Benjamin Lee

For fans of joyless screaming and stabbing, there might be something here worth your time but for those who expect more thrills from their thrillers or at least something close to a purpose, 7500 is a flight worth missing.

It’s a mismatched buddy film, but not entirely unsuccessful thanks largely to Jenkins, who can play a role such as this with his eyes closed, and McGhie who captures a mixture of righteousness and despondency.

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.

It’s a film with too much yet somehow so very little.

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.

It’s mostly kind of tolerable in a low stakes, rosé-wine-swigging way, inoffensively middling rather than rotten, an easy, undemanding afternoon watch with nothing of note other than a few laughably dumb moments..

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.

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.

It’s a film trapped between a low- and a highbrow version of a story we know all too well, landing firmly in the middle of the road.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

An odd attempt at genre-surfing that ends up well out of its depth.

There’s something so constructed and suffocating about watching a tried and tested formula not working, the over-sentimental string-pulling on show for all to see.

Bonneville’s performance will linger, the film not so much.

Clumsy attempts at comedy are weaved in to try and alleviate the remarkable grimness but all it really does it add to an uneven tone.

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

It has the feeling of a short film stretched beyond its limit, with all that early tension dissipating, and while there’s certainly something jolting about the gonzo violence in the finale, it’s otherwise ineffectual.

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 formula is so well-trodden that it needed a sparkling jolt of energy to justify Penny traipsing his way through it again. Uncorked isn’t exactly corked but it’s definitely flat.

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.

Its undemanding nature and flat aesthetic making it an adequate background watch at best. Yet there’s also just enough here to make me wish it had been that bit better, a serviceable watch with a frustrating throughline teasing what could have been.

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 too sloppily written and edited for even the least discerning of horror fans to really enjoy, a patchwork of nonsense confusingly stitched together by someone, who at one point, knew better.