Ian Freer

One’s a cop who can’t shoot straight! One’s a kid with a nose for trouble! Together… they lack the wit, thrills and rapport to deliver fun genre times.

The Occupant is a slow burn of a thriller that never catches fire. Looking to skewer the pursuit of perfection during late capitalism, it misses both its satiric targets and a sense of kitsch fun.

A fun diversion for the kids, but you feel Attenborough could have packaged these often beautifully produced images with more rigour and insight in under an hour.

Togo is in a slightly more sombre register than Call Of The Wild but delivers similar sturdy pleasures; exciting dog-in-peril action and striking landscapes, all anchored by Dafoe’s grounded performance.

Astronaut doesn’t have the budget or cinematic ambition to deliver on its premise. Despite the best efforts of Richard Dreyfuss, it reaches for the stars and misses by a mile.

Well played and well shot, Run’s idea of relocating Springsteen’s America to a rain-swept Scottish fishing town is interesting, but sadly it runs out of gas and road before it hits the horizon. Less baby we were born to run, more baby we were born to drive around in circles for a bit.

Despite the odd strong moment, this Bloodshot is anaemic.

And Then We Danced is a well-made love story, anchored by a mesmerizing Levan Gelbakhiani and enlivened by electrifying dance numbers.

A bizarrely strait-laced project for Todd Haynes, Dark Waters lacks dramatic oomph but compensates via a well-mounted telling of a terrifying story, driven by still contemporary concerns and a convincing central turn by Mark Ruffalo.

A sentimental but solid dependable retelling of an oft-told tale, it doesn’t do anything radical with the material but gets by on well mounted set-pieces and Ford’s grizzled gravitas.

Strongly performed by a fresh-faced cast, A Paris Education is familiar and doesn’t completely grip, but is an enjoyable celebration all the good things in life; films, arguing about films, friendship, love, politics and Paris.

It should be a delicious chocolate gateau but Emma. makes heavy weather of Austen’s charmer, delivering a tonally uneven, mostly airless affair. Amy Heckerling’s Clueless — Emma in the Valley — remains the big screen benchmark.

It’s messy, with a middle section that sags, but Birds Of Prey has vibrancy, anarchy and balls to spare. Harley and Joker are dead. Long live Harley Quinn.

Eddie Murphy’s Dr. Dolittle generated four sequels. On this showing, Downey Jr’s will be a standalone, an uncynical but mostly lacklustre kids’ flick that doesn’t find its voice, animal or otherwise.

Neither a splendid phoenix from the ashes nor a complete failure, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is erratic, occasionally inspired, occasionally dull, but shot through with a grandiose sense of ambition. Plus, Driver and Pryce add some magic along the way.

It could easily be twee twaddle, but A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood is a nuanced, formally playful delight, a perfectly pitched and played ode to goodness. All hail Marielle Heller.

More engrossing than both "Sully" and "The 15:17 To Paris," Richard Jewell is enlivened by Paul Walter Hauser’s breakout performance yet undone by a lack of subtlety and real dramatic wallop. Solid, dependable, very late period Eastwood.

If you don’t like Malick’s movies, A Hidden Life won’t convert you. But this is the filmmaker on sublime form, putting his artistry and obsessions at the service of something frighteningly relevant.

Joining the ranks of Sphere, DeepStar Six and Leviathan as soggy Alien do-overs, Underwater finds a few tweaks to the monster play book, but not enough to make it live.

What it lacks in freshness and depth, The Gentlemen certainly makes up for in cartoon-y bluster and fun details.

Better in conception than execution, Spies In Disguise never really gets the best out of its James Bond Is A Pigeon high concept. The result is entertaining while it lasts, but won’t lodge itself permanently in your memory bank.

A feminist horror flick that lacks nuance in its feminism and thrills in its horror. But it should be applauded for reinterpreting rather than just retreading the original.

Anchored by great performances from Liam Neeson and especially Lesley Manville, Ordinary Love is alive to the feelings and moments other hospital dramas overlook. Its accumulation of details form a shattering whole.

Beautifully played — especially by Wang Jingchun — So Long, My Son is sprawling, audacious, sometimes bewildering, ultimately moving. It tests your patience but it’s worth it.

The Two Popes shouldn’t work, a two-handed conversation about Vatican minutiae. But with great writing, smart direction and late career-high performances from Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce, it’s a high-end treat. Send up the white smoke, we have a winner.

An affectionate portrait of a remarkable woman that loses its grip when it bites off more than it can chew.

An interesting, well played and well made attempt to reframe Shakespeare’s most famous play through a feminist lens, Ophelia ultimately doesn’t have the boldness to deliver on its resonant idea.

The Amazing Johnathan Documentary starts as a blast but as the journey progresses, becomes ever more slippery: Is Szeles tricking Berman? Is Berman bamboozling us? The answer is entertaining and frustrating in equal measures.