Benjamin Lee

The “more is more” approach (hallucinations, orgies, pissing, stabbing, shooting, splitting, piercing etc) is attention-securing in the moment but oddly forgettable after, like waking up from a nightmare you can’t remember. Infinity Pool is too hectic to truly haunt.

It’s an intimate portrait that at times borders on meandering but it remains free of judgment throughout, with Einhorn and Davis using their background as journalists to let the story happen without coercion or commentary.

Cretton ... can’t quite rise to the material or his performers, choosing anonymity over ferocity, making the dullest, safest decision at every turn. It’s not enough to topple the fascinating true story at his film’s centre but it does have a frustrating, flattening effect.

Heretic might not be good clean fun but Grant makes it worth us getting dirty.

The Good Nurse remains a good, if not ultimately great, attempt to tell the story of a very bad person.

There’s definite fun to be had here and franchise fans will surely appreciate both Black’s nods to the past and his plan for the future but there’s something forgettable about its freneticism, and I struggle to imagine in 31 years if it will be thought of at all.

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 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.

It’s not that its heart isn’t in the right place, it’s just that its heart has been transplanted from somewhere else.

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.

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

It’s just a film that never really finds its footing, a problem that would have been noticeable with or without the increased frame rate. It’s just that at 120 frames a second, it’s so much more noticeable.

It’s competently acted and made – her direction easily trumps her writing – and while there’s nothing close to suspense, there are some effectively visceral moments of gore.

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

Without the franchise pull behind it, Next of Kin is a rather anonymous horror of demonic possession, competently made and with decent acting but indistinguishable from the pack, where predictability wins over personality.

The pair never convincingly hate or even mildly dislike each other, there’s no bite there, it’s more like watching a happy couple playfully rag on each other for an audience and we’re never given enough of a reason as to why they wouldn’t be together from the outset.

There’s a cracking elevator pitch of an idea here (one wonders if inevitable sequels will be able to squeeze more juice from it) but Jardin’s cocky, in-your-face excess coupled with his lack of follow-through makes this an unwinnable game.

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

The sheer existence of Lou might be a step in the right direction for women over 50 in action movies, but it’s a misstep everywhere else.

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.

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.

The Last Thing He Wanted is a thing that no one wanted.

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.

There’s never really enough for the underserved trio of actors to sink their teeth into, although they all manage to coast comfortably enough.

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.

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.

It all goes off the rails in the worst way in the chaotic final act, as Schlesinger invents a farcical, and increasingly ludicrous, way to wrap things up, the truth of what happened proving far too pedestrian for the framework she’s created.