Helen O'Hara

It’s a fun premise, one that this treats seriously, but it never quite reaches the highest levels of the genre.

The midway point between "A.I." and "Diary Of A Wimpy Kid." It has quirky charm and a tender heart, but the treacly sentiment may become wearisome.

These Mark 6 Jaegers with their electric whips, “gravity slings” and plasma swords deliver all the giant robot thrills you could wish. Thanks to Boyega and Spaeny, you might even care about the human characters, too.

A crime thriller with no interest in thrills and not much in crime, this is an at times frustrating character study of a guy who can’t get out of his own way.

A so-so animated adventure that can’t ever find a compelling story to tell despite a few catchy songs and some colourful design. Maybe some dead things should stay buried.

The bones of the story have been played a million times, but a talented and committed cast make this swoonsome rather than samey.

A sportsman biopic that concentrates more on the man than the sport, this offers food for thought for those who can stand the languorous pace.

However slight the recorded romantic history of a well-known female author is, you can be sure it will become a key part of her biopic. Joining the trend now is this account of the life of Emily Brontë, which spends a chunk of its time on a romance that may not have happened. It’s well played and well written, but it’s an odd addition to a story that is remarkable even without invention: studios need to start letting spinsters be spinsters.

The plot’s all over the place, but there are a lot of laughs and some strong action beats along the way.

It loses sight of its own heroes amid the hustle and bustle of its wildly entertaining environment, but Zootropolis is still a blast to visit for a couple of hours.

A sugar-fuelled thrill, this boasts a fine young cast and pleasantly pantomime adult roles. It may be too long for younger kids, but tweens are going to love it.

An uneven but essentially likeable story about the joys of setting yourself improbable goals and the tribes you can find as a result, with a strong, committed performance from Bell at its heart.

An awkward mix of gross-out comedy and big emotional sincerity, which may be authentic to the experience of pregnancy but feels clumsily balanced between these two characters.

A beautiful, subdued Daisy Ridley performance anchors a story that is underplayed to the point of almost non-existence. Still, if you’re tired of blockbuster bombast, this could be the antidote.

Haynes’ film has lovely performances from both actors, and a keen sense of time and place help, but the story is a little too shaggy and unformed to entirely hold the attention.

It’s an intriguing look into a secret world and a great performance from Chastain, but Sorkin’s directorial debut never quite makes the leap from great poker movie to great movie.

It's loud, at times unwatchably gross and sometimes lingers on the verge of hysteria. But it's also a warm-hearted and optimistic celebration of black womanhood. Maybe friendship can save us all.

A life story packed with incident means that this sometimes rushes past events that would be formative for anyone else, but equally means that Lamarr’s life story is never, ever dull.

It’s bleak and understated, but strong performances and a thorny moral maze give this considerable power despite the gloomy skies.

It’s clearly made with real love and care, but shows far too much deference to its progenitor. Even in a remake, we need more originality and less playing the hits.

There are colourful characters and cool moments to keep you entertained on the road to nowhere, but they can’t disguise the fact that this is a shaggy-dog story with no real point.

It’s silly and a little too slow, but the characters are enormously charming and the design is overwhelmingly sumptuous. It should give viewers, especially children, a welcome hit of Christmas magic.

It’s a light diversion rather than a symphonic masterpiece, but it’s still pleasantly in-tune entertainment.

This lacks the sting in the tail of something like the similarly post-War The Others, but it offers a soupy atmosphere of low-level dread and paints a devastating portrait of a vanishing age.

It’s fun to see Zoolander once more. It seems unlikely that the premise could ever sustain a third film, but if this is Derek’s swan song then he leaves amid a flurry of feathers and bustle – surely all a male model could wish for.

The set-pieces are quick, light and for the most part fun. What Game Night lacks in (any) plausibility or coherence it makes up for in Friday night, pleasingly brainless entertainment.

The few weaknesses in the plot can be overlooked as The Vow makes for a wonderful - if a bit teary - romance that is brilliantly acted.

This starts strong but doesn’t always have the room to explore all the ideas it crams in, even with a lengthy running time. Still, Rockwell’s man-on-a-mission is a delight.

As a counterpoint to the (much better) "Spotlight," it’s a fascinating look at modern journalism – but perhaps not always for the reasons its makers intended.

It's less action-heavy than the last trilogy and inevitably more ape-centric, but this is a promisingly chewy start for the latest series of simian thrillers. These apes are still strong.

Big, bold and teeming with imagination, it is so busy world-building that it occasionally forgets to have fun. But with this heavy lifting done, there’s every reason to hope for an even more magical adventure next time.

Proof that Netflix doesn’t just do Kissing Booth movies: given the right talent, they can produce a genuinely compelling high school comedy. And you thought they didn’t make ‘em like this anymore.

With its uncompromising commitment to gross-out injuries, nerdy pop culture in-jokes and inappropriate touching, Deadpool 2 was clearly made to cater to existing fans with every innuendo-filled moment (they should stay through the credits for some important story points that are very nearly thrown away).

It's all very, very silly. That, combined with the relentless pace, should ensure that it delights its target audience of under-tens, but the adults shouldn’t fear this dog’s bark too much.

It’s relentless and exhausting for adults, but kids and die-hard SpongeBob fans may find something to love here as the consistently cheery fry cook once again out-dimwits a dastardly foe.

It’s consistently pretty entertaining, even if it takes a while to get going.

Smart, funny and really quite hot, this is worth a look no matter what you think of "Charlie's Angels."

A curiously bloodless account of a real-life disaster that has moments of gripping tension punctuating long stretches of fatally understated business as usual.

It’s beautifully designed and pleasantly quirky, with fun performances from the cast, yet the arch narrative style and structure can make the whole feel thin and unsatisfying.

The fire scenes are terrifying and may well sear themselves into your brain, but however well-intentioned, the human element is less involving than the disaster they must endure.

An informative but incomplete look at Whitney Houston’s life and death, this will frustrate fans as much as it fascinates them.

Funny and scary - and sometimes both at once - it lives up to the original, even if it fails to surpass it.

The drama and tone are powerful and effective and Lawrence makes an exceptionally charismatic heroine, but an almost total lack of action means this is less catching fire than treading water.

Gentle, unchallenging drama for people who already know they like it, this is a nostalgic and rosy depiction of an England that was, surely, never so innocent.

The people of Downton Abbey have never been relatable, but they’re really pushing it this time.

It’s cool and brutal, but with such impressive action credentials you almost wish there were fewer plot devices to distract you as Charlize gets up and at ’em.

It may be too tame for horror fans, but the gothic twist works remarkably well — even if everything else is business as usual for the Belgian detective.

It’s long and sometimes gets swept astray by currents of family drama and period detail, but Ridley’s plucky determination and can-do energy carries the whole thing along. The result is an old-fashioned inspirational pleasure.

It is entirely predictable from moment to moment and frequently laughable in its portrayal of international relations and politics, but it’s also funnier than it needed to be, and, thanks chiefly to Zakhar Perez, often charming.

It falters in the middle and hesitates unnecessarily in setting up the love story, but Gru still has charm and kids will adore the Minions.

The result is overlong and rarely groundbreaking – there are hints of The Truman Show, Edge of Tomorrow and, visually, Inception – and suffers from some obnoxious filmmaking shorthand in its portrayal of other cultures late on.

It’s not as scary or as effective as the first film, but points for the performances, and for trying hard to do something different and fresh.

A perfectly serviceable biopic with good performances, which goes some way to explaining Franklin’s genius as a musician and a star, but one that isn’t nearly as transcendent as its subject deserves.

Nearly as good as the last film — the starrier cameos compensating somewhat for the more scattershot plot — this is fun but could have been more deeply felt.

Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum make a sweet and spiky couple in this likeable caper. It’s never going to challenge The African Queen for quality, but it offers 
a consistently good time.

The stories are all individually charming, but overly familiar animation and underwhelming character-design blunt the effect. 

Everyone’s trying hard, but they can’t quite live up to the particularly gentle, warm tone of Pooh himself. Unlike the bear of very little brain, this is a film pulled in different directions with entirely too many thoughts in its head.

The blood and gore is all present and correct, but the focus on Kramer's vulnerability and human side sits at odds with his awful judgmentalism. Let monsters be monsters.

We know that this cast can produce magic together, and that this director can inject pace into unlikely topics. It’s just this one that seems to have feet of clay.

[Ridley Scott's] second film in as many months, after The Last Duel, is uneven, overlong and completely over the top, and has characters and plot turns that Marvel and Pixar would reject as ‘a bit much’. The good news is that it is undeniably a proper drama and, for the most part, wildly entertaining.

The film doesn’t quite trust the magic of the garden, adding visual dazzle and, sometimes, artificiality, but when the film relies on the kids and their relationship it still finds the book’s magic.

A quiet and meditative portrait of the artist as a retiree, this lacks incident or high stakes but has an elegiac feeling of regret and reckoning that fits its subject’s twilight years.

A likeable cast and colourful depiction of Pakistani (and Pakistani-British) culture makes this look warm and inviting, but the central romance can’t hold our attention as it should.

There’s a good-hearted father and son tale at the heart of the madness here, but the surroundings are sometimes a little too silly for true greatness.

The plot is insubstantial in the extreme, but Rae and Nanjiani are so cool, and their loose, free-flowing improv so winning, that you probably won’t care.

It’s not a hugely innovative biopic, covering just a short period of Bader Ginsburg’s extraordinary career, but this is still a vastly inspiring account of the fight for equality.

It's scatty, scrappy and thoroughly OTT, but then that's like the characters themselves.

Happily, it emerges at last with enough inventive action to stand alongside its murderous predecessors, and makes Ana de Armas into a likeable assassin hero – a phrase that makes more sense in her killer-filled world than our own.

Another ‘live-action’ remake that’s darker and less compelling than the animated original, but it’s saved by Bailey’s charming performance, McCarthy’s sass and the story’s own eternal magic.

It’s not the toothless remake we feared, and is often very funny, but there’s a slight imbalance between the Roses that blunts some of its effect.

It’s far from a complete biography, but it makes at least some effort to engage with the messier aspects of Lee’s life. Ultimately, however, this is a celebration of Lee and the cheerleading he did for comics, and that is surprisingly moving.

The two gifted comedic actresses give their characters depth while also finding moments of lightness that stop the drama from ever bringing the pace down too much. It makes for a wickedly funny spin on the safe old British period drama.

With a cast this talented there will always be decent moments, but they never cohere. Credit for its casting and design, but it’s not the movie messiah, just a very disappointing mess.

An animation that never drags itself out of mediocrity despite the best efforts of gifted animator Tartakovsky.

It’s a well-made adventure with great energy and considerable style, but it’s essentially a maze without an exit.

The performances are solid and the story is touching — and perhaps that will carry this to its chosen audience. But it's a little flat for true drama.

These bosses cannot justify either murder or lasting comic memories, fatally compromising a farce that could have been great but ends up merely mediocre.

It's an impressive performance from Chastain and a fascinating subject, but the film doesn’t delve deep enough into Bakker’s inner life.

This is just as unevenly plotted as the original, lacks even the element of surprise, and is not by any reasonable standard “good”. Between gooey and ghoulish, there must be better options.

Cavill and Hammer are made for each other, but the film can’t always find the pyrotechnics to match their chemistry.

It benefits from a supernaturally engaging cast, but this treads too closely to the rom-com model to feel as smart or moving as Westfeldt's previous best.

As with many high-concept horrors, it falls apart as it grasps for an ending, but there's still enough dread, and three great central performances, to just about carry it through.

Savage directs with a light hand, and sometimes you wish for a little more shape to the baggier scenes.

This is an Aquaman film that needs lots more Aquaman and vastly less bombast. It’s visually wild and recklessly inventive, but the cast deserve better than to be cast adrift in a tempest of CGI.

In this fun action-thriller, David Harbour’s Santa is less Saint Nick and more John Wick.

Some fun intergenerational warfare, clever genre nods and a generally sharp script enliven what could have been a bog-standard slasher movie.

The great circle of life has thrown up a gorgeous, star-studded story, but trading feeling for realism means that we lose something of the original film’s excellence.

Even the slightest wisp of critical thought will bring the house-of-cards plot tumbling down, but avoid thinking too much and it’s a frothy, sun-drenched bit of fun.

Kormákur creates some effective jump scares and considerable suspense as the lion stalks its prey with blood-chilling growls one minute and deadly silence the next. The CGI budget can’t always quite match his ambition, however, and perhaps as a result, his timing sometimes seems off.

A fun blend of scares and sentiment, this largely justifies a lengthy run time with effective frights and a valedictory feel. Just don’t watch it before trying to clear out the attic.

McKellen has fun as the bitter, biting Erskine, but the plot takes so long to come together that at times he’s the only thing holding the audience’s interest.

It’s unexceptionally filmed and occasionally clunky, but this is a gently heart-warming underdog story, and Turner shows real star-power in the lead role.

Lawther’s a charismatic, uncompromising lead, and Billy’s campaign is an inspiring one, but this sometimes settles for broad strokes of heroism or villainy where more subtlety would have increased its impact.

This spectacular adventure sometimes wanders across the borders of invention into artificiality, but finds its feet when it focuses in on its characters and their relationships.

It looks gorgeous and offers strong performances from Driver and Ridley in particular, but ultimately the saga ends with neither a bang nor a whimper but something inbetween.

It’s annoying and one-note and so relentless in its cheeriness that it eventually comes to seem almost likeable. At least there are great voice performances underneath all the felt and pop mash-ups.

Fleischer Camp brings a light touch and a good human cast to this reverently faithful effort, but it’s never as clear and bright as its source material.

It’s not all bad: no film with this cast could ever fail entirely. Staunton makes you root for Sandra even at her worst, and Imrie offers an impish, joyous counterbalance to her pursed-lip disapproval.