Benjamin Lee

It’s a very minor victory to report that rather than being bad, it’s merely bland, an adequate milquetoast time-waster for a very young and very undiscerning audience.

This isn’t Perkins’ first shot but it’s his biggest swing and ultimately his clumsiest miss, a grab bag of ideas and tricks that can’t be coerced into anything resembling a whole.

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?

Rather than a heartwarming family favourite-in-the-making, The One and Only Ivan is just a vaguely watchable cookie-cutter caper thrown together by people who should know how to make something far sweeter and substantial, a fleeting attraction for undiscerning young kids and a whelming waste for anyone older.

It’s difficult to fault a film for being over-ambitious given the low-effort nature of so many genre films but the sheer, two-joints-in bizarreness of Run Sweetheart Run needed a surer hand to guide us through. As it is, that run to the finish line ends up feeling like a crawl.

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 cast all perform adequately, with Hendricks in particular proving effective, but it’s just difficult to really invest in what happens to any of them. Before long, characters are all making stock horror movie decisions, and there’s no amount of effective craftsmanship that can sell stupidity.

It’s solidly acted by Martell and Sutherland, although the latter seems as desperate as we are to let loose and have a bit more fun, and has a confident sense of place as King adaptations often do but it’s all rather unforgivably dull, a call to be swiftly ignored.

There are good intentions and good performances here, but they’re squandered in a movie that isn’t quite sure what it should be and how far it should go.

Try as writer-director Mike Flanagan might, there’s something coldly unmoving about it all, a disjointed and dry-eyed tearjerker that never rises above Instagram caption philosophy.

It’s oddly safe, given the subject matter, and the humour is similarly sanitised. What Waititi thinks is shockingly audacious is in fact frustratingly timid, he opts for a gentle prod when maybe a punch would do.

Paulson’s commitment is unwavering, and it’s refreshing to see her in genre material a little more grounded than what the various American Horror Stories have given her, but she’s an actor in search of better material and, sadly, Hold Your Breath means that search is ongoing.

If Jimpa itself pushes us away, Colman tries to keeps us close, a warm and astute performance of raw, red-eyed emotion remaining entirely real until the end. If only we could have joined her there.

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.

A misfire not quite bad or powerful enough to undo Janiak’s great work but one that questions whether the world of Fear Street is one we need to spend much more time exploring. If the introductory trilogy started us off on a thrilling journey, here we’re brought to a sudden dead end.

It’s cheerily done and competently made but broadly sentimental to a fault, the strings being pulled too visible for the film’s many coerced moments of emotion to really work. For a film all about the importance of heat, it’s frankly lukewarm.

It’s an undemanding watch, easily digestible while on in the background, but even easier to forget.

There’s a cinematic slickness to the film (it was intended to be released theatrically until the pandemic) that separates it from its more noticeably shoddier fright night competitors but it’s mostly a familiar, if not entirely fruitless, trudge down a well-trodden path, one that takes us into, at times, questionable territory.

It’s competently made but utterly vacant, a forgettable indie fading fast.

James had impressed with her debut, the dementia horror Relic, but any of that film’s texture or creepiness has dissolved on a larger scale.

Bertino doesn’t need to give us another Strangers, and we certainly do not need anything else in that particular universe, but he needs to give us something more striking, and certainly stranger, than Vicious.

There’s little in the way of dramatic conflict or base wit to keep us hanging around to see what happens within each.

It’s a pulpy slab of exploitation masquerading as an important treatise on the struggles faced by the working class in rural America, thumping us in the face with its shallow viewpoint until we beg for mercy. Or at least the credits.

The script is sensitively handled and it’s unarguable that showcasing stories such as this is an important way of educating the masses about a difficult process. But while it’s hard to hate, it’s even harder to like.

For a film that wants us to stop worrying and love big tech, Atlas does an awfully good job of showing us why we should still be wary of it.

As a drama, it’s frustratingly insubstantial, failing to provide enough of an emotional centre or a convincing payoff.

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.

Before things go south, there’s an effectively clammy escalation of panic as Watts leaps from call to call . . . But the script, from Chris Sparling . . . isn’t quite ingenious enough to find ways to involve her in the drama.