Robbie Collin

Connoisseurs of the accidentally ludicrous will find much to laugh at here.... But scares and intrigue are both in miserably short supply.

Mawkishness, gay panic, and lazy jokes make Vince Vaughn's workplace comedy considerably less fun than work itself.

In place of Bay’s provocative humour and unparalleled eye for destructive spectacle are brain-numbing quantities of strong language, action scenes that look as if they were edited with a knife and fork, and a blasé attitude towards violence that renders every shootout pointless, since the bad guys are invariably mown down in seconds while the heroes saunter off with barely a scratch.

This is a film in which one of the more emotionally detailed performances is given by a product-placement Audi.

This first half of Snyder’s diptych (the second is due in the spring) is more of a loosely doodled mood board than a functioning film – a series of pulpy tableaux that mostly sound fun in isolation, but become numbingly dull when run side by side.

It has all the charm and personality of a dented traffic cone and features perhaps the single most tin-eared screenplay – in which Papa Smurf is kidnapped by the villainous wizard Gargamel, and Smurfette leads a globe-trotting mission to free him – that I have ever encountered in my two decades as a critic.

While the del Toro Hellboys were postmodern Frankenstein fables, shining with pathos, fun and fairy-tale allure, this unsolicited reboot is ugly, obnoxious and yowlingly witless, with nothing to say for itself that doesn’t start with the letter F.

It’s not bad so much as lightly feeble – and Pegg acquits himself respectably in a lead role that, for a change, chimes well to his best comic persona: the beta male under alpha pressure.

The whole thing is so roaringly absurd, and delivered with such hands-clasped sincerity, that the only rational response is to laugh the house down.

It is three parts The Mighty Boosh to two parts The Goon Show, which, when mixed with the quite astonishing lack of wit and finesse seen here, makes for pure cinematic strychnine.

The end product is all but unfollowable, thanks either to a screenplay that was incoherent to begin with, or an edit so slicingly brutal that almost every trace of the plot’s connective tissue was chopped out.

Seventh Son would hardly be the first film to use "strong female characters" as a means of waving its misogyny under the radar, but it’s seldom carried off as depressingly as this.

How can it be possible that nine years have passed since the previous instalment, yet every facet of this one feels so woefully first-draft? Expend4bles: wh4t a lo4d of cr4p.

What fun it is to watch a film this expensive and not be able to quite work out where it’s going – or even if it might just stay put for a bit, and soak up the dustily poetic death-of-the-American century vibe.

If we’re reaching for something, anything nice to say here – and we absolutely are – Theron’s black trouser suit and trench coat is a strong look.

This second Fisherman’s Friends is not without its moments, but the aftertaste calls for a strong menthol lozenge.

The film doesn’t look like the future, or the past’s idea of the future, or anything other than a venal cash grab.

In a golden period for both animation and children’s filmmaking, here is a head-splitting reminder of just how bad those two things can get.

What distinguishes the film from last year’s backpacking adventure, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, apart from its lobotomised worldview and charred, corroded soul, are Hector’s philosophical musings – “people who are afraid of death are afraid of life,” is one – that pop up on screen in a handwritten font whenever a lesson has been learnt.

Willis himself could not appear less enthusiastic in the role, and doesn’t phone in his performance here so much as clip it to a nearby pigeon and hope for the best. Yet perversely, his apparent lack of interest works rather well: McClane, after all, is now a grizzled back-number who has bumbled his way into a younger man’s action movie.

Often the film resorts to that unforgivable cheat move of having the supporting cast laugh at its leads’ antics on screen, in the hope of prompting us to do likewise. Instead I found myself curling over in such a paralysing cringe, my body had to be rolled out of the cinema afterwards like a dented bicycle wheel.

If Sandler can’t find it in himself to be verbally or physically entertaining on set, you start to wonder why he’s there in the first place, although his hollow stare in a number of scenes suggests he may be pondering the same thing.

A psychotically unfunny art-heist romp.

If you’re not staggered by the technique on display here – the stuff that sets Bay’s work miles above the Fast & Furiouses, X-Men: Apocalypses and Tom Cruise-chasing Mummies of this world – you’re not paying attention.

There’s an inevitable and perhaps unavoidable hitch. People in sitcoms generally don't change at all, while people in films can rarely afford not to – and a movie-sized plot, with its multiple emotional crests and dips, isn’t the kind of environment these characters were built to thrive in.

The film is almost all build-up, though any mounting sense of excitement is dispelled by the monotonously downbeat tone and the cast’s conspicuous lack of chemistry. Nobody looks like they’re having fun, and the gloom is infectious.

All in all, it’s a new low in a mini-franchise comprised almost entirely of new lows: Venom, Morbius, and now this.

The irresistible comic elegance of the premise – a remarried widower is tormented by the ghost of his first wife – is lost in a mass of pointless embellishments and tinkerings.

Each individual moment in the film barely seems to be on speaking terms with the rest.

No child deserves to be subjected to this kind of blaringly witless branding bombardment; as for adults, I felt like I was being beaten around the head with the Argos catalogue.

There is something utterly perplexing about this British comedy, in which three middle-aged women go on an Interrailing trip with the daughter of a recently departed friend: it’s as if the cast and crew were planning to make a musical, then got to the set and decided they couldn’t be bothered.

I still can’t quite believe it exists, though I may yet find myself shouting about it on the street.

You can sense what Dahan’s aiming at: by introducing the spectre of Hitch early on, he lays out Grace’s existence as a kind of lived-in Hitchcock thriller... But the acting is so heightened, and the script so thoroughly awful, that Dahan’s idea – his big and seemingly only one – can’t begin to stick.

Geostorm’s disasters are just barrages of drab, anonymous digi-porridge, with a very occasional unhinged flourish thrown in, such as a stadium that’s struck by lightning and immediately explodes.

So, what happens in Grown Ups 2? Almost absolutely nothing.

After watching Peter Farrelly’s Movie 43, I was immediately overcome with a sudden rush of emotion: not amusement, anger or even mild irritation, but a profound and faintly tragic sense of pity.

The whole thing is stupefyingly unfunny and un-tense, and doesn’t end so much as just give up and grind to a halt.

It’s not that the film is particularly loathsome, or that Blart is an overweeningly horrible character. What rankles is that he’s barely anything at all; a stereotype of a stereotype; a half-remembered punchline; a stomach with a moustache and wheels. As you watch the film, it’s already forgotten.

The film makes no attempt to grapple with the American school shooting as a nihilistic cultural phenomenon.

As dismal to contemplate as it is persistently horrendous to even look at, there aren’t enough Patrick Stewart-voiced emojis in the world to express what an ugly, artless exercise this is.

Disasters: well, they said it. The new film from Dennis Dugan is a frighteningly inept stab at a romantic comedy in the Nancy Meyers style.

Nothing here looks like a genuine interaction between real human beings: Spacey may be the first actor to give a comedic performance in which his own smile looks like it had to be green-screened in at a later date.

In short, it’s a bum trip and then some. Kechiche has always been an admirer of the female posterior, but here he shifts styles into what could be called gluteus maximalism, filling the screen with frantically gyrating hindquarters for literal hours on end.

There may well be a worse film released this year than this unwatchable British black comedy, although it sets a terrifyingly low benchmark.

The film bounces along predictably but charmingly, and parents whose cringe threshold is as low as my own will be relieved to find its sense of humour is gratifyingly un-tacky throughout.

The talking heads offer little but platitudes and clichés, while the endless racing footage is dry in the extreme. Here is a life not sugar-coated by cinema so much as rolled in powdered alum.

This quietly courageous debut feature from Anastasia Tsang, which had its world premiere at this year’s Tokyo Film Festival, is an elegy for that lost Hong Kong – and suggests that in certain corners of the city, its old spirit still fizzes and glows.

Ken Loach-style didactic social realism is all well and good, but Loan Ranger looks as if it was shot on a block of processed cheese and written with a bucket and mop.

It is like watching British cinema undergo a deathbed hallucination.