Mike McCahill

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.

An unexpected joy.

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.

The actors lend it a sick heft, and there are droll, region-specific footnotes...but one senses the sniggering film-makers playing variably funny games with our phobia of pedophiles, rather than having anything lasting to say about it.

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

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.

[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.

Fortunately, the animators get stuck in: the foodscape Flint's party passes through is again wittily realised, each frame sprinkled with colourful hybrid creations, from "flamangos" to "shrimpanzees".

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.

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.

Wan remains a crafty enough director to draw your eye warily across the frame. You shouldn't feel so daft for flinching this time.