Peter Bradshaw

Viewers may be split on the question of exactly how satisfying it all is in the end. The performances are strong.

It all hangs together and the final shot rounds it off nicely enough.

Like Werner Herzog, Kier’s German accent lends a deadpan drollery to everything he says, but there is a gooey soft-centre to his film, and Kier carries that off reasonably well, his face becoming almost boyish. Another intriguing persona in the Udo Kier gallery.

There are some nicely creepy moments, and director and co-writer Nick Murphy interestingly dramatises some of the neuroses feeding the appetite for ghostly phenomena – repressed sexuality, guilt and self-harm.

Introduction, like so many of Hong’s films, occupies a delicate middle ground between whimsy and poetry, between inconsequentiality and epiphany, between lightweight and light. My feeling is that Introduction is closer to the former in each case, and I wanted to hear more about and more from Young-ho’s troubled father. But there is an unmistakable and mature film-making language on display: a simplicity and charm.

When Fanning is off screen, we are marooned in a fashion shoot in a hell of silliness. Yet her star quality gives The Neon Demon what substance it has, and Refn’s film-making has self-belief and panache. Take it or leave it.

For good or ill, the film does not directly engage with Ginsburg’s views on contemporary feminism and sexual harassment and what is sometimes derisively called identity politics.

The Day After is an elegant exercise. It feels like a chapter from something bigger.

Sex is earnest, but cerebral and challenging.

Despite being a valuable reminder of Thunberg’s idealism and unselfconscious courage, the film doesn’t entirely work.

Perhaps there is less zap in Scream nowadays and archly invoking the newer generation of indie horror - Jordan Peele is mentioned, with absolute respect - only serves in the long run to remind you how elderly Scream is. But it’s still capable of delivering some piercing high-pitched decibels.

Ronan is just so good in this movie – so intelligent, so passionate, but she upstages Robbie, and Robbie’s parts of the film, often lumbered with leaden historical exposition dialogue, especially from Pearce, don’t have the same snap.

Unassuming, likable entertainment.

The film is watchable in its quirky and wayward way, with some funny moments – though shallower than it thinks.

The film is probably on its strongest ground with the most purely absurd touches.

As ever with comedies like this, all the really funny stuff is in the opening 20 minutes. But it's entertaining stuff, with a scene-stealer from Alan Arkin.

Not everything works here, but the sheer crazy confidence-through-chaos of the Suicide Squad and their bizarrely dysfunctional MO makes for a mighty spectacle.

It’s entertaining, though composed with algorithmic precision, and it winds up suspiciously neutral about whether kids really should abandon digital enslavement in favour of real-life human friends.

It is well acted, well shot, earnest and high-minded in its eroticism, but with a certain Mills-and-Boony-swoony-ness that creates something unsubversive in the love affair itself.

An entertaining showcase for two first-class performers.

Never was a film so candidly designed to sell products, but it has an archival interest.

Disappointingly, it is a borderline dopey, sentimental children’s adventure mostly without the wit and spark that converted grownups and kids to the Lego films.

It feels as if you've seen it many times before. Bill Nighy isn't in it, for example, and yet afterwards I had an intense memory of Bill Nighy being in it, the way amputees can feel their toes itching.

There are one or two interesting moments: including an intriguing discussion of the idea that Tinder is anti-love and in fact just promotes addiction to the app, which is inimical to actually finding a long-term partner. But really this is a very tiring and mediocre film.

It’s all very easy: a feelgood war tale from what feels like a distant age.

There’s a little bit of fun and interest along the way and Lange has some fun with her eccentric persona, but this feels under-energised.

It is soulless, like something that has been generated by a computer programme.

This solid roster of acting talent can’t do much about how frankly uninteresting and unfunny The Toxic Avenger is most of the time. As satire or spoof of both superhero movies and scary movies it is abysmally obsolete, and on its own terms as horror-comedy it achieves neither scares nor laughs.

Upper-middle-class white privilege does not exempt you from drug problems, but it looks as if it rates you a premium kind of respectful and sorrowing film treatment, something to do, I suspect, with the tremulous father-son ownership of this narrative.

What a bland and sugary texture there is to this very conservative, undemanding oldster roadtrip.

A good performance from Tom Hollander can’t save this stodgy, ungainly and strangely reactionary family drama from the French writer-director Amanda Sthers.

The supposedly important themes of immigrants and Syria are cancelled by its naive flippancy.

The film is smothered with a syrup of condescension.

There are some entertaining meta-touches here, but the entire Gutierrez plot is strained and borderline dull. Pascal isn’t a natural comic and the movie winds up fudging his crucial bad-guy status.

It seemed overextended and self-conscious.

As a war movie, it’s bafflingly dull; as a political-intrigue drama, it’s lifeless; as a personal portrait of Meir, it’s inert and superficial.

This is a well-intentioned film with some forthright performances, although there’s a fair bit of actorly shouting going on and the smiley spaciness of Bruni-Tedeschi can sometimes feel a bit affected.

There is no accumulation of drama or tension or intellectual revelation and the setpiece shootout is ultimately valueless. What exactly is it saying that we didn’t know already? The wait for Aster to recover his directorial form goes on.

The film squanders one or two promising plot ideas, and winds up making a hamfisted paean of praise to the idea of “open carry” gun ownership.

There are some cheerfully amusing moments . . . . But really the banter and the elegance needs some substance in the script and it really isn’t here, or not enough of it, and the serious moments seem glazed in a kind of negligent unseriousness.

No songs at all now, and not much fun.

The narrative focus is frustratingly split between Ben’s family and Abbie’s, and the result is a non-frightening muddle.

Plaza’s natural toughness gives this film some texture, but the truth is she isn’t in it much. You can spend very, very long stretches of the running time longing for her to re-emerge. So, when she doesn’t, it feels bland.

The estimable cast all do their utmost but the overall effect is frustratingly implausible.

This is at least concentrated dramatically in being brought to an endpoint. For fans only.

Not funny enough to be satire, not realistic enough to count as political commentary, not exciting enough to work as a war movie, David Michôd’s supposedly Helleresque romp, released on Netflix, is an imperfect non-storm of unsuccess.

There is no radical reinterpretation of Romeo and Juliet here, and the staging, costumes and performances look as if they come from something as trad as Zeffirelli’s 60s version … only it’s modern-language. Not worth the two hours’ traffic of their stage.

It all feels like a heavy meal, and the action scenes and the creature effects are very derivative.

Verhoeven just presents us with the raunchiness, using the religiosity as set dressing.

There is something basically unsatisfactory about this glassy-eyed biopic of the satanic dreamboat Bundy.

It’s a film that ostentatiously concerns itself with contemporary, zeitgeisty issues such as digital culture and the internet, and whether this is undermining the world of reading and books. But strip out the strained speechifying on that subject and it could have been made at any time in the last 40 years.

The spark that was there in the opening section disappears and the film splutters out into something directionless and derivative and dull.

The film, though eventful enough, does not quite succeed in its tacit claim to be a study of poverty; the author behaves like a student who is stoically accepting some temporary dodgy accommodation.

The complicated web of narrator-switches, flashbacks and POV-shifts seems clotted and Emily Blunt – usually so witty and stylish – is landed with a whingy, relentlessly weepy role in which her nose hardly ever resumes its natural colour.

Director Denzel Washington and his stars do their best with this bland, shallow and awkwardly structured film.

Not so much a documentary, more a sleek two-hour commercial for itself, Reset is a glossily produced non-look behind the scenes at the Paris Opera Ballet.

It needed bigger laughs and more of the big, ironic comedy that Erskine can clearly deliver.

It is colossally indulgent, shapeless, often fantastically and unthinkingly offensive and at all times insufferably conceited. Yet it is frustrating precisely because it sometimes isn't so bad. There is something in there somewhere - striking images and moments, and the crazy energy of a folie de grandeur.

Sadly, this fatally self-conscious and self-aware movie fizzles out– a process that seems to start with the opening credits.

Murphy’s maverick cop – and his theme music – are back to fight corruption, but four decades on there’s little energy to enliven their formulaic reunion.

The resulting movie is a technically competent piece of work; but no matter how ingenious its references to the first film (let down, however, by borrowings from the A Quiet Place franchise) it has to be said that there’s a fundamental lack of originality here which makes it frustrating.

Clooney guides the performances competently, but the story drifts pointlessly into space.

This film isn’t really sure where it’s taking us and how, or if, it wants to surprise us, and the key scene with Klaudiusz doesn’t work.

Fraser does an honest job in the role of Charlie, and Hong Chau brings a welcome fierceness and sinew to the drama, but this sucrose film is very underpowered.

This tennis film feels like a two-hour baseline rally, and it’s not just the rackets that are made of wood.

All the traditional ingredients are there, and I do have to say that the film does a good initial job of being claustrophobic and spectacular at the same time.

Russell Crowe is rather wittily cast as the portly, pompous Reichsmarschall Göring; it’s the best he’s been for a long time, a sly and cunning manipulator playing psychological cat-and-mouse with the Americans. But there is a deeply silly performance from Rami Malek as Kelley.

There’s nothing wrong with a weepie or big emotional moments, but for me Goodbye June is too unreal, too contrived in its sugary farewell.

Fans of smurfiness may well like it, and Gargamel gets some nice lines, but I have to say that both script and animation are entirely predictable, as if generated by some computer software.

Oblivion goes on for a long time, moving slowly and self-consciously, and it looks like a very expensive movie project that has been written and rewritten many times over. It is a shame: Cruise, Riseborough and Kurylenko as the last love triangle left on Planet Earth should have been quite interesting.

This is a great-looking movie with a sure sense of time and place; it is obviously a personal, and in fact, autobiographical work about Assayas's own youth. But for all its flair, I came away dissatisfied at its colossal self-indulgence and creamy complacency, and the way historical perspective and meaning are permitted to dissolve in its sunlit nostalgia.

It’s all more or less sufferable, and it may well keep young children quiet at Christmas … but we surely needed a higher joke content.

With the fourth film, the Ice Age family animation franchise is looking almost extinct.

Ticket to Paradise may well do great business to those looking for some escapist fun, and that’s entirely understandable. But I found the wacky double-act of George and Julia slightly hard work.

This frankly odd film is misjudged and naive about the implications of its Holocaust theme. Its bland, TV-movie tone of sentimentality fails to accommodate the existential nightmare of the main plot strand, or indeed the subordinate question of when and whether to put your elderly parent in a care home.

The romantic relationship with the “good Nazi” is a little too glib (quite as it was in the film version of Suite Française) and the camp scenes have a misjudged sheen of romanticism and come perilously close to the bad-taste border. But Stenberg’s performance is good.

It is basically deadly serious, and after some moderate knockaboutfun, settles into something pretty dull. Where's the edge?

This film is covered in a thick ectoplasm of disappointment.

The performances are exhaustingly unsubtle and undirected and the film’s failure to hit the comic note early on has the added disadvantage of undermining the avowedly serious moments of solidarity and body-positivity at the end.

Movie 43 is sketchy, in every sense. It's a collection of short comedy films in the manner of the 70s cult classic "Kentucky Fried Movie," each with a separate director, in which many very famous actors have been persuaded to take part.

Not even the fierce wattage of Toni Collette’s talent can light up this hokey crime comedy.

This is a vacuum-sealed package of fan-orthodoxy that never takes off. The euphoria and uplift aren’t there.

This is another well-intentioned but syrupy and pointless hagiography.

The performances of Mara and Phoenix are careful and respectful, though with nothing like the lightning-flash of energy and scorn that they have given to secular roles in the past.

This is like an over-chewed piece of gum: flavourless.

The humour feels as if it is pitched at kids rather than adults, and for me Johnny English’s wacky misadventures aren’t as inventive and focused as Atkinson’s silent-movie gags in the persona of Bean.

Perhaps any screenwriting teacher could explain why romantic comedies such as this frontload it with all the jokes in the first act, and then get progressively sentimental and humourless. This one becomes gooier and squishier until the comedy has entirely gone.

I was disappointed with a film whose crises and dilemmas seem laborious and essentially predictable; it does not fully work as sci-fi or satire or comedy.

There’s a reasonable premise to this horror-thriller, but also something straight-to-rental about the look and feel of the whole thing.

There are some good ideas, strong moments and a blue-chip cast in Broken, the feature-film debut from award-winning theatre and opera director Rufus Norris. But they somehow don't come together successfully.

This garden is pretty but lifeless.

Jason Statham is the only bit of genuine oomph in a tired tale whose digital effects could have been shot on an iPhone.

The dog transformation is somehow always Dr Jekyll, and her “nightbitch” persona frankly never becomes a very interesting metaphor for depression or midlife crisis. Yet there’s no doubting the sympathy and vehemence of Adams’s performance.

There's a too-cute-to-be-true ending to this US indie movie by the much-acclaimed young director Destin Cretton; I couldn't buy it, and found myself wondering if I had kept the receipt for the rest of the film too.

In the main, it's the usual story – much more rom than com.

There is no law that says a movie like this has to be funny exactly, and it needn’t be something in the style of Booksmart – but there is something rather solemn about it.

This could provide some small-screen entertainment for bored kids on a rainy day. But really: enough.

He [Sorkin] can also become fantastically ponderous, bloated with finger-waggingly self-important liberal patriotism. Sadly, that is the tone with this exasperatingly dull, dramatically inert and faintly misjudged re-creation of the “Chicago Seven” trial in the US, which Sorkin has written and directed.

In the end I felt that the film fully achieves neither the ostensible comedy of the opening, nor the supposed sadness of its denouement.

This curious, truncated piece tells us nothing substantial about Zofia Bohdanowiczowa or Józef Wittlin – or, indeed, about anything at all.

How bland and forgettable this film is, without in the smallest way harnessing the real performing power of Banderas, Colman, Pugh, Winstone et al.

It is more than half an hour longer than the Stanley Kubrick film, although it seems more than that – laborious, directionless and densely populated with boring new characters among whom the narrative focus is muddled and split.

Bogdanovich is a formidable figure, but with this movie he’s just coasting. He surely needs to find a screenplay more attuned to his brilliance, rather than a derivative, low-octane comedy.

This pretty routine follow-up has some decent material and amiable bad taste, heavily diluted with gallons of very ordinary sequel product: more of the same.

This film comes to life in the two scenes when its hushed note of kindly reverence is broken.

This is a stridently, bafflingly cacophonous movie which despite some smart, shrewd touches, is pretty much content with its single note of shouting acrimony and finishes by immolating itself in martyred self-pity.

Trance is a disappointment: a strident, chaotic, frantically overcooked film with an almost deafeningly intrusive ambient soundtrack. There is some embarrassing, eyeball-swivelling acting from the male leads, and the elegance of the film's premise is quite obliterated by its crude and misjudged violence.

The film is a derivative, if well intentioned, piece of fan fiction.

A disappointment.

Antoine Fuqua’s demi-biopic of Michael Jackson gives you the chimp, the llama, the giraffe … but not the elephant in the living room. It’s like a 127-minute trailer montage assembling every music-movie cliche you can think of: the producers’ astonishment in the recording studio, the tour bus, the billboard chart ascent, the meeting with the uncool corporate execs in their offices.

The results are by turns boring and bizarre, although Diesel still has some presence.

This is a two-dimensional piece of work.

There are some gruesomely ingenious moments in this gleefully yucky horror-comedy from director Conor McMahon, starring the standup comic Ross Noble. But I have to say it somehow wasn't funny or scary enough – though I do have to admit it is always more than revolting enough.

No one could doubt the technical mastery of this movie and its formal audacity. But for all that, I found something unliberating in its mercurial restlessness.

It is more of a holiday romance and the well-intentioned performances lead nowhere.

Despite the hefty talent involved, there’s a preposterous pass-agg tweeness to this film.

Hart’s brilliant hyperactive comedy has been dampened and smothered in this disappointingly unfunny showcase, which he has produced and co-scripted with five other credited writers.

This is pretty ho-hum stuff, but it could keep very young kids quiet over a lockdown Christmas.

It’s all a bit earnest and derivative and sometimes a bit lachrymose, despite some perfectly decent performances.

However earnest and heartfelt, the film doesn’t tell us nearly enough, or really anything, about Joe.

Looks dated and clunky, like a drawn-out episode of Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected on TV, and the direction doesn't have Softley's usual drive.

This comedy never quite relaxes or convinces or comes together, despite a blue-chip pedigree and a great cast.

It really is pretty dull, though, with the same moments of campy silliness: the same frowning gym bunnies with the same digitally enhanced abs.

Despite the panache with which the dance sequences are presented, it is frustratingly inert dramatically.

The comedy is fundamentally hobbled by the split in narrative focus between Jordan and April. We are never sure who is the heroine here, who has the comedy underdog status, who we are supposed to be rooting for.

Too often it’s just silly.

Just as in the book, the memorable part of this story is its ripe black-comic business.

All the fire and lifeblood of this idea has been sucked out and we are left with something bland.

It’s a film jam-packed with very good actors and big names, and suffused with a puppyish willingness to please. But where is the bite?

Fatih Akin’s mediocre revenge drama In the Fade is the TV movie of the week: feebly uncontentious and un-contemporary.

Berman is guilty of one of the most tiresome cliches in documentary – solemnly playing the audio of a phone conversation, with subtitles, over an exterior shot of the building where it is taking place, giving the impression that this is smoking-gun proof of something sensational, or at any rate interesting, when it is pretty ordinary.

Stephen Frears is a supremely accomplished director, but perhaps there was little he could do with this garbled and unsatisfying story about gambling.

It can sometimes be cute or zany and briefly send itself up, but there is fundamentally something pretty straight in its DNA.

The crude, tedious action sequences with their video-game aesthetic are an incredible trial and there is nothing interesting or glamorous about these vampires at all.

In the end, this film suffocates you with ersatz compassion and personal growth.

Something has perhaps been lost in the edit. This never quite comes together.

Some interesting material here, but the punches don’t land.

As must be obvious to real connoisseurs, I am hardly a natural consumer fit with this franchise. It may well play with fans, but will in all probability make no converts.

There are sparks of interest and some powerful moments, but it is structurally disjointed, tonally uncertain, unfocused and unfinished, with some very broad drama-improv-class acting from the kids and a frankly unrelaxed and undirected performance from Halle Berry.

An explosion of pass-agg hipster quirkiness is what’s offered here, an everything-everywhere-all-at-onceuniverse of cutesy vulnerability and pseudo-childlike ersatz charm.

Here is a frustrating film that tries to tell two stories at once, and succeeds with neither.

There’s not much real spark to it.

There are one or two laughs here and an attempt at a queer romance, but no real signs of life.

It is weirdly opaque and internalised, and doesn’t ever really come to life.

The initial setup is great, the Ephronesque excitable phone conversation montage is tolerable, but the cliched breakup and makeup plot transition clanks.

Given that a fair amount of creative licence has been exercised here, it is strange that Bruce Lee has such a small part to play.

Dead in a Week is striving for a weirdly sentimental kind of black-comic farce, and it doesn’t work.

It’s comedy-drama that is not funny enough to count as a comedy and not plausible enough to count as a drama. You’re going to need a very sweet tooth for it – sweeter than the one I have.

Really there is very little chemistry between Bautista and Nanjiani, the cameo from Karen Gillan is disconcertingly fleeting, and if you compare this with something like the Beanie Feldstein/Kaitlyn Dever comedy Booksmart, the dialogue really does sound a bit pedestrian.

Tamahori, director of Along Came a Spider, does a competent, if over-fussy job, but the pace flags in the showdown in Iceland.

Lakeith Stanfield, Rosario Dawson, Owen Wilson and Jamie Lee Curtis cannot save this laborious story of a creepy old dwelling and the awful Hatbox Ghost.

The coming-of-age parts of the film centred on Frances work a little better, but for all that, and despite Lithgow and Colman’s commitment, this is very uncertain.

This is by-the-numbers stuff, not quite funny enough for comedy or having enough of the crazed seriousness that marks out a successful superhero franchise.

As for Malek’s performance, his line readings and screen presence are very distinctive, but I have to say the moments when he has to present anguished emotion to the camera do not quite work, and feel eccentric.

Our Time, for all its moments of brilliance, takes almost three hours in leading us nowhere very rewarding at all.

A rather silly, pointless and directionless film.

& Sons doesn’t deliver on the promise of all its film-making talent but Nighy is always amusing.

The digital novelty is striking for the first 10 minutes, silly for the next 10 minutes, and by the end of the movie you’re pining for the analogue values of script and direction.

It generally feels secondhand, though the final musical scene has an authenticity and heart that the rest lacks.

Anne Zohra Berrached’s film is ambitious and interestingly intended, but naive and flawed, with a fundamental problem, which is right up there in the title.

Despite an intriguing high-concept lo-fi premise, its oddities and uninteresting superfluities mean that it never really emerges from its self-imposed inertia and gloom.

It’s silly and flimsy but sometimes oddly daring; director and co-writer Caroline Vignal coolly protracts certain scenes, extracting their potential for softcore eroticism where the standard-issue romcom would cut smartly away, having coyly established what was going to happen.

Directed by Olivia Wilde, it superciliously pinches ideas from other films without quite understanding how and why they worked in the first place. It spoils its own ending simply by unveiling it, and in so doing shows that serious script work needed to be done on filling in the plot-holes and problems in a fantastically silly twist-reveal.

Never Look Away is not without ambition and reach, and there is a real storytelling impulse. But the central performance of Schilling looks shruggingly uncertain, as if he is bemused by what is going on.

Director Robert Zemeckis is usually known for his zestiness and zippiness; but this is arduous. Screenwriter Steven Knight scripted smart movies such as Locke, Dirty Pretty Things and Eastern Promises, and there are some nice touches, but it resembles an unconvincing and sluggish pastiche of a war movie.

The film is intensely, almost radically humourless, which is hard to ignore and in fact hard to bear, because of this film’s obvious resemblance to recent great movies like Booksmart or Lady Bird and particularly at times the hard-edged classic Election.

A lively idea for a drama, but the sheer oddity of the real-life premise slows it down.

For me the superpower idea can only work with humour and lightness of touch: and there is a persistent and disconcerting joylessness about this.

Kristin Scott Thomas and Sharon Horgan saddled with a by-the-numbers script in a well-meaning but hackneyed Brit flick.

There is a kind of solidity and force to the film in its opening act, but its interest dwindles and we get little in the way of either ambition or moment-by-moment humour.

Thewlis keeps the film from sinking completely: the haunted, unhappy man resigned to his unjust burden of guilt and shame.

the film is often stately and sluggish with some very daytime-soapy moments of emotional revelation.

Here is a toothless, aimless dramedy from Canada, a lo-fi excursion into nothing very interesting; it’s what would happen if Harry met Sally and maybe they weren’t meant to be lovers or even friends and were both a bit bland.

In the end, the film looks like something that’s been salvaged in the edit, as it muses boringly on life’s great imponderables.

Intriguingly, but finally a bit frustratingly, Perry is running four ideas at once, a kind of cine-quadriptych with the plurality signalled by the title.

It's a road movie that runs out of road – and out of ideas.

The premise is looking pretty tired.

The snuff-porn aesthetic might suggest a realist drama, but a supernatural dimension is brought into play, making the plot directionless. There isn't an ounce of ingenuity in the way the movie is concluded, but some generic expertise in the way it is put together.

Denis's drama intrigues more than it actually delivers...Sleight of hand is all well and good. But sooner or later a film must pay up.

Strident, derivative and dismayingly deficient in genuine laughs, Ruben Östlund’s new movie is a heavy-handed Euro-satire, without the subtlety and insight of his breakthrough movie Force Majeure, or the power of his comparable Palme-winning spectacle about the art world, The Square.

It is a rather slight dramatic experience.

Though I was willing myself to enjoy this fourth film, about the heroine’s adventure with a younger man, the Bridget Jones series has frankly run out of steam.

This film could have done something more convincing with that mode of reverse-vertigo hinted at in its title: that fear and willed blindness about what looms over us. But if the movie helps to do something about climate change, such critical objections are unimportant.

This Joker has just one act in him: the first act. The film somehow manages to be desperately serious and very shallow.

None of this is represented in any compelling dramatic style, and the actors – all very talented and assured – have perhaps not had clear enough direction. It is a mood piece. Whose mood leads nowhere.

Irrational Man is a good idea, a sketch for a movie, but the movie itself is unrealised.

The plot’s twists and turns, which were manageable in a three-part TV drama, look contrived and unlikely in a feature film and Bullock has little to do but look self-consciously solemn and martyred for the entirety of it.

The second film adaptation of the phenomenally successful video game is a disappointment to rival the first.

It’s all just one monumental splatterfest, where the zombies’ army of the dead face off against people who aren’t very alive, and all basically without jokes.

It’s good to see Hamilton getting a robust role, although, sadly, she has to concede badass superiority to Davis. This sixth Terminator surely has to be the last. Yet the very nature of the Terminator story means that going round and round in existential circles comes with the territory.

Dario Argento’s return to directing after a 10-year absence has its moments of macabre and melodramatic invention.

Of course, Sorrentino’s way with a camera will always be intriguing and exhilarating to some degree. Yet Parthenope simply floats complacently across the screen, like a two-hour ad for some impossibly expensive cologne.

Comedy gothic isn't exactly novel, and frankly there is a sense here of a movie coasting along on Halloween hype-marketing, without providing as many laughs and ideas as it really could have done.

Even without Liam Neeson’s bizarre promotional “rape revenge” anecdote, this violent movie would leave a weird taste in the mouth, lumbered as it is with odd sub-Coen, sub-Tarantino stylings.

The film has an impeccable technical finish, but it is insipid, contrived, solemn, and ever so slightly preposterous.

You'll need to have a very sweet tooth for this, and it makes light of those difficult sexual politics that Mad Men attacked with such fierce satire.

Robert Pattinson has to do an awful lot of hollow-eyed smouldering in this hammily enunciated French period drama, taken from the 1885 novel by Guy de Maupassant.

The complete jigsaw doesn’t fit together, hampered by plot implausibilities and unrealities.

A few laughs.

It's a thriller in which the twists become so absurd that it becomes a kind of caper, but without the humour.

Sirāt is a path to nowhere, an improvised spectacle in the Sahara; it is very impressive in the opening 10 minutes but valueless as it proceeds, and a pointless mirage of unearned emotion.

It's evasive and feeble; Julia Roberts is not a properly funny or satisfying villain, and yet neither is she the interestingly flawed, even sympathetic figure she might have been if the film had kept the all-important question she asks the mirror.

Sweeney has already shown what a superb and detailed performer she is in the FBI interrogation movie Reality, but this is far inferior: a stodgy, lifeless piece of work.

For the first half-hour it's got a full-on horrible energy, but there isn't enough humour for it to qualify as comedy, and not enough reality or plausible characterisation to justify calling it any sort of procedural noir.

Day’s rendition is heartfelt. But the direction and storytelling are laborious, without the panache and incorrectness of earlier Daniels movies such as Precious (2008) and The Paperboy (2012). A cloud of solemnity and reverence hangs over it, briefly dispelled by the music itself.

There is something absolutely robotic about Trolls World Tour: the voices, the design, the dialogue, the plot progressions, the break-up-make-up crisis between Poppy and Branch, everything. It’s chillingly efficient, like a driverless car going round in circles.

It’s a fascinating story but the resulting film insists on a kooky relatability that isn’t really there. A misfire.

The happy ending redemption narrative is not entirely earned.

It’s amiable, but the real action thrills and the chemistry between the leads isn’t there.

It is a beautifully shot, and very nicely acted beginning to something: but finally frustrating.

Perhaps Schrader will indeed defiantly return to his accustomed theme for his next film – and this brilliant, restless director might well make it work. Sadly, this one doesn’t.

It’s all socked over with great and gruesome conviction, but there isn’t the same character-related interest as the TV series could generate.

It is a good idea and there are good moments in the film, especially at the very beginning when Anna and Aleks have a bizarre encounter with the old woman herself, Rita Concannon, strikingly played by Olwen Fouéré. But then things begin to slide. There are however some resonant ideas here.

Director Ali Abbasi has given us fascinating monsters in the past with Holy Spider and Border but the monstrosity here is almost sentimental, a cartoon Xeroxed from many other satirical Trump takes and knowing prophetic echoes of his political future. It’s basically a far less original picture.

It is mainly a rather silly high-concept dramedy intercut with maudlin moments, and the sentimental keynote inevitably dominates by the end.

It’s a sonorously well-meaning film that bathes everything in the bland, buttery sunlight that Disney always produces and in which the human performances are as opaque as the ones given by the horses

It’s a very forthright performance from Dern, but Stewart is simply too opaque and subdued in the role of Knoop. The film itself pulls its punches, unwilling to satirise either her or the egregious Albert too fiercely; it is inhibited about really attacking the vanity of the situation.

It’s a time-honoured and perfectly enjoyable setup, and the first act, when the new reality dawns on clueless Bradley, is watchable. But the plot twists are derivative and the action then becomes dependent on weird stabs of grisliness that are not convincing or consistent with the characterisation.

Special Correspondents shows that Gervais has a plausible Hollywood career, but there’s a baffling lack of real laughs and performance chemistry between the leads, and very little of the acid characterisation and cynical discomfort which is vital to his screen presence.

There are some lively things about Mortal Engines, and the performances are game enough. Yet in all its effortful steampunkiness, Mortal Engines isn’t a film which is particularly exciting or funny, and the idea of the “traction city” is a stylistic and visual design tic that you just have to take or leave.

Bizarre, colossally self-indulgent ... This one feels as if Kechiche has simply given us three-and-a-half hours of his unused beach and nightclub footage from the first film.

Brandon Cronenberg's movie is made with some technical skill and focus, but it is agonisingly self-regarding and tiresome.

Bland, incurious and passionless, this documentary about the great tenor Luciano Pavarotti is like a promotional video licensed by a team of copyright lawyers – and about as challenging as a Three Tenors gig at Wembley stadium.

There are some nice moments and sweet showtunes, but Encanto feels like it is aspiring to exactly that sort of bland frictionless perfection that the film itselfis solemnly preaching against, with a contrived storyline which wants to have its metaphorical cake and eat it.

The spell does not get cast.

It is a film with all the depth of a fridge magnet.

With In The Basement, [Seidl] seems to falling back on the same old shocks. The freakiness is losing its capacity to disturb.

There are some almost-laughs here and there, but please tell me that we aren’t in for The Hitman’s Mother-In-Law’s Agent’s Bodyguard in 2023.

The Electric State is a fundamentally unsatisfying and muddled film, even leaving aside the deja-vu.

This elaborately contrived story feels as if it has been cobbled together from a dozen others, and it never escapes cliche.

The Sixth Sense director’s apocalyptic mystery horror is short on both mystery and horror and the ambiguous finale is deeply ridiculous.

This plumply preposterous film from director Mika Kaurismäki (brother of Aki) is an unconvincing and solemn account of the controversially mannish Queen Kristina and her secret sapphic yearnings in 17th-century Sweden.

Nicholas McCarthy's The Pact is a horror film developed from a short, and unfortunately it splits apart while being stretched out to feature length.

Writer-director Isabel Coixet has taken a real-life love story from 20th-century LGBT Spanish history and turned it into something bafflingly passionless, joyless and excessively tasteful, an anti-alchemy assisted by stately monochrome photography that makes every frame look like a postcard from an art shop.

Despite the film’s historical interest, it plays like a Carry On film without the gags, and the way it is shot makes it look like a coffee commercial.

Three big names doing a professional job … but the target isn’t found.

Good intentions are all but submerged in nonsense.

It's a bit of a flavourless CGI-fest, without the character and comedy of the Arnie version, and it never really gets to grips with the idea of "reality" as a slippery, malleable concept.

Like so many of Shyamalan’s adventures, Glass starts strongly and fizzles, a dramatic droop which is initially camouflaged by the escalating grandiosity of visual rhetoric, something febrile and high-concept that is visionary in everything except having vision.

Some guilty pleasure thrills are what’s on offer but they are frankly annulled by Liam Neeson’s autopilot dullness, a driverless car of a performance from an actor we know to be capable of much more.

Only the robust presence of Russell Crowe – and what might conceivably be a sly visual joke about exiled Russian plutocrat Mikhail Khodorkovsky – make this generic slice of superhero action worth watching.

It's made with gusto, but there's little dramatic interest for non-enthusiasts.

There’s bits and pieces of entertaining stuff here, a few sharp lines and a gonzo final shootout, but the overall tone of cliche is a bit wearing, correctly signalled in the title, which appears to misremember the phrase “saints and scholars”.

The comic material really isn't there, and the plot transitions feel forced and uncomfortable.

This is a glossy piece of Netflix content, but it relies very heavily on NBA fan buy-in for the drama fully to work; there is a continuous series of recognition jolts provided by the stars and legends playing themselves.

There are watchable moments, undoubtedly, and it is extraordinary to watch Houston’s sensational performance at the 1991 Super Bowl, singing The Star Spangled Banner with such passion: perhaps the greatest moment of her professional life. Her enigma remains unsolved.

Epically tiresome. ... What is exasperating about the film is its reluctance to dramatise the teaching: to show the young people themselves simply getting better at acting.

It doesn’t, in fact, quite fall into place.

The movie has a high gloss and sheen, like something by Nancy Meyers, which creates a diverting disconnect, yet it flinches from the recognisable, tragicomic reality of a bad marriage.

For me it never gets to grips with the real issue for Pornhub, OnlyFans or indeed Facebook: are these sites publishers or platforms? If they derive profit from the content they host, then should they be responsible for it, or not?

Throughout Vikander maintains a kind of serene evenness of manner. Blandness is Lara’s theme.

The movie is fundamentally silly, with tiringly shallow characterisation and broad streaks of crime-drama intrigue, which only underline the fact that not a single word of it is really believable.

There is visual interest here, but for me the drama isn’t sustained.

This is a film that is trying very hard to be liked, while at the same time complacently assuming its likeability is beyond question.

This tricksy, exasperating and strangely unenlightening film, with its pointless fictional narrator played by Alan Cumming, purports to tell the story of Orson Welles’s mysterious “lost” masterpiece, The Other Side of the Wind. But in jokily trying to imitate the jabbering chaos of this film’s production history, it fails to give a clear, informative account.

It looks like an interesting experiment, but there is something fundamentally inert here.

The scene with a jetski on the edge of a waterfall deserves points, but this feels disposable: the Chinese New Year is earnestly referenced as part of the film’s strident and faintly humourless patriotism.

This has been a regular payday for Beckinsale and she certainly gives it her all, but you have to wonder why she bothers, certainly now that we know what she can do with more interesting material.

In plot terms there is something unsubtle, unconvincing and even absurd in where it’s all heading.

The tropes are a bit familiar.

We’re always waiting for something important or interesting to happen, but it never really does.

Brave it might be, but there’s nothing all that “new” about the world revealed in this latest tired and uninspired dollop of content from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Director Will Sharpe is a potent talent whose early movies Black Pond and The Darkest Universe I loved – but this is a strained film, overwhelmed with self-consciousness at its own unearned period-biopic prestige.

The sheer pointlessness of everything that happens subtracts the oxygen and even Fanning’s imperishable star quality can’t save it.

Branagh brings something spirited and good-humoured to the role of Poirot, but the film’s attempt to create some romantic stirrings to go with the activities of those little grey cells is not very convincing.

Baldwin has some brilliant moments as he icily dismisses Monica's posturing: his final closeup – heavy-lidded, undeceived – is fascinating and rather chilling.

It is a tense, claustrophobic nightmare, played with sincerity and force, particularly by Adam Driver. But a strident orchestral score keeps intruding, dark chords telling us how scared we ought to be, and it is as if Costanzo is not content with an ultra-real relationship drama, and wants his film to be some kind of heavy-handed horror-thriller too.

This movie is content with congratulating itself for being on the right side of history, with little attention paid to questions unanswered and history unresolved.

Despite all those fierce confrontations and tribal divisions, exhaustively rehearsed and mythologised, nobody's really a bad guy and nothing's really at stake.

The transformation scenes are passable – including time-honoured fingernail- detachment moments – but far inferior to comparable scenes devised long ago by John Landis or David Cronenberg. Those estimable performers Garner and Abbott look exposed by a film project that simply feels rushed and undeveloped.

As the couple try to rekindle the bedroom flame the note of cutesy comedy kicks in and the movie gets phonier and phonier.

No amount of spooky jump-scares can save Kenneth Branagh’s latest Christie adaptation, which wastes its atmospheric setting and stellar cast.