Catherine Bray

It uses its supernatural premise to explore some very human behaviour.

McAvoy is the most compelling reason to see this one. The original may be darker, but it didn’t have McAvoy.

It may not stick around in your memory with the persistence demonstrated by the entity towards its victims, but it passes the time chillingly enough.

It drags a little in places, despite the appealing animation style, which really comes into its own during the action sequences.

It’s heartening to see Ransome’s fiction taking on a new and more independent form, suggesting an ongoing relevance for a series of books that could easily be viewed as too dated for modern children. As the kids put it: Swallows and Amazons forever.

You’ll spend the next 90 minutes finding out, and for the most part that’s a brisk and painless journey that romps merrily along, powered by its own cliches and memories of better movies, in a way that’s more comfortingly familiar than wearisome.

Where the film runs into some difficulty is in sustaining its initially very promising mood of incipient violence. Withholding revelations can be an effective strategy, but it’s perhaps slightly overused here, as the result feels ever so slightly dry.

For veteran viewers who’ve seen it all before, it’s not exactly the Second Coming. But novice nunsploitation audiences might find this habit-forming: a stylish enough entry-level initiation.

While the craft team here feel at the top of their game, delivering scene after scene of perfectly composed glossy, grimy, sweaty tableaux, the script could have used a bit more time to sharpen up. Still, there are some zingy, zesty sequences here that really pop.

While it may have more punch as chilly horror-drama than allegory, it’s a decently put together film.

As fun as the boys are, this is Barrera’s show. She is tremendous, and seemingly having a tremendous amount of fun.

It’s not for everyone, but for gorehounds this film delivers and then some.

It always feels as if the people making this movie are having fun, and while that’s never a guarantee that the audience will too, it’s certainly the case here.

The film is intriguingly anthropological in its take on America as a subject, viewed less through the prism of what American might signify as a nation, than how America might feel as an experience — there’s a sense of disintegration and incipient violence seeping through everything, which occasionally explodes to entertaining effect, but there’s clearly deep affection there too.

Existing as a labour of love isn’t enough by itself to earn any film a pass mark, but when the result is a committed piece of indie genre work with a suitably silly sense of the macabre, this gets the job done.

Newcomer Marder’s performance is a thoroughly engaging one. She manages to demonstrate both screen presence and likability, despite a role which requires her to represent youthful optimism to an almost symbolic degree.

Serving as co-editor as well as writer and director, Emiliano Rocha Minter is very much the author of all the chaos wrought here, and his thoroughly arresting vision could squat quite comfortably alongside Hieronymus Bosch’s depiction of hell.

Despite Zellweger’s appealingly warm, vulnerable performance, the film itself is a mixed bag.

Sharp, funny and strongest when it stands on its own two perfectly manicured feet, this snappy musical successfully updates the original Mean Girls template for a fresh audience.

The screenplay isn’t nuanced enough to switch between modes in a way that feels intentional and the result is the sense that there are a few different films jostling for attention.

Despite quality performances from both leading lads, Land of Bad won’t exactly knock anyone’s socks off.

The filmmaking is at its most successful when it moves away from dialogue-driven sequences and into the more visual, visceral aspects of Nejma’s chosen line of work.

It is an odd, mostly compelling yarn, and acted with gusto and shot with real physical commitment to the wide open spaces and raw chill of the elements.

You’re never left in any doubt that The Sacrifice Game is made by film-makers with affection and respect for horror movies – but it might not be the type of horror movie you thought it was at first sight.

Director Pete Travis’s film is distinguished by some transposition of noir tropes into cultural spaces not traditionally associated with the genre — from the London bar scene to a mosque — that keeps things from feeling too déjà vu.

A late third-act turn into sentimental territory, in which the original show’s misanthropy is sugared up, may feel artificial to viewers drawn to the series’ persistent despairing streak; still, it makes a certain sense given that the film would otherwise entirely lack an emotional arc.

There are some decent PG-rated thrills and scares for the preteen audience, but adults are unlikely to find it especially convincing, with clunky dialogue and a generic score letting down a solidly traditional spooky mystery.

The longer it goes on, the more we find ourselves in therapy-land, in contrast to the zingy, zesty territory in which we began.