Stephen Dalton

This prosaically competent comedy-thriller turns a rich true story into a tonally uneven blend of lukewarm laughs and low-level suspense.

Mary Magdalene is an uneasy viewing experience, ponderous and disjointed in places, but also crafted with conviction and a strong aesthetic vision.

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

The second English-language feature by Berlin-based Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz (Futuro Beach, Motel Destino, Firebrand) is shallow and lurid and not entirely coherent. Even so, it is loaded with enough visual brio, acrid wit and WTF plot twists to hit the target as a surreal, salacious guilty pleasure.

Kill Your Friends remixes a brutally funny novel into an entertaining if somewhat familiar big-screen tale of amoral, chemically-fuelled decadence.

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

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.

There are teasing glimpses of artistic genius in A Dog Called Money, but eccentric choices and muddled intentions, too. A talent as strong and singular as Harvey deserves a more probing, less indulgent film than this.

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.

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.

The film relies on high production values and sense-battering shock tactics to make up for wooden performances and an illogical, silly script. As an exercise in retro pastiche, it impresses. But as a postmodern genre reinvention, it fails to deliver.

Without Crowe's brooding performance, Unhinged would just be another forgettable, formulaic, functional B-movie. With the burly Kiwi on board, it is transformed into a forgettable, formulaic, functional B-movie starring Russell Crowe.

Initially a caustic and somewhat programmatic checklist of alt-right obsessions, Cuck becomes more tonally and dramatically interesting after it shifts gear midway through, when Ronnie's story becomes a lurid psychosexual nightmare reminiscent of Darren Aronofsky's "Requiem for a Dream."

The gory carnage is sparingly but vividly staged, the suspense-driven plot twisty enough to tax the brain.

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.

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

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.

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.

No Escape is a pedestrian but modestly gripping nerve-jangler from writer-director John Erick Dowdle.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Goldberg has made a commendably adventurous and mostly enjoyable meta-comedy that recalls both the best and worst of 1970s Hollywood.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

With its secret gadgets, poison pills and furtive assignations in snowy graveyards, it is also an enjoyable throwback to the cloak-and-dagger heroics of classic Cold War cinema.

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.

There is ample material in Fortunata for a heart-rending tale of blue-collar female empowerment, but Castellitto’s noble intentions get swamped along the way in incontinent floods of histrionic excess, broad caricatures, clumsy allusions to Greek tragedy and psychodrama subplots that feel like half-baked afterthoughts.

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.

The Man Who Feels No Pain is a fun ride, unashamedly zany and eager to please, even if the humor is very broad and the sprawling plot too baggy for an action-driven piece.

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.

Of course, ravishing Malick-esque visuals cannot quite excuse muddled plotting, portentous dialogue and wobbly performances. But In Full Bloom is still an impressively polished debut feature, admirably ambitious and elegantly crafted.

As a piece of drama, Citizen Saint is opaque and cryptic, leaving many loose ends unresolved. Even so, it is never boring, holding our attention with outlandish plot twists and strong performances. But its key strength is as an exquisite visual artwork, largely thanks to Krum Rodriguez’s gorgeous high-resolution monochrome cinematography, which makes every shot an Old Master tableaux of fine-grained detail and chiaroscuro shadow.

There are decades of unresolved tensions simmering away between mother and daughter in Keeping Mum, which make this Karlovy Vary world premiere almost uncomfortably voyeuristic and a little too self-indulgent in places.

A little more narrative rigour and psychological depth would have been welcome here. Messy lives do not always require messy films. That said, Tomasz Naumiuk’s whirling, kinetic camerawork has a freewheeling rock’n’roll energy that suits the material.

For casually curious viewers, Scream of My Blood is a fast-moving, well-crafted primer on the band, light on background detail but generally compelling.

Even if the screenplay stretches credulity at times, Blanc’s brisk, bouncy, twisty narrative should keep most viewers gripped.