Benjamin Lee

A fiery Dever gives it more than the film ends up deserving, though, rising to a difficult challenge with both the virtual lack of dialogue and a string of sequences that force her to energetically react to a range of digital effects, a performance that almost saves the movie.

It’s all too silly and the writing too hokey for us to keep up and by the end, truly care about who survives or not.

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

Lost Girls is sorely lacking and, ironically, one wonders what a Garbus docuseries could have found instead.

In his dry and uninvolving dramatic take, Stone has made a film aimed at breaking out Snowden’s story to the masses but it’s made with such limpness that a swift read of his Wikipedia page will prove far more exciting.

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.

Haley, who last directed the sweet and underseen Hearts Beat Loud, gives the film a stronger aesthetic than most Netflix teen offerings, and Fanning and Smith work hard at charming us into submission, but their hard-to-buy relationship isn’t quite the immersive ride-or-die love connection it needs to be, given the melodrama of the last act.

Thinly etched topicality only gets the film so far (the script is very “I read an article once”) and when the action mechanics kick into gear, it’s yet more of the same with very little to distinguish it from the pack.

The decision to make the film a musical is a genuine head-scratcher, one that’s never justified or even mildly explained given that the two leads are not natural singers and so throughout the lunges into song feel awkward at best.

The lack of tension, innovative kills or atmosphere is far more of an issue, the film looking every bit as tinny and flat as the very worst that streaming has to offer.

What propels us past the cliches of Intuition is a desire to see just how it all ties together, an assumption that a story as busily plotted as this must have an ace up its sleeve. But the last act is all fizzle, played out predictably with a mundanity that no amount of sweeping aerial shots can disguise.

As dated as its slow-mo zombie-killing opening credits, at times Zombieland: Double Tap feels like it was made directly after the original yet carelessly forgotten about. It’s rushed and dusty, a film more belonging on Crackle than the big screen, more expensively budgeted than the first yet mostly creatively bankrupt.

Tonally, it’s all over the place, that aforementioned sap curdled together with Wilson’s trademark crudeness, an R-rated comedy that wants to be both sweet and salty, a balance it never manages to perfect.

The more accomplished the film-making becomes, the more we then expect the script to level up too.

It’s brand management dressed up as insight and while it’s not not entertaining, it’s certainly far from particularly revealing, playing more like a PR exercise then a festival-worthy feature.

Trap is a thriller that incorrectly thinks it’s fiendishly smart. Maybe if it was more aware of how stupid it actually is, it might have been a lot more fun.

There’s probably a semi-decent creature feature here and maybe, with a hefty amount of redrafting, a semi-decent human drama but as it stands it fails at both, a satisfying, coherent film buried underneath copious amounts of animal guts.

While we’re compelled along by an urge to know the film’s secrets, convinced that like-father-like-daughter, a twist is on the way, it’s clear from the outset that we are being guided by far unsteadier hands.

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.

Watching a couple bicker about the specifics of their relationship can be illuminating when done right, but here it becomes a chore, the problems they encounter feeling contrived and silly.

The bizarro plot might help Candy Cane Lane stand out from the bland, busy crowd of new seasonal movies but it’s just as limp and lacking in spirit as the rest of them. Murphy and Ross deserve better, and so do we, and so does Christmas.

While the screenwriter, Brad Ingelsby, does root us in the minutiae of the trio’s day-to-day, it’s never in particularly interesting ways, and over an indulgent 135-minute runtime, we gradually grow tired of them, often questioning exactly why we need to know so much about their lives.

It’s a film entirely devoid of subtlety yet one that also fails to provide the grand emotion it yearns to deliver, despite the use of a sledgehammer.

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

You Should Have Left should have left our nerves frayed and our dreams haunted but instead, it leaves us cold.

Mara and Mendelsohn have a compellingly toxic chemistry together and their initial confrontation is intriguingly tense. But once we’re locked into the meat of the story, the film has nowhere else to go, at least anywhere that’s of interest and the pace becomes laborious as their discussions turn repetitive.

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 sleepily hits the beats we expect but without the emotion or passion required to make them land, a by-the-numbers exercise from someone with barely enough energy to count.