Peter Bradshaw

The supposed satirical attitude of Irresistible can’t conceal the fact that it’s contrived, unfunny and redundant.

It’s rare to see a film quite so lacking in animus. It exists only to gouge money out of gamers. They might well want to stick to the game.

This has to be the year's most pointless remake: a boring and badly acted reboot of John Milius's gung-ho red-scare actioner from 1984.

Joyless and tedious, a reboot quite without the first film’s audacity and fun... It’s a movie that is going through the intergalactic motions.

There are in fact one or two big gags, but no real sense of fun - not compared to something like Thor: Ragnarok. Director Ruben Fleischer, who made Zombieland and Gangster Squad, is uninspired. Venom is riddled with the poison of dullness.

Here the formulaic silliness, sometimes part of the enjoyment, is just tiring.

Some French films, like wine, don’t travel. This one turns to vinegar.

Cine-narcissism like this is always tiresome, and it isn’t any more palatable in a European setting.

This is just a dull and badly acted movie.

This film is making a wheezing, spluttering sound: the sound of a profitable YA franchise running out of steam.

The final explosive showdown seems to be competing with Marvel movies for spectacle. But Marvel brings wit and fun. As far as those factors go, the Transformers franchise is in very short supply.

Director Niels Arden Orpev was in charge of the original "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," starring Rapace, but fails to create a revenge thriller with anything like the same focus.

There can hardly be a bigger waste of time than this piece of twee nonsense.

A dead-eyed Chris Pratt presides over this convoluted mess of Bond-style villains and toothless action that even the original cast can’t save from extinction.

Here is a terribly meagre experience from writer-director Rodrigo García, a silly, pointless movie which never delivers on its promises of drama and comedy and contains not a single funny or believable moment. As a filmic meal, it is pretty much entirely without nutritional or calorific value.

Sadly, Savages plays up to Stone's worst tendencies: machismo, bombast and self-indulgence, and the factor that could conceivably have made this movie tolerable – humour – is off the menu.

This week we learned that 99% of Sun readers want a return to capital punishment. I learned that 100% of me wants it for 100% of people involved in this romcom.

For all its apparent sombreness and thoughtfulness, The Sea Of Trees is an exasperatingly shallow film on an important and agonisingly painful subject - depression and suicide. This it slathers in palliative sentimentality.

This could theoretically be a fun movie, but it is all so self-conscious and self-admiring, with key action sequences rendered null and void by being played on two levels, the imaginary and the real, so cancelling each other out.

It is a film so awe-inspiringly wooden that it is basically a fire-risk. The cringe-factor is ionospherically high.

A jaw-droppingly self-indulgent, shallow, smug if mercifully brief feature with a plot that looks like the outline for a pop video.

It’s difficult to know what subtitle to give this. Taken 3: Not Again, or Taken 3: Seriously? or Taken 3: This Is Getting a Bit Much Frankly.

Cue all sorts of strangely tired, laugh-free goofiness, with none of the funny lines and wit that come as standard with Pixar/Disney films. I guess it would pacify very young children.

There is no drama or jeopardy or human interest anywhere. This franchise now looks about as urgently contemporary as an in-car CD player.

The Aquaman franchise is just flatlining, floating through the dreary depths like the kind of discarded plastic bag which is going to choke the last remaining vaquita porpoise.

It goes on for ever without getting properly started: an epic of depthless self-indulgence.

Cringemakingly written and clunkily directed, and even the final action sequence runs out of steam after a minute or so.

Anne Hathaway detonates a megaton blast of pure unfunniness in this terrifying film.

In its pure misjudged ickiness, bad-acting ropiness, and its quirksy, smirksy passive-aggressive tweeness, this insidiously terrible film could hardly get any more skin-crawling.

What Sheen, born in Gwent, makes of Downey’s accent can only be imagined. It really is horribly inert, and every time Downey opens his mouth to say something unintelligible, the film dies a bit more.

Jennifer Lopez is radioactively humourless and Owen Wilson is robotically bland in this stinker.

The whole affair is misjudged and sickly sweet.

Mon Roi, directed and co-written by Maïwenn (that is, film-maker and actor Maïwenn Le Besco) is an unendurable confection of complacent and self-admiring nonsense: shallow, narcissistic, histrionic and fake.

The scenes have no fire or lightness and sometimes they are embarrassing. ... Sachs is such a talented film-maker, but this is a baffling misstep.

The gimmick behind this excruciating propagandist movie about the US special forces' war on terror is that it features not actors but actual Navy Seals.

Everything about this clunks.

It’s as if everyone involved is terrified of actually making people laugh in case that gives offence somehow, or disrupts the algorithmic calculation that theoretically makes this a palatable piece of content. The whole thing is as bland as cellophane.

This buttock-clenchingly embarrassing movie from director Valérie Donzelli is a pre-Revolutionary period drama from the quality end of the sugary French market – theatrically tricked out with one or two annoying and clumsy Brechtian touches of stylised self-aware modernity.

Sophie Marceau delivers the cringe in this clunkingly bad LA dating comedy: tin-eared, cliched, unfunny and misjudged in every horribly unconvincing syllable, sadly sounding as if it has been written by someone who has never been to Los Angeles or met any human beings.

There’s nothing wrong with a big-hearted film for Christmas, but this commercial and formulaic slice of content is a toy destined to be forgotten.

A film full of people smiling knowingly and laughing delightedly at each other’s not-especially-funny-or-interesting remarks, and it’s all the more insufferable for things the film gets fundamentally and structurally wrong.

As ever with a Sparks story, the action takes place in a sugary vision of small-town America that does not correspond with the real world at any point.

This movie is a case in point. It's a film which is so demeaningly bad, so utterly without merit, that there is a kind of purity in its awfulness. There is a Zen mastery in producing a film which nullifies the concept of pleasure.

It is bloated with all the artist cliches, but freighted with mind-blowing dullness and joylessness.

Given the nasty taste in the mouth that the film leaves, it seems almost besides the point to worry about plot holes.

The two adjectives in the title should be replaced with "annoying" and "unendurably tiresome".

There are no insights to be had – and no laughs.

It’s a crunching disappointment: a dull, crass, formulaic and frankly misjudged chiller.

A real Christmas miracle would cause every copy of this film to spontaneously burst into flames.

A staggeringly pointless supernatural non-chiller featuring some very tiresome jump scares.

Calamy gives it everything she’s got but this film is fundamentally heavy-handed.

This could be one of those rare and terrifying serial killer cases where the psychotic culprit apparently intends to bore and embarrass everyone to death with bad acting.

The ploddingly unvaried pace and undirected, underpowered performances make this an exasperating experience: a directionless, shallow movie which seems bafflingly unconvincing and inauthentic at every turn.

Watching this film is a nightmare in all the wrong ways.

Dejah, with her seen-it-all-before smirk, is not a very sympathetic heroine, and Kitsch is stolid and dull. And as for the red planet, the answer to David Bowie's famous question is no. What a sadd'ning bore it is.

Here is a scary movie that is so hammy and so clunkingly written it will reduce your brain to the consistency of muesli mixed with diesel.

Everything about it is heavy-handed and dull: the non-comedy, the ersatz-pathos, the anti-drama.

The Fleabag star’s detailed performance in this missing-child thriller makes its myriad implausibilities all the more dismaying.

It’s a relentless surge of solemnly ridiculous nonsense in the style of romdram maestro Nicholas Sparks (creator of The Notebook and Message in a Bottle) culminating in a courtroom trial with Edgar-Jones’s free-spirited heroine in the dock as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Murder Suspect.

This movie finally ties itself into various knots to prefigure the later world of Katniss, but the time to end the Games came long ago.

There is a creeping and depressing awfulness to this sentimental silver-years comedy.

A deafening, boring action pile-up that is more Call of Duty than Robocop.

A strained jeu d'ésprit which is smug, precious, carelessly constructed, emotionally negligible, and above all fantastically annoying. It's a terrible waste of real acting talent.

One for Hardwicke, and everyone else, to forget.

It is bafflingly complacent in its sentimentality and its sheer, fatuous implausibility, which makes it valueless and meaningless as drama and comedy.

It’s now commonplace to compare programmatic stuff like this to AI, but this is almost a second evolutionary step downwards; it looks as if humans, using AI, have tried to copy something that was originally AI generated, creating a bland, simplistic template that can be sold in all global territories where it can be dubbed by local voice talent.

The acting and directing are entirely terrible, the editing and pacing are so sluggish you’ll feel as if you’re going into a persistent vegetative state, the plot is tiresomely unthought-through, the split-screen shots don’t work and the musical score is so pointless and undifferentiated it sounds like elevator muzak.

The madly, bafflingly overwrought and humourless storytelling can’t overcome the fact that everything here is frankly unpersuasive and tedious. Every line, every scene, has the emoting dial turned up to 11 and yet feels redundant.

All the material about social media looks forced and behind the curve, and nothing about the movie is really convincing or entertaining on any level, making it valueless as drama or satire.

It can’t end well. In fact, it ends badly. In every sense. The mystery of Myers has long since become deflated and inert, and when he is unmasked, the camera can’t quite be bothered to show us his pointless old face (unlike the unhelmeting of Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi, which did at least show us what the great villain looked like). The only thing that’s scary is the thought of how long this has all been going on.

It’s a script which shows every sign of having had plenty of rewrites, though perhaps it could have done with a few more.

The first Extraction was entertaining enough but this new one is just cynically about extracting the cash.

There is something deeply crass about this facetious nonsense, and everyone involved in this film might want to reflect that Nazi medical experimentation during the second world war did in fact happen, under circumstances other than these. It was a very real thing, not just a death-metal horror movie gag.

He's done it again. M Night Shyamalan has done it again. Again. Done it. Again. He has given us another film for which the only appropriate expression is stammering, gibbering wonder that anyone can keep making such uncompromisingly terrible movies with such stamina and dedication.

The estimable Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters has bafflingly decided to try everyone’s patience with this insufferable vanity project: a violent gonzo grossout that sadly conforms to the horror-comedy tendency of being neither properly scary nor properly funny.

The film clunks on, acted with no flair or charisma by anyone in the cast and no energy or interest in the direction. A Rodriguez or a Tarantino – or, indeed, a Schrader – might have found something in the film’s episodic structure and its gallery of grotesques, but, as it is, this is just leaden.

The mystery has been dialled down, the treacle dialled up, and what we are left with is basically Eat Pray Love 2.

Lemercier’s weirdly grinning, gurning face superimposed on the child’s head creates an unnatural chill that the film fails to shrug off, even after Aline as an adult is supposed to be glammed up with her teeth fixed.

It really is a nuclear war of dullness.

Every syllable of action, as we grind towards the broadly guessable finish, is jeopardy-free and interest-free. Wilson looks as if he is thinking about something else: the halting sing-song rhythms of his voice sound vapid, and Hayek is trilling, whooping and smirking away in a world of her own.

It really is an amazingly pointless and dumb film: the good/bad setup between Morbius and Milo is muddled and cancelled by the not-especially-compelling moral struggle within Morbius himself. Both Leto and Smith have to keep doing the evil demonic face-change growling thing, and it is intensely silly. Let’s hope the extended Spider-Man universe extends far enough to include something more interesting than this.

This fantastically muddled and exasperatingly dull quasi-update of the King Kong story looks like a zestless mashup of Jurassic Park, Apocalypse Now and a few exotic visual borrowings from Miss Saigon. It gets nowhere near the elemental power of the original King Kong or indeed Peter Jackson’s game remake; it’s something Ed Wood Jr might have made with a trillion dollars to do what he liked if he’d been given a trillion dollars – but minus the fun.

This fudged, pseudo-progressive approach is so tiring you’ll want to put your head in your hands.

It is put together with technical competence, but is entirely cliched and preposterous, and it implodes into its own fundamental narrative implausibility.

Even the vocal presence of Sean Connery can't lend interest to this tedious, crudely animated, bafflingly conceived cartoon feature, liable to please neither children nor adults, developed from a 2006 short film to which Connery also contributed.

Oldman delivers his lines with a strange lethargy and tonelessness, as if – just before speaking – he has just realised that income tax will have to be deducted from his fee.

The awful truth is that this is a generic derivative horror script.

This is a muddled, leaden fantasy adventure for Christmas which feels as if someone put all the Quality Streets in a saucepan and melted them together, with the wrappers still on.

There’s an odd, disconcerting tone of solemnity to this slice of cultural history.

It’s warbling warbling warbling piffle.

It’s pretty much a laugh-free film to make you appreciate the work of Nancy Meyers or Richard Curtis; their films may look easy or corny but they have something this doesn’t, a kind of buoyancy or a way of alchemising all the luxury tourist incidentals into something entertaining.

Audiences may come to this film expecting the conventional pleasures of a spy thriller – excitement, tension, suspense – along with the additional values associated with the very best of the genre: character nuance, emotional complexity, plausible human dilemma. The Operative utterly defeats all of these hopes, chiefly in being at all times extremely boring.

There are some comedies that seem to have been rubbed all over with an anti-funny, anti-romance Kryptonite. This is one. It’s the cinematic equivalent of elevator muzak – a festival of glam-smug with zero chemistry between any of its three leads.

It’s a dismal TV movie of the week: trite, shallow, cautiously middlebrow and blandly complicit in the cult of female prettiness that it is supposedly criticising.

This is one to forget: a muddled, tonally misjudged, badly acted, uncertainly directed and frankly dubious drama, something that falls into the so-bad-it’s-bad bracket.

This horrifyingly yucky, toxically cutesy ensemble dramedy creates a Chernobyl atmosphere of manipulative sentimentality, topped off with an ending which M Night Shyamalan might reject as too ridiculous.

Once you get to the big reveal, you feel like you’ve sat through a hundred episodes of a saucy daytime soap with the saucy bits cut out. They could franchise out a sequel: Strictly Confidential in Dubai.