Benjamin Lee

What none of the tonal shifts and story tweaks can do is distract us from his boringly flat direction, failing to justify why something so drab and cheap-looking would warrant the surprisingly wide theatrical release it’s receiving this weekend.

Nothing can distract us from a script that just doesn’t work, family dynamics we don’t believe, jokes we don’t laugh at and characters we don’t care about. Oh. What. Fun. is anything but.

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 all so hard to define not because it’s too brave and original to fit into the system, but because it’s never all that clear that anyone involved knows what the hell they’re making. Whatever their answers might be, I’m positive that Nathan and Cage didn’t aim to deliver something quite so dull.

Silverstone’s easy charisma, and initial lived-in chemistry with Hudson, can’t overcome a script that isn’t witty or involving enough for us to care about another milquetoast Netflix family frantically hugging and grinning to show how close they are.

This is a little too slight and breezy to really make much of an impression, like a dream you’ll forget as soon as you open your eyes.

Even in an oversaturated genre of increasingly diminished returns, Shelby Oaks is about as dispensable as it gets.

Horror director Michelle Garza Cervera opts for the muted slow-burn (it’s a convincing argument for more studio work) and Winstead gives an earnest performance, the film for the most part existing in a recognisably grounded dramatic universe. But the plotting is often laughably hokey and its flashes of violence so distractingly grotesque that it’s never quite clear how seriously we should be taking any of this, a campy good time masquerading as prestige drama.

At just under 2 hours, Black Phone 2, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a needlessly long and hugely unconvincing argument for the birth of a new franchise. The next time it rings, I recommend not answering.

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 really nothing to see here, just another synthetic simulation of a film and a genre we used to love, less maintenance required and more complete overhaul.

Minghella doesn’t seem confident in what he’s really trying to make, his film as plainly, ploddingly shot as a daytime soap with an equally rubbishy score. If he’s trying to do a knowing carbon copy of a bottom shelf VHS horror, then he hasn’t gone far enough into studied pastiche to sell it as such.

Even at a brief 73 minutes, Good Boy can feel stretched, a film that never quite convinces you that a short wouldn’t have worked better. Even though Indy is a remarkably expressive dog, there are only so many variations on dialogue-free scenes of him checking out a weird noise in the dark and the cycle soon gets repetitive, exposing a script that’s a bit on the thin side.

Obsession is satisfyingly slick proof that [Barker] knows just what to do when levelling up to a different platform, and while his debut might have been a film designed around a very modern form of horror, this time he’s looking back, his set-up using elements of a classic fable and the kind of grabby schlock you’d see in a video store back in the 1980s.

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.

At a game-length 91 minutes, Saipan smartly comes and goes with speed (for all of its anger, it’s also a breezy, funny time) but it’s the rare football movie that’s worth a replay.

Gavras leaves them and us stranded on the way to his out-there ending.

There are moments of creaky comedy and some bluntly emotional dialogue that one can more easily picture in front of a specifically catered-to live audience.

While there’s something engaging in how the film takes us to a place so, literally, far from where we started, how we get there is not as entertaining or propulsive as it should be with anonymously staged action, easy-to-spot twists and a crucial lack of suspense.

I admired a great deal here, though, especially Freyne’s attempt to transport us back to a cinema landscape before it was dulled down by streaming. That’s an afterlife I would happily choose.

The Christophers is a talky, at times incredibly funny, comedy drama with plot reversals that make it feel like it’s on the verge of a thriller. It doesn’t end up there, at least not strictly, but it’s unpredictable enough to never make us entirely sure just where it’s heading.

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

Another, more textured film might have tried to paint him as more than just lovable rogue but Roofman is too focused on making us feel good rather than bad. I would have settled for conflicted.

There are noble intentions to Good Fortune, in ways related to both the resurrection of the big-screen comedy and its of-the-moment through-line about the increasingly untenable class divide in America, but also not a lot of laughs, the idea of its existence more appealing than the experience of watching it.

It’s as twisty and stuffed with second and third guessing as one would want but its charmingly convoluted nature feels as elegantly composed as it felt in the original, building to a finale that leaves us with a satisfied smile.

The writing might be disappointingly inelegant but The Lost Bus is forthright and frightening regardless.

Christy Martin’s life was filled with devastating blows but in her biopic, we barely feel the impact.

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