Cath Clarke

There are some nice touches here and there, like the whirling little demons with batwings who are devoted to Mandrake. But the script ignores all the interesting bits of the story – who are the witches chasing Earwig’s mum and how does she shake them off?

In the end Horns is weird without being interesting.

This bland and predictable animation about an outsider kid who makes friends with aliens pinches an awful lot of its ideas from superior family films, without reviving any of their wonder or fun.

This film really is a sunny delight as the weather turns cold.

This really is an incredibly cheesy remake—the original was already pretty cheesy—starring Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston and Kevin Hart, doing their best with a script that cranks out all the odd-couple movie clichés.

A couple of scenes in Destination Wedding fall so calamitously flat I had the disconcerting sensation I was watching the film dubbed in a foreign language or for a spoofed internet meme.

This is paddling-pool-level entertainment.

A Million Little Pieces is a weirdly unreflective exploration of the destructive force of addiction and, setting a new benchmark for blandness, drags on for what feels like a million not-so-little minutes.

The will-they-won’t-they succeed in carrying out the poisoning plot makes for pretty flat drama, and for a film about people who have suffered so much, this really fails to make us care about the characters.

This Brit comedy has the watchability factor of a mediocre TV sitcom.

Weirdly prudish about the intimacy scenes, the sex addiction storyline is a cheap attempt to spice up the romcom formula, but this movie is as vanilla as they come.

Mortal Engines really is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent slog, as characters leap unfeasibly out of planes on to bits of cities while a squad of rebel-fighter pilots straight out of Star Wars buzz around.

Diehard romcom fans will have their socks charmed off, but this is no ‘Notting Hill’.

It doesn’t even qualify for dumb fun.

A smarter, sharper film might have explored what happens next in an otherwise happy marriage when the spark goes out. Instead, the comedy here is as broad as it gets, with some wildly unconvincing and unhilarious set-pieces.

Home Alone meets The Lost Boys in this trashy half-way entertaining Christmas vampire movie from director Sean Nichols Lynch; it’s a black comedy with some silly splattery gore.

But the storytelling is unevolved compared with the animation.

What a waste of Shailene Woodley the Divergent franchise is turning out to be.

Spree is meant to comment on the shallowness of social media culture; the trouble is, it’s a film with the depth of a puddle.

The script gives us less about their emotional connection and to be honest, the will-they-won’t-they-stay-together drama is a bit of a snore. The best scenes are down the rugby club, portrayed with tremendous warmth as a happy-ish semi-dysfunctional family.

Harvey is mostly a watchful observer with a notebook; sometimes she reads lines of poetry she’s jotted down on the voiceover. But we barely see her interacting with anyone on the ground, which gives the whole thing an impersonal feel.

An unthrilling, bland drama.

As a thriller, Before I Go To Sleep is perfectly effective, but while director Rowan Joffe keeps the twists coming, something about Kidman’s blank, frosty performance is unconvincing.

Forget about chilling to the bone, The Grudge barely drops below room temperature.

There are a couple of decent jumps and a few giggles, but nothing armrest-clenchingly scary about The Quiet Ones.

The gags here ought to have been put out of their misery and the we’re-all-in-it-together bonding between the kooks of table 19 is just painful.

Weirdly for a film supposedly based on actual events – adapted from Dave Roberts’s football memoir about life as a fan of beleaguered Bromley FC during the 1969-70 season – a persistent whiff of fakeness hangs over it.

Is there something creepy about Franny’s aggressive generosity and need to be needed? In a film with a better script, yes.

Why drag the franchise back now? The screamingly obvious answer is sheer cash-grab cynicism. Or perhaps it’s to cater to the generation of kids who’ve grown up riding the Saw-themed roller coaster at Thorpe Park. Either way, it’s depressing.

I have to admit to being helplessly enchanted – or suckered – for the most part. There’s wit here and The Nutcracker will take you from zero to Christmas jumper in the opening sequence. What’s missing is the melancholy darkness of ETA Hoffmann’s story. Instead, schmaltz-merchant director Lasse Hallström tugs at the heartstrings and ladles on the syrup.

Given the calibre of the voice cast, perhaps the biggest disappointment is how humourless the movie is.

The film is constantly defining what ugly is: freckles, crooked teeth, excess weight, glasses, clumsiness. At times it feels like an unintentional crib sheet for under-sevens bullying.

The movie falls apart with some moral handwringing that will likely infuriate genre fans, and for everyone else, feel like a tired airing of the debate around violence in movies – all the more objectionable in a film with its fair share of mutilated female victims.

Loud and zappy, The Jungle Bunch trots out predictable be-kind-be-brave platitudes, but lacks anything distinctive of its own.

The top-notch cast keep calm and carry on, but this TV remake is a waste of everyone’s time.

The film is gorgeous to look at, all alpine meadow flowers and glorious green mountains. But the drama loses momentum pretty early on.

As charmless as its predecessor, The Addams Family 2 is without an iota of ooky, nor any shred of kooky. Really, it’s just kind of ghastly – and not in the intended way.

It might perhaps have been more ruthless. The movie ends on a bit of a flat note too, with personal growth where you might have hoped for a murder, or at the very least a public humiliation. Still the performances are unfailingly entertaining.

The script feels completely devoid of ideas about what the future of AI might look like. But what it does prove is that Pearce adds a basic layer of credibility to any film simply by showing up.

This sentimental Michael Caine drama is so dull that doctors could prescribe it to treat insomnia. What the hell, they could probably use it to medically induce a coma.

There are some nice enough performances, particularly from Ken Jeong as JJ’s CIA boss and Anna Faris playing the high school deputy principal leading the choir trip. But tonally the movie is all over the place.

The actors – who seem to have been involved in a hideous industrial accident that’s left them with the superpower of repelling all comic timing – are spectacularly unfunny.

We don’t invest anything in either character, and with barely any tension, Serena grabs neither head nor heart.

The story is a real-life political chess game with the makings of a gripping race-against-the-clock thriller; but here it drags out into sluggish, dull and unconvincing melodrama.

Not even an impending apocalypse adds much in the way of urgency. Still, Boyega is very credible and at 29 he’s beginning to look like a leading man with real gravitational pull. Likely he’ll file this on his CV under misfire.

All told, ‘Winter’s War’ is not the fairest sequel, but it’s not so terrible that it deserves to be taken out to the forest and finished off.

The denouement when it comes is meant to be shriek of pure sci-fi horror; but really, you’d find better entertainment – and more energetic acting – watching a fish tank.

From the opening voiceover to the out-of-their-heads party scenes, it’s utterly generic.

A strong whiff of phoniness hangs over the whole thing.

A right royal mess.

The novel A Long Way Down is not-quite-vintage Nick Hornby. And this is a disappointing film version, a bit hokey and fake.

There are a few ideas knocking about in the script – including repression of childhood trauma – but the silly, hand-me-down scares just don’t chill.

This forgotten chapter of history deserves to be better told.

The average lifespan of a chipmunk is five years – which means the kids’ cartoon franchise about the trio of singing superstar rodents has already outstayed its welcome.

You can see why this girl-saves-guy storyline clicked with Watson’s feminism, and she brings pin-sharp intelligence to the role. But everything here feels inauthentic.

It aims for a loose, French New Wave style but settles for muddled and rambling. It’s tortured for all the wrong reasons.

The whole thing hangs on a twist that anyone who has ever watched a trashy thriller will have cottoned on to at around the 20-minute mark.

Cruz has enough charm to melt a glacier, but she can’t rescue the shamelessly sentimental script by director Julio Medem (‘Sex and Lucia’). Ma Ma is going for the heartstrings, but don’t bother taking tissues.

The film left me shaking with anger more than fear.

The whole thing is boring and phony, with just a couple of lines of dialogue that feel sharp.

This is a well-made film and nice looking, but there’s a tiresome predictability to a few too many scenes. It is a franchise that feels like it’s hit the rocks.

Simon Pegg plays the world’s most unconvincing psychiatrist in this fluffy, irritating Brit comedy.

Everything here feels inauthentic, from the cast speaking their lines in English to the unthrilling final escape attempt.

Clarke directs fights in weird slo-mo and is generous with scenes of himself in his undies.

It’s a preposterous plot, with a damp-squib ending, and like an episode of Dallas, the dialogue gets phonier and phonier.

Brie and Cena look lifeless and blank-faced; they’ve got no chemistry, and the objectionable dynamics of him manfully rescuing her shrieking from the clutches of the bad guys on repeat feel like a satire of the genre – which this isn’t.

The film dies an agonising death long before it ever reaches Valhalla.

Semen cocktails, broken testicles and dancefloor laxatives are among myriad reasons to avoid this grim grossout comedy.

It’s a handsome film, but in the end perhaps Wes Anderson’s pastiche approach in The Life Aquatic (in which Bill Murray’s character is a tribute to Cousteau) more vividly brought to life the era of the last great adventurer-superstars.

It’s entertaining enough, but certainly didn’t have me reaching for a jumper.

Everyone here emotes like they’re acting in an electric toothbrush ad.

Director Daryl Goodrich has access to all the right people, and his footage is nicely chosen, but ‘Ferrari’ is unlikely to convert non-petrolheads.

At two hours, the film feels a little long, but this is a heartfelt and human drama with the texture of truth and characters to care about.

If gym buff Henry Cavill really is quitting the role in the movies, as has been rumoured, the film-makers could do worse than to follow the direction here, opening a vacancy for a skinny, long-haired Superman with an earnest hipstery vibe that screams Adam Driver.

It really is such a blatant copycat job, ripping off Cars note for note and lifting so many elements – from talking driverless cars to the dim-witted, buck-toothed sidekick – they might as well have called it Carz.

The hits comes thick and fast, tightly arranged and slickly performed, but this lineup of well-preserved mostly male musicians gives the show the bland atmosphere of a celebrity tribute band.

The story has the makings of a gripping adventure, but something is lacking.

If you’re looking for a definitive Dalai Lama documentary, this narrow-focus film about his lifelong passion for science probably won’t cut it.

Here’s a modestly entertaining stop-motion family film with a fuzzily retro homemade aesthetic and a warming gentle Englishness: decent enough, but stretched perilously thin.

The action is relentless and laboured with the odd pause for a sentimental lesson or moment of personal growth. StarDog may work its slight charms on young children, but older kids will feel they’ve seen smarter, funnier and cleverer before.

What an emotional, satisfying film this is – and a whopping oversized calling card for everyone involved.

Some might find her style, leaving no thought unexamined, a bit rambling, but Paula is doing something interesting here.

Deadwyler’s soulful performance really grounds The Devil to Pay even as it cranks into revenge-movie mode. That said, if you want a slice of grim Americana to hunker down with, I’d go with Winter’s Bone or Frozen River.

An intriguing, somewhat abstract drama about a country descending into chaos.

You could just as easily picture this film playing on the white walls of a gallery as a cinema – if either were open.

More like 92% generic.

The family dysfunction stuff is sensitively handled with some originality.

Here’s a tale of chest-puffing courage and one-dimensional heroism from Russia during the second world war: an old-fashioned patriotic epic with slo-mo action scenes, intestines spewed on the battlefield and a soppy sentimental romance.

There’s nothing quite so naff and depressing as a British comedy misfire, and Me, Myself and Di is the real deal: a miserably unfunny romcom about Bolton’s answer to Bridget Jones.

To begin, there are a couple of genuinely repulsive horror moments, but things get silly very quickly.

The film feels more like an authorised biography than a documentary, and for that reason it’s a little dull.

The acting is daytime-soap standard and the tasteful, softcore sex is shot in such a way as to not look like actual sex. It’s unerotic, unsweaty and performed with expressionless faces. It feels like the film-makers know they have to do the sex bits, but don’t really want to actually do them.

The film is depressingly thin on the women; often it seems more interested in arranging them in arty tableaux than investigating the way that isolation has shaped their personalities and how they see the world.

An Italian-American man in late middle age rejects the rat race and embarks on a voyage of self-discovery and winemaking in this lifelessly unfunny comedy.

It’s all very silly, with a few enjoyable moments.

It’s an entertaining, uncontroversial film directed by the actor Sadie Frost, who pulls in her celeb mates to do talking-head duties: Vogue editor Edward Enninful, Kinks guitarist Dave Davies, and even interview-shy Kate Moss gives a quote or two.

The film catches the excitement of this moment for Clarice, and Dynevor’s performance is wonderful.