinematography from Guillermo del Toro fave Dan Laustsen – but the film bears too much of that synthetic Apple feel, as if it was primarily made to show off the abilities of a new iPhone.

Whatever might have made sense on paper just doesn’t translate to screen, a fun little concept that ends up being something of a drag.

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

While there’s a cynicism that clearly comes from someone who has done his time in both Los Angeles and the industry, it’s ultimately about something more human, and more unsettling, than just Hollywood. There are, after all, lurkers everywhere.

For a film about advanced technology, it’s all awfully simple.

Chainey is certainly skilled at distracting us, drowning his film in atmosphere and mood to offset the devolving half-baked hokum of his plot.

While the film does happen upon a real, and painful, truth of the problems that come from dating without a label, as things start to devolve, it becomes harder to understand how they ever found themselves here.

The aimless and unfunny shenanigans of Atropia never really lead to anything and they certainly don’t lead us anywhere that demands the sudden level of dramatic seriousness that the ending brings about.

The real win here is watching Witherspoon and Ferrell show off, both unrestrained by a harder rating and a more raucous script than the norm and while their escalation of bad behaviour might not be quite as bad as it could have been, they both make for wonderfully petty antiheroes.

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.

There’s something refreshingly blunt about what Together is trying to say about the dangers of codependency, a film too busy having fun to waste time writing a self-satisfied dissertation.

Recovery is shown to be a tough, jagged process and while Rebuilding might not offer much in the way of specifics, it offers a wealth of hope which might be enough for now.

We’re in safest hands with Lopez and Condon when he’s playing in that sandbox as the cell-based scenes can be a little stagey and rushed in comparison.

Sweeney’s smart and highly unusual film earns its boundary-pushing because he never loses sight of the inescapable, human sadness at its core. For all of its themes of identical mental and physical connection, Twinless is a true original.

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.

In just under two hours with a plate filled a little too high, not everything here quite works as well as Byrne, but Bronstein clearly hasn’t made something to be liked, she’s made something to be experienced. I can’t say I’ll forget that experience easily.

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.

Dear Santa is like watching Bad Santa slowly turn into Elf, an unsatisfying attempt to be both naughty and nice, ending up as nothing instead.

It never really feels like we’re on a journey anywhere we haven’t been before, with Spellbound far too bewitched with the past to create any of its own magic.

The stakes here are too low and so is the entertainment value.