Benjamin Lee

Actor turned writer-director Jillian Bell’s naked, and sometimes literally naked, attempt to craft a new rewatchable comfort food favourite with notes of both sweet and salt is charming when it works but distractingly effortful when it doesn’t.

With Hathaway at its centre, The Idea of You is on far surer footing, in small moments almost threatening to be something far greater but settling into being perfectly acceptable instead, a plane movie par excellence.

The Jason Bateman comedy model hasn’t quite been radically altered in Game Night but it’s one of his more entertaining outings. Just don’t count on remembering much of it once the night is over.

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.

Perhaps the film’s overwhelming ace is an overarching awareness of just how pointless it really is, made with the same disposability with which it should be consumed.

While the shifts in genre, plot and location do prove intriguing for much of the film, they ultimately result in a feeling of mild dissatisfaction, the whole never quite the sum of its parts.

There are tasty moments here, but genre fans looking for a full meal might leave a little hungry.

When the first-time director Bishal Dutta does try to add freshness to the familiarity of formula, he manages to carve his film its own place within two overstuffed subgenres, flashes of intrigue as he veers between schlocky curse and even schlockier monster movie.

The first-time writer-director Laura Chinn can’t quite muster enough genuine emotion to get us there, her so-so debut working best when investment is at its lowest.

The Twitter-to-screen adaptation of Zola is as scrappy and imperfect as the original story but just as likable. There’s something unusually compelling about what Bravo does with the material that makes up for its missteps.

Arguably the film’s biggest problem is that it’s less laugh-out-loud hilarious and more deserving of the odd casual smirk.

It’s carried through by an all-in Hawke who is really put through the wringer, arguably his most physically gruelling role to date (the upside of a low budget is that his hardships are made to look that much harder), a muscular and entirely persuasive performance that continues his winning streak.

There’s intermittent fun to be had in this throwaway relaunch of the female secret agent franchise but the party is cut short by incoherent action and a clunky script.

It’s the problem faced when one of these films is raised just above the gutter-level norm, you end up wanting it to be that much better. As it stands, Jingle Bell Heist is as good as it’s getting for now.

It’s perilously close to being overstuffed (one more introduction would have tipped it over the edge) but a controlled and nimble script justifies the large ensemble, using each thread to quickly switch back and forth between the anger, ecstasy, disbelief and fear that seeped from conference to dorm room at the time.

This odd, nasty yet rather funny little film tears apart ideas of sisterhood and female friendship and replaces them with burning hate and gratuitous violence.

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.

As another one of the director’s mid-budget, mid-level crowd-pleasers, it mostly works – well-made enough to distract in the moment but not quite enough to last in the many after, unlikely to catapult him to the top or sink him to the bottom.

Lady and the Tramp works well enough on its own simple terms as watchable, competently made home viewing.

It all remains refreshingly and unusually old-fashioned. A gentle film aimed at the younger end of young audiences that will also find the approval of those that much older.

This is stupid but it’s also mostly entertaining, thanks to Johnson and a plot that moves fast enough to retain our attention yet without enough, ahem, the originality to ensure it lingers in our minds once the fire has been extinguished.

It’s a calm, crisply made film (one can again see how it matches the Apple aesthetic) but one about heartache and tumult, and I found myself craving something that felt as difficult and stinging as the feelings it was trying to stir up.

It’s watchable enough but let down by a strange lack of interest in presenting Salander as anything but an engine to propel a plot. More female action heroes is by no means a bad thing but forcing Salander into Bond’s shoes feels like a misstep, her intellect and survivalism suited to far more interesting pursuits.

Outside of Savage’s visual verve, there’s really little else to The Boogeyman, its attempt to use its central villain as a metaphor for emotional trauma never working quite as well as it did in last year’s Smile (horror as therapy is getting a tad exhausting in general). It ultimately works best as further proof of his ability as a genre film-maker, sleekly gliding from a laptop to the big screen, better things to surely come.

For all of its faults, there’s still plenty here to praise, the result of so much being thrown at the wall is that some of it will stick. Pearce has a sharp creative flair and a head full of ideas but he feels somewhat hemmed in by the constraints of a short running time and a high profile release date.

The life lessons being taught here about self-acceptance, self-love and self-worth might be a little pat and some of the darker elements could have afforded a tad more darkness, but It Ends with Us leads with heart first, everything else later. It’s a film of huge, sometimes hugely unsubtle, emotion but it has an effectively forceful sweep to it.

This is a broad, frequently cartoonish romp that plays like a less effective mishmash of To Die For and Fargo. The blunt, unashamed crudeness does provide some laughs but the tonal shifts are often uncomfortably handled.

There’s ultimately too much in the film’s rushed 94-minute runtime for anything to really breathe.