Mike McCahill

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.

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?

This underdeveloped offering barely lifts itself off the drawing board.

More meme than movie.

Wilson and Farmiga remain solidity incarnate, capable of enlivening even speculative spiritual dialogue. The film-making pulls no surprises out of the hat, though, and gives no indication that it would if it could.

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

Its arcs and beats are as careworn as your grandfather’s armchair.

Hinds is a strong, wounded presence, but the laboured structure cuts insistently around him to get at a psychology mostly scrambled in translation. This Sea's just too choppy.

The problem lies not strictly with what’s on screen – which on its own, reduced terms is basically watchable and not unlikable – but in what’s been elided or forgotten about in the rush to duplicate the original’s surprise success: any sustained wit or personality.

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.

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.

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

A debut of unarguable promise, though – plenty to build on if Elba can resist the adolescent lure of running round with 007’s PPK.

Deadwyler remains credibly frazzled, pushed towards monstrousness in ways that will be familiar to anyone who homeschooled during Covid, and the bundled figure closing in on her is genuine nightmare fuel. Yet the rest of this hotchpotch never matches it, and flails in trying to explain it away.

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

A starstruck Jones hardly pushes his interviewees on it, but somewhere in his naggingly monotonous morass of talking heads is the tale of how the Boss gained a social conscience.

Belleville cranks up the colour saturation and ironic Yuletide soundtrack, but all his slo-mo hedonism can’t disguise an otherwise addled story treatment: we chop haphazardly between hemispheres, leaving characters and subplots treading crystal blue water.

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

Nobody lands the one knockout punchline to elevate matters above tolerable mediocrity.

If you’re looking for world building, you’re come to the right place. Yet its architects prove keener to flytip this secondhand imagery than they are to sort through it.

It’s moderately diverting Halloween filler – earning points for reviving Taco’s electropop cover of Puttin’ on the Ritz – but still way too static to become actually entertaining.

Beneath middling songs – walloped out in the artless, post-Cowell manner – there's something faintly touching about its vision of broken homes.

For an action-comedy, its timing is lousy.

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.

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.

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

Lowish-level titters are in evidence – mostly care of Kristen Schaal as Dave’s tech aide – while an analogue finale on a scrappy-looking airfield offers passing respite from the multiplex’s usual VFX-bloated city smashing.

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.

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

If the shark-versus-Statham bout doesn’t tickle you, the shark-versus-Pekinese sidebar might. Not quite killer, but it’s rare to see a 21st-century blockbuster having this much fun – right through to its sign-off – with its own premise.

We’re mostly watching Allam scowling at the eccentrics passing through his eyeline – but it’s still a pleasure, and often a joy, to watch the star measuring out and savouring Fry’s rich wordplay like fingers of scotch.

Assiduously replicating its predecessor’s strengths and weaknesses, the one thing it risks is that a three-word summary – Hindi Forrest Gump – would tell you all you ever needed to know about it.

The malfunctioning studio system has foisted many subprime ideas upon us recently, but this opportunistic, Trump-age hybrid of war-on-terror drama and YA fantasy numbers among the junkiest.

Racing towards its splattery finale, it just about qualifies as lively schlock, and is likely your one chance to see Crowe in flowing robes piloting a Vespa to the strains of Faith No More.

The eye is caught and sometimes diverted – with its Slush Puppie palette, Wonder Land is uncommonly pretty – but very little about it sticks.

As with Den of Thieves, Angel falls into the “lively mediocrity” category of Butler schlock, with one or two plot hikes that suggest the script meetings were well-refreshed.

Their singing is robustly and winningly performed, and the whole thing is heartfelt. Nice also to see Maggie Steed as the local pub’s landlady. It’s pretty goofy but fun.

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.

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.

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.

There are baffling shunts from town to country, while the middle stretch tosses up scenes with no real function or punchline.

Toning down his usual act in a manner that suggests he’s finally read his reviews, Butler gives it handfuls of dramatic ballast, but this vessel has been badly compromised: any interest seeps out by the frame.

By their very nature, dog lovers may be more forgiving and enthusiastic, but much of it is reaction shots of trained mutts, right through to the closing-credit snapshots of the crew’s Forever Friends, this movie is almost literally all puppy eyes.

Escobar is not without interest, sweep or colour, but bears signs of high-level, edit-suite indecision over what sort of movie it wants to be. It’s an alluring product, inexactly cut.

Tom Gustafson's film proves genial to a fault.

These 88 minutes never drag their heels long enough for us to get hung up on their myriad implausibilities. One of those low-expectation releases that’ll see you right if Infinity War remains sold out.

The odd vivid shot reminds you of Rodriguez's dynamic visual imagination, but also what it's wasted on here: a project as indifferent as some of the trash that inspired it.

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

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

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.

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.

[Jason Statham] has some nice, relaxed moments with onscreen daughter Izabela Vidovic, and gets to fulfil half his audience's fantasies in wiping the smirk from James Franco's face.

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

The pieces of a potential franchise are put in play here without stakes being raised or pulses quickened.

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.

Dead Men Tell No Tales moves at a faster rate of knots than any Pirates film; trouble is, nothing has really been added. It’s the same soggy ride, set to a marginally preferable speed.

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

Odd zingers and residual eccentricities (a Whit Stillman cameo, anyone?) stand as traces of the blast it might have been, but this cast surely signed on in anticipation of many more laughs than there are in the final cut.

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

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

The connective circuitry is too identikit for Demonic to be especially distinctive.

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

The summer of inessential animation continues with this very middling sequel to 2014’s semi-forgotten squirrel-based timekiller.

Watching it is like travelling through a wormhole to a slightly crummier version of 2004.

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

It’s been compiled with enthusiasm, flashes of skill, and a certain devil-may-care cheek – an infusion of newish blood for a Brazilian film industry that’s been badly drained in recent years.

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.

If you thought the bogeyman was slender, wait till you see the film.

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.

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.

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

Hollywood's latest play for the growing Asian market revisits the ancient Japanese legend of self-sacrifice, hoping to offset its garbled narrative and grinding humourlessness with 3D and Keanu Reeves as a samurai Jesus.

Appreciation for the artistry of the John Wick series redoubles frame by crummy frame.

Plotkin’s relentless button-pushing, coupled to the script’s cringe-inducing yooftalk, instead mark Hell Fest as unmistakably the work of middle-aged execs trying to jab suggestible teenagers back into cinemas.

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.

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 watch the resultant, wholly bloodless carnage with brain in neutral and eyes glazing over, as you would a re-run of Police, Camera, Action! at two in the morning.

This final chapter, like its immediate predecessors, falls somewhere between footnote and outright detritus, like a plastic bag being blown through the multiplex by a stiff breeze.

Ban this sick filth.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Under Slee’s direction, even the teensiest creepy crawlies find themselves noted and taxonomized; it’s encouraging to see a format that generally sets audiences to non-specific gawping attempting to focus and refine our gaze.

This production’s triumph is the room it’s granted Rajamouli to head into the fields and dream up endlessly expressive ways to frame bodies in motion.

Baahubali demonstrates the pleasing, straight-ahead simplicity of certain videogames: whenever our hero accomplishes a task, some new challenge presents itself.

Prolific sports documentarian James Erskine (Pantani, The Battle of the Sexes) here takes on his most ambitious project yet: a study of Sachin Tendulkar – the closest thing Indian cricket has to a living deity – played out over Test session duration to soaring AR Rahman compositions.

As a film, it’s altogether keener to Turtle Wax the brand than stop for even a moment to examine what Ferrari the man, logo and company ever stood for.

Uncommonly alert to small, telling details, while more expansive in its attitudes, the result proves far richer and worldlier than anything previously observed coming down the Khyber Pass.

If October feels more tentative than Piku, which had rock-solid star turns to ground it, its emotion is at the last earned honestly: any structural wobbles will be nothing compared with the audience’s lower lips come the finale.

Even narratively, the new film is a dud.

It has that rare and unmistakable look of an event movie that was huge fun to assemble. Whether you’re watching in Hindi, Tamil or Telugu – or reliant on English subtitles – much of that enjoyment does translate.