Benjamin Lee

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

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.

It’s ultimately a doomed voyage: for the crew, for the audience and for Universal’s monster movie strategy at large.

Like Beckett trying to escape his pursuers, it’s a scrappy little film but one worth keeping up with.

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 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.

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.

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’s pacy enough to secure at least our divided attention, competently trotting along in the background revealing surprises that aren’t really that surprising, like a pulpy, well-worn airplane novel that you guiltily devour in a day.

This is stupid but it’s also mostly entertaining, thanks to Johnson and a plot that moves fast enough to retain our attention yet without enough, ahem, the originality to ensure it lingers in our minds once the fire has been extinguished.

The film’s old-fashioned nature is a plus and a minus, delivering us the satisfying beats we’ve come to expect from such a story, yet also giving it a dusty, dated feel, playing like a mid-90s TV movie stumbled upon late at night.

A fun night will be had, but you’ll have trouble remembering it in the morning.

It’s the kind of adaptation that is so misjudged that you end up struggling to see why anyone thought it a good idea to adapt in the first place.

It’s slick in one moment and a little too scrappy the next but Ritchie’s puppyish insistence that you have as much as fun as his stars is hard to resist. The film’s bizarrely reticent rollout might have already killed any chance of further operations but there have been far, far worse franchise-starters in recent years.

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.

While it’s not going to make a star of Pataky or anyone watching a sudden convert to Netflix’s mockbuster oeuvre, it’ll make for a decent summer snack until something better lands.

Let It Snow is a prime example of what happens when the Netflix algorithm machine spews out something that actually feels like a real movie. It ticks all the right buzzword boxes for the platform (YA, Christmas, romcom, cast filled with recognisable faces) but does so with such ebullience that you’ll fail to notice, or at least care about, the many strings being pulled throughout.

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.

The more British director Sean Ellis prods and provokes, the hokier it all gets, a film about cutting weight that could have benefited from a leaner edit.

At a baggy, over-stretched two hours, its welcome is close to being overstayed, but there’s just about enough charm to keep Disenchanted from living up to its title.

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?

It might look the part, with the director Paul Feig successfully capturing the glossy, tourist-friendly London one would crave from such a film, but the script feels like a rejected first draft with unfunny filler one-liners and a scrappy, ill-thought through narrative. It’s a beautifully wrapped Christmas gift that’s filled with rotten turkey leftovers.

It would be difficult to invest in if not for its two main stars who work hard to elevate the overly engineered plot, filling in the emotional gaps left by the haphazard script.

While the story of an old flame coming alight again can be a very poignant one, especially with an older age attached, there’s very little here to move us; a crippling dearth of chemistry between two likable enough leads who are forced into thin, circumstantial conflicts and overdramatic reactions that feel unearned and at times baffling.

The stinging tragedy of being gay at the wrong time in history is something that will always prove ripe for emotive, painful drama but director Michael Grandage struggles to pull our heart-strings, an easy target easily missed.

When the first-time director Bishal Dutta does try to add freshness to the familiarity of formula, he manages to carve his film its own place within two overstuffed subgenres, flashes of intrigue as he veers between schlocky curse and even schlockier monster movie.

Even the fantastical elements don’t make that much sense, magic with rules that are loose and undefined, leaving us with an eye-roll of an ending we can see from a mile away.

Against the Ice is a Danish story flattened for a global audience.