Tim Robey

Nerve zips along, looks really smashing and has the mental wiring of a hyperactive squirrel. You may well risk it anyway.

The film is much too anxious – desperately so – for us to feel that Barry is a fundamentally decent guy.

The thing actually docking this unpretentious ride is a nagging shortage of charm, because all the script’s efforts can’t drum up a buddy dynamic between Elba and Madden (both playing Yanks) that’s anything more than strictly contractual.

This prodding, acidic, bumpy-but-worthwhile movie is about even the world’s consenting creatures winding up with nothing they really wanted, while a dog submits to human will just to make us feel like we’re the ones in charge.

While you couldn’t hold up Sumotherhood to any legitimate standards as good cinema, it’s an entertaining shambles – and far less toxic than anything Clarke made.

Personally, I couldn’t follow Arnold over the dotted line into violent magical realism, however situated it might be in a young girl’s sense of fantasy. It’s a miscalculation, like playing your weakest suit mistaking it for a trump.

There’s a good trickle of laughs running through this, and an observation of British familydom that’s just on the credible side of cringeworthy.

The Commune doesn’t openly stumble so much as constrict itself awkwardly inside its main love triangle, short-changing the terrific supporting cast, and nearly forgetting what we thought it was all about.

It’s hard to decide whether Annabelle: Creation gains or loses points for this immensely daft set of developments, but surprisingly little damage is done to the business of turning up the scare dial.

Keanu is cool and breezy enough to live up to its title amply.

It gets by more on goodwill than inspiration, but it’s lightly amusing and well played.

The crazy surfeit of style can only go so far to compensate for the story, which is well-nigh impossible to care about.

Hunting Bourne is more than ever a business now, with a bottom line to worry about, a crowd to please, and presumably hasty deadlines to meet. It’s not that there’s no pause for thought in this still-good-fun episode. There’s just not enough thought in the pauses.

The existential crises of music industry hotshots in Los Angeles might struggle to mark it out, to say the least, as a film for our moment. At the same time, it’s a refuge – a balmy vision of cloudless blue skies, rooftop martinis on someone else’s tab, and a few soulful jamming sessions in a recording studio no one’s using. You could disappear into Nisha Ganatra’s film for a couple of hours and easily forget where the evening went.

There may not have been such an awkwardly homoerotic bromance-seduction on film since Jim Carrey molested Matthew Broderick in The Cable Guy, but it’s one of Central Intelligence’s redeeming features that it’s generously forgiving, rather than nastily phobic, of Bob’s quirks.

These complications want to spin off into fluffy absurdity. Instead they thicken into treacle. It’s a mistake to have Lohan and Curtis mainly interact as new characters, because the emotional core between their old pair gets dislodged – though it certainly helps that Butters is such a splendid, grounding co-star both before and after the switcheroo.

The film’s sincere core is threatened a little by its flashier directorial effects.

The Mustang could have held more surprises, but as a landscape study – “Prison, with horses” – it’s ruggedly stunning.

Scary Stories hits with the scares as much as it misses with the storytelling, levelling out to a glass half full.

Branagh exploits a star-packed cast to distract us in all directions. The trouble is, it sometimes feels like a dozen actors signed on, then drew lots to see who was playing whom.

Irons’s Hardy steals this film away from its ostensible hero, in part because pulling the shutters down makes him that much harder to know.

Only when it reaches for all-out camp does this script truly tickle the pleasure receptors.

Against the Ice is very square, very straight, and just naggingly average in all departments.

Sheer novelty powers this confrontational curio, up to a point. But the nastiness cuts both ways.

The film has been put together like a machine to rattle you. It does that. I didn’t care for anyone on screen at all, and can’t say I’ll ever be tempted to watch it again, but here it is, for the delectation of a niche market.

Runner Runner starts off with a solid draw, then folds on the flop.

What keeps it on its feet is the snappy direction of Jeremiah Zagar, a Philly native who shows off his home town with unmistakable pride, and has a lot of vivid strategies for what the camera’s doing (there are more time-hopping match cuts than I could count) or which song to put on top.

More than the sets or spectacle, Vikander pulls you into her picture, as if we’ve signed up for a special edition of the game where Lara Croft has only one life to spare, one go to get it right. It’s not rocket science, just an elementary way to make us sit up and care.