Fionnuala Halligan

A good cast including Sam Rockwell and Jared Harris wander around sincerely in what feels, at times, almost a shot-by-shot remake, and at others, an obstinately wrong-footed exercise in dabbling with the narrative.

Cherry comes across like a deeply personal passion project for a group of talented filmmakers, and that’s for better and for worse. In its attempts to address Cleveland’s opoid crisis and the devastating trauma of repeated overseas conflicts for young Americans, the Russos’ film can effectively convey the grim desperation of those involved. It is often distracted by its own technique, though. The tone wavers wildly, the attention hovers, and scenes are allowed to ramble on. At times the resulting sense of discomfort can help challenge the viewer, but Cherry isn’t sufficiently fresh to be challenging enough.

The Cured is at its sharpest when drawing acute political parallels. As a zombie film, the shocks are few/

Using the Great Hunger as a backdrop for a revenge western is an interesting way to exorcise old ghosts, but the end result drains pathos from the tragedy while muting The Proposition-style genre elements.

Director Juan Carlos Medina (Insensible/Painless) fails to muster Golem’s many moving parts, and tension leaks from the film like the blood from one of its many savaged corpses.

I, Olga Hepnarova struggles with its difficult central character, always spiky and occasionally psychotic but never really as intriguing as the filmmakers clearly believe.

A Dog’s Journey is certainly manipulative - humans aren’t safe here either, with a significant cancer side-plot. At times, it even seems obsessed by death. Yet there’s something oddly cathartic about sobbing your way through this film, with its mash-up of Buddhism and All-American values.

Despite the keep-it-open ending, it seems clear that Chastain has an idea, and not a franchise; that Simon Kinberg (X-Men) works better as a producer than a director.

Vroman follows up The Iceman with a competently-made film, featuring solid production design from Jon Henson (Testament of Youth) and some good, gritty chase sequences, particularly at the film’s onset.

The effort is strenuous; all 128 minutes of it. But it’s almost as exhausting to watch as it must have been to make.

[A] clearly well-intentioned, attractive, wistful-to-the-point-of-inertia film.

Neighbors: Sorority Rising turns out to be an uneasy watch, awash with unconvincing performances, unfunny stereotypes, and dubious gross-out gags.

A muddled bid for political relevance has led the film-makers to drag on The Gunman’s primary mission: to entertain.

Watching it is akin to witnessing Maggie Smith’s The Van slowly rear-end Richard Curtis’s Notting Hill: a cringing slow-mo car crash best viewed between your hands.

The thin story plays out in a hail of bullets, zombies and action-laden sequences.

Whether it’s the sheer weight of the narrative repetition - which involves rewatching a brutal rape - or the two-men/one-woman perspective, which results in an underwritten character and a strained performance from Comer, The Last Duel is crushed by the weight of its own armour.

Like the book, Reed Morano’s film is long on atmosphere and short on the kind of detail a spy thriller needs to be credible.

There’s hopes of an awards push for Zendaya and a bravura show from John David Washington, and their commitment should be recognised (although, as producers, they’ve already experienced some significant success). This is a woefully self-indulgent piece, however: fascinating at the outset in its frank assessment of race – written by a white man - but ultimately a hollow drum.

Gorging on bombast and self-importance, swamped by its own mythology, Batman v Superman is loud, sprawling, and distracted. The action jumps around almost as fast as a man can fly, but nowhere near as smoothly.

Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole series is comprised of page-turning, airport-blockbuster Scandi crime potboilers; Alfredson scorches the seventh, The Snowman, with such art-house intensity that it eventually melts into an exhausted puddle.

As the narrative gears grind through like the slow and steady paddle boat, there’s a sense that Branagh has lost a lot of the fun of Agatha Christie along with his passport - although as the credits indicate he kept a navy’s worth of digital compositors in work through the pandemic, at least they’ll be smiling.

Its sly irony is muffled by a convoluted, fatally tedious plot.

Creepy “send them back to Fuckheadistan” sentiment overwhelms London Has Fallen’s guilty pleasures, its meaty violence and xenophobic nastiness giving the cheddar an unpleasant aftertaste.

Everything about The Mummy strains solely towards setting up a franchise in a world which only makes sense to its writers.

Bezhucha seems to have spent all his effort and imagination on the journey: the destination an afterthought, the denouement bizarrely prolonged, and all but written in a flashing neon sign above the Blackledges’ heads.

This religious-themed horror based around the phenomena of Marian apparitions has an intriguing premise but cuts too many corners in its catechism.

It’s a commercially marketable prospect, sure, thanks to a committed performance from Julia-Louis Dreyfus (who also produces), but Downhill has also groomed out the subtlety from the original Swedish-language source material in some wincing stabs at cross-cultural comedy.

Long, shiny, and treading a lot of water.