Benjamin Lee

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

Cronin, an Irish film-maker who has made just two films to date (The Hole in the Ground and Evil Dead Rise), is an undeniable visual talent but his Mummy is also absurdly, watch-checkingly overlong (134 minutes is an unacceptable length for a genre film as thin as this), tonally unsure and, fatally, not all that scary. It’s also, for something so clearly attributed to just one person, a film so deeply influenced by the work of many, many others. It might not feel like a Mummy movie you’ve seen before but it’ll feel like a great deal else.

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.

This is a ferociously well-made film right through to the bitter end.

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.

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

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.

Watching all the tried-and-tested elements fail to coalesce just makes us nostalgic for the classics instead. Let us all wish Disney can find that magic again.

While Dauberman manages a handful of effective moments (a morgue scramble with a homemade cross and a drive-in movie light trick are particularly good), he’s never able to capture the slow, escalating dread that a story such as this demands.

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

It all has the distinctly cheap whiff of something that should have gone direct to the small screen – hammy acting, stilted dialogue, chintzy effects, tinny score, Halloween costumes – but without the raucous fun that should come with it.

It’s a still fun yet far sloppier outing, a second round that’s less of a win for us and more of a draw.

If The Blair Witch Project signalled a new dawn of horror, Blair Witch is the loud death rattle of a once exciting sub-genre, disappearing into the darkness.

The graphic novel-inspired world of Gunpowder Milkshake isn’t unique, but it’s admirably committed and Papushado edges his film away from the danger of pastiche thanks to an equally committed cast.

A to-the-point two-hour slab of pulp that slickly glides above a very low bar.

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.

It’s held together by Sandberg, a director who has mastered the art of totally competent studio horror with slick, equally forgettable films like Lights Out and Annabelle: Creation and he again shows himself to be a crisply efficient commercial film-maker again let down by a far less effective script. For a film all about repetition, one viewing will suffice.

It’s by no means the worst of Allen’s later films (Cassandra’s Dream remains unrivaled in that department) and the flashes of brilliance from Winslet and stunning visuals do lift it but there’s an overwhelming, existential pointlessness to it all.

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.

Ballad of a Small Player ends up a little too slight, a sketchy look at a familiarly doomed character.

While Something from Tiffany’s is unlikely to rise to the higher regions of any genre fan’s best-of list (it’s too frothy to even rise to the middle), there’s something engagingly earnest about its relative lack of meta self-awareness and robust attempts to look and feel like the studio meet-cutes so many of us were raised on.

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.

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

[Miller] is a far better director than he is a writer though, and the film is crisply, thoughtfully made, at the least looking like it belongs on the big screen.

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 reminders of Inception become so distracting that the film starts to border on pastiche. ... It’s overwhelming, even suffocating at times, which is a shame because there are elements here that work independently, without the need for the Nolan playbook to be so obsessively followed.

Don’t Breathe 2 is not only struggling for air but it’s struggling for purpose and meaning and hopefully this weekend, audiences too.

If Damsel doesn’t exactly rewrite the storybook, it makes for a competent rework of it, a rousing revenge saga that provides a thin yet encouraging message for its younger female audience and a balm for those older viewers who grew up being spoon-fed the same old gendered cliches.