Tim Robey

It’s far less endearing than we’re presumably meant to think.

As you’d expect from Rodriguez, it has a decent number of pow-wow fight scenes, and sure loves to watch machinery being ripped to shreds. But it's all uncomfortably close to the gruesome Flesh Fair from Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, revamped as an ain’t-it-cool demolition derby with a charm-and-conscience bypass.

A midnight-movie, exploitation-savvy version of this film, with Spencer chewing up the scenery like nobody’s business, might feasibly have been a camp classic. But this is Tate Taylor’s version: too nervous to thrill, too daft to upset anyone, and constantly policing how much fun it lets Spencer have.

Piggy presumably aims to test our sympathies, but just forfeits them entirely, in the service of a facile plot and a heroine even the film itself can’t seem to stand.

There’s a kernel of philosophical intrigue in The Assessment, encased in a sleek shell of dystopian science fiction, and unfortunately flung a million miles away from audience engagement.

If you’ve seen Eastwood’s Gran Torino or Nicolas Cage in The Weather Man, you’ll know the sort of cranky redemption arc we’re eventually in for here, but this is the flat-packed, self-assembly-kit version – more likely to exacerbate a mild depression than warm the cockles.

]Herzog's] film has the distinction, and also the disadvantage, of being probably the least severe Herzog has yet made: it’s pretty and watchable, with Kidman trying her heartfelt best, but it can’t make its Gertrude Bell, as lover, cultural pioneer and feminist icon, add up to more than a series of voguish poster-girl poses.

So many shivery night-time clinches in Moscow fill Despite the Falling Snow’s modest runtime, you wonder what proportion of the budget went on that ever-whirring snow machine.

Oscillates between the jolting and the absurd, bottoming out with a nonsensical coda.

There’s little here to keep us up at night – or from forgetting all about it by tomorrow.

The film’s more nothingy than noxious: Mark Waters (Freaky Friday, Mean Girls) directs with vanishingly little of the snap he had back in the day.

The macho showmanship of director Fyodor Bondarchuk, wedded to such a facile script, turns this undeniably impressive megaproduction into a behemoth you mainly want to cower from.

Washington – Man on Simmer – keeps himself awake with a few fun, staccato line deliveries. But the flurries of pointlessly sadistic violence are jaggedly dispensed, botching the build-up.

Southpaw asks both too much of Gyllenhaal and not enough – he’s being forced to build a whole character out of scraps, sawdust, and horrendous clichés.

That the film winds up cramped, underwhelming and strangely thwarted is hard to square with all the effort up on screen – or perhaps it just feels too much like effort.

On all fronts, you wish that Dear Evan Hansen had nothing to do with Evan Hansen.

Converting dyed-in-the-wool Appalachian pessimism into honest, bootstrappy uplift is not a task you envy Howard or his cast, as the running time slips away and no concrete point materialises. Elegy is four years late and doomed.

While Gyllenhaal thrusts himself into the role with energy, you can sense his awareness that his acting has to carry the whole shebang, like a chef in the kitchen doing every last job. He’s entertaining, but guilty, like The Guilty, of throwing nuance in the bin.

There are snatches of crude enjoyment to be had, if you venture in with basement-level expectations, and manage to ignore some dire third act CGI. Roth’s fetish for gloating nastiness in his other work makes it hard to decry the mutilation of whatever his original vision might have been. For once, he’s at the receiving end of a rusty blade, instead of wielding it

Shallowness permeates all the characterisations, giving it a bland, marshmallowy centre.

For all the solid efforts of the cast, it’s still one of those biopics with a totally canned story arc and as many head-slapping moments as intentional laughs.

With a tighter plot and slightly more knowing craftsmanship, this might have worked, but Swedish director Mikael Hafström (1408, The Rite) isn’t really the man to poke fun with any sophistication at his stars’ well-established personas.

There are snatches of fun to be had early on, before the teasing gimmickry about reality and fakery expires. But the second half is just a slavish rehash of all the series’ best-known tropes. Unlike Alice in Wonderland, crossing through this looking glass, we may simply wind up less and less curious.

Maguire tries hard, and has a good stab at Fischer’s twitchy rage, but can’t bring much freshness or specificity to anything else.

Whatever kinship Depp may feel with this tortured, misunderstood, and regularly blotto artist is expressed, unfortunately, as a string of gruelling clichés.

To everyone’s complaints that Longlegs’ plot turned daft, I can only shrug: it was easily assured enough to sustain a deadly undertow, while dancing about with a diabolical sense of mischief. I also point them to The Monkey as Exhibit A for what misfiring daftness looks like.

Just when it’s threatening to pay off, it ends, with an experimental cliffhanger, not Levy’s idea. It reminds us – by simply not working – that abrupt, unresolved endings are the hardest kind to earn.

If it weren’t for the stifling earnestness about patriarchal dogma, you could mistake it for M. Night Shyalaman’s The Village given some kind of vague off-Broadway workshopping, and regurgitated minus the twist.

It has a perky winsomeness: there are jokes, not all of them morbid, about being dead. There are tear-jerking scenes that require a viewer to surrender. I struggled to do so. Funnily enough, Eternity drags.

The movie is immaculately dressed, but there’s a mannequin blandness lurking beneath: it’s all logistics, no guts.

The film seems to think the mere presence of Mirren as a wisecracking widow will be enough for us to forgive it a multitude of sins.

The Forgiven concentrates on awful people doing awful things they’ll pay for unless they can avoid it, but as morality play it’s stuck in a rut, with an ending that just seems to have stumped McDonagh – it dissipates.

It’s impossible not to come out wishing it were better.

This Tex-Mex drama about a retired rodeo star on a mercy mission has an intermittent dawdling charm. It’s also slack and featherbrained – and set in the late 1970s, but you can barely tell.

It gives you plenty to look at, even if you could say it’s been Avatarred and feathered to within an inch of its life. It’s the big, echoing hole in the middle – insert story, any story – that no one has figured out how to plug.

The dancing and photography are striking, and the acting’s perfectly fine. But the sum of it all is a moony inertia, lacking any awakening spark of life.

Pérez relies on his cast to do what they can with sketchily written roles, and also to pull off that dodgiest of acting tasks, speaking English with a pronounced German accent – something the stars curiously manage with much more shading and conviction than the mostly Teutonic supporting cast.

There are only so many ways Foxx can hobble around with a stab wound and pick up multiple cellphones before the very sight of him gets silly: after a while, it’s like watching fatigued takes of the same scene over and over again.

Stanfield’s dropout charisma can cushion a role fine, but can’t make this one very interesting.

It’s murky and unsatisfying.

It goes all-in on the foolproof chemistry, at the expense of everything else. We know from Thor: Ragnarok and the subsequent Avengers pow-wows how well Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson can spar, but their partnership only takes a film so far when the script’s in freefall and nothing else seems to have a stake.

One swaggering brawl plays out to a certain synth version of Beethoven’s 9th, suggesting that Love’s fanboy devotion to A Clockwork Orange might override having fully understood it. But who knows?

Hamburg’s always reaching for poo-based humour in his more desperate moments.

As a directing assignment, it at least proves that The Imitation Game was no fluke: Morten Tyldum can make glossily sexless, space-cadet guff out of whatever half-baked script you throw at him. The attempts at humour are wince-inducing.

While it wouldn’t be entirely fair to accuse the film of having “bonus DVD content” written all over it, little here is, shall we say, incompatible with the hard sell.

The film frustrates because it’s frictionless, almost completely devoid of credible conflict, and generally keen to sail through as a testament to everlasting love at its most altruistic.

A garbled mélange of arbitrary, unsatisfying action and token remorse.

The Instigators is little more than a stacked cast list on an Apple budget, waiting for a good script to materialise.

Wild Card, which keeps giving the Stath too much mannered hard-boiled dialogue for his own good, is a promising blend of components that don’t quite end up gelling.

It’s never outright bad – not unforgivably so – but comes off muted, diffuse and generally half-baked.

It tends to be flat, misjudged, and a bit of a nightmare, but it’s too frivolously knocked-off to give lasting annoyance.

Stevenson has configured her tale as female body-horror fit for a dissertation, without giving it much of a spine: while slick, the set pieces are few, far between, and over too fast.

Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli (Sick of Myself, Dream Scenario) likes his black comedies of discomfort to make us squirm, as does producer Ari Aster. But this film is skimpier on insight than the best work either has done, and Daniel Pemberton’s poignant flute score deserves to be in a more mature film.

We’d give the lazy set-up a pass if sufficiently fun things started happening off the back of it.

While the leads get it together somewhat in the final stretch, it can’t be the hardest job to access these teary-bonding emotions opposite an actual loved one.

The film succumbs to being undiluted tripe.

The general ineptitude is more likely to make you cackle in disbelief.

Other than sniggering about what an outré stereotype they’ve served up, it’s hard to see how Lee and Copley can justify this performance, which is quite the worst of the year, and sends the whole final act of their movie straight to oblivion.

It’s a series of pointless, boorish skits about two unrepentant lotharios.

It’s a misguided enterprise all round, and while it’s perfectly possible to applaud everything the film wants to say, you find yourself cringing at the ways it’s saying it.

MacFarlane’s making no effort to push the envelope, which is something of a relief, but nor is he winning anyone around to his increasingly desperate stylings as a nerd-turned-bully.

I snorted with genuine laughter, hard, at this film’s closing notion of what being a comedy even is.

With the filmmakers almost palpably high-fiving between these takes, it’s no surprise they wind up with a star performance that has to count as one of this star’s most strenuous. Treated as this zoo exhibit, he isn’t unleashed to express himself creatively. He’s caged.

It’s the film that’s hell – and a very dull, desperate hell at that, as if these dungeon masters have realised we aren’t sufficiently scared by the main event, and try throwing the kitchen sink at us, almost literally.

Ana de Armas stars as a new, lethally dull trainee assassin, Keanu Reeves makes an emergency cameo, and the film is an absolute stinker.

This would-be-frothy date flick is a sub-"Meet the Fockers" dog’s dinner.

The level of psychological nuance in Desch’s script, not to mention feminist enlightenment, makes EL James look like Virginia Woolf.

Transcendence is the worst, most portentous, and certainly the silliest big-budget science fiction film since the 2008 Keanu Reeves remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still.

The film is close to parody – not of anything Potter’s ever done, but of male artists and their obsessive end-of-life regrets. If you’d told me it was a shelved adaptation of late Philip Roth done by Alejandro González Iñárritu in Birdman (or Biutiful) mode, I’d have believed it in a shot.

The level of not very funny things this entails, even by the standards of barely-awaited sequels to lowbrow Yuletide comedies, is kind of impressive.

Zemeckis can’t let go of his ghastly conviction that everything has to be heart-tugging schmaltz. Alan Silvestri’s ruinously sickly score is his main accomplice.

Antebellum doesn’t so much concertina the past and the present as do a leering jig back and forth, then blow you a callous raspberry instead.

A pound-store Tarantino with the sadism dialled up and the wit switched off, Roth has the very basics of a stomach-clenching suspense sequence down pat. It’s just that the film never provides any rationale for why you’d want to submit to it.

Let’s blame Fellowes before Shakespeare – one of them built this house, the other has just walked right through it in his filthiest garden clogs.

The film thinks fame alone is a substitute for wit or charm, and might just as well have outsourced every last role to a hologram.

The film has about five sets and they never feel like they connect together, but this is less an attempt at disorienting the viewer than simply cutting corners; the grisly, overdone lighting, meanwhile, makes you want to hide behind your fingers for all the wrong reasons.

The film has zero finesse even by Ritchie’s standards, but if star ratings were calculated on body count alone, give it hundreds.

Almost everything these two say to one other is so wince-worthy you want to crawl under your seat, scuttle along the whole row if possible, and make for the nearest fire exit.

This film, with its endless copying of Assassin’s Creed camera angles and state-of-the-art bullseyes, is an ugly machine, tiring to the eye, monotonously scored, and also weirdly regressive on quite a few levels.

Theoretically, getting to see Peña and Skarsgård goof around with these leading roles is the film’s headline draw; but the script is so misguidedly pleased with itself, all you’re doing is watching two amiable stars mug strenuously and try their best.

Jack Thorne's screenplay has all the emotional nuance of a Sudoku puzzle; directed by French romcom veteran Pascal Chaumeil (Heartbreaker), it's bouncy and vacuous enough to feel like a light comedy from the planet Neptune.

It’s staged, scored and cut together with an aggressively deadening quality, numbing your senses to the very impact it intends.

This film’s two hours feel like four.

The last scenes aren’t just bungled, they’re hideously sentimental – insults to both viewer intelligence and the touted gravity of the subject matter.

Fans of Cage and Cusack, previously paired as unlikely allies in Con Air (1997), may be looking forward to a bit of deranged actorly combat once Hansen is cornered in the interrogation room, but it’s here that this hopeless flick comes up especially short.

This is the problem with being held hostage in the worst studio comedy of the year: for cast and audience alike, there’s little to do but wait for it to stop.

Last orders can’t come soon enough for the whole parade of supervillains, superheroes, or however they’re now choosing to identify. This is rock bottom.

The Snowman goes wrong quickly, permanently, and in a spiral, turning into a nonsensical nightmare of Scandi-noir howlers from which you sometimes feel you may never awaken.

The samurai code of Transporting has been ditched, the budget slashed, the product placement upped through the roof. And it’s the first of a threatened trilogy.

Even when the duo commandeer a luggage cart and trundle around these shiny corridors getting sozzled, we remain prisoners in their departure lounge of the damned.

The Matrix wants its green-and-black colour scheme back. Cape Fear wants its toxic male combat back. You may well want your money back.

Director David Gordon Green fails to whip up even a fraction of the original 1973 chiller's menace in this sloppy, CGI-heavy farrago.

No Escape is a film you’d want to recoil from taking seriously, so it’s almost a relief that its bungled execution makes this actively impossible.

As trash pleasures go, Serenity’s too ploddingly stretched and lacking in plot curlicues to reach nirvana, but it’s capable of making a whole audience giggle at its wonderfully pretentious gracenotes.

The actual exorcism sequence, involving three well-meaning cult members and a chicken, is strangely uneventful – and if there’s one thing a movie exorcism should never, ever be, it’s that.

Both the festival and filmmakers might have been better off waiting another week, until the screens were empty and delegates had all gone home, before unveiling this thing, perhaps to a slightly less derisory audience of seagulls.

Many good actors here are weirdly bad.

There’s almost nothing the film does well, but that doesn’t stop it donning a winner’s smirk while it copies every 1980s science fiction smash you’ve ever seen.

Incoming director Michael Dougherty (Krampus) is the one in this unenviable hot-seat, but he can’t competently handle a budget this huge when it’s being poured over an assignment this vague.

he film's indulgences are so heart-on-sleeve that it's hard to differentiate watching it from hearing someone pitch their very bad screenplay ideas with no attempt to read the room.

Rather than being any particular person’s bright idea for a girlboss fantasy revenge caper, this lousy romp was obviously hatched by an algorithm, and might just as well have been directed by AI.

Wholly useless, entirely harmless, Stratton would be good clean fun, if it was good or fun.

Schrader is a million miles from the potent anguish of First Reformed, the 2017 film that won him an Oscar; rather, this nearly rivals his 2013 erotic thriller The Canyons, starring Lindsay Lohan, for bewildering tedium.

The bizarre achievement of this new film is to make us feel trapped and punished through every phase of the story.

The thrill of the games is matched fleetingly here at best, because it feels like a simulator being put through a simulator, and not all the effects are up to snuff. Script-wise, we don’t just get Formula One, but formulae two through infinity.

This may be the single worst film I’ve seen all year; it’s certainly the most confused.

It’s just all too supremely silly to worry about in the least.

This is like picking holes in a mesh crop-top. The script’s so creaky it often sounds AI-generated.

Seinfeld’s affable mugging is no compensation for putting us through a glorified pitch session anyone sane would have nipped in the bud.

Bono may be his own worst enemy in the one-man show Stories of Surrender, but only just. His second worst is Blonde director Andrew Dominik, who has turned it into a more excruciating film than you might even have surmised.

The Voice’s vengeful motives are ridiculous, and the audience is captive to the special dullness only a suspenseless potboiler can provide.

Bad scripting, bad plotting, terrible joke formulation, and not a single character actually having a hangover until part-way through the end credits. What kind of a Hangover movie is this?

The more calculated Vaughn’s films are to appeal to his surprisingly rabid fan-base, the more they seem custom-built to repel everyone else.

The movie doesn’t have a funny bone in its body, clomping from one unoriginal set piece to the next with a head-scratching lack of urgency.

In practical terms, this just means he’s Iron Man with a spray-paint job. The film’s draggy middle act has to confine Jaime in Victoria’s secret lab, or there would be nothing for the non-superpowered rest of his family to do: at long last, he’s pitted against the grievance-harbouring Indestructible Man (Raoul Trujillo) in one of those climactic clashes we know all too well, which is just a slam-bam VFX-off.

It’s Mamma Mia!, minus ABBA. Don’t say you weren’t warned.