Kate Taylor

Leong’s documentary realism is powerful – if tough on an audience – but his fiction skills are erratic in a film that relies too heavily on Sister Tse’s narration, much repeated flashbacks and heavy exposition of the characters’ motivations.

If you can ignore an ending ripped straight from the AA playbook, there’s minor fun to be had along the way.

An icy Sarah Gadon can’t plumb it, offering a quietly mannered performance where a beautifully furrowed brow and occasional tear suggest the character cares more about looking elegant than dying. Thankfully, in the warmer roles of Yoli and her resilient Mennonite mother, Alison Pill and Mare Winningham do find the big broken heart at the core of this story.

Mainly, this movie chatters when it should sing.

Ambivalent and tepid as it attempts to fashion a tick-tock thriller from Ailes’s downfall.

The problem is not so much Satrapi’s theatrical approach to the subject, which veers wildly from the overwrought to the dramatically compelling, as it is Jack Thorne’s abysmal script, full of clunky exposition about isolating elements, curing cancer and refusing sexism.

Perhaps you can accuse all historical fiction of presentism, the sin of applying contemporary values to historical events. Why does the past interest us if not for the comparisons it provides with the present? But with the example of "The Favourite’s" wittily anachronistic romp through the 18th-century court of Queen Anne so fresh at hand, it is hard not to judge the earnest Mary Queen of Scots for its ignorance of the problem.

As Kurt finds his true art in the West, thanks to the help of a fictional version of Joseph Beuys, the film turns gripping, but it ultimately reduces art appreciation to the autobiographical.

A critic needs only two words to dispense with The Grinch; the first one is bah.

Hansen-Love’s ability to evoke the unspoken remains in full play as she returns to themes of young love and emotional crisis, but much of the film is in English and both dialogue and delivery feel stilted. Meanwhile, it’s never clear why being the object of a youthful crush might be a good cure for PTSD.

Part police procedural, part supernatural thriller, part lesson in metaphysics and all neo-noir, Carol Morley’s Out of Blue never gels into a convincing whole.

[A] bafflingly unbalanced film by American auteur director Alex Ross Perry.

As the obscenities of wealth accumulate while a large cast of Asian and Eurasian actors render their many silly characters, the source of the laughter becomes troubling.

No, Christopher Robin is not a naked cash grab, just a prettily clothed one.

The difficulty is that Fogel hasn’t got enough plot here to keep things going at this smart pace. Even by the standards of a spy comedy, The Spy Who Dumped Me’s wafer-thin storyline makes precious little sense.

Greenfield tells us she charts the extremes to understand the mainstream, but glimpses of an explanation for the insanities and obscenities depicted in Generation Wealth are frustratingly few.

Filled with lovable eccentrics, Boundaries tries too hard to avoid the commonplace as its jolts erratically down the well-travelled, heavily signposted route that is the big-hearted road-movie.

If it weren’t for Binoche’s warmth, the film might easily sink beneath the stereotype of French culture as overly talky and sex obsessed.

Like "Everest," Adrift is a movie throbbing with an audience’s anxiety – and yet it is not particularly dramatic.

The drama is memorable but often feels grimly unpleasant rather than moving. And, as always, it’s frustrating to see Montreal cast as some anonymous and unilingual North American city.

This pretty movie feels convenient rather than meaningful.

Even Clarkson's work on the intriguingly ambiguous Paige is starting to wear thin this time out; the combination of flat characters, a young cast and a director whose strengths lie elsewhere means that the overall level of performance is painfully low.

Ridley, full of charming spunk playing a skeptical rebel recruit in The Force Awakens, is the biggest disappointment here. She is less engaging now that she is committed to the fight and plays most of the later action on a single note of earnest desperation; Johnson's script leaves her little else.

No, there's no shortage of interesting characters with intriguing powers on display here, but there's frustratingly little space to tell their individual stories and, biggest problem of all, they lack a worthy opponent.

Branagh finally concludes that business with another determined tapping on Poirot's own moral compass but, as his suspects face him, lined up at a trestle table across the entrance to a railway tunnel, the situation, his revelations and theirs, all feel flat and forced. Both suspense and emotion are curiously absent.

Yes, it's up to the older generation to provide the comedy here, and they do it fairly consistently, with the delicious Christine Baranski carrying most of the movie as Amy's mom.

It's a movie intent on telling us the hotshots were heroes, without sufficiently dramatizing either their professional decisions or their private lives.

We all love Winnie the Pooh; that is why we are interested in the story of the real Christopher Robin. To learn that public affection all but destroyed his childhood makes an audience uncomfortably complicit in this cuddle-free origin story of the world's most famous teddy bear.

The formula is a bit too neat and the dialogue is often painfully expository, but there are some fine performances – especially from Gillian Anderson as the earnest Lady Mountbatten – and plenty of compelling drama.

This is Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote territory. How are we to reconcile such images with righteous vengeance wreaked on a genocidal war criminal? Not even a busload of popes could make moral sense of this one.

The fault in the film lies as much with Cretton’s script, which he co-wrote with Andrew Lanham, as it does with his direction.

A splashy ending does something to redeem the action before setting up the characters for a potential sequel but who needs more Dru?

The car-as-human idea was never Pixar’s biggest brain wave and as Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) hits the track for a third outing, the Disney animated franchise is running on fumes.

This story soon turns excessively maudlin.

The most engaging performance is Javier Bardem’s solidly nasty Captain Salazar, the undead commander of a ghost ship. His disintegrating skin and holey crew are fabulously rendered as evaporating digitizations: It’s the special effects and swelling action sequences that make the movie palatable.

Snatched piles bad ideas on good ideas and lame bits of gross-out humour on genuinely funny bits of character work, without ever building enough dramatic force or comic energy to craft a full movie from the results.

As her oddly unengaged zoologist husband, the Belgian actor Johan Heldenbergh appears to be working in a different movie altogether.

Zhang’s apocalyptic view of the beasts from above as they swarm over the palace like rats may be a chilling metaphor for what awaits us all if we don’t achieve effective international co-operation – but it is also the too-hasty climax to an underdeveloped martial-arts/monster-movie mashup. East and West are going to have to do better than this.

For all that Silence is a gorgeous film filled with imagery that is sometimes startling and often compelling, the director sadly fails in a passion project decades in the making: This is a long and dull costume drama that seems to think a contemporary audience can picture faith as easily as it does a cassock, cross or kimono.

It is a busy narrative machine that raises expectations of a tidy ending; instead Almodóvar offers an artfully mysterious conclusion that seems unearned by the movie that preceded it – except, of course, for that lonely stag.

Only Tudyk’s dry humour in the role of the tactless droid K-2S0 makes Edwards’s darkly reductivist approach occasionally seem smarter rather than lesser. In the end, this hardening of the franchise seems likely to alienate both the fans and the uninitiated.

Miss Sloane is a powerfully conceived thriller with something dead at its centre: there is no reason a female protagonist must be good or well-behaved, but she must at least be interesting.

As a 21st-century account of the soldier’s enduring alienation from the home front, Billy Lynn is highly effective. It’s what surrounds that account that doesn’t work.

Whatever the locomotive power of the novel, this film adaptation only limps into the station.

In short, his film asks that an audience listen to a fair amount of ugly racism without offering much enlightenment or even entertainment in exchange. Words may build bridges but people have to cross them: Imperium remains safely outside the unexplored region.

The result is an intriguing but uneven thriller that doesn’t fully establish the tone and style that would be needed for an audience to accept its supernatural plot.

And therein lies the difficulty of adapting Indignation for the screen; remove Roth’s prose from the equation and you don’t have much left. Writer and director James Schamus turns Indignation into a minor period piece, a precise but seemingly pointless evocation of the stultifying conventionalism of an American university campus in the 1950s.

Gorgeously shot by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who takes much delight in exposing the blinding sunlight and dusky interiors of old Hollywood, the film is lightly entertaining but largely pointless.

There’s also not much chemistry between Skarsgard and Robbie in a film that hints at the Greystokes’ great sex life but barely shows it. Instead, we get flashes of flesh that are hilariously dated in their obviousness.

In the end, the power of Minervini’s pseudo-fiction gives way to a much blander version of pseudo-reality.

It’s ripe to the point of bursting and, with a plot that tilts to melodrama, Davies flirts dangerously with cliché, creating an over-wrought period piece where every wheat field is bathed in golden sunlight and every childbirth is announced by chilling screams.

This time, Tykwer somehow manages to turn Eggers’s attempt at an era-defining story into a weird little cross-cultural comedy with romantic overtones while remaining largely faithful to the original plot and dialogue. Here, globalization’s economic devastation is just a nice backdrop for some amusing – and, thankfully, inoffensive – observation of one American abroad.

Unlike the smarter "Maleficent," a revisionist Sleeping Beauty created by the same producers, what The Huntsman series lacks is any intriguing psychology.

The disappointment here is that an intriguing psychological premise about a personality swap is never used to do anything more than provide the juice for a run-of-the-mill action movie.

There are many plot lines here, but little tension.

The Program makes passing references to the power of celebrity and the Live Strong narrative – the cyclist admits to telling people what they wanted to hear – but it never goes deep on what it was that produced the awfulness that is Lance Armstrong.

Zootopia takes the cultural practice of posing animals as human characters to queasy new heights.

A Perfect Day, the first English-language feature from the Spanish director Fernando Leon de Aranoa, is in many ways a remarkable film: a taut, darkly comic drama about the dilemmas of international intervention in civil war, all of it neatly symbolized by one elusive length of rope. It is also, sadly, a film much marred by its sexism.

From a sympathetic perspective, let me say that sequel No. 3 shows how difficult it is to keep these franchises fresh while remaining true to their initial charm.

It’s the direction, not the script, that really kills the picture, as Mazer limps along from the chugging contest to the half-naked conga line to the car chase without ever raising the laughs he needs from the comic set pieces or the tension he needs from the dramatic developments.

Bay has attempted to carefully characterize and humanize each member of the security force, and Krasinski, Dale and Schreiber are largely successful at creating personable fighters.

There are unresolved questions and puzzling detours along the way, but Bikes vs Cars does show that cars, millions and millions of stationary cars, may yet prove the bike’s best friend.

For the first time in the series, Stallone did not write the script, yet director Ryan Coogler and his co-writer Aaron Covington aren’t exactly brimming over with fresh ideas: Worn thin with repetition, the sentimental old premise muffles suspense and dampens emotion.

Every scene is perfectly framed, every symbol lovingly shot, but the story and the characters remain opaque.

In fashioning a creation myth for Peter Pan, director Joe Wright and writer Jason Fuchs have produced such a thin story that they reduce, rather than amplify, J.M. Barrie’s famous characters.

As directed by Robert Zemeckis from a script he co-wrote with Christopher Browne, the film limps through its first two acts, putting in time until the big moment.