Mike McCahill

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

Cheung shows promise as a shotmaker and stager of blunt-force action. If somebody cares to arm him with a script editor and production grants, we could have a discovery of sorts on our hands.

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.

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

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.

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.

Pushing its luck at two hours, this eventually collapses in a heap of its own symbolism, barely unpacking the missing-persons intrigue it started out with. Nice views en route, but it’s a tale scribbled in haste on the back of a postcard.

Tom Gustafson's film proves genial to a fault.

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.

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.

This underdeveloped offering barely lifts itself off the drawing board.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The film’s artistry is undeniable.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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