Tim Robey

[Burton] never thought acting was a manly profession, and seemed to be involved in a tug-of-war against himself, tangled up by his roots. To have half explored these themes, as Evans’ film does, means we’re left wanting more, but there’s a pleasing ache to the experience as a platonic love story.

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.

It’s a candy-coated underworld romp, and pleasingly weird at times – when we’re invited inside Harley’s cutely tattered parlour, no explanation’s given for why she has a stuffed beaver in a pink tutu on her kitchen table. It’s just… the kind of thing she would have. Yan’s film converts her from livid to likeable, and doesn’t give a hoot if you mind.

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 uses some hoary devices to twist your arm, but resistance, eventually, is futile.

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.

Mark Chappell’s script has a refreshingly high laugh-rate as these things go, with a seam of pure English silliness that sets it well apart from Knives Out, without gunning for anything like that league of plot ingenuity. It’s closer, really, to doing for Christie what Scream did for the slasher flick – goosing the formula with winks and tickles.

Jeremy Renner is superb as a reporter ruined by his biggest story, but The Parallax View this isn't.

Anyone who’s ever wondered who and what made Tony the way he was will be richly rewarded by Alan Taylor’s trip back in time.

The killings themselves are run-of-the-mill, jump-scare assaults staged with minimal invention or flair, which only makes the film’s box of tricks look emptier: there are even quips about how we’ve seen it all before, at which I found myself duly nodding. It gets almost too meta to function.

The film suggests Inglourious Basterds dumbed down, pumped up, and ditching all pretension. If only it played like a spirited B-horror hybrid we could all get behind, instead of a ghoulish effects trip for the Resident Evil crowd.

Weakly acted mainly because it’s weakly conceived, Good Boys doesn’t have a sincere bone in its body – or even enough funny boner jokes to compensate.

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

Through all the film’s bumps and scrapes, Firth does invest a lot of commendable energy in helping us grasp Crowhurst’s besieged state of mind. It’s a good performance in shaky circumstances, but at least he honours the man’s contradictions, on top of his terror of public failure, and even greater one of exposure as a fraud.

A good cop/bad cop action comedy with the funniest two-women-above-the-title pairing in memory.

Tomorrowland is half a day having all the fun of the fair, and half a day paying for it back in the classroom.

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.

There are cameos from James Franco, Stephen Dorff, a comically moustachioed David Schwimmer and an unrecognisably hirsute Chris Evans as various lowlifes. A pity, then, that nothing else in Ariel Vromen’s movie is remotely on Shannon’s level, from the plodding, Scorsese-clone script to the needlessly lifeless editing and cinematography.

The film itself never exudes much heat: it’s a chilly, impeccable diagram.

If this is Mitchell trying to go full-bore David Lynch – as a zine author and oddball collector, he pointedly casts Patrick Fischler, aka the diner-nightmare guy from Mulholland Drive and a sinister bureaucrat in Twin Peaks – he’s certainly not holding back.

The film settles into a Forrest Gumpian groove that doesn’t glorify the human spirit so much as sap it.

The trouble is that Jackson can’t make it mean very much: when every life on Middle Earth is seemingly at stake, few individually grab our attention.

All is True is a tongue-in-cheek title all the same, for a script which fills in factual gaps with its own blatant leaps of imagination: they’re just far more respectful and illuminating leaps.

For all its properly surreal mayhem, this flick isn’t quite as nimble or emotionally rounded as its predecessor.

Even those familiar with King’s 2013 follow-up of the same name, more of an absorbing dark fantasy than a horror novel, won’t be prepared for the alchemy of elements cooked up here.

The result is a film that does perfectly respectable justice to Lomax's ordeal, without ever making a strong case for itself as independently stirring art.

Fast becoming one of the most reliable character actors we’ve got, Strong gives a quietly heroic rendition of Landau which bolsters White’s performance beautifully.

[A] mildly engaging print-the-legend documentary.

It's a comeback you root for, then, even while it’s wobbling and occasionally falling in the mud. But goodwill gets it home.

There’s something ever-so-chic, a touch too manicured about the film’s despondency, and only rare moments land to touch us, especially. But it’s a gentle, genial watch.

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.

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.

The Art Life shows us a lot about Lynch’s process, just in a different medium from the one that made him famous. His paintings are terrifying. One day, he just had the sudden urge to watch them move.

The film could have done with a richer sense of what Milly and Jess really see in each other. It’s as if Barrymore and Collette have been flung into this relationship unprepared, and must hustle to suggest there’s much of a history.

Billed as a “survival thriller” and starring a weirdly underutilised Angelina Jolie, this is a musty amalgam of fire-fighting action flick, John-Grisham-esque conspiracy hokum and outdoorsy bonding adventure. All it lacks is a web search using Ask Jeeves.

It’s a pleasing if minor piece of work, like a semi-precious stone that you’d still keep.

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

An unfashionably male art film of Nietzsche-quoting, Tarkovsky-adjacent bent that’s ghoulish, baffling and rather brave.

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.

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.

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 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.

None hold a candle to the main event: pulverising verbal jousts between two stars who can toggle between serious and silly like few others. Watching them cajole, manipulate and savage each other is effervescent bloodsport: you want neither to win, or the fun will stop.

Novocaine may not be based on any pre-existing IP – no comic book or game, say. But that’s not much to crow about, because few flights of the imagination have lately felt lower in altitude.

For all its flashes of ingenuity, The Voices is secretly more scared than scary, lacking the truly disturbing ambition to get real.

A vastly enjoyable theatrical banquet, if perhaps not a profound one, is served up in a bit of a rush here, as if they can't wait to get the next sitting in. But you certainly don't come away feeling hungry.

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.

This film pretends to be cleaning house chez Mr Strangler, when it’s just pushing dust around.

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

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.

Like most comedy sequels, it’s also content to dig out the same old punchbowl and dilute the dregs.

Rather than bionically enhancing all its characters, a better movie might have found ways to celebrate their sloth and slime.

Quantum of Solace offers next to no solace, if we mean respite, but in plunging its hero into a revenge-displacement grudge mission, it has the compensation of a rock-solid dramatic idea, and the intelligence to run and run with it.

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.

Director Christopher Landon, a veteran of the Paranormal Activity series, keeps the energy levels so peppy and the twists coming so unflaggingly, you barely have time to lodge any complaints.

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.

The songs put Wicked to shame in every way. They cluster neatly around entwined themes: spreading your wings versus the tug of homesickness; finding your path but daring also to lose it. With a running time that brings us briskly ashore, the film is a grand voyage in miniature – a taster epic. Further feasts, if you stay seated for the end credits, are thrillingly promised.

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.

Your hope, gradually dashed, is for The Seagull to convey more of a sense of human loss than this faintly so-whattish drama about a dead bird.

Jenny Lecoat’s script admits to being a fictionalised version of Louisa Gould’s heroic martyrdom, but it’s one with an unfortunate air of unreality.

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

What The Gorge does supply is a novel science-fiction premise and some captivating bursts of suspense.

Bizarre quantities of action simply don’t connect to anything at all.

If there’s a chink in your emotional armour, there’s simply no resisting what this film has to offer.

Director/co-writer Babak Anvari made a startling debut with Under the Shadow (2015), but like his follow-up, Wounds (2019), this is a shakier pot-boiler – diverting, provocative in spots, a little head-scratchy in plot terms. The secret weapon is Ascott, an actor you itch to see cast in more films

Encounter is bugged-out science fiction paranoia, stylish and sinewy, with an opening sequence that may have you bolting for the door, or at least the remote control.

It’s a film whose final shape feels dwindled by compromise – not unappealing, but stymied, like a luxury jet which spends two hours taxiing on the runway.

First-time director Brewer was the visual effects supervisor on Everything Everywhere All At Once. It’s this department that’s his forte, rather than marshalling actors, or stitching scenes together with functional continuity.

The film’s about a chapter we prefer to get out of the way in adolescence; revisited as this kind of helpless mid-life crisis, it’s exquisite torture.

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.

The sum total is superior in every way to what he dished out last time. With a third one openly teased at the end, the fog has lifted: Hemsworth has landed on his Bourne, and this is his Supremacy.

Sometimes it just takes one actor to elevate a film from innocuous, take-it-or-leave it fare into something winningly tender – and if your first film’s needing that kind of lift-off, you could hardly do much better than Monica Dolan.

The film is street-hawking its thesis all over the parish. Had it tried a softer sell, it would have been much more tempting to stop and listen.

If production problems didn’t thwart Maclean and crew from making a proper fist of all this, the editing took its eye off the ball.

The film has limitations. But it has Binoche, and that’s almost enough.

These characters get ghastly fast. It’s the pace and panic of modernity Moverman grasps best as morally corrosive forces: the soft ping of iPhone email alerts never letting us be, and consciences wiped clean as quickly as the next news cycle whips around.

Both the sweetest and the funniest performer is Love and Friendship’s Tom Bennett, endearingly innocent and dreadfully coiffed as a third-generation British hedgehog gently upgrading from his dad’s tired routines.

It’s the character dynamics here, more than the dark and stormy set-pieces, that get things off the ground.

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.

Fuqua’s film is lacking much of an intelligible plot other than “tough hombre rights wrongs in ways pushing the boundaries of a 15 rating”.

Many things in this film have an off-kilter absurdity, for good and bad.

This modest ladcom scores rather higher on the sincerity scale, much like a best man’s speech that fluffs the jokes but semi-accidentally gets a deep sense of friendship across.

Given that this family-friendly confection looks, sounds and tastes a treat, you’d have to be fussy to quibble.

Director Jake Schreier (Robot and Frank) deserves some credit for the spark and timing of his ensemble – the supporting cast, especially Abrams and Smith, come close to winning you over, but they can’t disguise the mechanical, one-sided insights where this story’s centre should be.

The film’s nothing if not an argument-starter, with plenty of hot provocations – especially about the bargains underpinning black excellence – to toss out. They’re like firecrackers, though. You come out rattled, but half-certain you’ve been toyed with.

Hyena doesn’t stint on creating a grubbily repellent universe, but it never gives us one solid reason to stick around.

To call Fast X one of the most ludicrous action films ever made would be a borderline tautology for any instalment in the Fast and Furious franchise. But this one takes the cake.

One of Howard Shore’s routinely excellent moody scores helps our wend through the wilderness. But the irony, for a would-be-macabre mystery about hearts being ripped out, is a flatlined pulse and a puzzling absence of red meat.

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.

[Folman's] new film, Where is Anne Frank, doesn’t need to make sense of Anne Frank’s diaries – they speak for themselves – but instead builds a bridge to the present day, where Folman finds a troubling deafness to the very lessons, and alarm bells, that her legacy ought to have guaranteed.

What you see in Dom Hemingway is exactly what you end up getting. It’s filthy, it’s shouty, it’s embarrassing, and you mainly want it to go away.

We’re missing any real sense of awe – but for all its faults, this lands somewhere between noble failure and endearing oddity.

It has heft, it looks amazing, and it's businesslike to a fault.

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

This supernatural thriller has a wild conceit about a time-bending beach, and every creaky device to hand gets thrown in to keep it going.

I’ve rarely felt more impaled on the fence by a film, because, exactly as promised, it’s everything at once – good and not good; fresh yet still a formula; cramped, strenuous, full to the brim.

Stone packs a ton of information in, then lurches to a halt; while he milks Kennedy’s mistrust of the three-letter agencies, his grasp of “what really happened” is still fundamentally guesswork. Still, he does persuade us of smoking guns out there that weren’t Oswald’s, or anywhere near the book depository.

As a platter for meat-and-potatoes, bump-in-the-night thrills, it’s a little on the shaky side, but they’re still delivered to the table.

The engagement with JM Barrie’s themes here is palpably sincere, and I found myself pulled along, not only by Zeitlin’s tugging showmanship, but the ache he manages to create around childhood as an enchanted space.

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.

Enjoyment of The Flash hinges on two things: how much Ezra Miller sprinting about you can realistically withstand in one film, and whether multiverses seem cool any more, a year after we just flogged them to death. I wish you the best of luck.

Spirited never gets you to a place of soaraway joy, exactly, but it’s busy, silly and not a bad time.

Though it coasts on some wildly uneven star charisma, there’s nothing particularly objectionable about Double Tap, finally. It’s fine? It’s just a time-killer we didn’t much need, a decade after we hardly needed the first one.

For a comedy about a tribe of manic homunculi with nylon faux-hawks, it’s really got to be counted a pleasant surprise.

The film isn’t a write-off – well-handled, it could have had the sober dramatic voltage of Todd Haynes’s Dark Waters, which relates a now-familiar story of corporate malfeasance in a different place and time. The problems are of style, focus and intent.

The whole thing drips with garish insincerity and preaching to the choir. Irony of ironies, that a show about out-of-touch luvvies swanning down to wave their magic wands at red-state intolerance has become… the spitting image of that, as a home cinema offering from Murphy and team.

This is Sachs in Éric-Rohmer-abroad mode, and some way off top form. Frankie suggests a gloriously civilised shoot more than it coheres into much of a film.

The film’s twists, alas, fall into one of two categories – the obvious and the tasteless – and the side-orders of gruesome violence feel like they’ve been delivered to quite the wrong table.

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.

Taken on its entertainingly trashy terms, Espinosa’s film does most of the things you want from it quite well, at least until a gotcha ending which doesn’t getcha.

Some of the supporting performances are so hammily spiteful and giggly they let the side down, but the film is perfectly cast in its main roles.

Chaves has become a skilful enough craftsman that he deserves parole to pastures new. Meanwhile, Wilson and especially Farmiga, who have lent gravitas to so much that’s profoundly trumped up and silly, can take a long-deserved bow.

As an undemanding pas de deux, it’s sweet enough.

There are clever and sensitive touches right through, and a moving ending. But Fanning seems wholly uncomfortable, and not always intentionally.

Even Moore seems quite stranded, given little chance to animate her character except as an unenviable technical exercise. Love is meant to be soaring across parapets, melding destinies with the fluttering elegance of a high B flat, but in Bel Canto, flat is the operative word.

The star’s comeback isn’t quite as entertaining as his 2022 Oscars punch-up – but it comes close.

It might have been a classic stoner comedy if far-out outweighed the gross-out.

Law is horribly good.

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 oddity, and pretty much sole selling point here, is Phillips, a delightful stalwart of British telly for years, fronting a coy Australian sex comedy of almost dogged, determined mediocrity. Writer-director Renée Webster is at least to be credited with grasping her star’s flummoxed appeal in a rare leading role.

The Boys in the Boat is autopilot Clooney – a pleasant, coddling watch almost ruthlessly shorn of depth or subtext.

This film isn’t a nadir at all – it’s divertingly loony – but Jordan has rarely had less urgent things to say to us.

Struggling with tone and urgency during its recruiting phase, the film clomps along to a pedestrian drum-roll, summoning a stark, brooding edge without quite enough lift-off.

The main disappointment, other than female characters who only exist to be disposed of, comes from recognising the kernel of something unusual buried in the film’s marrow.

The film’s wobbles begin at this stage and spread unstoppably through the last hour. It’s one of those steep-tumbling disappointments where almost every scene feels like an additional step in the wrong direction.

The cop thriller Black and Blue is just the ticket for Naomie Harris, if she wants to prove she can shoulder a suspenseful action flick by looking sharp, acting credibly nervy, and keeping us squarely on her side.

The film has a sheepish, hair-shirt quality, as if it wants credit for intersectional largesse. What it does do quite well is challenge the temptations of unquestioning nostalgia.

What’s impressionistic on the page has to be re-sculpted and honed to a point on screen, but the result is that the novel’s tenderly hidden secrets become rather blatant twists.

Bremner, perfectly cast and moving as well as funny, makes McGee an unrepentant showman who’s also an addict high on his own success. It’s refreshing, after the arduous self-pity of Rocketman, to watch a British music biopic which doesn’t wallow in finger-wagging regrets all day.

The film’s messaging, heavy-handed as it can be, has some firework moments that might really spark the imagination.

Based on the Colleen Hoover bestseller, this vacuous film splices abuse and glossy courtship in the big city – to deeply dubious effect.

The film is awfully methodical, almost mathematical, in working through the various emotional steps every character must take in reaching an end point we readily guess. You appreciate the effort, even as you sense it.

You sense structural uncertainty about what the Armstrong saga connotes and how exactly it was begging to be told. But you can’t take your eyes off Foster.

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.

Whatever Muse drives Malick, whose best work feels both found – in the sense of discovered in the shoot and edit – and profound, he could be accused of cheating on her in Knight of Cups, leapfrogging between unsatisfactory short-term conquests. His career is quite a journey, but this episode has an empty tank.

Allen has worked wonders in the past with superficially similar moral tales, but this one’s a sketchy rehash.

Shan Khan’s feature debut swaggers into its subject with more cocksure style than cogent analysis, like a tabloid splash designed to grip first and (if at all) illuminate later.

It’s impressive how many layered twists Dark Web inflicts after its simple start, suggesting the tendrils of a conspiracy proliferating so quickly and steathily there’s no undoing them.

What lifts it to a major degree is Rahim’s performance. We know little of Salahi’s life outside Guantánamo, dealing with him as a virtual blank slate, but he fills this in with a remarkably charismatic personality, riven with contradictions, and clinging to bursts of mischievous humour as a survival strategy.

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.

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.

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

Marc Webb, returning after the last instalment, again shows a better feel for the relationships than he does for juggling all the overlapping story elements.

When Clooney gets this cast riffing off each other in boozy hangout mode, the movie skips along surprisingly well for all its so-what-ishness.

There’s nothing soft and romcom-cuddly here, but a brutal dissection of competitive friendship dynamics, eating disorders and selfish misery.

There’s half an argument that this schlocky lowlife caper energises its director’s visual imagination more than we’ve seen lately – hey, at least he’s trying something – but it’s not a juggling feat he can keep up all day.

Michael Chaves, proves himself again to be a shrewd replacement, somehow inviting the viewer to buy into a frankly wacky screenplay by dint of decent acting and committed style.

The Moment is an alienating, glitchy mockumentary imagining something that never happened.

Something went wrong here – it feels like the final cut of the film is either the victim of duff scripting choices, or made equally duff attempts to fix them. It’s a pity, because it wastes Affleck’s solid efforts, and thwarts the picture Lyne got halfway on screen: a portrait of an affluent marriage as a toxic sham, with all the solidity of a Love Island merger.

There’s only so much in this desperately involved historical saga that Chadha and her screenwriters are able to grapple with.

Match-making two stars with the natural zing of Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum ought to be a breeze. It’s funny, then, that this 1960s space-race caper specifically fails at being a romcom, because the “rom” keeps dragging us back to Earth.

As a debut, it’s grungy, overscaled and rarely far from cliché. But it also has guts, and there’s a vigour to the acting that pulls it through.

Coogan, like Tom, weathers this relatively unscathed. But Federico Jusid’s tango-inflected score just won’t stop plucking our heart-strings, as if keen to reassure us that we’ll make it through one of the darkest periods in South America’s history without the mood souring.

We’ve had two-hours-plus to leaf through this empty life, but Sorrentino makes it amount to almost nothing, except his usual love letter to Napoli, and an added ode to side-boob.

This long-overdue sequel to the 1980s hit romcom is no masterpiece, but it’s full of slick cameos, zany set-pieces and eye-popping style.

It manages the all-important jump scares with the finesse of a skilled stage illusionist, but it’s the surprisingly sincere emotional core that makes it the pick of the series.

The fact that Trap is 100 per cent ridiculous – like, off-the-chain barking mad, from the moment the plot kicks in – doesn’t stop it being a funfair ride that’s worth a spin.

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.

It’s not the premise that’s the problem. It’s everything else.

The United States vs Billie Holiday might be all over the shop – a tatty red carpet for its much-ballyhooed star turn. But this other Lady Day still seizes her moment.

There are moments which directly recreate Oshii’s best scenes, with real sets and actors performing a balletic kind of stunt-karaoke. But the story is far more graspable – more streamlined – and the gracenotes, action-free, tend to be the highlights.

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.

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.

You’ve got to take the rough with the smooth, and there’s a lot of smooth here. Jim Broadbent has the balance of jollity and melancholy just right as Santa.

Companionable as he always is, the way this flaunts Statham’s star power leaves a lot to be desired. He’s a totem of meathead carnage, barely sustains a scratch, and doesn’t get nearly enough moments of the deadpan bemusement he excels at best.

Taken as a speculative romance, and in the right matinee spirit, it’s lushly engaging, with a star pairing that – appropriately – rivets.

Better than Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, but not by an awful lot, and vastly less entertaining than Marvel’s current Captain America smash, it’s also curiously more sadistic, and seemingly less bothered about large-scale human fallout, than this once-spirited series used to be. Apocalypse isn’t quite the end of the world for X-Men fans, but it might be the end of the line.

The problem isn't a lack of weight, but of lightness. It's stuck with lead feet for a historical caper and serves no other worthwhile purpose.

Though pristinely faithful to Maynard's book, it blurs inexorably into Nicholas Sparks.

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.

The film is not only unchallenging, it seems actively scared of challenging us. You emerge feeling pacified and only semi-entertained.

How deep can an authorised portrait of Whitney Houston delve? The answer: not very. I Wanna Dance with Somebody aims, instead, to climb high – to cheer and celebrate as a glitzy biopic, where documentaries have tended to dwell morbidly on Houston’s downfall.

It’s all lightly reminiscent of Bride Wars, the cat-fighty 2009 farce with Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson doing very unfeminist things to ringfence their perfect day. You’re Cordially Invited has a little more heart than that: it hits an average yet amiable stride.

Hoffman's performance has a sadness, an unexplained loneliness, which gives this slightly diffident piece a centre of sorts, and there's a pleasing air of melancholy all round.

As a bouncy childcare aid, it doesn’t exactly fail, but you might be better off asking an eight-year-old about that. It’s witless fare if you want the whole family entertained.

I was surprised to find how emptying out a man in this fashion triggered genuine emotion by the end.

It’s daft, disposable fun while it lasts.

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.

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

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.

There’s gentle manipulation, and then there’s having your arms manacled to a freight train of weepy catharsis, which is roughly the experience awaiting viewers of Me Before You.

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

It's decent but not deep fare, connecting most with the theme of alcoholism as a different kind of tempting but terrible abyss.

The secret weapon, though, is dimpled star Ben Wang, the 25-year-old lead in the Disney+ series American Born Chinese.

A sombre spiritual war epic which surges up to claim its place among the director’s most deeply felt, sturdily hewn achievements.

This starfighter-recruit blockbuster is refreshingly idea-driven.

The film is torn between the conflicting instincts of sassy playing to the gallery and sanctified mush.

Give the film this much: it’s egalitarian in its imbecility.

With its meathead sensibility, Day Shift is always most comfortable hacking and slashing. These set-tos can be reasonably tasty, but everything else? Way more seasoning, please.

Watchable though the One Good Cop formula has oft proven, it’s shot through here with unearned self-regard – and turns acrid fast.

Take one high-concept format, two big stars and lots of songs... this romcom isn’t perfect, but you can’t help rooting for the main couple.

The all-round exertion is immense, but the experience is a bizarre ordeal.

With better pacing and jokes, the film could have been a goof-off exercise to satisfy the midnight-madness crowd.

Abbott, almost invariably good (we’ll forgive Kraven the Hunter), is perfect here: he gives us a guy striving too hard to be a great dad, unlike Blake’s own father, and neglecting the husband side of the equation.

We’re stuck with Key, a stand-up virtuoso who is thankfully amazing playing a windbag who can’t read the room – a ludicrous ruiner of sunsets, or any other vaguely peaceful moment.

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.

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.

At base, these are meat-and-potatoes genre thrills, but the meat’s decently seasoned, and, even if there’s too much token foliage crowding the plate, it’s cute that they mind about presentation.

It’s very much the point of Athale’s screenplay that life was too short for such a grudge after the epic association these men had. By saying so, Giant hoists itself out of sports-biopic ordinariness and becomes really quite moving.

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

We’re all aboard, and there’s certainly some enjoyment to be had. It’s just a pity that the ride is a bit of a con, at times. It’s a template without spark, a formula which seldom takes the risk of experimenting with anything fresh. It needed some of that old Spielbergian magic.

Having your heart in the right place isn’t much use, if you’ve forgotten your head somewhere up Sugarloaf Mountain.

Grandage’s feature debut, the literary biopic Genius, was an all-star dud; this is colourless, miscast, adrift. He hasn’t yet found cinematic lift-off: the camera gazes endlessly into the soupy sea off Peacehaven, as if it were a Magic Eye picture hiding the drama of a Turner painting inside. Amid the drab ruin of these lives in the 1990s, and their equally cheerless salad days, rare sparks of life succumb to a great deal of mopey regret.

When it’s in-flight entertainment this winter, no one will necessarily moan, but it plays like a soothing feature-length trailer for your first cocktail on the beach.

Buoyed by an appealing duet of star turns from Margaret Qualley and Sigourney Weaver.

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

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.

Stuffed with so many strenuous editing ideas you suspect the influence of something illegal, Demolition is mainly casting about for a point, when it doesn’t feel like a wrecking ball aimed squarely at itself.

Don’t Look Up’s driving thesis – roughly, “look at all these morons!” – is so basic it’s only really possible to respond to it as a hit-and-miss actors’ showcase.

Benedict Cumberbatch is inspiredly cast, serving up a technically ingenious performance which may be his juiciest ever.

The final hurrah for Mercury’s genius, this huge, hubristic spectacle lets you grant his troubled film a pass: at least it keeps on fighting to the end.

Little is colourful enough, with some inventively weird costumes to distract you from the arbitrary plot. But it has a dog of a script, co-written by the director, Tina Gordon, and Girls Trip’s Tracy Oliver, both scrabbling around fruitlessly for inspiration before and after the central conceit drops.

It’s a thoroughly warm diversion, whose lapses into cliché only make it cosier.

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.

Hush and patience are simply not in Anderson’s vocabulary. He bombards you as if terrified of encroaching tedium, and the set pieces trip each other up in their sheer haste.

The film satisfies all the same, because they’ve figured out what a great stand-up routine Venom can do this time, and Hardy has settled well into being straight man to his own not-at-all-straight alien weirdo.

It makes genuinely important points about homelessness, and the middle-class horror of ever crossing that line. But the script, by Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Ida, She Said) is a surprising letdown.

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

Shallowly entertaining but the opposite of insightful, this film repeatedly hails the clever USP that Beanie Babies were understuffed on purpose, so they could be “posed” better. As a piece of malleable, threadbare, plasticky content with a plum destiny as digital landfill, their biopic is certainly in a position to know.

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.

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

Cinematically, Golda doesn’t altogether avoid a TV-movie stodginess – it looks a bit drab, with some duff effects and uneven staging. But it has a businesslike running time, and doesn’t waste it.

The film is like a cheeky seaside postcard with swastikas and cryptography on the reverse.

The more you scrutinise the society Roth and these screenwriters have created, the more it seems a chintzily self-designed dystopia whose rules and entire infrastructure are pure cardboard.

It’s a thriller’s engine purring away, while it stubbornly sits in neutral, getting us nowhere.

It needed a director to grapple with all this, deadhead the redundancies and deliver a coherent vision; it’s especially disappointing to watch Christopher Smith struggle to pull it off.

Another play Hitchcock was resistant to adapting, this time by John Galsworthy, made for a static but honourable picture. [14 Jul 2012]

The moment-to-moment incoherence of Dashcam makes it maddeningly hard to figure out what’s happening – the “WTF?”s that appear in the chat-box might just as well be our own. There’s a certain delirious energy to it.

The experience is frequently infuriating, but it’s quite clearly supposed to be – it’s about hell being the other people in your own family.

Overegged is the word – there was enough conviction in Radcliffe alone to pull the story through these straits.

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.

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.

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.

Had Roupenian stretched out Margot’s ordeal into the turgid novella it hereby becomes, we’d never have heard of Cat Person in the first place.

It’s as if the book has been given a full-body massage en route to the screen, teasing away some of the spinal kinks that actually made it interesting.

The movie subverts expectations, and not in a good way, by seeming in a dither about its own identity. The romance is by the by, the comedy as sparse as can be. We’re left with a curious non-film about the pitfalls of higher education assessment. Odd.

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.

In its best moments, which tend to involve Gambon lurking at the back with a seedy grimace, or Broadbent looming almost motheringly over a rival’s shoulder, the film’s writing and acting have the grubby energy of good Pinter. In its worst though, it’s business-like and, for all the vivid performances, oddly bland.

If there’s one reason to see Prisoner’s Daughter, it’s Kate Beckinsale.

Ford doesn’t give a bad performance, but the dog does: the obvious fakery we can (maybe) overlook in a CG lion is far too glaring when it’s man’s best friend.

The only means it can find to be funny is sabotaging its own message, which isn’t a great starting point, let alone finishing point, for a body-positive comedy.

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.

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.

As a film, it feels like a bunch of people pretending to be in a film. As a continuation of the show’s faintly ridiculous appeal, it has enjoyable moments.

Dean Parisot, who made the delightful Galaxy Quest, has a funnier sensibility than the first movie’s director, Robert Schwentke, but he’s still defeated by a script that’s over-complicated and under-sophisticated.

When [Penn] steps aside, or simply lets Zelensky talk, the film hits home as a crudely earnest plea for more principled military aid, and you can’t really fault its message. The delivery, though, leaves a lot to be desired.

When A Cure for Wellness goes full wacko, it certainly doesn’t worry about questions of taste. But it hasn’t worried about questions of logic, duration, or novelty, either.

As a thriller, it’s lethargically paced, uninspiringly edited, and hardly raises your pulse even during life-or-death mano-a-mano.

The film’s major blunder – it’s got plenty of competition – is mistaking Kate Winslet for Rita Hayworth.

Monster Hunter is silly, it’s loud, and it has a synth score by Paul Haslinger that pipes away addictively, manoeuvring the film’s tone into an optimal space for this sort of junk. It achieves a kind of jokey bombast.

Certainly not free of clichés, Black Flies actually gains an added soul-sickness from being stuck with them as everyday realities.

Midway will never be mistaken for a classic, and even box office success for the $100 independent production looks dicey. Stretches of the film work beautifully, though, and the sinking feeling for Japan’s forces is painted with sympathy, not schadenfreude.

Sure, the film is crude, calorific and full of groanworthy half-jokes, but it holds together. It stacks up as an oafish pleasure for an undemanding summer – a rewriting of myths in scrawled crayon, with a nonchalant quality that makes its judiciously brief running time fly by.

The film tries to scale a gargantuan mountain of a subject – the broken voting system – and just keeps slipping repeatedly down the sides

The trouble with Dean Israelite’s film is that it’s far more excited about the shallow possibilities of cheating the fourth dimension than the infinitely scarier ones of messing it all up.

As a straight-up redemptive sob story with no other purpose, it cooks the books.

Notching up his third entry in what I suppose we’re meant to call the CCU, Michael Chaves looks alive, as often, with the set pieces.

The Alto Knights certainly has the off-screen pedigree you’d hope for. Nicholas Pileggi (Goodfellas, Casino) wrote the script, named after an infamous Manhattan social club. But the circuitous shaping feels off, a problem Barry Levinson’s direction is too flaccid to fix.

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

The movie achieves a take-it-or-leave-it watchability without being much to look at, and as a nominal thrill ride, it’s underpowered.

It isn’t Allen escaping into the past so much as defensively dredging it up, script-wise. And though he’s hired another world-class cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro, to give this the gaudy hypercoloured glow of a pastichey Douglas Sirk melodrama, the film’s look is pushy and unattractive, as if it’s wearing too much lipstick.

Constructed to fool the viewer with layer upon layer of lame cheats and moth-eaten devices, the film has nothing on its mind but sinking you gently into an in-flight stupor.

It’s not enough for Loach and Laverty to have their hearts so reliably in the right place. The Old Oak is sluggishly predictable in plot, but also sharply unsatisfying at the end.

So glibly controlled is the entire cruise, you wonder if it’s without a boatman, gliding on tracks underwater.

It’s sludgy, and kind of random, and if you already know you’ll enjoy it anyway, you undoubtedly will.

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.

Great art it's not – but it's frisky, in charge of itself, and about as keenly felt a vision of this S&M power game we could realistically have expected to see.

In a sickly-sweet genre, it’s almost bracingly sour.

Dropping its leash on a star who needs one, the film mistakes decrepitude for drama, and the closest it gets to mid-scene narrative suspense is wondering whether Al Capone has just let himself go with a number one or two.

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.

Dark Glasses is mainly just flat, but it could definitely have done without this all-round disgrace of a dog performance – quite enough to have Uggy from The Artist shielding his peepers with a front paw.

For all the film’s fumbled shortcuts, air of semi-intentional Nineties-ness, and the completely mad bit with a stray flight of doves, it jollies along with some amiability.

The whole thing remains ridiculous, partly since Avery can’t persuade us we’ve been watching a possessed boy so much as an overtaxed child actor he’s putting through boot camp. This was William Friedkin’s – and Blair’s – quite particular achievement. Think of Avery’s go as a goofy cover version you can indulge just the once.

Sincerity isn’t the film’s problem; it’s more a question of mileage.

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

There’s nowhere near enough horror, threat or intrigue to last the course.

It has a serviceable but stalled quality.

It takes a special kind of biopic to reduce its subject to the least imaginably interesting version of itself.

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

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

Angel Has Fallen is almost worth seeing.

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.

This cast of national institutions make fools of themselves with a lack of vanity that’s theoretically fun, but there’s playing to the gallery, and then there’s clambering up there to wiggle your bits at them.

Being funny with Dark Age clichés shouldn’t be a challenge, even if you have to trudge off-script and simply cover yourself in mud. The cast of Seize Them!, a plucky shoestring Britcom about a peasant revolution, unfortunately face an uphill battle.

Robbie lights up her scenes with the much more special effect of raw personality.

Some of the action sequences are OK, the cast decent – but this convoluted action-adventure's poor attention to detail is its undoing.

Unusually for any film top-billed by Adam Sandler these days, there are jokes to please young and old.

It’s hard to extend much credit for the subject matter when it’s exploited for a “wild ride” that isn’t even wild, hawking a true story that isn’t even true.

From top to bottom, it’s Brydon’s film, and his performance matches the modesty of the surroundings: rarely pushing too hard, he finds just the right groove as a browbeaten Everyman lacking spring in his step (or dash in his breaststroke).

Mortal Engines has been thoroughly storyboarded, make no mistake. But here lies the rub – lift-off, personality, and plainly put, direction, aren’t there. All the pieces of the movie slide mechanically into place and wait – and wait – for some spark of soul to turn up and animate them.

The two who do succeed in forging a convincing bond are Bateman and a spry, switched-on Driver, as brothers with a significant age gap who get each other and tend to join forces against the surrounding tumult.

The film’s family-saga pretensions and bombastically overdone characterisation keep hobbling its better elements.

The production design and effects for this apocalyptic terrain are way above par for this sort of thing, and evidence of a much higher budget than Ball had first time around.

The film’s a little wobbly on actual charm; stronger on smarm, in-jokes and Bond-riffing action pastiche. Yet whatever their niggles, families can flock to it, relieved to be getting brand new entertainment that entertains.