Leslie Felperin

For all its cack-handedness, there’s some effort here to grapple with issues around institutional and personal guilt and the wrongs done to young people that might turn them into smirking, giggling serial killers … or mass murderers, depending on how you define the term.

Blades of the Guardians offers a duly impressive spectacle, chock-full of epic set-pieces that lean more on physical effects than CGI, and of course lashings of exquisitely choreographed fight scenes mostly using – as the title suggests – swords.

It’s hard to outline what makes this work interesting without spoiling it, but let’s just say that as a satire it has helicopter parenting, sinister medical innovation to extend lifespan, and our obsession with youth and beauty in its sights. It’s a shame the final chapters don’t quite coalesce these fertile themes in more satisfactory fashion, and the film just ties everything up with some cursory violence.

Sonomura was the action director for three Baby Assassins features, which might explain that this, his third gig as a main director, feels more weighted towards scenes that showcase fisticuffs and fancy fight choreography rather than character development and emotional nuance.

For a film about the inevitable eradication of most life on Earth, Arco isn’t as depressing as you might expect, as it finds a tiny thread of optimism to hold on to.

It’s a bit of a snooze, but Therese is very good at channelling terror and distress.

It’s not a deep work, but it’s relentlessly fun if you’re not squeamish, or indeed sentimental about animals getting killed in the opening minutes.

It never provokes full-on out loud laughs, but there are wry chuckles to be had and the ferocity of the execution is pretty fun.

Honestly, there isn’t a single step in Shelter’s plot that isn’t entirely predictable, but to the film’s credit the fight choreography is solid (Waugh was a stuntman himself once) and young Breathnach proves, after her turn as Susanna Shakespeare in Hamnet, that she is a find with a future.

Much less convincing are the shots involving a malevolent maine coon that attacks a drug dealer and turns into a blur of fake cat and visual effects. But the moment is so gloriously cheesy and ridiculous that on its own it almost makes this something worth paying for.

The whole package is an easily digested guilty pleasure.

Davidson’s essential likability shines through, thanks in part to Aramayo’s endearing, guileless performance and in part to writer-director Kirk Jones’ machine-tooled script, clearly fact-checked and vetted by the film’s exec producer, the actual John Davidson himself.

Overall, this is better and glossier than some of the Adams-Poser posse’s earlier efforts, but perhaps not quite enough of an evolution to take their vision to the next level.

Best of all, Zenovich and her editor, splicing and dicing 50 years of archive material, get across Chase’s abundant talent at its best, particularly his masterly command of the pratfall, and his immaculate comic timing.

The lack of story, structure, or any clear editorial principle is a serious impediment to empathy for these poor, struggling people; the 159-minute runtime feels like four years.

Director Joshua Erkman’s feature debut manages to deliver an impressively creepy horror exercise that’s also a bit of a send-up of horror conventions.

One could list all the film’s shortcomings, but that would be like pulling wings off a fairly harmless moth.

The package has a nasty little swagger that makes it a nice counterpoint to all the holiday cheer coming our way.

More persuasive is the testimony from the half dozen men we meet, who bravely discuss their pain and distress while the cameras roll.

A syrupy stream of EDM-style pop in assorted languages fills in the spaces where people aren’t talking, but ultimately it’s all too bland and banal to even be offensive or annoying.

The film is at its best when it homes in on the literary criticism – bringing in articulate readers of the text such as novelist Jay McInerney, who details the effort that went into making it look thrown together in a matter of weeks.

Through it all we see Richard O’Brien himself, sometimes jamming on a guitar and dropping crisp bon mots, right up to the end when he gets just a little bit weepy thinking about it all. Adorable.

The cast’s enthusiasm, especially that of Coolidge and Murray who are willing to play the most loathsome of people, makes up for a lot.

It doesn’t quite lasso the bronco, but the ambitions of writer-director Tony Tost’s yarn are ambitious and interesting, and he has at least assembled a cracking cast to tell it.

It all feels like the film is setting up for nested tales within tales, but instead the layers don’t go that deep. Nor does the film offer up much in the way of thematic substance beyond love (between women) is grand, men are mostly bad, and matriarchal societies are better than patriarchies.

The action sequences, which are what made the original Sonja so indelible (especially since Nielsen had Arnold Schwarzenegger as a co-star), are a bit more rote. But someone somewhere must have done a punch-up on the script, because every now and then a reasonably witty quip arrives out of nowhere before the dialogue reverts to faux medieval speak.

It plays as pseudo-feminist horror for viewers who don’t really like women, or, for that matter, men. Or people of any gender. It’s all curdled but not in an especially interesting way, although there is no denying that Thorne has a basic charisma that holds the screen, and Ryan Phillippe is well cast as a grouchy cop whose agenda doesn’t mesh with Clare’s.

At least Sweeney has good enough comic timing to make the thinly written dialogue sound vaguely amusing; he’s also adept at making his many reaction shots exaggerated just enough to tickle without descending into outright mugging.

At least the makeup and the gore effects are competently executed, making the ensemble look like blood smeared meat-puppets on a rampage.

At least Pacino doesn’t seem to be taking any of it seriously as he phones in an uncharacteristically low-volume performance whose most distinguishing feature is the Mitteleuropean accent that makes him sound as if he’s reprising his performance as Shylock from The Merchant of Venice.

To knock its sentimental failings would be like kicking a puppy – and there are actual puppies in the film just to ensure it snags the heartstrings. Resistance is futile.

We’re invited to laugh at the characters gently but The Uninvited never goes for all-out satire and is all the better for it, even if the last act is overly neat.

This low-key oddity has the potential for some proper horsepower given the odd but intriguing casting of Peter Dinklage and Shirley MacLaine, but it never manages to build up much comic or dramatic speed – much like Dinklage’s electric scooter, his main mode of transport throughout.

One might be tempted to describe West as rocking her huge natural hairdo, but rocking doesn’t do justice to its glorious volume; it is practically a supporting character in its own right, and one that calls to black heroines of yore, such as Pam Grier’s Foxy Brown and Tamara Dobson’s Cleopatra Jones back in the 1970s. Furthermore West has a nice way with a quip and has presence to spare, so while the script doesn’t exactly stretch her acting range, she holds the screen.

Movements are very fluid, but expressions limited and there are buckets of cartoon gore, in a deep ruddy red that recalls mass-produced tonalities of fake Persian carpets.

This is a workmanlike iteration somewhat ploddingly true to its genre, from the style of lighting used for the interviews, to the sweeping, keening strings-led soundtrack, to the almost shocking moments of humour and honesty.

A film that feels short on real passion, but big on banter and sharp suiting.

It’s all a bit too sanctified and safe – lacking in rock’n’roll edge perhaps – but Fortune-Lloyd’s core performance is deeply empathic and buoys the film up as it races through the stations of Epstein’s short, sharp shock of a life.

Here the actual transitions are quite nifty, featuring lots of bulging veins and grisly-looking in-between stages as people turn into different kinds of snarling mammalian creatures. However, once they are done transforming, the masks or make-up or whatever the actors are clad in are so ineffectual they end up looking like a bunch of underlit extras in Halloween costumes recreating The Purge while howling.

The comic timing and bonhomie of the ensemble is sort of infectious, and (what do you know) some of the songs are pretty darn catchy.

Tedious stretches of vulgar banter are interspersed with equally dull interludes during which people melt. Then it finally gets resolved after 85 very long minutes.

If you’re in the right headspace, the whole thing is quite entrancing. Still, it’s also an extremely rarefied sort of entertainment.

The drama sputters and fails to catch fire; it’s as if Gilford is far less interested in kindling things and prefers to just look at his pretty cast in a variety of lighting schemes from stark noontime sunglare to the golden hues of magic hour. That said, the toothsome cast is well worth watching, especially Plummer with his nervous smile and the incandescent Lindley.

The moral maths seem calculated in advance to ensure a by-numbers outcome, but it’s an absorbing puzzle while it lasts.

The film-makers never probe psyches very deeply, not even the parents’. It’s just one contemporary travelogue cliche after another, admittedly beautifully shot in super high definition.

The end result is so comically tawdry and silly you can’t but wonder if its all a bit of a tongue-in-cheek goof, a gag that Elizabeth Hurley at least seems to be in on, judging by her ripe, almost-winking performance.

Skincare is a worthy contribution to the growing microgenre of female-led beauty-themed horror, and some of us out here are ready for more.

While Paddington in Peru sadly lacks the absurdist wit and decidedly dark edge that elevated the first two Paddington movies, it’s serviceable enough given its limitations.

As visual wallpaper it’s serviceable enough, providing a constant backbeat of blam-blam gunshots and explosions, mostly at night.

The fight sequences are lethargic and feature a lot of extras waiting patiently for their cue to fall over dead. The Maltese architecture remains as lovely as ever; the dialogue is, however, shockingly bad.

Of course, the music is the main attraction and that’s served well, with long chunks of performance footage that aren’t sliced and diced as much as they would be in a contemporary rock doc.

The stunts are duly impressive and filmed with vim, but the party apparatchiks would probably be happy with how thuddingly sentimental the film is, and how conservative it is about family values.

While there’s much to admire here . . . the drama too often lacks the subtlety that distinguishes the British writer-director’s work at its best. Two hours long, practically to the second, this feels like a project that’s been excessively trimmed, snipped and tapered to fit an arbitrary running time.

Yes, it certainly is about her, but it’s almost as if everyone involved – Gabeira, people who were supposedly her closest associates, and even the director Stephanie Johnes – aren’t quite conscious of the fact that they’re also making a documentary about endemic sexism in sport.

Usually anything this many generations into its evolution is pretty exhausted – but this is pretty good, or at least in parts.

No amount of budget could make up for the sputtering mess of a script, or the dead-on-the-inside expressions of the cast – apart from Rudolph who is consistently watchable.

Gorehounds will appreciate the film’s many beheadings and bloody murders.

If it’s lucky, Emmanuelle might find an afterlife as a kind of Showgirls for its generation, a great-bad movie that’s undeniably craptacular yet strangely endearing, a shameful pleasure in every sense.

If only the film were a little bit smarter and less predictable, it might have had a chance of becoming a cult classic.

By far the best thing in the film is Ken Jeong as the theatre manager, preening and ridiculous, dispensing putdowns with surgically precise comic timing.

The suspense-building and denouement are adequate enough, but what makes this more interesting is how director Rodger Griffiths weaves in a subtle dissection of how abuse can damage families in different ways.

Chapter 2 proves to be more fun to watch than 1, at least for this critic.

You can’t help but admire Anger’s audacity, sly humour and film-making chops.

In the end, it all feels a bit like a fashion film or some other branded exercise in style — except that the brand is Ortega’s peculiar and unique vision.

And in terms of docs about people with disabilities, this one is pretty honest about the mental anguish of losing mobility and – in a sideways fashion – addresses how such a change particularly affects men like Ed and Ben, hyper-masculine dudes whose identities are tied to their physical abilities.

By the end, ballet as practised here does indeed look a bit punk rock.

Marshall goes big on the use of freeze-frames, onscreen graphics deployed when introducing characters, and wink-wink meta jokes, all of which feel pretty tired and early noughties British crime drama by this point.

Despite those based-on-a-true-story bona fides, the script is taut as piano wire, strings of inciting incidents strung like steel cables between concrete coincidences, ironies and tragedy.

This portrait of title subject Lhakpa Sherpa, the only woman to have summited Mount Everest 10 times, is so densely packed with uplifting moments that at times it feels like emotional mountaineering – but the climb has terrific views.

The package as a whole, with its sun-bleached palette and colour correction that makes its blues pop, is reasonably entertaining, perfectly suited to watching on an airplane while flying to your next holiday destination.

Director George Kane keeps the energy up throughout, helped along by a game-for-it cast that know exactly how to pitch the material.

While Sporrer in the lead role is fairly credible, a lot of the line readings by the rest of the cast are stilted in a way that a more experienced or native speaker would have picked up on. The result is that all the other characters except Amanda sound as if they’re in a radio play rather than an actual film.

A work that is very recognizably Serebrennikov’s, which is to say it’s nostalgic for the Soviet era, outlandishly celebratory of the callow charms of bohemian youth (compare with his pop-music-themed Leto), baggy to the point of undisciplined (see Petrov’s Flu) and full of long, fluid, roaming, handheld single takes (applicable to nearly all his works).

Merlant obviously knows she’s taking risks with a free-form, genre-bending structure, and that’s cool. It’s just a shame that the end product is so loosey-goosey it’s less a bold sui generis experiment than a hot mess.

Cue group hugs and sappy music as the credits roll.

This fetid stew of sex, death and tech may be an aphrodisiac for hardcore Cronenberg fans, but more casual viewers are likely to find it all rather slapdash and undercooked here.

The ending is a bit flat and anti-climactic.

The mechanics of revealing who’s behind it all creak like under-oiled hinges.

There’s a bit of soft-core humping and salty talk to break up the tedium, a phenomenon that’s fast disappearing from most mainstream films. The ripe naffness on show makes it somehow entertaining, especially as you can tell the film knows it’s naff.

While the core conceit is sort of cute, Razooli really can’t direct actors who aren’t already seasoned with prior experience.

Sometimes it feels like a cross between a film studies lecture and what happens when you leave YouTube to keep autoplaying while the all-powerful algorithm suggests more and more content.

Back to Black is, like its heroine, flawed and fallible but frequently very affecting.

Ultimately, the characters’ motivations, like their titular instinct, are weakly delineated, but viewers are well-advised not to worry their pretty little heads about any of that and just concentrate on the pantsuits.

The section where Lillian tumbles down a film-making rabbit hole is by far the most amusing.

All the characters are rounded, fallible and likable in equal measure, and even if the score is a bit syrupy, it’s a pleasant, engaging watch.

Cabrini’s story is rather absorbing and the film offers a lushly mounted portrait of life in 1880s New York, when immigration was just as much of a contentious issue as it is today.

The rhetoric here is slippery as a Pentecostal snake bathed in holy snake oil, to the point where you almost have to admire the film-makers’ tenacity – especially when it comes to swirly-whirly visual effects showing near-abstract pearly gates and deities presenting themselves as rays of luminosity, like celestial lightbulbs.

Given no one is a novelist or a poet or a filmmaker here, this represents a bit of an adventure for Hong beyond his usual milieu. That said, this is still profoundly slight stuff, thin and ineffable as mist.

Director Gonzalo López-Gallego creates a strong frame around the characters in both visual and narrative terms, while a lovely score credited to Remate, mixed with well-chosen soundtrack cuts, creates a limpid poignancy.

The stars are toothsome and have a fizzy chemistry, while the ending is surprisingly poignant for all its corniness.

It’s sort of impressive how much director Simone Scafidi allows Argento’s dark side to show through all the hype about his genius.

It’s thrilling to see the iconically ugly Transamerica Pyramid skyscraper get trashed in the finale, but otherwise the look of the film is pretty generic.

The film’s best decision is to cast the great Ralph Ineson as an ambiguous local figure of note. With his basso profundo rumble of a voice and air of rough-hewn potency, he’s always a striking figure on stage and screen.

The whole shebang is quite bizarre but sort of works, thanks to the brisk pacing of the editing and the joie de vivre that directors Zoya Akhtar and Ryan Brophy inject into the proceedings.

It’s all quite lovely to look at or even just listen to, making for something that can easily be experienced at home while the viewer is knitting or chopping vegetables.

The execution is dire, with cliche-riddled dialogue as cheesy as a packet of Kraft Singles, stodgy pacing, poorly developed characters and shonky acting.

The back half is all over the place and doesn’t seem to know what to say – but Connelly never ceases to be anything less than mesmerising as the kind of older woman full of spit, vinegar and shrapnel who could go off at any second.

This one has all the Norwegian drama of Yuletide in one tidy package, yes sir.