Kate Taylor

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

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.

This movie is not just badly executed, it's also stupid.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Its war scenes are plenty thrilling, but the film’s real achievement is its quiet authenticity.

The script, written by neophyte Alex von Tunzelmann, is appalling, its plot simplistic and its dialogue alternating between misplaced bits of contemporary psycho-babble and improbable grandiloquence.

And, make no mistake, this is a movie that is supposed to be seen from the perspective of a small child.

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.

The script by Stephanie Fabrizi is full of oddly terse interchanges that Krill and Linder deliver with a lifeless cool that feels more under-rehearsed than erotic.

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.

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.

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

The storytelling is bald and the logistics remain vague. The adult characters, especially a sadistic prison guard, are laughably overblown and the simplistic dialogue betrays the script’s YA roots.

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.

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.

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

There are many plot lines here, but little tension.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The performances of Travis Fimmel, Toby Kebbell and Paula Patton as the warrior Lothar, the orc hero Durotan and the half-orc/half-woman Garona, all awakening to the evil forces around them, are meaty enough to hold attention.