Peter Bradshaw

There are some nice images of the teeming penguin population, and great fun to be had witnessing the love life, and indeed sex life, of penguins. It does have to be said, though, there is a fair bit of Disneyfication going on.

It's rammed with cliches and silliness and conforms to a lot of stereotypes, the most suspect being the obligatory scene in Ibiza whose only purpose is to show loads of young women with no tops on.

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?

It's competently made, but pointless.

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.

Poor Princess Diana. I hesitate to use the term "car crash cinema". But the awful truth is that, 16 years after that terrible day in 1997, she has died another awful death.

It can be a bit soppy, sometimes resembling Sunday-night TV comfort food, but this big-hearted picture wins you over, and there are certainly some marvellous panoramic shots of the Highlands.

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 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.

An ingenious idea for a suspense thriller – or maybe even an old-fashioned, "Wait Until Dark"-style stage play – turns out instead to be the pretext for a crass, over-long and tiresome splatter nightmare.

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.

It’s ingenious and watchable stuff, with cheeky twists, although the final escalation to full-on action mayhem is maybe a step too far towards pure absurdity. The film is also a bit lenient on AI: “Human or AI – we all make mistakes.” Uh … yeah. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Raven and Judge Maddox revive their human-digital chemistry for a sequel.

Romcom fans deserve something with more heart.

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.

There are always some laughs to be had here, and Ben Stiller’s couture legend now has an endearingly muppety look.

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

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

It’s a deafening misfire, like the most unbearable, unwatchable daytime TV soap filled with the most awful self-conscious hamminess, parodic emoting and pointless shouting-at-each-other acting.

It’s a ragbag of action scenes which needed to be bandaged more tightly.

This could have been a good premise, but the basic idea of the pandemic and bubbling up itself now feels spurious and dated, and there just aren’t enough funny lines to carry this film through its punishing 126-minute running time.

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

There is a spectacular scene in which someone drives a tank off a bridge, and JK Simmons gives the film some ballast as the guys’ scowling commanding officer, but the rest of the time this resembles a TV movie of egregious averageness.

It features laborious acting and directing, and a screenplay whose revelations are uninteresting, even were they not guessable long in advance.

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.

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.

A hammy and facile family drama in the TV-movie-of-the-week mode.

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

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.

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

It’s written to a machine-tooled formula, with two more episodes naturally planned to gouge cash out of the fanbase, and whatever interest this film has dies about five minutes before the closing credits.

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

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.

It’s warbling warbling warbling piffle.

It’s a strange, naive work, with something fundamentally misjudged about the drama, characterisation and casting.

This lavishly produced and costumed European co-production is handsomely cast – but the range of talent here feels wasted on what is a fundamentally dated and stereotypical drama, whose Bohemian passion is diluted.

This bloated, featureless, CGI-heavy movie is not so much stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, as stealing from Guy Ritchie, Batman, Two-Face and a few others – and not giving back all that much to the audience.

Just occasionally, the story accelerates to a canter,and Gilbey works hard to deliver some bangs for your buck. But it soon collapses into cliches. "Plastic" just about covers it.

The Kindness of Strangers is one of those terrible ideas for a film: ensemble dramas that are superficially attractive because of all the big names shoehorned into the cast-list.

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.

This very uninteresting and uninspired story plods along for an hour and a half, though there are some almost-interesting surreal scenes when our heroes find themselves in weird alt-universe dimensions.

It couldn’t be more boring than this. It seems counterintuitive to say it, but there is something pretty soulless about this new Hellboy franchise.

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.

Every implausible scene, every unconvincing character, every contrived dollop of symbolism, every toe-curlingly misjudged and unearned emotional climax seems as if it has been concocted in some secret bio-warfare lab for assaulting your mind with pure, toxic nonsense.

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.

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.

A huge amount of talent here, including Joanna Lumley and Eddie Izzard. Sadly it goes nowhere.

Images and characters bounce around like shapes on a screensaver and only McDonnell and Gad’s performances have any fizz. This is a YA-franchise by numbers.

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

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

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.

This is a Rocky Horror Picture Show of cluelessness and misjudged Judy Garlandification. I can imagine masochists getting together for Diana: The Musical parties, just to sing the most nightmarish lines along with the cast. The rest of us will need a long lie down.

There is some surreal fun at the beginning as everything collapses.... But then it’s the same thing over again.

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

This is a tear-jerker that does not shrink from using plangent piano chords on the soundtrack to tell you when to feel sad, but it also has something interesting to say about intergenerational wealth.

It’s a lumberingly dated kind of spy thriller, convoluted without ever being intriguing – and an insufficient number of bangs for your buck.

The entertainingly frazzled presence of Nicolas Cage provides a reason to pay some attention – but not much – to this otherwise uninspired and by-the-numbers martial-arts action-sci-fi crossover.

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.

Songbird is an acceptably watchable thriller that’s more notable for what it achieves technically than anything else. For many, the topical gimmick will prove irresistible but for others, it will be repellent, making the decision to avoid an expensive, anti-escapist rental all too easy. Either way, it’s headed to the history books.

There are some nice touches, but it unwinds into dullness and silliness and the hi-tech conceit is basically abandoned in favour of low-tech analogue violence and punch-ups.

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.

Despite the heavyweight cast, the film’s production values are those of a kids’ TV show that might go out on a weekday afternoon.

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.

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

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.

Maybe it’s the last great mainstream exploitation picture, a film which owns and flaunts its crassness; a bi-curious catfight version of All About Eve or Pretty Woman.

It’s low-key and modestly budgeted, but perfectly well made, and Watts maintains a cool and steady presence.

The whole thing is shot and lit in that dull flat way that is mandatory for Hollywood family comedies, and the script is mainly dull, though I concede Key has some nice lines as he gets cross with Brynn’s sarcastic attitude.

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.

It’s a serviceable, watchable thriller, with very gruesome images.

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 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.

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

Some laughs – and some unintentional eeeuuuwwws.

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.

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.

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

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.

This film is one long biopsy of pure horror: the tumours of sentimentality and bad acting metastasise everywhere, and Bernal, in particular, is horrendously bad.

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.

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.

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

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's all a bit tame, predictable and muted; the inevitable revelation of German decency seems contrived and there's an outrageous plot cop-out towards the end. It's a reminder of how David Lean exploited this kind of drama with more potency in "The Bridge on the River Kwai."

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.

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.

Antiporno has a kind of energy, but is also shallow and frantic.

An opaque, but beautifully composed film.

It’s a gentle, charming study of loneliness.

There are some riveting revelations here.

The best of this is Yorke’s music, which is fierce and propulsive. But, as visual spectacle, there is a strong so-what? factor.

There’s a puppyish charm here.

It is opaque, sometimes eccentrically comic, but intriguing.

A very absorbing and valuable documentary about the creation of this artwork, which relates to Ai’s honourable record of using art as memorialist-activism.

It’s a movie whose subtle thoughts are in danger of being upstaged by a potent and erotic love story that surfaces and then disappears, leaving you uncertain whether finally to be more interested in that romance or the ruminations it has interrupted – or enlivened.

Here is a strange, opaque but interesting piece from Vietnamese film-maker Minh Quý Truong: an ethno-fictional essay movie.

The twin storylines should undermine the film’s pace and focus. They don’t. There are some impressively spectacular shootouts in the streets and a Bourne-level rooftop chase, together with some very crunchy close-quarters martial arts.

Apart from anything else, it’s a spectacular action movie that begins with a shot that had me gasping: a Hong Kong protester on a rooftop is cornered by police and, in an attempt to escape, he tries climbing down the unstable scaffolding on the front of the building, with other protesters at street level screaming their alarm. The result is heartstopping.

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.

It’s a dry and somewhat lifeless tableau.

This is engaging, intelligent film-making and Navas’s performers relax into the space that she creates for them.

The keynotes are anger, confusion and despair, and to some degree the film could have been opaque or contrived but its malaise ultimately finds expression in a truly horrible #MeToo moment, one of the most brutally plausible and unsettling I have seen in any film recently.

There’s a fair bit of posturing and radical chic happening in this movie and it’s sometimes a little glib. But the droll double-act chemistry between Paterson and Swinton is unexpectedly great, especially considering the enigmatically childlike and lovably humourless demeanour that Swinton often projects.

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.

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

Maybe the Indian influence on the Beatles’ music didn’t last, but India’s own prestige, its soft power in the west, was immeasurably enhanced.

Ameen has perfectly plausibly brought off a high-gloss mainstream picture with a big heart and a very nice supporting cast, including Stephen Dillane as Shirley’s new boyfriend. For Ameen, it’s another step on the way to Hollywood stardom.

This is confident, distinctive work.

Bollaers works well with co-star Benoît Magimel and together they do their best to raise the standard of this well-meaning but basically unsatisfying work.

A well-meaning but hammy and perfunctorily sentimental heartwarmer in the familiar Britfilm style.

This engrossing film is a time capsule of London itself – the faces not so very different from those you would see in the 40s or 50s.

Letts is a brilliant entrepreneur, an inter-disciplinary artist and eloquent speaker about what life was like in the punk era, and despite his (correct) refusal to see things in these tiresomely nostalgist or sentimental terms, there is a pang in recognising the spark of that time.

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.

It’s another film to leave you sighing over New York’s lost 70s heyday of gritty reality and creativity and danger.

The performance styles of Behrens and Hoya are quite different – Hoya is more opaque – but this is a pointed, candid drama.

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

The nation of Ireland is vastly different now, but O’Shea shows this change was not inevitable, but the effect of courageous dissidents.

Depardieu brings his natural charisma and watchful presence to the role, and he can bring off Maigret’s air of worldly, tolerant bemusement and distaste at the transparently guilty people he comes across.

An entirely absorbing, coolly low-key movie.

With natural sympathy and warmth, film-maker Carol Morley has created this likable, generous, imaginative response to the work of the neglected English artist Audrey Amiss.

The fly-on-the-wall camera has had privileged, intimate access, there’s no doubt about it. But it still always looks like a film which is happy to go so far and no further. Perhaps some more detailed, critical analysis of the music itself would also have been welcome.

Perhaps Control will gain cult status – or inspire a remake. But Spacey’s eerily detached, jaded presence does not do much for his putative comeback.

This is stylish, energised new wave film-making.

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.

It’s a sombre, sober movie but made with impressive artistry.

It’s an entertaining and sympathetic movie, if a bit route one, and audiences might possibly feel that TV shows like Sex Education and Heartstopper go a bit further and with more contemporary nous. But nice performances from Anders and Small bolster this movie’s likability factor.

Though a little mannered, the film has intelligence and force.

It all could have been fun with a teaspoonful of humour, but everyone concerned behind the camera has calculated (perhaps correctly) that this would be inimical to its commercial success.

There’s plenty for nostalgists and completists to swoon over. . . . Such a pleasure.

This is a very impressive debut.

Perhaps there can be nothing totally new to say on film about Hitler and nazism, but Lang is interesting on the hidden disbelief and fear that existed among the leaders.

A documentary might have served this material better, or a fiction feature that doesn’t have a made-up character as the lead.

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.

The house is just there and the characters waft through it. Gray admirers might prefer Gray Matters, Marco Antonio Orsini’s documentary on the subject.

This forthright and watchable picture, with its terrific cast of veteran players such as Jack Warner, Thora Hird and the totemic Sam Kydd, is entirely happy in its own B-movie skin, with the “X” in “Xperiment” gleefully signalling its identity as a pulp shocker.

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

The 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in London which caused 72 deaths is now the subject of Olaide Sadiq’s heartwrenching and enraging documentary, digging at the causes and movingly interviewing survivors and their families, whose testimony is all but unbearable.

A likable, admirably intentioned if slightly more predictable entertainment, in which the good guys and the bad guys are more obvious.

You have to make friends with the jauntiness and zaniness of this film and to forgive its sometimes rather laborious quality, and Lara’s deadpan drollery is always watchable.

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

This cynically Christmassy movie is leaden, unconvincingly acted and about as welcome as a dead rat in the eggnog.

Opera director Damiano Michieletto makes his underpowered cinema debut here, and the whole film, with its lifeless staging, uninteresting performances and laughably naive ending can only be described as the school of Salieri.

Ramblers are justified in keeping the pressure up and the take-home message is: opening up the glories of the countryside and nature itself to everyone is a universal good.