Robbie Collin

The Gentlemen is a valiant, often raucous bid to drag the tried-and-true old Ritchie formula into the present, and while the result feels like he got about as far as 2005 – with lip-service acknowledgements of grime music and YouTube – for the purposes of this film, it’s close enough.

The gonzo-Wagnerian backstory the franchise subsequently built up hasn’t been sufficiently pruned – and with so many characters to juggle, the story feels less like a coherent chain of events than a bundle of obligatory subplots.

King’s fluid direction of her four actors means the snug setting never feels dramatically constricting, while their jostling performance styles make each combination of voices feels like its own distinct treat.

When it finally gets going, it becomes gloweringly compelling, shored up by its strong supporting players (Paddy Considine, Vincent Cassel and Charles Dance also pop up), handsome photography and sheer, clanking momentum.

Endless Poetry may not quite live up to its interminable billing, but there’s certainly lots of it, and a little goes a long way indeed. But a long way is the distance Jodorowsky wants to take you.

Blue might be the warmest colour elsewhere, but here it’s just a bit tepid.

There is a special cupboard in Purgatory for films that are blissfully unaware of what they’re actually about, and a place is reserved on its shelves for Love Sarah.

This isn’t just lazy, it’s borderline nonsensical. Resurgence inflates the scale of the alien threat to such a preposterous degree – the mothership takes up roughly an eighth of the Earth’s total surface – that the queues of honking traffic and rooftop helicopter rescues we’re supposed to invest in can’t help but feel like microscopic trifles.

Kung Fu Panda’s knee joints these days are creaking like a haunted flight of stairs.

Perhaps this meeting of suspicious minds really was an unsung crux of modern American history, but Elvis & Nixon feels like a trifle about a trifle.

Casablanca Beats just about gets by on restless teenage energy and its bustle of winning young faces. But it’s a new arrangement of a very familiar old song.

Telling an audience this stuff is important is one thing: making them actually feel that it is is the magical part, and Grindelwald bungles the trick.

Rather than doing anything novel or surprising with the basic spies-gone-rogue template, The 355 just repackages it in girl-power wrapping: it’s the film equivalent of a high-fructose, corn-syrup-based fizzy drink being passed off as chic in taller, slimmer cans.

This script has not exactly been laboured over into the wee hours, and an audience used to Disney and Pixar will rightly expect better than this, whether they’re under 10 or not.

The one thing there’s no accounting for in The Accountant is taste.

Every frame is so obviously green-screened, airbrushed and otherwise climate-controlled that it unfolds without a squeak of peril – the stakes couldn’t have felt lower if an extra-life counter were sitting in the corner of the screen. As for the script, you can almost hear the words NEEDS TO BE FUNNIER written in capital letters in the margins at least once per scene.

Almost nothing seems to click.

In the end, I was nagged by a question posed by Polley’s sister Joanna in the film’s opening minutes. “I guess I have this instinctive reaction: who cares about our ----ing family?” The answer, of course, is Polley herself, who smilingly tells us that a story like hers can never truly be tied down, even as she screws every last piece into place.

Like the earlier Divergent films, Allegiant is studded with enticing science-fiction ideas, but it keeps such a poker-straight face while presenting them, you often can’t help but crack up.

Disney's centenary animation feels like an attempt, after a wobbly decade, to return the brand to first principles – but it doesn't come off.

It feels less like a real Dante film than a dashed-off counterfeit.

Far too much of it still feels scaled to the stage. Comic material that in a theatre might have simply played as broad comes across as forehead-smashingly crass, while the dramatic shorthand in the grown-up scenes turns that whole section of the story into a conveyor belt of clichés.

But nothing here or in the previous instalment will make you give the slightest fig who wins. Yes, the world of Rebel Moon is richly imagined, even if its origins as an aborted Star Wars project still remain far too obvious. In place of storytelling, though, it’s built on unwieldy lore dumps: we’re given hundreds of details about this galaxy far far away, but no reasons to care about any of them.

Art was a labour of love for Maud Lewis: that much Lewis’s film makes clear. But by zeroing in on both the love and labour of it, the art itself – and the point of Maud’s life story, by extension – gets exasperatingly short shrift.

At least Watts’s bright-eyed charisma and obvious commitment passes the time – while director Phillip Noyce, who also had Angelina Jolie running for her life in 2010’s Salt, does his best to keep things visually fresh.

Your Place or Mine is thoroughly mild, considerate and well-behaved. But where’s the fun in that?

The result is an empty film about emptiness, and therefore doubly depressing.

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.

You can’t help but wonder if some important people in boardrooms watched the last two Expendables films and, between sips of mineral water, diligently noted all the ways in which the third might be made slicker and more polished, without realising the franchise’s doughy unslickness was the wellspring of its charm.

Assassin’s Creed is leaps and bounds ahead of kitchen-sink-hurling flapdoodle like X-Men Apocalypse – it’s only the second-worst Fassbender star vehicle of 2016 – but it never allows him a sober moment, as that film did in a hushed Polish forest, where his talent, as opposed to his biceps, gets a stern workout.

The much-vaunted fresh perspective on a notorious figure turns out to have been so much sweet talk.

It’s the opposite of what a Borat film should feel like: business as usual.

Too hectic to be scary, and with a plot that’s regularly bogged down in optimistic franchise-building spadework, The House with a Clock in Its Walls never quite grasps what made its inspirations tick.

I’m So Excited! is vertiginously disappointing in the way only bad films from great filmmakers can be.

Your ass is constantly braced in readiness and hope, but it remains un-kicked.

It’s a project driven by ideas but made for a mass-market audience, which are always welcome in principle. The problem here is the good ideas are all extremely familiar, and the handful of new ones aren’t much to write home about.

While Swinton and Elba make smooth work of the fairy-tale-toned dialogue, they simply lack the chemistry to make their tryst convince as romance. And the fantasy flashbacks too often sink into chintz.

The latest Marvel title is just dollop upon dollop of dourness, leaving its stars no space to show us what they might bring to the franchise.

Holiff assembled this memoir from his father’s papers and audio diary, although the portrait of Cash that emerges is that of a pill-popping religious nut, and there is next to no insight into his music or creative process.

It’s mostly handsomely shot, with painterly vistas of the French countryside and lots of dazzling Versailles interiors. But the central relationship never convinces – it all just feels like a performance, put on for the benefit of the courtiers and by extension, us.

Time and again, the film corrals their characters into situations it lacks the emotional delicacy to get them through unscathed – not least a weirdly frenzied sex scene which begins with so much off-screen grunting and puffing I assumed it must be the set-up to a joke, and the camera was about to pan across to the pair shifting furniture.

So much of the film’s (notably slight) running time is squandered on filler – a subplot involving bickering henchmen consumes around a third of the film – that it’s never able to hit its grindhouse stride.

As a masterclass in having as little fun as possible with an irresistible premise, JT LeRoy is a hard act to beat.

Here and elsewhere, you sense the film knows more than it’s prepared to share, which gives it the queasy sheen of a PR exercise.

What Halloween Kills lacks in ideas it partially makes up for in gruesomely authentic slasher texture. From cinematography to editing, casting to oozy prosthetic gore, Green and his crew have recreated the feel of the Carpenter original with an almost academic diligence, particularly in an extended 1970s-set opening flashback.

With Caine, Freeman and Arkin, you know what you’re going to get. In Going in Style, it’s all you get.

The result is a film with the depth and decorative value of an inspirational fridge magnet – yet there is a certain degree of fun to be had in hearing Costner monologuing about tapeworm and then picturing him in the voiceover booth, possibly with his head in his hands.

Blair Witch styles itself as a love-letter, but it’s pure transcription.

DisneyToon Studios have borrowed so much from Pixar here, and yet they seem to have learned almost nothing.

Dad’s Army bleakly suggests that even the best source material in the world can only take you so far.

Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado, the two-man writer-director team, are swinging at serious targets here... But their point soon wears itself out, and what remains is schlock with airs and tired black humour.

McCarthy keeps dragging the film away from thriller and procedural territory and back to this blossoming domestic setup – but while Damon and the kid share some cute scenes, it simply isn’t that interesting, and all the would-be colour (see: Virginie’s acting career) adds nothing but extraneous detail.

Perhaps the hope was that Marvel’s 26th film might rattle the franchise out of its comfort zone. But the franchise is nothing but comfort zone, which renders its latest entry an instant white elephant.

It’s not entirely without redeeming features. Margaret Qualley’s game lead turn would fit into the joint Coen canon on its own merits, and the final line (yes, I’m reaching, already) does land with a certain Billy Wilder-esque comic grace.

Unfortunately, its odd mix of hard-boiled noir and cod-metaphysical waffle comes together in a way that defies you to take any of it seriously.

The film staples together two snazzy-sounding ideas – an ecologically inclined disaster movie with dinosaurs, and, later, dinosaurs on the loose inside a stately home – without considering whether the end product’s sheer snarling hideousness might just prove an intelligence-insulting turn-off.

The awkward middle course charted by new director James Foley (Glengarry Glen Ross, House of Cards) and his cast is unsatisfying in terms of head, heart and, well, elsewhere. It’s an alleged 18-rated, adults-only filth-fest that behaves like a flustered PG.

The film’s determination to remain politically even-handed robs much of the drama of any sense of urgency or purpose.

What we get is a collection of moderately violent action set-pieces untroubled by humour or broader coherence.

The performances are great, the rise-to-fame story gripping, and the music and choreography are making my skin tingle. I can’t wait to see how they’re going to deal with the trickier stuff.” But then you do wait. And wait. And then the credits roll, and you’re left waiting still.

From the Land of the Moon is a story about how good it feels to feel very, very bad – and how a life lived in rapturous misery is somehow more valuable than mild domestic contentment. That might ring truer if Garcia wasn’t working in such a starchy register.

While there’s still (arguably) some fun to be had with this independent comedy’s double-entendre-friendly title, the laughs – such as they are – don’t extend a great deal further than that.

Children encountering the faux-ET format for the first time may enjoy it well enough, but signs of life, extra or otherwise, are low to nil.

It takes around three minutes for Chaos Walking to fully set out its premise, and around three seconds more for everyone watching to realise it’s not going to work.

Its fusion of maudlin social commentary and banana-slipping pratfalls is graceless in the extreme: picture an episode of Chucklevision directed by Ken Loach.

It feels entirely made by committee – the definition of house style, without a personal stamp in sight.

The trouble is, Rare Beasts lacks the razor wit, merciless candour and stylistic panache of Fleabag and I May Destroy You – not to mention Piper’s own Sky Atlantic series I Hate Suzie, made after Rare Beasts with the playwright Lucy Prebble, and broadcast last year.

Those in the market for domestic drama, sexual tension and humorous mishaps against a backdrop of sawing and sweeping would be advised to try any home renovation show over this.

This spooky theme-park spin-off has its moments, but the plot is creakier than the floorboards, and why is it over two hours long?

For all its innovativeness, Everyday has the rhythms and intrigue of a not-very-interesting family’s Christmas letters.

Watching del Toro’s film felt like playing with toys as big as skyscrapers, but everything about this successor feels trinket-sized.

Gleeson and Byrne actually make for an appealing double act, and their scenes together are fun enough to make you wish that Gluck had ditched the digital animals and made an all-human countryside screwball instead.

The film squanders both of its casts, reeling from one fumbled set-piece to the next. It seems to have been constructed in a stupor, and you watch in a daze of future past.

Like one of its animated 3D asides, the film jumps out at you, twiddles around and then folds itself away into nowhere. It’s all pop-up, no book.

Hopkins’ performance isn’t good, exactly, but it’s certainly interesting to watch, as the actor seems to swipe his lines of dialogue from the shelf in passing, as if playing a script version of Supermarket Sweep. Goode is restrained by comparison, but then the film does a lot of restraining on his behalf.

Amenábar is no stranger to psychologically vivid thrillers with ghostly overtones, but Regression feels depressingly like journeyman work.

The question of where Dominika’s true loyalties lie isn’t nearly as ambiguous as the film seems to think, while the question of the mole’s identity becomes a footling side concern as the film ties itself up in Lawrence and Edgerton’s is-it-for-real-or-isn’t-it flirtations.

So no, The King’s Man doesn’t take itself especially seriously – until it suddenly, jarringly does.

Anderson’s Pompeii doesn’t sweat the human stuff. His camera is mostly trained on the big picture: billowing smoke, tidal-waves, fireballs streaking through the sky. What’s happening to the people on the ground doesn’t matter, so long as we’re aware that 95 percent of them are being squashed or torched.

The film carries itself like a bright and mischievous character study in the style of Nicole Holofcener, but is ultimately just a dog weepie with airs.

The film’s slightly feeble and teenage ideas about what counts as transgressive quickly drain these outpourings of their capacity to shock.

It offers a selection of sweaty, string-vesty, bulgy-bare-armsy scenes from the life of the real-life submarine commander Salvatore Todaro, played here by Pierfranceso Favino. It isn’t dreadful.

It has a weird, half-finished vibe, with a lumpy, repetitive structure, a bizarre colour palette that resembles an exploding Tango Ice Blast machine, and too many scenes that wear on well beyond their natural usefulness.

Intertwining, Altman-esque social tapestries are all well and good, but the connections between characters should ideally run a little deeper than having them occasionally stroll past each other in the street.

Gibson wisecracks with a weary panache, and the tech credits are sharp: production designer Bernardo Trujillo and director of photography Benoît Debie make El Pueblito look almost as disreputable as their leading man’s pebbledashed phizog.

The film has so little to say about forbidden love, and gives its stars so little dramatic sinew to flex, that it already feels like a footnote in the genre.

The first Enola Holmes was colourful, spirited – and made for cinemas, though it was fast-tracked onto streaming during Covid. The sequel, however, has the silty pall of content: scenes often look dreary and move more drearily still; you’d swear in the fight scenes the actors are just taking it in turns to be hit. Elementary? Not really – just basic.

As an occasional source of broad and undemanding chuckles, the film doubtless serves its purpose. But the mystery itself unfolds with such plodding expediency that there’s little suspense to speak of.

What’s surprising about Minions is that it squanders these yellow oddballs’ new-found freedom.

Dramatic things keep happening in the love lives of its two central couples, yet handily for Gen-Z viewers who like their protagonists morally spotless, none is responsible for any of it. It sometimes feels as if you’re watching a couple of hours of incredibly bad luck.

Will it enrapture its target audience regardless? It should certainly keep them occupied for a couple of hours, though perhaps more with nodding recognition rather than delight.

Cherry might represent a drastic shift in scale, tone and subject matter for its directors and leading man alike, but there’s a blockbuster-sized gap where its point should be.

As things go on, Cross’s plot doesn’t so much thicken as coagulate into nonsense. Serkis’s evil plans don’t always make much sense, even when factoring in the whole murderous psychopath thing, while the grislier imagery is often too poseur-ish to unnerve.

The picture is slight to the point of translucence.

It’s less an adaptation than a recapitulation.

It’s the kind of format that works as long as the characters aren’t all completely unbearable – which is, alas, not the case here.

The conceit of a film as a warning from the future is a promising one, but 2073 feels more like political signalling for the present.

Is Mother Mary a comment on modern stardom? Or the study of an intense, broken relationship? Or is it just an excuse for two hours of sculptural close-ups and artfully creepy tableaux? As you watch, you find yourself continually grabbing at meaning but, like a ghost, your fingers slip straight through.

Neither clever nor stupid enough to work.

The placid, open-ended charm of its video game source material is nowhere to be found in this grindingly generic brand extension.

Historical epics are rarely light on their feet, but The King sets new standards in the field of galumphing: the film moves like a rhinoceros through porridge.

The whole thing unspools at such an unremittingly earnest pitch that it leaves you groping under your seat for a ventilator.

But the only sense of wonder the film instils is this: if we have to wait so long between movie musicals, who on earth thought it would be a good idea to wait for this one?

There’s little chemistry and less comic frisson, thanks in part to the weird seams of pettiness and condescension running through the script.

The Hunger Games prequel plunges us back into the futuristic empire of Panem – but fails to live up to the first films of the franchise.

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

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.

It bombards you with overwritten monologues and try-hard music cues in an attempt to drown out its dramatic shortcomings.

Smith makes Nicky too obviously insincere, with a grating, gloomy edge – which means he never suckers you in, and the fun dries up before it ever starts.

The previous X-Men film, First Class, was secure enough in its own skin to embrace its comic side. Mangold’s picture affects a pubescent snarl instead: that’s the difference between comic and daft.

It all feels grindingly perfunctory – gloopy with jargon and lore, and with no concessions made to newcomers, the film feels less like a worthwhile film in its own right than an invitation to existing fans to buy a ticket, just to see how things turned out.

One hopes the golden age isn’t quite over yet, although as Moxie galumphs from one glib, soulless scene to the next, it’s hard not to fear the worst.

There’s an unmistakeable timidity to director Leigh Janiak and Phil Graziadei’s screenplay: it feels odd to watch an 18-rated horror that feels as if it’s going out of its way not to offend.

There’s a leaden-footedness to the direction, too. Where Burton’s camera lurched and crashed, Williams’s has a habit of hanging back sheepishly, fluffing visual gags and sapping scenes of the unhinged energy they need.

No major blockbuster in years has been this incoherently structured, this seemingly uninterested in telling a story with clarity and purpose.

Spurlock himself is nowhere to be seen, perhaps because the man in charge of this film is plainly Cowell himself, whose influence hangs over the picture like the smell of a leaky bin bag.

It’s not simply that its various comedic scenarios aren’t funny (though they aren’t); or that all of its would-be snappy one-liners drop on the floor like wet socks (though they do), or that the timing is so off that it feels like the film was edited with a spork. It’s that nobody on screen, Lawrence included, seems remotely invested in the exercise in the first place.

A thrill-free thriller.

It ultimately feels like a counterfeit of priceless treasure: the shape and the gleam of it might be superficially convincing for a bit, but the shabbier craftsmanship gets all the more glaring the longer you look.

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.

For a franchise in need of refreshment, it’s anything but a quantum leap.

Raucous but fatally confused, openly pilfering its central themes from Gilliam’s own 1985 masterpiece Brazil, but with no idea how to develop them.

When the culprit is revealed to the audience after an hour or so, and the film attempts to dig into the psychology behind their reign of terror, it quickly finds itself out of its depth.

A Wolf of Wall Street-like treatment of this story could have been a scream – and the details are more than bizarre, crass and damning enough to have supported it. But cheeks aside, this is flat, colourless stuff.

Amid the bungles, Collins is a bright spark.

Rather than embracing the jangling song-and-dance numbers that made the live version box-office catnip, Eastwood sheepishly tidies them into the background, treating the project instead like a standard music-industry biopic.

When you compare Suicide Squad to what James Gunn and Marvel Studios achieved in Guardians of the Galaxy – low-profile property, oddball characters, make-it-fun brief – the film makes you cringe so hard your teeth come loose. But it’s a slog even on its own crushingly puerile terms.

It feels like a Blazing Saddles gag writ large – no bad thing – and the jab of Mel Brooks humour it provides feels considerably more inspired than the hackneyed split screens, freeze frames and wobbly zooms which are regularly deployed in the rest of the film for winking grindhouse cred.

The sheer half-heartedness of the whole exercise, though, may still catch you unawares.

Every punchline is followed by a quiet pause for audience laughter, the lengths of which might kindly be described as optimistic.

This jumbled sequel, which was also directed by Carlos Saldanha, loses most of what made the first film such an infectious entertainment.

It’s testament to just how bad the original Super Mario Bros Movie was that this sequel can be a noticeable improvement in every respect – animation, storytelling, humour, vocal performances, you name it – while still comfortably qualifying as absolute rubbish.

The last thing you want to feel about the end of the world is that you’ve seen it all before.

Ritchie’s film...is so misshapen and inert, your imagination and memory never come close to being sparked by it. Just sticking with the plot soaks up every ounce of concentration you have.

The 3D photography is shallow and muddy, although a David Attenborough voiceover helps sustain interest.

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

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.

The issue here isn’t the moment-to-moment loopiness. It’s that the film’s cumulative unmanageableness soon starts to look like a put-on – Aster seems much more interested in pushing the limits of his audience, rather than his own.

The film contains deeply felt work by Hugh Jackman and Vanessa Kirby, but it’s an otherwise drab, simplistic, mechanical thing that wears its workings right on the surface.

Perhaps La Grazia is enjoyed best as a more optimistic B-side to either Il Divo or Loro, Sorrentino’s lewd and scurrilous biopics of the former Italian prime ministers Giulio Andreotti and Silvio Berlusconi – both of which, incidentally, were also played by Servillo. But I know which ones I’d rather put on for fun.

Dialogue aside, the craftsmanship is unimpeachable, and Gray takes a timeless approach to pacing and camerawork: even the sunlight is sepia-tinted. But the grand themes of loyalty and ambition never catch fire, and the film’s few truly memorable moments are invariably its smallest.

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.

It’s another flick through a familiar and by-now bulging scrapbook, but it leaves you craving less – and more.

Despite the clumsy writing and production design, Thirlby and Hurt acquit themselves perfectly well, and Jürgen Prochnow makes an enjoyably ripe appearance as a former Nazi who unwittingly helps direct Ari towards his target.

Writer-director James Gunn finds moments of inspiration in this sequel, but the plot is a mess, the film irritable and frazzled.

Meg 2, by design, is a completely anonymous bag of lukewarm McDonalds – it’s hard to be mad at it, but only because nothing in it stands out enough to get mad at.

A terrific, despair-drenched final scene is the viewer’s reward for staying the course: pitilessly cruel, spare and shivery, it’s got everything the rest of this strangely stiff and synthetic film lacks.

These poor players have all hand-picked their roles, and are resolved to strut and fret as convincingly as they can, right up until the curtain plummets.

Henson is a natural at this kind of broad comedy, and throws herself into the goofy-cringe set-pieces with enough energy to elicit giggles, if not outright guffaws. The result rarely looks like something anyone might want, male or otherwise, but it passes the time, just about.

Truth or Dare is the kind of film that must have seemed like a good idea at the time, but its initially appealing premise – what if a demon possessed a drinking game? – quickly falls to pieces under its own self-generated confusions.

Teenage idealism curdling into cult-like insanity is a punchy, timely subject. But it’s hard to discern what Hauser and her regular co-writer Géraldine Bajard actually want to do with it, or how much sympathy their film has for Miss Novak’s follower-victims.

The problem isn’t that this unusual combination of genres doesn’t click. It’s that the jokes are so stale, the performances so broad, and the plot so greased up with improbable short cuts, that Audrey’s journey feels less like a voyage of self-discovery than a coach tour of the form’s dustiest landmarks.

Even in the realm of scrappy British underdog comedy, there is a clear line between endearingly ramshackle and downright slipshod. Fisherman’s Friends blithely crosses it, never to return, from the moment it chugs out of port.

Much as it would be nice to report that the film lived up to its director’s triumphant return, it’s unfortunately a swaggering chore: watching it feels like competing in a sort of art-house cinema Krypton Factor, with a barrage of interpretative dance interludes, unflinching full-frontal male nudity, pulverisingly bleak mise-en-scene, and writhing mental collapse.

The whole is rather less than its constituent parts – which didn’t really fit together in the first place.

Dylan and Penn do share a few lovely scenes . . . . In such moments, the project suddenly and charmingly perks up. The rest of the time, ‘flag’ is about right.

Admirable cause, amateurish film.

Song to Song was formerly known as Weightless, which would have suited its drifting, twirling rhythms. At least its new title doesn’t invite an en-masse sigh of: “well, quite”.

While his ambitious conceit hangs together over two hours of loudly-declaimed meta-metatheatricality, my word, does it feel like an unholy slog.

While the Black magic of old was a great fit for Iron Man 3 – the writer-director’s last venture into franchise territory – it turns The Predator into a shrill, murky, retrograde bore, whose handful of punchy ideas get lost in the cracks of its terminally haywire plot.

Muppet film number eight is a resounding disappointment: it’s uneven and often grating, with only a few moments of authentic delight, and almost none of the sticky-sweet, toast-and-honey crunch of its vastly enjoyable 2011 forerunner.

Seydoux is coolly enthralling throughout: her mask-like face, often streaked with a single, strategic tear, mirrors the fundamental blankness of her line of work. Thanks to her performance, France is never less than intriguing. But it’s also extremely hard to get along with – a broadcast-news parable whose sense of purpose keeps fuzzing in and out.

In terms of representation, you couldn’t ask for more. And that’s just as well, because in terms of entertainment, you could barely get less.

Human moments are few, and overwhelmingly feature Christy’s fellow fighter Lisa Holewyne, a rival-turned-rock tenderly played by Love Lies Bleeding’s Katy O’Brian. The relationship between Sweeney and O’Brian might be the gentlest, most unassuming part of the film – but it’s what stays with you.

The Nicolas Cage aficionado carries two hopes into each of the 59-year-old actor’s new films. The first – not often met, truth be told – is that it will be good. And the second, failing that, is that it will be mad. Alas, this thin and lumpy western is neither.

Iñárritu has cooked up a personal epic of the most exhaustingly swaggery type, man-spread across three hours of screen time during which flashes of genuine, startling brilliance occasionally manage to push their way through the strenuously zany macho-visionary fug.

A little of the new Spider-Man went an exhilaratingly long way in Captain America: Civil War last year. But a lot of him goes almost nowhere in this slack and spiritless solo escapade, spun off from an initially intriguing premise that deflates around you with a low whine as you watch, like a punctured bouncy castle.

This expensive-looking follow-up, which tells the story of Simba’s father’s own coming-to-power, sheepishly papers over all of the now-unfashionable concepts on which its forerunner was built.

Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo don’t come close to defying gravity in this bloated, beige screen adaptation of the Wizard of Oz prequel.

This is pure filmmaking-by-paycheque: you can virtually hear the clock card machine crunching at the start of every scene, as cast and crew punch in dutifully for another shift.

Banderas is good value, playing the role a few shades more seriously than it deserves, while first-time director Richard Hughes deploys much fizzing neon and halogen to strike a convincingly sleazy tone. But even at 90 minutes the plot feels padded, and it’s all so preeningly sordid.

Morris gives it the old college try, but Rumsfeld is too smooth an operator to let anything slip.

Almodóvar has always been the sole screenwriter of his films – but perhaps in this case, keeping an English assistant in a nearby antechamber might have been a wise move.

The second leg of Peter Jackson’s three-part adaptation of The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien, is mostly stalling for time: two or three truly great sequences tangled up in long beards and longer pit-stops.

Adams almost makes it work through sheer force of musical-comedy will: her mimicry of “classic wicked stepmother poses” is a scream, and despite the thin material, she never looks less than fully, beamingly engaged. Even so, it’s hard not to wish she’d just stuck with her happily ever after first time around.

The baseline for these things should be a little higher than ‘doesn’t retroactively sour you on its predecessor’. Even today – never mind in another 36 years – it’s hard to imagine anyone with the option of watching the source plumping for thi

Amsterdam might encompass 15 years of history, straddle two continents and throw in innumerable subplots, but it becomes increasingly hard to shake the sense that you’re watching a very thin idea twiddling its thumbs.

Nothing here is raw enough for the strength of the brothers’ bond and the weight of their sacrifice to really bite.

The idea is that Chickie’s experiences will challenge his simplistic view of the conflict, but Farrelly frames his jaunt as a glorified gap year, with various atrocities repackaged as opportunities for personal growth. Napalm

For all its sporadic wackiness and wonder, on balance Aquaman still comes out a bore. But they’ve given it a heroic shake.

The problem with this latest entry in Disney’s ever-expanding range of recycled classics isn’t that it hews too close to the studio’s original animated masterpiece, but that its many departures only muddle the original’s nursery-rhyme simplicity and neuter its famous sustained emotional wallop.

Slaloming between Hoffman’s testimony at DeLorean’s trial and the caper that got both men there for no obvious reason beyond it being the way these things are usually done, the film obediently pads through the shaggy-dog motions.

Maggie Carey, the writer and director, has plenty to say about life on the cusp of womanhood, but never quite works out a way to make her points without getting her characters to recite them verbatim.

The themes of mob justice and socialised misogyny could have hit a little harder if they’d been explored rather than simply harped on about.

There’s some commendable trippiness towards the end, but for the most part Godzilla Smooch Kong is all too ready to fall back on delivering the bare minimum promised by its title. It’s giant monsters fighting, the thing constantly shrugs: what else do you want? Ideally a bit more than this.

The film is such a crackpot tangle that it is even hard to fathom what a successful version might have looked like.

A wildly arresting performance from Buckley is not enough to save this generic and uninspired adaptation.

Director Chris Smith builds the film around Ridgeley’s mother’s scrapbooks of photographs and memorabilia – and perhaps partly because of that, it ends up feeling like little more than a leaf through the milestones. It’s been made for the fans, but they’ll know every last detail already: it’s pop history as singalong.

A variously lukewarm and lugubrious melodrama adapted from a 2008 novel by Sebastian Barry.

So many sequences here feel like free-floating trailer fodder: surplus to plot requirements, but too expensive to cut.

Around halfway through a sustained shootout in Prague, the sheer thundering mindlessness of the whole enterprise becomes impossible to ignore.

With just a scattering of stumbles, Unlocked could have conceivably ended up as a romp whose flaws and idiosyncrasies gave it character. But there’s only so much character a film can take.

For all its visual fizz, Bonello’s film, which he co-wrote with Thomas Bidegain, tells us nothing about the designer save the usual pompous/concessive hero-worship.

Visually, narratively, every creative choice forks off down the most obvious route.

The long-term consequences are depressing, but also low on dramatic tension and life.

It plays like a listless mash-up of every Young Adult franchise movie you’ve ever seen – domineering rulers, anguished, system-smashing teens, and all the purposeful striding through rubble you can handle.

Almost every last breath of The Journey is extraordinarily badly written, from the various contrivances that bring the two men together without supervision, to the verbal sabre-clashing that ensues.

The Bird Box beasts may be back in business, and perhaps in films to come we might even get a proper look at one. But it’s hard not to feel the apocalypse has moved on without them.

It isn’t especially funny, and I’m not even sure that it’s meant to be.

It feels like a film that is attracted by the shape of love and pain, but is a long way from understanding the content.

In practice, the interplay between events old and new is equal parts tedious and indecipherable, with the characters talking about parallel timelines like studio executives thrashing out a franchise in a boardroom.

You suspect Sorkin relishes the clash between Ball’s fundamentally fatuous show and the razor-smartness of his take on it. And it is smart. It just isn’t much else.

Beneath the charming sparkly wrap, there’s just more of the same underneath: an endless round of pass-the-parcel that never actually coughs up a gift.

Any film that hands Sofia Boutella a katana can’t be dismissed as an entirely fruitless exercise. It’s the Algerian actress and dancer, rather than Cage, who proves to be Ghostland’s greatest asset. And when your damsel is evidently capable of dealing with her own distress, thank you very much, the rescue mission can’t help but feel a touch redundant.

Drag is what it is, and drag is what it does.

Faulkner’s book, an oblique and complex tale of the American South’s festering decline, hasn’t so much been reworked for cinema as simply dumped on the screen in handfuls, and the result is a swirling mess.

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.

At a glance, A Boy Called Christmas looks delightful enough, with its snowy landscapes, cosy knitwear, and scenes of Jim Broadbent larking around in a periwig and frock coat. But beneath its Paddington-meets-Potter storybook exterior, its bloodstream runs with purest gloop.

The Humbling, which was directed by Barry Levinson (Good Morning, Vietnam, Rain Man) and based on a novel by Philip Roth, is such inept, shuffling nonsense that an apter title might have been The Bumbling.

It’s a hectic, sour and muddled film – a flailing counterfeit of satire that keeps slipping on its own banana skin supply, and never remotely gets to grips with what it thinks it’s sending up.

Leto throws himself into the role with a steely commitment that would be easier to understand if the film surrounding him weren’t so thuddingly generic.

High-speed antics have never felt this slow.

In a story that could have offered a parade of vivid character roles, only Foy and Glen really register: a kindly park ranger (Hakeem Kae-Kazim) deserved more screen time, while the various surly faces on the Manhattan carriage-toting scene are only thinly defined.

But the idea that Raimi’s signature touch amounts to rewarming old flourishes from his work over the last four decades is a wildly embarrassing and juvenile way to think about filmmaking: what you actually get here is the Marvel house style with Raimi flavouring sprinkled on top, and anything that feels outrageous only does so in the context of the franchise’s fussily restrictive rule set.

In spirit, it’s all very Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. But in execution, it’s far closer to Meet the Parents with a heavy dose of identity politics.

Cinema-goers desperately need a fresh, unusual and franchise-free blockbuster to rally behind, but Jupiter Ascending isn’t it.

This is exasperatingly thin stuff from Loach and Laverty, who have in the past built far more textured narratives, peopled by far richer characters, even while maintaining the fierce, politicised charge they aim for here.

The effects have a pleasingly retro patina, but the action itself is drab, the jokes scarce, while the town itself is both entirely characterless and oddly deserted, giving the impression that nothing’s really at stake. It’s just what we were warned about all those years ago: something weird that don’t look good.

So if the sex is such a ball, what’s wrong with Love? The answer, unfortunately, is absolutely everything else, of which there’s more than you might initially expect.

It is two and a half hours of self-reflexive torture porn with an entire McDonald’s warehouse of chips on its shoulder, and a handful of genuinely provocative ideas which, exasperatingly, go nowhere much.

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.

Well-informed, enlightening writing on Tolkien’s life and creative process is hardly scarce. But his genius stems from his scholarship, which doesn’t obviously lend itself to cinema, even with Derek Jacobi on hand as a professor-cum-mentor fruitily declaiming in Gothic as he potters around the quad.

Every shot is sluiced in flat grey light – the action scenes look like gravel in a food processor – while the dialogue is all botched quips and clichés (“Did somebody order backup?” one Transformer smarms while cocking a rocket launcher), and the human characters timidly written nobodies.

As last dances go, it’s the Macarena in film form.

If you don’t actually want to make a film out of a Roald Dahl book, this critic’s advice is: don’t.

The film is so myopically gripped by the idea of Marvel as endlessly fascinating corporate soap opera that in five years time, you wonder if it will make any sense at all.

The amatory mechanisms here are so basic they make 1970’s Love Story look like Wuthering Heights, but at least Love Story had the courage to wring every last drop of pathos from its tragic-romance premise.

This series' sixth film has a daft plot, groans with lousy action and makes the poor old dinosaurs humiliatingly surplus to requirements.

Tom Gormican, the writer and director, mostly uses overlapping dialogue in place of actual jokes, although occasionally he stretches to toilet humour.

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.

The result is cinema you don’t watch so much as absent-mindedly scroll through, wondering when an idea or an image worth clicking on will finally show up.

As filmmaking, it’s as mindless as Hollywood’s worst.

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

In cinematic confession, no number of Hail Marys could make amends for this.

American Assassin seems to have a certain target audience in mind, and it’s probably not one you’d want to be considered a part of.

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.

The action is slapstick-driven, yet the set-pieces are all so transparently bogus – with fourth-rate CGI and actors’ digital doubles flopping about the place like haunted marionettes – that they play as insulting rather than outrageous.

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

The film never tries to do anything other than look good, and is hellishly ugly even so.

A psychotically unfunny art-heist romp.

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.

A shambolic film populated by some of the most aggressively charmless characters ever seen in a blockbuster.

A second instalment of the Oz origin movie is bloated and boring despite new songs for both Elphaba and Glinda.

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.

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.

As a motor-mouthing smart-ass, the 58-year-old Pitt is badly miscast – every detail here seems tailored to Ryan Reynolds, director David Leitch’s Deadpool collaborator – while the film's bulging cast and bloated running time recalls those all-star capers of the 1960s: imagine It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World crossed with a migraine. For the sake of all that’s holy, take the bus.

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

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.

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.

There is a noxious undead pong emanating from this latest entry in the 1980s franchise, which is now being necromantically sustained through force of sheer commercial desperation, and nothing else.

If every last joke in it wasn’t built on the premise that anyone who isn’t a straight, white, able-bodied, middle-class male isn’t intrinsically laughable, it might have made for lively comedy.

Essentially – astonishingly – the Tom and Jerry sections of Tom & Jerry are a sideshow, used to punctuate the human scheming and blundering around Preeta and Ben’s forthcoming nuptials.

Baby Invasion, which premiered at Venice tonight, may be the stupidest film I have ever seen. And I use the word “may” only because I’m not entirely sure this thing actually is a film in the first place.

While the plot’s endless lurches and jinks are designed to hold you in a constant state of pleasurable bafflement, the cumulative effect is desensitisation: no single thread holds long enough to give you anything to cheer for or believe in.

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

A film so frivolous and twee I felt as if my brain were leaking out of my nostrils as I watched.

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.

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

As satire it’s a dismal dereliction of duty; as comedy, a one-note joke that wears out fast.

The ugly and incomprehensible big finish we get appears to have been shot by the Hunchback of Notre Dame and edited by a monkey wearing oven gloves, and if there’s a single clear shot of the Dinozords in action in there, I must have missed it.

In place of classic thriller techniques and mechanisms are a beige aesthetic, limp dialogue and glib let’s-just-vibe-with-it attitude that only grow more maddening as things progress.

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.

The film’s glib disregard for collateral murder runs to farcical extremes.

Somehow, this new animated adaptation of the video game is even worse than the abominable 1993 live-action. Even the CGI is second-rate.

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.

The Hitman’s Bodyguard simply doesn’t put in the effort, with the result that almost every aspect of the film proves wildly irritating, from its central odd couple to the dubious green-screen work that regularly has them pulling nonchalant faces in front of exploding buildings.

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.

Substance-wise, there might be enough going on here to sustain a five-minute short.

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 shortest of the films yet is also the most interminable, a knot of nightmares that groans with the series' now-trademark VFX sloppiness.

Robert Zemeckis, who should be well above this, imprints a bit of personality on this nightmare exactly twice.

The pacing seems intentionally designed to break your spirits, with a climactic set-piece that rages on forever, despite being comprised of nothing but shouting and torpedos. It makes Crimson Tide looks like a masterclass in international relations.