Benjamin Lee

It’s neither a rousing success nor an embarrassing failure, falling somewhere in between, closer to admirable attempt.

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.

Nicholson fails to give his film the specificity and emotional depth required to make it seem necessary. We’ve been here before and nothing in the film’s 100-minute length truly justifies why we’re back here again.

It’s less of a film and more of an actors’ workshop, an exercise for everyone involved but meaningless to us.

Lopez slinks through Hustlers with a deceptive ease, as in control of the film as her character is of her situation. It’s the sort of role that only a true movie star could pull off, so much of it reliant on a rare, intoxicating magnetism.

So there are two films here: one is frightening and poignant and the other tender but slight. The first one will haunt me even if the second will fade.

A contemporary whodunnit that both respects and revises the subgenre. ... It’s such a rare pleasure to see a director so in love with a genre without slipping into Tarantinoesque fanboy indulgence, remembering his audience is bigger than himself and also that his film requires both head and heart.

As a comedy, it’s simply not funny and as a horror, it works better in pieces but not with the consistency a film set over one night would require.

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 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.

The Kitchen, a late summer, female-led adaptation of a little-known DC comic, is the worst kind of bad movie. That’s because it has all the ingredients of a good movie, from a juicy premise to a stellar cast, yet it’s assembled with such staggering incompetency that from the very first scene it boils over into one star territory, all promise evaporating from the screen. The boredom and confusion that then follows is backgrounded by an almost angry frustration that someone could get something so potentially thrilling so very, very wrong.

Even though Share wraps up within a slim 90 minutes, Bianco does struggle to sustain her premise until the end, especially in the final act, as beats start to feel repeated and our investment starts to waver.

It’s a direct, nasty, entirely unpretentious B-movie and while this remains faint, faint, faint praise given the state of the genre, it’s one of the year’s sturdiest horror films. I wouldn’t exactly urge you to run rather then crawl to see it, but a brisk walk should do.

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.

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.

Annabelle Comes Home is hopelessly light on scares.

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

A surprisingly nimble summer comedy that finds both Aniston and Sandler at their most charming.

I Am Mother is undoubtedly a strong calling card with plenty on its mind. I just wish it had figured out what to do with it all.

Even die-hard De Palma completists would be better served by forgetting this one exists – a tedious, ugly thriller devoid of anything to say that will serve as a regrettable footnote for a distinguished film-maker who is capable of so much more.

Like Set It Up before it, Always Be My Maybe hits all of the beats we have come to expect yet fails to do so well enough, as if the mere existence of a technically well-structured romantic comedy is better than nothing.

Spencer works hard to keep us on her side and it’s her messy, melancholic character work that endures, a portrait of a woman broken and breaking those around her that’s really quite hard to shake. Ma is a few more drafts from perfection but the actor playing her is the real deal.

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

There’s a rare unpredictability that initially proves alluring, at least until that confusion starts to feel less intentional.

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.

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.

Wine Country is scrappy and, at times, misjudged but it’s also very, very funny with a cast of women whose collective charm makes the patchier moments forgivable. Watching it with wine helps too.

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.