Clarisse Loughrey

This action caper is less a film than a collection of buzzwords.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie offers very little to audiences, young or old, who don’t already know these characters and spaces like the back of their hand. But, hey, if you take a tequila shot every time something explodes, you’ll have a great drinking game on your hands.

No, the problem with Home Sweet Home Alone isn’t that it had the temerity to encroach on a holiday classic. It’s that they bungled the whole thing so badly.

The real selling point is a romance so dorky, sweet, and likeable that, well, maybe only Taylor Swift could have written it.

‘Spider-Man’ spin-off is too flavourless to even be the wild, untethered disaster some were secretly hoping for.

Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway’s script is profoundly scattered, and there’s such a ruthless amount of re-recorded dialogue inserted that there’s little cohesion between or even within scenes.

The Scargiver is at least basic enough to feel relatively inoffensive; the first film’s uncomfortably vague deployment of racist and sexual violence has been reduced to a single reference to the empire’s hatred of “ethnic impurity” (never to be picked up again).

There is no chemistry, sexual or otherwise.

Any effort to force us to identify with Chris comes to naught. Any promising idea leads to a dead end. It’s a maddening watch.

What should’ve been an intricate, twisted, and absurd treat is demoted to generic horror movie sludge, in no way discernible from any of the other spooky titles lining the October release schedule.

It’s a film populated by some of the Justice League Snyder Cut filmmaker’s worst impulses: a mess of imagery, some of it attempting to shock, congregated largely around the idea of what might look good in a trailer.

The characters are presented in the of-the-moment style of CGI rendered to look like hand-drawn animation, but with a scarcity of detail and a flatness usually associated with preschool television.

The Garfield Movie is stuffed with enough tragic backstories to make a therapist rich.

A wrong turn was taken. And The Starling has come out the other side an utterly bizarre, tonal misfire that fumbles through several ideas before implying that it’s perfectly OK to berate the suicidal for being so suicidal.

Apologetic sequel brings back franchise veterans Sylvester Stallone and Dolph Lundgren and ups the violence from ‘Expendables 3’ – but that’s not enough.

The Electric State is somehow both punishingly obvious and completely incoherent.

Wildly miscast actors and an impenetrable script make this long-delayed actioner alienating to fans of the game and incomprehensible to the casual viewer.

Madame Web is fiction and has seemingly passed on the opportunity to make itself exciting – instead offering a two-hour prelude to a 30-second trailer for a sequel that will never happen.

Robin Robin may be short, but it’s rich and satisfying – maybe one to serve alongside the pudding on Christmas Day.

It’s a rare achievement contained within an even rarer type of film: a Black-led, British romantic comedy. But there are, unfortunately, limits to how new and invigorating Boxing Day actually feels.