Benjamin Lee

But as effective as the film might be in the moment, Singer’s increasingly sloppy plotting starts to get in the way of the bigger picture by the frantic last act, which is both strangely filled with exposition info dumps yet still lacking in much sense.

Nothing here is to be taken very seriously at all but it is mostly devoid of the suffocating, and often nihilistic, smugness one has come to expect from modern action films.

It’s a film so light that it barely exists but Huppert makes it worth remembering.

There’s more of the same in Enola Holmes 2, an equally boisterous romp that’s equally as hard to remember once it’s over but one that should keep its many fans engaged enough to warrant further sequels.

There’s fun to be had here, thanks to Moss and an involving set-up, and given the state of multiplex horror, especially at this time of year, this is a striking diversion. But Whannell gives us just enough to make us want more and despite the stretched 125-minute runtime, he can’t quite deliver what he loosely promises.

It’s about misogyny and abuse and memory and materialism and gender performance and many other things that would be a spoiler to mention. It’s therefore less of a plate and more of a buffet, and while it might be beautifully served, it’s a film about excess that suffers from it too, a case of too much leaving us with too little.

An inoffensive time-filler that’s hard to love but easy to like.

There’s something refreshingly blunt about what Together is trying to say about the dangers of codependency, a film too busy having fun to waste time writing a self-satisfied dissertation.

The film is in need of an edge that Peter Straughan’s screenplay fails to deliver.... Yet Sandra Bullock seems blissfully unaware of the film’s faults and delivers a performance that expertly plays on her strengths.

It succeeds in fits and starts – I laughed more than I have at many a comedy in the past year – but its wild, scattershot humour is so hit and miss, too many jokes going nowhere, that it’s not quite the rousing win I wanted it to be.

It’s in many ways a minor, almost mundane, story with an ending that chooses the small over the big but it resonates just about enough, a quiet scream in the darkness, now able to be heard in living rooms across the world.

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

The sweeping, full-throated romance of the last act might not work for some, who could conceivably argue its dominance leaves gaps in Sérgio’s professional life, but it makes for an emotionally satisfying ending.

Soderbergh operating at a lower level is still higher than many of his peers. Presence just never fully comes together in the way we hope, a ghost story haunted more by the possibility of what it could have been.

It exists in Netflix festive movie world, an ever-expanding place of ever-diminishing returns, and while this won’t be a film someone would consider returning to next Christmas, it’ll just about do for now.

Coda is a mostly likable concoction, but one that’s just too formulaic and ultimately rather calculated to secure the emotional response it so desperately wants by the big finale.

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.

Whodunnits require so many moving parts to be expertly placed and played with, and, ultimately, the script isn’t as sleek as it needs to be with a board as ambitious as this. The game is a fun one, but you might feel a little cheated once it’s over.

It’s made just-about-watchable by Sandler and Aniston again, whose combined movie star charm proves magnetic enough to carry us through the flatter moments, both nailing some effectively chaotic physical comedy and maintaining a warm, relaxed chemistry.

It doesn’t always work – a two-hour runtime that’s a little too long, world-saving stakes that are a little too big, funny lines that are a little too not funny – but it’s a mostly watchable second-tier event movie that, in a world of inconsequential sequels that fail to justify their existence, will do.

This is an unrepentant midnight movie, dirty and violent and best enjoyed with a steady supply of alcohol.

In a genre plagued by a lack of effort, I’ll take a solid try.

If Union County serves as proof that Poulter deserves more substantive work and shines a light on people in a remarkable system, then it’s more than worth the choice to go docudrama over drama. But I still craved more of the real people.

Lowery’s film mostly plays it safe, only slightly remixing the beats we know a little too well, wrapping them up in a pretty enough package that will get tossed aside and forgotten about once opened. It’s by no means the rockiest trip we’ve taken to Neverland but let’s all pray it’s the last.

The pair share an easy, spiky chemistry and Reeves in particular shows himself to be surprisingly skilled at delivering such bile-filled dialogue.

Even if much of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is in need of a rethink, it’s hard not to enjoy the scrappy, animated brainstorm taking place in front of us. The mess of it all is at least a very human one.

It’s a low-budget effort with high ambitions, something that’s hard not to admire, and while it often feels like the teaser for a bigger and better movie, it’s perhaps a sign that Hardiman is setting sail for Hollywood next.

It’s a shaggy, wistful film that acts as a heartfelt tribute to both a city and a friendship and when the cutesy quirk that surrounds it is dialled down, we’re able to appreciate the underpinning earnestness.