John Nugent

Despite some warm performances, it’s very hard to ignore the feeling that this is largely just two hours of product placement.

This might not be the venerable animation house at its very best, but it is a reminder of why they have endured for so long. Why change a formula when it’s a winning one?

A heck of a debut from first-timer Shawn Simmons, and another powerful argument for A-list status for Samara Weaving. Bring on the sequel, which is obliged to be titled Miny Moe. 

This is simply more fairly generic and forgettable family fodder.

Beautifully animated, and about as faithful and affectionate as a corporate cash-in is possible to get — but it still doesn’t come close to the experience of actually playing the games.

Not quite vintage Black, and Mark Wahlberg is no Robert Downey Jr, but this is fast and funny enough to be worth a couple of your hours. Squint hard enough and it almost feels like you’re back in the ’90s.

Is this what Studio Ghibli’s future looks like? Probably not. But what Earwig lacks in animation elegance, it makes up for in sparky, kid-friendly adventurousness.

A very silly, sporadically serious hood spoof, with some surprisingly frank discussions of mental health — and a welcome redemptive arc for the multi-talented Adam Deacon.

As sweet and beguiling a musical romance as it’s possible to have between two murderous psychopaths. Its kooky approach won’t suit all stripes of comic-book fan, but it finds a strange, tragic hopefulness all of its own.

As a fairy-tale romantic rendering of Ireland, Irish Wish is almost offensively bad; as another rung on the ladder for Lindsay Lohan romcom supremacy, it is almost, somehow, beyond reproach.

In a crowded marketplace, new superhero movies need a lot to stand out; despite some solid work from Sylvester Stallone, it’s not really clear what Samaritan is bringing to the table.

Despite its wild premise — Chris Pratt goes to the future to fight aliens! — and considerable talent, The Tomorrow War is mostly just bloated blockbuster business as usual.

An all-too conventional look at an unconventional man, Big George Foreman is, alas, a swing and a miss.

There’s much to chew on in Cherry, and not all of it works. But a never-better performance from Tom Holland, and some bold directorial choices, make it a mostly compelling watch.

Deeply forgettable and disposable, this is the kind of action-comedy you will feel like you have seen before. But Halle Berry and Mark Wahlberg are good fun, at least.

Standard-issue late-stage Netflix-era Sandler stuff: not exactly good, but goofy and charming in its own boneheaded, stick-it-on-if-there’s-nothing-else-on kind of way.

Waititi’s shtick runs thin, and there are badly misguided moments, but this is still a warm, heart-mostly-in-the-right-place portrait of a momentously poor sports team.

All is very much what it seems from another one of these all-is-not-what-it-seems thrillers — but there are fun, enjoyably unhinged performances from Edebiri and Malkovich.

Paul Feig is mostly back on form with a likeable, frantic, murderous, madcap money-grab of a high-concept comedy. It could be funnier, but it rarely stops for breath.

A typically formulaic seasonal sugar rush that’s only blandly mediocre, rather than so-bad-it’s-good. But Lindsay Lohan’s romcom-dominance cannot be denied.  

Moonfall is precisely what you’d expect a film called Moonfall to be: deeply, defiantly, sometimes exasperatingly daft. It’s Roland Emmerich on apocalypse-autopilot.

This is not the messiah. Nor is it a very naughty boy. There was an opportunity for a truly original spin on the so-called Greatest Story Ever Told here, but The Carpenter’s Son pulls its punches to make a rather rote horror that amounts to little.

An old-fashioned disaster B-movie with a slickly presented sci-fi premise, 65 holds few surprises — but like Adam Driver’s resourceful, humane hero, it gets the job done. More dinosaurs, please, Hollywood!

Mark Wahlberg is convincing and committed as a foul-mouthed Father, but this is ultimately just religious propaganda — preaching exclusively to the converted.

Spiral makes an admirable stab at defibrillating an old franchise — but ultimately wastes its stars, caught in the same bear-trap of a formula that befell earlier sequels.

Peter Farrelly’s latest semi-serious effort is light, goofy and sometimes perilously frivolous. But like sharing a few beers with your buds, you soon warm to it.

An odd, messy, misjudged shambles. You can’t fault the earnest tone or the plucky performances, but you can fault almost everything else.

Hugely impressive musical and dance performances from the two young men playing Michael Jackson cannot shake off the uncomfortable fact that there is an entire other side to the pop star’s story which is entirely conspicuous by its absence here.

A weak shadow of Eddie Murphy’s action-comedy yesteryear, The Pickup would be better off being left unpicked.

A disappointment. A premise with much promise has been turned into a bland retread through YA’s most familiar faults — despite some bold efforts from Holland, Ridley and Mikkelsen.

An unremarkable and quickly forgettable B-movie. Jessica Alba makes a decent stab for John Wick’s particular brand of movie vengeance, but she needs better material than this.

Despite some dazzling animation, this is a mess of celebrity and corporate cameos that fails to capture the weird spirit of the ’90s original, or the ’40s heyday — more ‘suffering’ than ‘succotash’.

Not a total catastrophe, but perilously close to being one. Is it too obvious to say Imaginary is simply lacking in imagination?

Quan is typically charismatic in a film that underserves his talents: an action-comedy with a solid amount of the former, but not much of the latter.

Judd Apatow’s broadest film yet is a patchy collection of Covid-themed comedy cock-ups — but a talented ensemble of performers means you’re never too far away from your next laugh.

A big old pile of Smurf.

This latest attempt to adapt the world’s laziest cat for the big screen just feels plain lazy: pure kids’-movie-by-numbers. The cinematic equivalent of a Monday.

The Electric State loses some of the quiet profundity of the original text, but as a breezily watchable retrofuturistic jolly, it has just enough juice.

An absolute shambles of a fantasy folly. Overlong, undercooked, and clogged with enough clichés that even its teen target audience will feel disrespected.

Incompetent and mostly just quite boring, Assassin Club doesn’t even have the good grace to be so-bad-it’s-good. Rough, rough stuff.

The 4.5 hour-plus runtime might put some off, but that massive canvas only allows for the deepest of deep dives into a monumental achievement in cinematic science-fiction. Another glorious day in the corps!

More unsubtly crowd-pleasing, Burnley-based ebullience, which gets by on its unimpeachably virtuous message — and a gloriously garrulous performance from the always-reliable Rory Kinnear.

Gurinder Chadha’s Dickens do-over is a typically original perspective on a canonical classic, if let down by its stretched production values and unlikable songs. But it aims only to be a crowd-pleaser, and may yet become one.