Cath Clarke

Jolie has assembled an A-list team – Roger Deakins behind the camera, the Coen brothers in charge of the script - but while her film is perfectly competent, it hardly dazzles.

It’s a mouth-puckeringly tart movie that’s tonally in a world of its own – darkly disturbing, absurd, brutal and silly, with a batsqueak of bonkers.

As the daughter of director Ron Howard, widely regarded as one of nicest men in Hollywood, Howard is herself blessed in the dad department; he is very likable here. His only parenting crime seems to have been to film the birth of all four of his kids. But the rest of the Hollywood contributions are irritatingly platitudinous.

In Firth’s every grimace and flinch you feel the torment of Lomax’s private world, but emotionally ‘The Railway Man’ feels trimmed and tidied up.

I’ve never liked Renée Zellweger more as a warmer and wiser Bridget Jones – but still capable of making a total prat of herself.

There are more than a few false notes here.... Still, the sight of Emma Thompson, wearing old-lady prosthetics and a leopard skin coat as Barney’s mum...is not to be missed.

The fish-out-of water moments are great fun, watching arthouse gods Depardieu and Huppert in tacky tourist hell.

The cleverness of Kingsley’s performance is the twinkle in his eye that leaves you wondering whether Dalí has disappeared entirely up his own myth. How much of the eccentricity is a put-on, brazen self-publicity to maximise sales? Disappointingly, the script invents a fictional art school dropout to be our guide to Dalí’s universe.

It’s a striking, ambitious film, but there is something about the tone – both glossy and grittily real, stylising everything to mythic proportions – that left me a bit cold.

Welcome to the Jungle is mostly great fun, with Jack Black outrageously entertaining as a teenage girl. But we need to talk about Karen. As Ruby Roundhouse, Gillan is stuck in less clothes than one of Rihanna’s backing dancers. It’s a dig at the hypersexualization of women in video games, apparently. If so, perhaps the male director (or one of the four male writers) can explain how fixing the camera on a skimpily dressed female character makes the point.

The trouble with Nick Frost’s knowingly cartoonish and silly comedy paying homage to folk horrors such as The Wicker Man and Midsommar is that Frost has done this kind of movie before, and better.

Sisters is too strained for a comedy starring two of the funniest people alive.

My Best Friend’s Exorcism could perhaps do with one or two genuine scares. But for anyone old enough to remember Tiffany and advice columns in teenage girls’ magazines, this is going to deliver a pleasing shot of nostalgia.

It's très chic and charming but a bit disappointing when you see where it's headed.

When it’s playing for laughs, ‘A Royal Night Out’ is harmless good fun.

There’s a kind of blunt brute force to [Bloom's] performance – and he looks almost unrecognisable, as if he’s using certain muscles in his face for the first time.

This Neil Armstrong documentary feels like unrequired viewing coming so soon after two cracking moon landing movies.

The impossibility of ever really knowing our parents is a familiar storyline, but it’s told here with real generosity and warmth. Malik slyly pokes fun, but never meanly. This is satire with the thermostat turned up to 22 degrees.

It is something of a letdown: a funny but conventional glossy romcom. But there is no messing with Viswanathan, who is undoubtedly the main attraction.

Kevin Macdonald’s slightly drab adaptation of Meg Rosoff’s popular teen novel would be nothing without Saoirse Ronan.

Entertaining but never quite thrilling, this actually feels like the second film in a franchise, coasting along, but saving the best bits for the next episode.

What follows is a race against the clock, cleverly constructed by director Maximilian Erlenwein and co-writer Joachim Hedén. Their script throws in plenty of calamities to nobble the diver’s escape, but didn’t quite manage – for me at least – to spark a vertiginous clammy terror.

The performances are thoughtful, and like a pinch of chilli, heat things up from time to time. But director Oren Moverman’s portrait of smug, toxic privilege misses its mark – and at the end of two long hours, this feels about as fresh as last night’s chips.

Sting, black with a lethal red stripe, is never silly looking, though some of horror references feel a bit obvious and fanboy-ish.

Mélanie Thierry does her best in the lead as Duras, but her character is maddeningly flat and dull.

A perfectly acceptable family animation.

The history that emerges here is of a band yo-yoing between attempts to be taken seriously as artists, then coming back for more boyband fame and adulation. An air of collective self-loathing and regret hangs over them.

After Blue is a preposterous film, easy to ridicule. But it’s surely already halfway to cult classic status – destined to play midnight slots, watched by students smuggling bottles of red wine into the cinema under their coats.

I enjoyed the jolt of strangeness delivered by this world of demons stalking the Earth. But the action is hit-and-miss.

There is just too much going on, and the movie doubles in hecticness with every minute that passes, which may have you rummaging around for a couple of paracetamol.

It’s perfectly adequate for little kids but with little character of its own and a straight-to-download-style blandness.

Pacino gives his most natural performance in years.

Lawrence is gritty, real and totally genuine. And, after ‘Brooklyn’ and ‘Carol’, here’s another film that passes the Bechdel Test for proper female characters with flying colours.

It’s not reasonable to ask that the film keeps Tina safe, but a sense from the start that things might end badly for her made me wince a little even during the lovely, authentic-feeling scenes of her life.

The movie noodles along amiably, but in the cold light of day, its quirks begin to feel like flaws.

This snore-bore doc follows the year-long world tour of Kevin Spacey’s Old Vic production of 'Richard III’ directed by Sam Mendes ('Skyfall'). Critics dusted off all their big words to praise the play. But we don’t get to see much of it.

It’s a nail-biting story, but this doc isn’t as gripping as it should be.

Trolls is not break-the-mould brilliant like The Lego Movie or Toy Story, or a keeper like Frozen. But it’s a lovable and giddy guilty pleasure.

It’s an interesting concept, but the characters are thin and nothing here feels insightful.

Here’s that Hollywood rarity – a sequel that’s better than the original. It’s wittier, less frenetic and introduces fresh characters and a nice scene of strategic furball vomming.

The ending is unforgivably mawkish, though, and the running time of two-and-a-quarter hours is simply too long.

It is a thing of beauty: too beautiful perhaps, running a real danger of prettifying poverty.

It’s a bit indulgent but, still, a gentle watch.

Wade’s dialogue is totally convincing, all in-jokes and boarding school banter... The trouble with The Riot Club is that dramatically it never quite comes together.

Like so many campaigning doc-makers he’s much more interested in throwing darts at the other guys – the anti-nuclear brigade (who have better slogans: ‘Hell, no, we won't glow’) – than giving us a balanced film.

It’s a hurricane of slapstick (some of it in fact very funny) and age-appropriate energetic fight scenes, but lacks the sweetness and charm of the franchise at its best.

As a war movie written by a soldier this material feels oddly lacking in authenticity and authority. And yet it’s a noble attempt to honour the resilience of Ukrainians and the courage of ordinary people like Voronin, fighting for freedom.

It’s a thoughtful, well-acted and perceptive drama. However, for a film about a love triangle the sparks don’t exactly fly.

It’s overripe and improbable, but you’d need a flinty heart to resist the message of solidarity, that if you spend time with someone, anyone, you’ll find common ground.

It’s sentimental, though the way Kirsty is helped by women boiling with fury at the injustice does feel modern.

If you’re a parent whose screen-time rules have crumbled in lockdown, under no circumstances watch this film until normal service resumes.

Becky’s crazed kills get more and more gimmicky, and there’s nothing in the script to indicate what has turned her into a pint-sized death-dealer.

The film can’t match the novel’s elegant, startlingly excellent Booker-Prize-winning writing, but a first-class cast (including Charlotte Rampling and Sinéad Cusack) make this an absorbing watch.

What the film does very well is show how doping became so normalised. It’s as much a part of the team’s routine as a post-race rubdown.

A lairy, likable film.

Brilliantly acted but never entirely credible and not quite the force for feminism it wants to be.

It feels worthwhile – funny and true about growing up and getting a life.

It’s refreshing to see a movie like this directed by a woman, Eva Husson, so boys and girls are objectified equally. Which is not to say this passes the feminism test.

This is a film with a lot of charm, and gives cinema its most lovable rats since Ratatouille. But I did wonder at points who the audience is.

The film is frantic and silly and our biggest gripe is that all the penguins look the same.

It’s a forgettable film, with a fair few gags that strike a depressingly sexist note.

It’s heartfelt and sweetly earnest, but humdrum and disappointingly unmagical. The animation doesn’t help: characters speak with blank paralysed faces as if they’ve had botched Botox.

Five Feet Apart, with its phoney emotions and baloney contrivances — these love-struck kids can’t even hold hands let alone get to first base because two people with cystic fibrosis aren’t allowed to touch — just didn’t do the job for me.

Chao is the standout here. She deserves more – a leading role of her own, at the very least, and a character with an inner life and interests of her own.

ISS does deliver one knock-out terrific death in space: a screwdriver to the neck, perfect little bubbles of blood floating prettily away in zero gravity.

Moretz is unnervingly talented, but Carrie is not a role she was born to play. She hasn’t a victim’s bone in her body and fluffs the early scenes when the mean girls pick on her.

There’s nothing to fault in the performances, but the characters are filo pastry thin and slightly bland-tasting – like less complicated, less interesting versions of actual people.

It's silly rather than scary, more insipid than insidious.

You’ll walk out of this electrifying documentary about the Arab Spring with your blood boiling.

This is anaemic stuff, though perhaps its target audience won’t care.

The trouble with the film is that beneath the surface lurks … well, perhaps not quite enough to keep the momentum going.

What keeps this out of Nicholas Sparks bumper-paperback territory are terrific performances and Reitman’s control of the drama.

The problem with the film is that Potts’s life story has been put through the Hollywood meatgrinder. Awkward details have been changed or erased – they’ve made Potts Welsh (he grew up in Bristol) and eliminated his siblings.

Love, Marilyn blows out of the water the impression of Monroe as the helpless dumb blonde.

There are some gorgeous Disney touches, rabble-rousing songs on the pirate ship and the usual ‘best friends for ever’ message.

Here’s a true story about a young soldier’s exceptional bravery and sacrifice made into a pretty average war movie, insubstantial and TV-ish despite the appearance of some decorated Hollywood veterans.

As modern dating movies go, How to Be Single gets a lot right.

More bah-humbuggery – which is a rational response to the wall-to-wall Christmas jumpers – and less zany antics here would have done the job better.

You’ll be left scratching your head wondering what a naked girl draped in a purple net curtain in a cemetery has got to do with frocks. Not many revelations here.

Sadly, this polite film, though touching in places, is so desperate not to offend, it’s the film equivalent of sensible shoes. Diehard fashionistas may disagree.

The film’s good-natured warmth wins the day, just.

It’s a political thriller that tells the story matter-of-factly, and is perhaps a little lacking in the pace department. But Isabelle Huppert carries it along with a performance every bit as gripping as you’d expect.

The Water Diviner is solid and old-fashioned.

Some people will hate Trash for being not grittily real enough, but Daldry’s point – a hope-against-hope optimistic one – is that the energy of young people can change Brazil.

Even with an intelligent, credible performance by David Oyelowo, the daftness and utter implausibility of a smartphone so smart it can make calls to the future is overwhelming.

How much you love this low-budget British effort will depend on your tolerance to quirkiness.

It’s a sweet, undemanding film that, despite the title, is tamer than a sedated bunny. That said, the four-year-old I watched with spontaneously yelped “this is the best!” 20 minutes in. So really, what do I know?

[A] thin, slightly exasperating documentary.

Making her feature-film debut, Elliott handles their story gently, with patience – though it might feel a bit slow for some.

Like a fridge whose door’s been left open overnight, the film doesn’t feel chilly enough. It’s not terrible, but fans of the book may well be disappointed.

There is a message here about celebrating differences, which would be a bit more convincing if they’d cast a smaller actor in the role – instead of using distracting CG effects on Dujardin.

Any of Dahl’s gruesome sense of fun is obliterated by a bulldozing message of empathy and kindness, thanks to a plucky orphan Beesha (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) and her pals pulling together an opposition to the Twits. This is vile and revolting in all the wrong ways.

To me this feels like a silly smirking film with zero insights into abuse or conspiracy theories.

What Morgan lacks in philosophy and ideas, it makes up for in bone-crunching violence.

There’s really not much for the humans to do, other than flash brilliant white smiles, making the film feel like the world’s longest toothpaste advert. And it’s a toothbrush you’ll be reaching for after all so much sugary sentimentality.

Leung Chiu-wai has a predatory glint behind the salesman’s grin, and Lau has the beaten look of a man bested for much of the movie. What’s really missing is a Leung/Lau face off, an epic confrontation.

Like watching a statue for two-and-a-half hours, there’s nothing to do but sit back and yawn.

The 3D effects are dazzling, but the script creaks and the characters are thin.

The film sags a little towards the end, with a few too many implausible action sequences: characters jumping out of helicopters and fighting on top of speeding SUVs, the choreography glossing over the basics of gravity and physics. Still, the cheers kept coming.

Director David Verbeek’s script doesn’t quite wield the scalpel with enough sadistic glee. Instead, this film feels ever-so-slightly sluggish and dour in places.

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.

It’s a film of desperately upsetting details.

The problem with Bruce Willis in the movie is that he’s not doing something that he is supposed to be doing: acting. He puts in a such a wooden performance playing a washed-up, burnt-out cop that I could have screamed in frustration.

Nine Bullets is unfocused to the point where you might want to scream with frustration.

It’s an almost entirely unfunny comedy from Debra Neil-Fisher, who edited the Hangover movies and makes her directing debut lumbered with a stinker of a script; it’s not smart enough to work as a grownup relationship movie, and laughs are too few for a proper comedy.

It’s a deeply uncomfortable film but also weirdly gripping.

The director is Christopher Nelius, himself a surfer, who has done a brilliant job with editor Julie-Anne De Ruvo of assembling the archive to capture the sport at a moment in time, all youth and energy. Smartly, he lets this exceptional group of funny, tough, talented women surfers, now in their 50s, do the talking.

At 88, Raven is still performing – perched on a stool – as his alter ego Maisie Trollette. In this affectionate if slight documentary, he tells a story or two, though perhaps not enough to fill a book.

The lowish-budget production values, gestural performances and blunt moralism of the scriptwriting puts this very much in the heightened dramatic tradition of mainstream Nigerian cinema, but Emelonye has an accessible style and has picked the topical subject of cybercrime, an approach which might broaden the film’s appeal.

Imagine Game of Thrones crossed with Gladiator and you’ll have something like this entertainingly old fashioned action movie with epic levels of throat slashing, spectacular scenery and a fair bit of camp.

Some Like It Rare is a tasty treat for herbivores and carnivores alike.

The film is expertly bolted together from archive newsreels, snippets of classic war movies and interviews with surviving airmen.

Nearly everything about Epic Tails feels a bit underwhelming, and limited imagination-wise.

What’s missing is a sense of what’s at stake – we never quite get a feeling for how desperate these men are, and for the most part they feel a bit too familiar from the Britcom playbook. That said, Burrows brings cheeky-chappie warmth to the character of Curly.

That sweaty, close-to-a-nervous breakdown tense feeling of being trapped is nowhere in the film. And where the script goes in its pulpy nasty final twist felt to me like a disturbingly misogynist move.

With Ladybug doing as much mooning as superheroing the girl power message feels more afterthought than heartfelt.

The film too has a meditative effect, with its soothing, gentle rhythms, watching the seasons changing, and sense of time passing.

The original delivered some big laughs, scenes that were an absolute joy. This is less good-natured; it is a film with streak of misanthropy, more likely to leave a sour taste in the mouth than a smile on your face.

The dogs give the film a touch of class, but as a whole this is forgettable.

It’s a silly horror that’s not as good, or as bad, as you’d hoped: neither funny enough nor ever properly scary. That said, there are some cheerfully gory bits and a smattering of decent culture clash gags.

It makes for some fun moments and a funny showdown with the baddies. In the old days this would probably have gone straight to tape, so straight-to-download feels like the right place.

The Tower is a hellish vision of isolation that must surely have been dreamed up during the pandemic lockdown; it made me want to switch on The Road for a bit of light entertainment. Not easy to recommend, this.

The film is a surprisingly gentle, touching story about acceptance, though it is less than sizzling as a romance.

The script is mostly tasteless, a buffet of blandness. Instantly forgettable.

Both Kerr and Burchill come across as unpretentious, down to earth and likable.

More than a little suspension of disbelief is required and, increasingly, I felt as if I was watching a video game. It’s a movie with a fairly low IQ too – violent, boring and a bit soulless, always on the edge of running out of steam from the 45 minute mark.

This is a respectful film, but it does pick a little at the myth of the Johnny’n’June love story.

In the end, this is a shallow drama passing itself off as saying something meaningful.

The cinematography here, capturing the fierce beauty of the craggy landscape, raises the quality an inch or two above hokey cheapness. In the end though, this is movie with right on its side but not a scrap of believability.

The script seems so focused on the family’s resilience it never really confronts the horror of surviving, and being alive in a world with no oxygen, where nothing grows.

It’s as if director Warren Fischer has forgotten to write jokes in his script. No one says anything remotely humorous; instead there’s just a parade of lowest-common-denominator gags.

Knepp is a heartwarming speck of biodiversity good news among the depressing headlines.

Strangely, this film keeps to the speed limit; it’s like Formula One with enhanced health and safety, slow-paced and a little low on adrenaline.

I didn’t feel the movie maintained the dramatic tension enough to work as a lean thriller, but as a portrait of a toxic man who thinks he could be a contender it’s funny and disturbing, with an impressive lead performance by Aldokhei.

[An] affectionate, nostalgic documentary.

The film, with its clanging score, felt to me slightly tactless in its approach, like a Hollywood-ised version of a human interest story.

It would be grating were it not for Kinnear, and some nicely performed supporting roles.

The movie is not lacking in adventure, perhaps what’s missing is a sense of fun.

At times, it feels hopeless. But eventually the victories come, sometimes from unlikely quarters.

For good to prosper, it seems, all it takes is enough good people to take action. It’s an uplifting message in a watchable movie.