Neil Smith

A serious subject receives a simplistic treatment in an ill-conceived thriller in which the emotive (and timely) issue of honour killings becomes just another plot device.

Believably charts a girl’s coming of age but is eventually capsized by lurid melodrama.

Irish politics made accessible with the help of a playful script, two fine performances and 11 years of hindsight.

Better than The Conjuring 2 and most of the Annabelles, this latest entry gives some zip to a stumbling franchise.

Reynolds and Pikachu make an inspired combo in a CGI/live-action mash-up that otherwise adheres to a rigidly boilerplate formula.

Longer than OHF and just as daft, WHD makes for a more entertaining watch before succumbing to the same bombastic overkill.

This is not, we’d wager, the film its director intended. Yet it’s worth watching, if only to see Caine and Kingsley together for the first time in 25 years.

Chloé Zhao gives the MCU just the kick in the pants it needs at this phase in its evolution.

It’s too brief to convey the intellect and almost mystical ability that underpin Carlsen’s success.

Too solemn to keep us invested in its heroes’ mission or fate.

Potts does the singing himself, but that doesn’t stop Justin Zackham’s (The Big Wedding) contrived script from sounding bum notes throughout.

Director Arnaud des Pallières lends a bleak austerity to the story, but with only one murky battle scene to quicken the blood it’s hardly a recipe for unbridled excitement.

It’s left to the leads to keep us engaged, a tall order given their film’s old-fashioned, fusty feel.

Marvel’s woes won’t be solved by a disjointed mini-Avengers that doesn't make a great deal of sense. But the cats are Flerken great.

Populist fare from across the channel that will amply repay those ready to put the time in. The scenery, meanwhile, makes you want to run out and buy a timeshare.

Bickering turns to bonding over the course of a predictable affair that only comes to life during a Texan steak-eating contest that has Babs ingest a mountain of meat.

An action vehicle that, in trying to do it all, does a little too much; Johnson and Blunt keep it afloat.

At least until its Turning Red-ish plot becomes subsumed by a tiresome showdown finale, there’s a lot to take pleasure from here - not least the invertebrate protagonists’ amusing elasticity, which recalls the madcap fun of Tex Avery’s cartoon classics.

Believers will be more interested in what he uncovers than the layman, who will soon identify this ’80s-set adap of Lee Strobel’s book as a tedious sermon that’s preaching to the converted.

An only moderately entertaining threequel that assumes a double dose of Carell will make up for missing Minions. It doesn’t.

Fun when Jones is around, dull when he's not, it's all just a little bit of history repeating.

Fast, furious and based on fact, this pleasingly lateral adaptation embellishes a console-jockey favourite with familiar sports-movie archetypes.

Just as bloody yet much more conventional, 300 #2 offers splashy thrills aplenty but fails to make a watertight case for its own existence. Green, however, ensures it stays afloat.

It doesn’t exactly soar and the lack of levity grates, yet the Spooks movie still delivers some appealingly old-school mayhem.

The most inventive sequence has Larry and Teddy plunge into an MC Escher painting, an interlude so dazzling you can almost overlook the weeing monkey.

Two characters, who you won’t like, insulting each other for two hours. Give it a miss and rewatch Midnight Run instead.

Directed by John McTiernan, it’s an ’80s classic full of still-thrilling action, quotable one-liners (“Get to the chopper!” “Stick around!”) and sly digs at Uncle Sam’s penchant for unwinnable jungle wars.

The Nun 2 feels like an unnecessary sequel to a hoary offshoot that was hardly essential in the first place.