Stephen Dalton

Originally teased with the droll but less marketable title Colin You Anus, Wheatley’s sporadically amusing semi-farce has a lively rhythm and some fine performances, but the baggy screenplay never delivers the emotional grace notes and knockout revelations it promises.

Closely based on the director's own troubled youth, Farming is rooted in rich, complex, potentially gripping material. But Akinnuoye-Agbaje slaps this story together with so little subtlety, he ends up seriously diluting its dramatic power.

Australian director Jonathan Teplitzky has fashioned a small-scale chamber drama from huge historical events, with a functional script and modest budget that fails to match the grand sweep of its story.

Untaxing as drama, thin as entertainment, but modestly enjoyable as a revved-up caper movie, Overdrive is pure escapist fluff with a light French accent. Which still makes it smarter, leaner and cooler than any of the Fast and the Furious films it shamelessly mimics.

Quincy is an unapologetically partisan insider's portrait. The material is rich and the cast list starry, but the overall package veers a little too close to gushing vanity project in places.

With its splashy paintbox palette and jaunty pop soundtrack, All Cheerleaders Die just about hangs together as a cheerfully goofy romp.

In its favor, The Last Witch Hunter boasts some terrific production design and digital effects.... Less impressively, Eisner’s movie is clogged with cardboard characters, flat dialogue and a sluggish middle act that gets lost in too much fabricated witchy folklore.

Olszanska gives an impressively intense performance, if a little too mannered at first, but neither she nor the filmmakers ever get beneath the character's skin.

Breathe is clearly aiming for the same heart-wrenching emotional heights as James Marsh’s Oscar-winning Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything. But this is very much a crude copy, its noble intentions hobbled by a trite script, flat characters and a relentlessly saccharine tone that eventually starts to grate.

There is enough rich narrative potential in The Corrupted for an ambitious state-of-the-nation TV miniseries in the mold of The Wire. Unfortunately, Scalpello and screenwriter Nick Moorcroft take the lowest common denominator route, falling back on tired mob-movie clichés, stock characters and leaden dialogue so generic it could have been written by an algorithm.

While Sandoval's hard-working dedication is admirable, and her semi-autobiographical story full of latent dramatic potential, Lingua Franca is ultimately an underpowered, amateurish disappointment.

An initially promising genre reboot ends up feeling like a major failure of nerve.

As an experiment in collaborative, exploratory docudrama, The Dead and the Others is an admirably committed enterprise. Sadly, as a cinematic experience, it is flat and functional.

Effie Gray is an exquisitely dreary slice of middlebrow armchair theater which adds little new to a much-filmed story.

It is difficult to believe a single word of it, still less to care about these relentlessly selfish and short-sighted characters.

This unflinching yet compassionate depiction of marginalized misfits boasts a few pleasingly poetic flourishes, but it suffers from some common first-time director flaws, notably a listless narrative, thinly developed characters and a relentlessly somber mood.

The scrambled narrative, listless pace, clumsy stabs at profundity and severe lack of humor will limit the film’s appeal to existing converts and cult movie connoisseurs.

David Brent remains an enduring comic grotesque, but this sporadically amusing big-screen resurrection is more cash-in reunion tour than killer comeback album.

Reclaiming Kristina as an icon of queer liberation and female empowerment is a worthwhile premise, but sadly the finished film is a stodgy multinational pudding that fails to give this concept wings.

Omirbaev fails to invest either the murder plot or its political subtext with much suspense or conviction.

For all its high-caliber talent mix, The Snowman is a largely pedestrian affair, turgid and humorless in tone. The cast share zero screen chemistry, much of the dialogue feels like a clunky first draft and the wearily familiar plot is clogged with clumsy loose ends.

Strip away its gorgeous wintry landscapes and we are left with a symphony of ponderous New Age mumbo-jumbo masquerading as philosophical wisdom.

Halfway between a guilty pleasure and a missed opportunity, it makes the crucial mistake of treating curious viewers like deferential subjects, demanding far more sympathy than it deserves.

Dad’s Army is hobbled by too much broad slapstick and labored clowning.

Heli is undoubtedly made with serious intent, but it is also relentlessly depressing and curiously uninvolving.

Director Simon West aims for a kind of Jason Bourne or Mission: Impossible feel, but he falls short in budget, star power and explosive spectacle.

Johnny English Strikes Again is an oddly mirthless addition to the series.

While Avery handles the kinetic action set-piece with impressive swagger for a first-timer, his self-penned screenplay is a major weak point.

Sadly, Berk’s stale screenplay simply lacks the heft or depth to lift it above third-hand homage to earlier, better, smarter films.

The premise is smart, the ingredients classy and the overall look stylish. But Niccol’s paranoid anxieties about the totalitarian dangers of cyberspace feel oddly glib and dated, light on thrills or narrative logic.

In its favor, Amanda boasts subtle, sensitive lead performances from Lacoste and Multrier, who has a rare easy naturalism for such a young performer.

The film’s facile message of cross-cultural unity owes more to fairy tale than reality, but the action is slick and the story gripping.

Lack of originality and self-awareness prove to be a fatal combination. There is something way too familiar about Hoffman's rites-of-passage portrait of wasted youth, with its inevitable soundtrack of fashionable angst-rock and predictably retro-cool cult-movie influences.

Given the tragic and highly charged events it depicts, All Eyez on Me is oddly low on emotional bite, perhaps because it never feels real. As clean and polished and blandly overlit as a TV soap opera, Boom’s film looks and feels smaller than Tupac’s cinematic life story.

The real problem here is not the shameless blurring of fact and fiction, but how unforgivably dull it all seems.

This bloodthirsty comic-book fantasy is let down by its infantile humor and derivative, incoherent plot.

The disappointing end result feels less than the sum of the talents involved, a weak script and thin high-concept plot only just held together by smart visual wizardry.

Mirren always brings a touch of class, of course, even to deluxe schlock like this. But Clarke is something of a blank leading man while the secondary characters are mostly pale phantoms sleepwalking through a thinly drawn plot.

Absolutely Anything is a flabby misfire full of labored slapstick, broad caricatures and groaningly absurd plot twists.

Loosely inspired by real events, the plot is time-scrambled and non-linear, hinting at Quentin Tarantino levels of post-modern playfulness that sadly never materialize.

The performances here are bloodless, the pacing listless, the dialogue witless almost to the point of deadpan parody.

Any meager pleasures that Lies We Tell offers are purely technical.

A clumsy high-school sex comedy which tries too hard to be both shocking and endearing, falling short on both counts.

Graham begins Run with a solid premise, but he lacks the dramatic horsepower to move the story out of second gear.

Dolan has labored hard to yoke together these tricksy, time-jumping, intertwined plots, reportedly editing down a mountain of material over two years. In the process, a whole character played by Jessica Chastain was surgically removed. But however long he tinkered, Dolan has not quite salvaged a story whose default setting seems to be mirthless, ponderous navel-gazing.

This film’s thin charms lie not in its authenticity but in its zippy energy, good-looking cast and mild sprinkling of action.

Behind its superficially avant-garde aesthetic, Baby Invasion is a shallow, conservative, masturbatory piece of work. It leaves behind an uncomfortable choice: either Korine has run out of anything interesting to say, or he has actually been trolling us all along.

Drunk on its own noble aims and rich ingredients, Megalopolis is a muddled misfire of overcooked kitsch and undercooked ideas.

With an ineptitude so thorough it borders on genius, Cummings achieves the rare feat of making Sheeran appear even more boring in person than he is on record.

Mortdecai is an anachronistic mess that never succeeds in re-creating the breezy tone or snappy rhythm of the classic caper movies that it aims to pastiche.