Neil Smith

"What are you going to do?" wails Maggie. "What I do best!" growls Liam. Yet while it's fun to watch him take out the Eurotrash, we've seen him do it better.

Maudlin, glum and distinctly cheap-looking, Angel brings the curtain down on a trilogy that should have never got this far.

A lavishly mounted re-telling that, for all its good intentions and visual wonders, can’t help seeming surplus to requirements.

The strange thing about Grimsby is that it works much better as a Bond-spoofing actioner than it does as a politically incorrect rib-tickler.

Affection for the characters will bring fans in. But many will leave wishing the makers of one of the most enjoyable programmes of recent years had left well enough alone.

As implausible as the stars' gleaming choppers.

Capturing Marley’s essence on screen proves an impossible task in a biopic that veers towards hagiography.

Sixteen years on from the Shia LaBeouf original, though, the many brains behind this franchise have still to figure out how to satisfy an audience without leaving it bludgeoned.

The best bits of Kingdom come when Jules Verne-esque technology like Manta’s Octobots collides with Atlantis’ psychedelic bioluminescence, a colourful contrast that gets to the heart of this watery franchise’s trippy appeal.

Early promise proves misleading in a sequel that should be far better than The Da Vinci Code than it actually is.

Ambitiously staged and impressively shot, Monsters: Dark Continent makes a bold stab at mounting a franchise but lacks the vision and surprise of its predecessor.

Though it’s good to see Michelle Pfeiffer married to the mob again, she alone can’t redeem a lumbering farce that takes an unpleasantly sadistic glee in violence, murder and intimidation.

What [Bekmambetov] doesn't do is offer us any respite from his 3D CGI barrage, an assault on the senses that makes the bullet John Wilkes Booth fired into the real Abe's noggin seem calming by comparison.

James DeMonaco’s blood-splattered thriller begins well before expiring slowly from multiple improbabilities.

Rob Lowe provides colour as a Southern-accented sleazeball, while the Free Willy finale has enough vehicular mayhem to excuse its dodgy FX.

The first Meg never pretended to be anything more than a shamelessly imitative, big-fish smackdown. Yet even that low bar proves too high for this listless, mechanical follow-up.

The final showdown whisks up the requisite excitement, but the open-ended coda feels like an optimistic throw of the dice from the franchise showing meagre signs of Harry Potter longevity.

Neatly juxtaposes the beauty of the landscape with the enmities it engenders.

It takes more than two Avengers and the director of Fast & Furious 8 to make the MIB hip again.

Can’t decide if it’s a broad farce or a poignant portrait. Small wonder then, that it falls short on both counts, failing to earn either Bridesmaids-sized laughs or nods of recognition.

In narrowing his film’s field of activity, director Colin Trevorrow dispiritingly winds up reducing it to the tried, the tested, and the numbingly familiar.

Twists pile as high as corpses before an overcooked ending sends things spiraling into silliness.

It’s no slam dunk for King James in a reprise that shows you can only spread Space Jam so far.

Though closer in quality to Morbius than Venom, Kraven is far from a catastrophe and serves up a decent helping of bloodthirsty, globe-trotting action. Taylor-Johnson makes a muscular if self-satisfied protagonist in a film that would have been better off standing on its own shoeless feet than cravenly (or should that be, 'kravenly') cleaving itself to its comic book brethren.

Snyder’s sci-fi epic stumbles towards the finish line with an underwhelming Part Two that feels more like a Part One-And-A-Half.

It’s the same sappy drivel as before.

Bobin’s attempt to fill Tim Burton’s shoes generates a lively but ersatz sequel that only truly ticks when Baron Cohen and Bonham Carter are around.

A ploddingly predictable, gore-lite yawner.