Cath Clarke

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.