Kate Taylor

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As it giggles away at its campy self, at least you can groan along with it.

I Feel Pretty paints the most garish and unflattering portrait of contemporary female culture.

There remains a nasty whiff here of a movie that is trotting out lesbian love interests and clawing cat fights for male titillation. With fashion taking the place of ballet, The Neon Demon may well prove controversial in a "Black Swan" kind of way, offering a love-it-or-hate-it debate over the appeal of its melodrama versus the politics of its social critique.

This film, about a French war correspondent and the Kurdish Amazon with whom she is embedded, has the worthy intention of telling the story of the women’s battalions in Kurdistan, but it’s formulaic and melodramatic.

And the living are pretty lifeless themselves. As led by the often wooden Tom Cruise playing the U.S. soldier who inadvertently wakes the dead, and directed by an indecisive Alex Kurtzman, the cast is offered some passable action sequences but struggles with weak dialogue and uneven comedy.

As Alice, Wasikowska, who has lost the injured look that made her so effective the first time out, creates a character who is fundamentally sweet, likeable and loyal.

Although Wonder Wheel begins with a few of the witty ruptures of the fourth wall that have often enlivened Allen's work, it soon descends into a bleak melodrama that is little more than warmed-over Tennessee Williams.

The Son is a film that is very cruel to its characters, and by extension to its long-suffering audience.

Today, homophobia may still blight many a queen’s family relations, but Stage Mother feels dated and formulaic.

The heavy-handed score, narrow performances (Nicole Munoz as the repeatedly terrified daughter; Laurie Holden as the dense mum) and weak dialogue all fail to justify a provocative ending that overturns the exorcising conventions of the genre.

This sadly derivative film has one too many screenings of "All the President’s Men" written all over it.

What makes it downright offensive are all the romance-novel flourishes that Leonard and the melodramatically inclined director James Foley, also new to the franchise, bring to glittering three-dimensional life in Fifty Shades Darker.

So, romance-novel boilerplate that sounded clichéd on the page becomes outright laughable as it's transferred to the screen.

The plot is cursory, the dialogue is repetitive and the psychology is cheap. Hanging in for the wanton violence may prove too much for anyone not seriously addicted to the guilty pleasures of cheesy sci-fi.

As the new Ben-Hur unspools into insignificance and sentimentality, there are fleeting moments that suggest someone behind this $100-million movie was actually thinking hard about how to replay a schlocky biblical epic for a secular audience in 2016.

In short, there are an awful lot of subplots and comic characters but none of the actors in this star-studded cast is allowed to build his laughs and the Coens just abandon several of these vivid personalities along the way.

It is not simply that this film is utterly unrealistic – perhaps that can be overlooked; it’s a fable of sorts, set in a scrupulously neutral pan-European setting. What is unforgiveable is that Langseth’s approach to complex emotional issues is unsubtle at best and untruthful at worst.

Any hope that the clever concept behind Risen might produce a clever movie is thrown to the ground, where it lies quivering for the next hour or so, before expiring noisily in the film’s second half.