Mike McCahill

The film achieves a functioning mediocrity we perhaps might have thought beyond this franchise, offering a modicum of diversion in return for the cash disappeared from your wallet.

Post-Slumdog, Hollywood and Bollywood have repeatedly attempted to collaborate, with mixed results: here, they’ve produced a properly expansive and enthralling afternoon matinee.

This offshoot is essentially a well-produced, easily accessed B-movie. Still, it wouldn’t kill you to watch it, and it does more than expected to reinvent its particular wheel.

It has tentacles and hot wheels, yes, but not the legs or bright ideas to sustain itself.

Very solid, very sound entertainment, with thumpingly good Pritam songs that make Eye of the Tiger seem like pipsqueakery.

What this exceptionally lucid film-survey reveals is what has to go on at ground level, and beneath the surface, in order to power a powerhouse.

Raised up on the big screen, the victories look even easier and more jaw-droppingly elemental: flashes of lightning, allowing us to share in the pleasure of watching a fellow human doing something simple preternaturally well.

Mark Waters wrings occasional snickers from a patchy script, but the whole feels tamely conventional: misanthropy passed through the usual Hollywood motions.

This thoroughly emo body-swap fantasia, a sizable hit on home turf, demonstrates that [Makoto Shinkai] inherited much of his [Hayao Miyazaki's] artistry and charm, but not yet his narrative mastery – nor, crucially, that magic that distinguishes lasting artworks from well-drawn ’toons for teens.

More meme than movie.

What’s odd is that the movie itself turns out not to be some incendiary provocation, but squarely Bollywood trad, a globetrotting weepie unlikely to offend anyone but the most entrenched.

It’s still no scarier than any branded content, and perhaps only the most lukewarm slumber party would truly need it. Yet if you were to ask whether Origin of Evil offers a better quality of timewasting than its predecessor, my finger would hover inexorably over YES.

Each helter-skelter turn throws up story and design elements you’ll have seen better programmed elsewhere.

If it’s far from bleeding edge – within days, it’ll look as dated as Tron and The Lawnmower Man do today – it’s a modest upgrade on all those killer-website movies that popped up a decade ago, keeping us at least semi-interested as to who stands and falls.

Director Susanna White favours a generic spy-movie look: those chilly blue filters surely need resting now. Yet she works smartly with her actors: while Skarsgård wolfs down great handfuls of scenery, McGregor effectuates a thoughtful transformation from ineffectual tourist to man in the field.

It’s soon clear that OOTS follows the model of Bay’s Transformers sequels. Longer, louder and boasting even more hardware, it does everything to generate the illusion of bleeding-edge bang-per-buck, while cribbing shamelessly from 1991’s Secret of the Ooze.

These films were always down on women – Armstrong squanders the peerless Krysten Ritter as eye candy – but this slovenly runaround only exposes the low opinion they’ve harboured of their target male demographic. We’re meant to identify with them?

You’ll shed a tear or two, possibly more.

It’s a film of few frills or flourishes, which never tries to dress up its subject or soften its blows. Yet in its rage and its pain, in the wire-brush scrub it gives to the movies’ woozily romantic notions of alcoholism, Glassland feels wholly honest and true.

It may wind up as the year's most significant horror film; it's certainly among the most original.

Gradually, the simplicity yields an idiosyncratic charm.

Tamasha keeps shapeshifting, in ways both intriguing and self-defeating.

It’s a thin, trickledown sort of fun.

If the plot’s familiar, no imagination or expense has been spared in mapping the kingdom it winds through.

Robertson gives himself and his actors time to ponder the board and build convincing relationships and tensions: he’s especially deft around his younger performers, allowing them to register as distinct, often defiant personalities.

Eid proves a dolefully expressive lead, and Wolfgang Thaler’s ever eloquent camerawork is as fascinated by the discovery of bullet shells in the sand – a clue, and a warning – as it is by the punishingly craggy landscape.

It’s a test of one’s tolerance for watching predominantly empty frames – the anonymous performers scarcely count – in the hope something will jolt us from mounting tedium.

Director Prabhudheva’s idea of comedy is broad and very much soundtrack-led.

Little here is going to challenge the opinion of Roth as a bratty provocateur, but it’s still fun to experience a latter-day thriller pushing so many buttons in broadly the right order: if Knock Knock’s no more than a sick joke, it’s been very shrewdly constructed.

One innovation: the application of thrash metal to fight scenes, which at least hushes the shriller voice artists.

Director Nicole Garcia strains to give this pablum social grounding, but hair and make-up overtake her.

Every other scene showcases a northern treasure (Coogan, Thomson, Tomlinson, Stansfield) and looks, feels and – crucially – sounds true to its sweaty-hazy, slightly cramped corner of history.

The actors are committed – Mara, generally waif-like, appears frail indeed – but there’s barely anything worth committing to.

This tardy rehash of fairytale tropes finds sometime genre innovator M Night Shyamalan clinging in abject desperation to the found-footage movement’s careworn coattails.

The debutant director applies himself with the same quiet assurance and attention to detail he’s displayed in his acting projects.

For all The Falling’s period trimmings, its uncanny power resides in these ellipses and blackouts – in elements that cannot be easily rationalised.

Sy is such an attentive listener in close-up that you instantly grasp the frazzled Alice’s attraction; if she’s less well defined, Gainsbourg’s nervy intelligence and clenched-jaw resistance to sentimentality hold the interest nevertheless.

The result may honour the daily reality of medical professionals – the finale’s a credibly fractious staff meeting – but it makes for a patchy, hesitant dispatch, more “er …” than ER.

ABCD2 is the latest film to recognise that – however you gender your gaze – there is an abiding pleasure in watching bodies in motion, and choreographer-turned-director Remo d’Souza keeps nudging more of them on.

Suri is also testing the modern audience’s willingness to suspend disbelief, and the material he’s working with here – unfolding the happenstance-heavy mystery of a woman at the mercy of the men around her – proves barely fit for this purpose, or any other.

Star power aside, it’s a modest, reined-in entertainment, rejecting musical numbers for a simple whistled refrain, and clocking in at just two hours.

Mostly it’s a scare machine, and in this respect Kenan’s is the more efficient telling, its VFX lubricating all that now creaks about the original.

Funny, oddly affecting and cherishably personal.

You emerge from this brutally unsentimental education with your chest pounding and your ears ringing – its radical empathy extends to putting us in not just the same room as its subjects, but the same helpless, despairing position. Some films are made to leave you speechless; for some experiences, there can be no words.

The film is never less than amiable, and rather more spirited and nonconformist than the Transformers movies.

Vengeance has powered countless movies over the years, but rarely can it have been given such a thorough – and thoroughly entertaining – showcase as it gets in Wild Tales.

Winterbottom’s shapeshifting spontaneity has long seemed as much limitation as virtue, characteristic of a filmmaker unable or unwilling to commit to his own better ideas. Here, you feel him hedging around his subject, less out of sensitivity than a constitutional evasiveness, an inability to formulate a clear line of argument.

This tale, more mechanical than human, is finally beyond [Bier's] skillset: it required ruthless tinkering, not the softly-softly approach.

This underdeveloped offering barely lifts itself off the drawing board.

It’s Akhavan’s presence that elevates it above a crowded field. Her film’s a little bit different from the norm, and that – for now – is promising enough.

Longinotto and editor Ollie Huddleston stitch it, with lightness and dexterity, into a wholly edifying, often stirring tapestry of survivors’ stories.

A social conscience movie with real cinematic bite.

Considering these characters are bounced round like pinballs, it’s amazing Hawke and the hitherto unknown Snook gain the emotional traction they do: even those struggling to keep up can’t fail to notice how these two are burnt, figuratively and literally, by their experiences.

Strange as it sounds – and is – Kumiko comprises a lingering display of empathy for its heroine, marching stridently on through her own peculiar headspace.

[Aniston's] the one element keeping this unexceptional dramedy halfway watchable.

Its success may depend on how alert you’re feeling, but for once you can’t complain that a movie hasn’t given your synapses a thorough workout.

Though our heroine remains more self-reliant than most Disney princesses, the film is too mild to constitute any kind of statement.

It makes the text feel newly alive, bristly, radical. A palpable hit, in any language.

It’s no-frills, B-movie modesty might have been winning, if it weren’t so dashed-off.

Headland has comic smarts enough to venture both filthily revisionist readings of My So-Called Life and riffs on the Potsdam conference, while refusing her audience any comforting safety nets.

The director's background in online shorts manifests itself in an occasional, montage-heavy scattiness, and the broadly conventional closing act can't quite maintain the laugh rate, but there's a lot of warm-hearted and commendably daft business along the way.

Boseman hits his key scenes out of the park, making a swell couple with Shame's Nicole Beharie, while Helgeland stages Robinson's signature base-stealing with undeniable aplomb.

A certain doofy sincerity – all fairy lights and lakeside kisses – and Wilde's nervy, natural responses keep matters semi-watchable. As a romance, though, it's by-the-book.

Ban this sick filth.

The film finds the subtle tells that suggest these free-roaming girls might themselves have become prisoners of war, while enveloping its heroines in a persuasive turbulence: unpredictable, never forced, and forever compelling.

As an antidote to Premier League cynicism, it couldn't be bettered.

It's imprisoned by its own glibness, grabbing for sensation over emotion, and looking silly whenever it misses.

Peake, warmly sketching a woman busy fooling herself that everything will work out, and Forte, as precise as he was in Nebraska, keep it honest, and within touching distance of real poignancy.

Even by the standards of allowance-snatching half-term filler, this is pretty indifferent.

It proves very much un film de Sandler: so lazy you feel unconscionably guilty for snorting at the three jokes in its two hours that merit any response.

It sometimes strays off the beaten track into shapelessness, but Oreck lends individual segments a quiet fascination.

Spiritually, it's closer to a mid-range crowd-pleaser such as City Slickers than Blazing Saddles, too enamoured of genre convention to reach for the comic dynamite.

Wallace permits some debate as to what this tale represents – miracle? horror show? evidence of declining anaesthesiology standards? – yet that titular conclusion depends entirely on faith: what's on screen peters out.

Tom Gustafson's film proves genial to a fault.

Ti West's latest feels both more expansive – choppering Vice reporters into a seemingly progressive tropical utopia raises intriguing social themes – and yet a marked disappointment.

Schwarz offsets the camp with a sincere appreciation of both the obvious, larger-than-life personality and this performer's oft-overlooked skills.

The franchise is a low-risk work-in-progress, but DeMonaco is improving as a shotmaker.

The absence of new or sustainable ideas dooms it to instant mediocrity.

The action is colourful, the vistas as organic as pixels will allow and, once it gets past the quickfire editing of the early stages, considered application of 3D heightens the sense of space and glide. Not much magic, but an appreciable level of polish.

Ping-ponging camera moves temporarily distract from the haphazard structuring and translation.

If it all feels too anomalous to seal its case against today's big legal and corporate predators, it never lacks for diverting turns and quirks.

Whatever enlightenment there is here proves far too easily gained. Keep looking, folks.

Its destructive setpieces may loose the odd popcorn kernel on to the multiplex carpet, but it's really just an effects reel: the weather – cloudy wisps turning to massive, fiery hellblasts – is considerably better developed than its quarry. Stick with Twister.

The weakness is in the material: these are second-string Miller yarns... But the vision remains uncompromising and it dazzles far more than any sequel should.

Hamm and Alan Arkin's grouchy scout conclude these deals with unarguable professionalism, but we can spot the manoeuvres required to magic neocolonialist playbook into heartwarming fairytale.

The smart cast occupy themselves with the dog-eared emotions scattered around the waiting rooms.

It’s not as focused as its predecessor, but its best sequences rehydrate the mind.

Set it against the shiny blandishments that have passed for family fun this season, and it starts to look vaguely radical.

Too much chaos ultimately prevails, but the rehearsal sequences at least forsake vapid luvvie-isms for close, instructive study of how to pull the best out of actors and text alike.

Cox's guardedly avuncular turn might have sustained a more rigorous endeavour, but the attempt to evoke the trauma of the Munich air disaster is rendered wholly insupportable by the trifling hooey around it.

As the narrative approaches its desired fusion of Gallic and Indian cuisine, so too Hallstrom looks to have hit his sweet spot: the very middle of middlebrow.

If you’re in the market for a workaday crime story, Schechter’s film fulfills some of its obligations. You might just wish it had more life.

These catacombs are just an echo chamber into which any rubbish can be pumped, and while this gives carte blanche to production designer Louise Marzaroli, the relentless flow of subterranean non-sequitur becomes at least as trying as the whirling, jerky non-cinematography.

Yes, the franchise's appeal lies in watching very ordinary boys making prats of themselves – but couldn't the vehicles transporting them to the wider world display slightly more ambition?

Only a film as big as Africa could have done Adichie’s novel full justice; the treatment it gets here, equally honourable and hurried, reduces it to Nigerian soap with BAFTA-level acting.

Nooshin holds on to a strain of logic that doesn't often survive at this level of filmmaking.

The arrestingly fierce Cooke, in particular, is surely a star in the making.

The more tangled the plot becomes, the more hackneyed Skjoldbaerg’s tactics get.