Tim Grierson

If One Spoon of Chocolate ultimately fails as a grindhouse banger, you still might understand why RZA developed this project for more than a decade. His rage at this inequitable country has only grown more acute as America’s racial divides widen and codify. But like Unique, RZA doesn’t know how to fight his way out of the hell that surrounds him.

Taylor can’t juggle the different tones, and as Sue tries to stay a step ahead of the crooks and the cops as her lies threaten to unravel, the film’s attempts at societal critique feel facile.

Alongside a sharp supporting cast that includes Dean Norris and Michael Kelly, Secret’s leads do what they can and never embarrass themselves. But the film’s so disposable, it vanishes right in front of your eyes.

Director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson brings some stylishness to the killings, but I Know What You Did Last Summer’s lack of compelling characters robs the story of its juiciest hook: these brutal slayings are cosmic comeuppance for their duplicity.

Hunter Killer conjures up whiffs of entertainment value from its shameless but spirited derivativeness.

Disney has rarely and so shamelessly plundered its own catalogue — not just in terms of homages to its greatest hits but also in the familiar elements thrown together for this wan fable.

The result is a smirking, shallow action-comedy — a total mission failure.

This new edition feels less inspired, missing not just the superstar’s quick wit but the 1988 film’s fecund fish-out-of-water premise.

There’s nothing more terrifying in this film than the creative talent wasted on such shockingly mediocre material.

Project Silence presents us with a kaleidoscope of different characters all caught up in the same terrible nightmare, but very few of them have lively personalities – and the same holds true for the film itself. The dogs may be merciless, but Kim Tae-gon never goes for the throat.

Antonio Campos introduces us to a world in which murder, violence, and suicide are commonplace, but he fails to find much new to say about this bleak thematic terrain.

This adaptation of the Delia Owens bestseller proves to be an unconvincing, melodramatic affair that only occasionally locates the story’s mournful heart.

This lack of sparkle can be felt throughout the remake which, like so many of the studio’s recent redos, feels stiff and reverential — a cynical reproduction suffused with deadening CGI.

Lucy In The Sky has ambitious visual flourishes, a bold performance from Natalie Portman and not nearly enough insights into the peculiarities of human behaviour.

Although the two leads have a steamy rapport, their chemistry cannot overcome a predictable and shallow saga about grief and second chances.

It’s a shame that Instant Family reduces the complexity, pain and joy of parenthood to a multiplex-palatable family comedy. The real story is probably far more interesting … and hopefully funnier.

Zac Efron projects the right amount of edgy, empty handsomeness, but the movie’s conceit doesn’t pay enough dividends — especially when trying to reconcile Bundy’s distortions of reality with the actual terror he caused in the 1970s.

The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent director Tom Gormican once again latches on to a meta-movie idea with great comic potential, but this limp satire of vain actors, deluded filmmakers and shamelessly recycled IP quickly starts to sputter.

No doubt Black Flies wants to honour the heroism and sacrifice of paramedics — the end credits include a statistic about the alarming rate of suicide in the profession — but it often dehumanises the people in desperate need of their help. Sauvaire seems more concerned with one group’s suffering than the other.

This new instalment knows which story beats to hit, but it has little grasp of the emotional undercurrents that made the original resonate — how it touched on adolescent insecurities, first love, and the scourge of school bullies.

Stars Dave Bautista and Brittany Snow aren’t compelling enough, and the film’s formal gimmicks aren’t clever enough.

Luke Wilson and Martin Sheen are respectably earnest as the caretakers of these blandly noble underdogs, but this sepia-tinged portrait slavishly follows the playbook at every turn — which is ironic since it’s a film meant to honour a coach who won by being inventive.

Eighteen years after The Matrix Revolutions, Lana Wachowski goes back down the rabbit hole, only to get lost in a sequel that lacks the visionary flair and zeitgeist-y profundity that once made this franchise such a game-changer for blockbuster cinema.

It’s fleetingly amusing to watch Blanchett flex her wit and grace amidst this motley crew of outsiders and reprobates. But Lilith so easily outclasses everything around her that Borderlands is that rare would-be blockbuster where you wish the main character could get her own standalone feature, just so she can escape this meagre adventure.

The feature debut of director Max Joseph can occasionally be as entrancing and euphoric as the pulsating dance songs on the soundtrack. But even an empathetic performance from Zac Efron (and an impressive, nuanced turn from Wes Bentley) can’t distract from a movie that mistakes surface flash for probing, zeitgeist-y insights.

Because the roles are underwritten and the players struggle to establish a rapport, The Magnificent Seven never lets the audience feel like its along for the ride with a dynamic group of death-or-glory hombres.

A lazy heist comedy that asks little of its appealing leads, Going In Style goes down smoothly even if the only thing that really gets stolen is the audience’s time.

Not very funny and never especially touching, this Dora feels dispiritingly perfunctory — a two-hour babysitting tool that leaves little impression.

Pugh and Freeman are superb at embodying their characters’ emotional wounds, but Braff’s melodramatic approach quickly becomes oppressive, clumsily orchestrating wild highs and lows with such inelegance that his protagonists start to resemble helpless pawns he is pushing around the narrative chessboard.

Lee Cronin knows how to construct suspense sequences and ramp up tension, and there are moments in his portrait of a couple dealing with the traumatic return of their missing child that are legitimately frightening. But the film’s ambitious scope is betrayed by derivative genre ideas that make this tale of the dead disappointingly listless.

But as lovely as Blackbird can be, it’s never particularly insightful or compelling — for a film meant to celebrate life, the storytelling is curiously moribund.

The obligatory nature of the fan service constantly undercuts the bittersweet, occasionally tearjerking tone, with the filmmakers more concerned about extending the franchise’s commercial life than really saying anything meaningful about loss and reconciliation.

There are plenty of would-be tearjerking moments in Family Business as different generations of this family reaffirm how much they mean to each other, but the sincerity of those scenes is consistently undercut by the filmmakers’ insistence on overdoing everything: the schmaltz, the slapstick, the feverish pace.

Rather than being insightful or candid, Five Nights mostly feels inconsequential — an intriguing, uneven narrative experiment more than a fully satisfying story.

Julie Delpy’s latest directorial effort juggles some potentially delicious ideas, but Lolo proves to be an exasperating romantic comedy that flirts with darker terrain it never has the guts or wit to really explore.

Unfortunately, there is not much ingenuity or inspiration to Snyder’s vision.

The actors lend sincerity to the proceedings, but the film keeps cheating to achieve its dramatic payoffs.

As the mysteries behind the strange occurrences are slowly revealed, this underpowered horror film starts to drown in cliches and predictable plot twists.

Mistress Of Evil invests heavily in inundating our eyeballs with relentless enchantment, which unfortunately translates into largely dreary CG renderings of pixies, sentient trees and other woodland critters

Chappie is a bucket of bolts, Blomkamp’s desire to say meaningful things outdistancing his ability to say them compellingly.

This sequel’s real sin is the fact the usually fearsome beasts are not suitably terrifying, resulting in some mildly effective action sequences but nothing that suggests the series is in the throes of a creative renewal.

Familiar execution and drab characters conspire to drain this vital story of its intensity.

Fraser walks through this aggressively sappy drama with the aura of simple goodness that has served him well. But such concentrated radiance starts to feel like a denial of the painful reality Rental Family ignores. The movie wants to give you a hug, but you may be tempted to slap it across the face.

Two Steve Carells most assuredly aren’t better than one in Despicable Me 3, a winded sequel which is cloying when it isn’t exhaustingly frenetic.

Flying off the rails at an alarming speed, The Girl On The Train fails as a compelling character study, struggles to satisfy as a psychological thriller and ultimately settles as an overheated potboiler that doesn’t have the courage to go full camp.

Roher’s willingness to blindly accept any and all of his speakers’ pronouncements leaves The AI Doc feeling toothless. ... Clearly, the filmmakers want to present the material in an evenhanded fashion so that viewers can make up their own mind, but in the name of so-called fairness, the documentary lacks any real perspective or inquisitiveness.

A good cast led by Miles Teller gets swallowed up in a narrative that grows progressively more muddled and tedious.

Any hopes of smart social commentary or unsettling psychological underpinnings are quickly shattered by a clichéd screenplay and amateurish performances.

The perfunctory martial-arts sequences and convoluted plotting conspire to make this a painfully uninspired proposition.

This low-budget combination of thriller, horror and satire flaunts a smartass tone that proves deadening, and as the body count starts rising, viewer interest quickly begins dropping.

The New Mutants’ greatest failing is that, even as a spinoff, its drama is puny and its spectacle nonexistent.

For all the punches thrown and buildings pulverised, The New Empire barely leaves an impact.

Director Gail Lerner’s Cheaper By The Dozen is aggressively cutesy while trying to address real-world issues such as race and class. Lerner’s version feels busy and laboured, its sitcom treatment straining equally for laughs and pathos.

Despite a few touching scenes in which Sophie and Agatha reassert their bond amidst handsome suiters and devious spells, Good And Evil ends up feeling both too busy and too underdeveloped to let their relationship blossom. There’s no happily ever after awaiting audiences at the film’s end.

For audiences craving shoot-‘em-up carnage, the sequel contains an abundance of explosions, car crashes and kill shots, although the strained air of hip irreverence soon turns suffocatingly stale.

Cabrini is a respectful biopic designed to shed light on a forgotten woman whose charitable acts deserve recognition. It’s also so stultifyingly dutiful you may find yourself missing Sound of Freedom’s tawdry watchability.

Kumail Nanjiani and Dave Bautista are a likeable pair that deserve better than Stuber, a strained action-comedy with a clever premise but maddeningly uninspired execution.

Mothers will do anything for their children, but this film’s simplistic brand of horror never makes that devotion compelling or frightening.

A parade of gaudy CGI and strained whimsy, Alice Through The Looking Glass proves even more manic and grating than its 2010 predecessor.

Although Reese Witherspoon and Sofía Vergara do have their fleetingly amusing moments, this road-trip buddy comedy feels like it rolled off the cliché assembly line, offering wan laughs and familiar setups.

The film is adrenalised but familiar, sporting a sarcastic sense of humour in an attempt to mitigate what’s so threadbare about the premise and increasingly over-the-top fight sequences.

No doubt the world needs more paeans to tolerance, but movies as ineffectual as The Best Of Enemies feel profoundly inadequate to the task.

Although the follow-up to the 2023 original boasts colourful animation, too often this Illumination production mistakes visual and narrative busyness for genuine excitement. As a result the film, based on the venerable Nintendo property, suffers from strained humour and cluttered action sequences — issues that will hardly discourage young audiences from coming out in droves.

The film is mostly unmoving, neither the romance nor the social consciousness succeeding in stirring our emotions. Even worse, Penn lets the plight of displaced Africans slip into the background, resulting in yet another well-meaning film that wants to address planetary ills by concentrating our attention on the good-looking outsiders who come in to save the day.

The Crow longs to be edgy and sobering, but the shallow, melodramatic treatment constantly calls to mind an insecure adolescent male who is trying to prove how dark and deep he is by dressing all in black and talking ponderously about death.

Director Stephen Chbosky badly mishandles the material, resulting in an increasingly frustrating experience in which Evan’s inability to come clean leads to a string of emotional manipulations that sometimes border on cruel.

The film is so weighed down by self-importance that the proceedings are embalmed in solemnity.

Attempting to celebrate the power of community and new beginnings, Sia’s directorial debut mostly serves as an unintended cautionary tale about chronic whimsy and outdated ideas.

Whether it’s Downey’s mannerisms or the dull quipping provided by his menagerie of digital co-stars, Dolittle is a joyless slog trying to pretend it’s a hip, magical adventure.

A teen group therapy session disguised as a superhero movie, Power Rangers is numbingly predictable and cynically made, recycling myriad blockbuster tropes but draining their adolescent pleasures in the process.

The killer mascots may spring the coop, but this sequel never breaks free of its own conventionality.

Kin never feels like more than uninspired borrowings from other, better genre films; it’s a story about family without any heart.

The filmmakers preserve Seuss’s narrative beats but strain to replicate his whimsical spirit.

A drearily sincere movie about faith and tolerance, Little Boy boasts plenty of good intentions but very little else.

The Longest Ride plays like cynical fan service to Sparks’ readers, who, it is assumed, will be content to sit back and enjoy a cheap tearjerker, no matter how mouldy its execution is.

There’s precious little to care about in a movie that’s neither ingenious nor silly enough to savour.

Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg are a lot less fun this time around, paired with a fumbling John Lithgow and a stiff Mel Gibson as their overbearing fathers who stop by for the holidays.

Thompson brings her reliably spry comedic talents as a new recruit who discovers all the extra-terrestrials in our midst, but she’s easily overmatched by a witless script, laboured plot and, most depressingly, a badly misjudged performance from her usually-charming co-star.

The film may pretend it’s more sophisticated than the show that spawned it, but its comedic stylings are alarmingly regressive.

Never satisfyingly kooky, spooky or ooky, the new animated Addams Family film transports Charles Addams’ lovably macabre clan into the 21st century, resulting in an undistinguished children’s comedy full of dull pop-culture referencing and half-hearted commentary about the importance of inclusiveness.

An agonisingly strained attempt at misanthropic comedy, Bad Santa 2 is puerile when it should be shocking, calculating when it should be transgressive, and listless when it should be liberating.

The film is a black hole that sucks comedy into its vortex, never to be seen again.

The life lessons Reef learns aren’t meaningful, and the movie’s message about making amends is patronizing. In the end, it’s the audience that deserves an apology.

A stunningly misjudged comedy, Rock The Kasbah stretches and strains Bill Murray’s deadpan nonchalance until it snaps, and what results is a singularly unfunny, often infuriating tale.

This series’ tone-deaf humour and dull nods to selfless heroism have become toxic irritants — a sensation not helped by the film’s collection of clattering, joyless robots and dopey humans.

Unfortunately, this adaptation of the popular 2014 video game fails at delivering scares or cheeky laughs, resulting in a tedious experience that relies heavily on horror’s most cliched tropes.

Feels manipulative and glib ... Farrelly’s tendency toward simplistic bromides in Green Book is even more egregious here.

This ungainly and glum tale of the man famously known as Tarzan — who returns to the Congo, reconnecting with his past in the process — slavishly adheres to contemporary blockbuster convention, offering not a single spark of inspiration or real daring. A talented cast led by Alexander Skarsgård scowls through the film, held hostage by a solemn script and ghastly amounts of CG.

Trying to wring laughs from the nauseating sex-and-stardom exploits of fictional Tinseltown A-lister Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier) and his buddies, Entourage consistently comes across as sour, shallow and misogynistic.

Between the overblown poor CG, witless dialogue and pervasive, numbing violence, the new Hellboy deserves its own special circle in Dante’s inferno.

The downside to a film that includes multiple shots of a clock counting down is that it provides audiences with an unintended rooting interest: we’re just hoping it gets to zero soon so we can leave the theatre.

Infuriatingly manipulative and insufferably preachy.

Fantasy Island is the sort of inept, forgettable disaster that doesn’t even induce so-bad-it’s-good chuckles.