Tim Robey

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.

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.

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

It knows its audience and doesn’t waste time. It also heightens the fun with elaborate practical effects, rather than blitzing us with eye-tiring CGI any more than it must.

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.

By concentrating on the relationship, the road they’ve taken here is too narrow, but I’m sympathetic to the problem: sharpening your focus always gives biopics more lift-off than vaguely trying to cram everything in.

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.

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

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

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

This defiantly blank canvas may strike you as a puzzling, even a dubious, heroine, but Ryder’s terrific. And at least she has the last laugh: no one can get their graffiti to stick.

This is a film of piercingly perceptive moments, even if, as some say of Haneke's own work, it is cold to the core. [28 Dec 2001]

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.

Franco is more skilled at getting us to think: not only about memory loss, but everything we choose to forget and can’t, and how these distinctions make us who we are.

It’s an egghead exercise, both scrambled and undercooked.

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

Baker’s tingling delicacy of touch makes it a subtly distinctive experience: it’s a film I already looked forward to revisiting while tiptoeing through it the first time.

These relationships are poised to be explored in more depth than they are.

Sasquatch Sunset barely gets started – though it does have remarkable prosthetics and some lovely sunsets.

Exuding more uncertainty than discipline, this wackadoo horror-thriller from German writer-director Tilman Singer can’t decide if wearing a smirk will see it through a sloppily developed plot, which keeps promising more than it delivers.

Keegan chose a man of few words to make his stand, and Murphy, very much the man of the moment, steps up to play him with a heroic understatement that could move mountains.

“We’ll tell it, but with one fewer death” is an odd way to go about this tale – which ends up as a solid flexing exercise for its cast, but puts us through a family’s annihilation for no other reason it can ultimately decide upon.

Kaufman has rummaged about in Pixar’s Inside Out grab-bag and mussed up the elemental simplicity of Yarlett’s idea. It’s nicely personal as his spin on a Pixar film, but the downside is that he can’t help imitating too many of them at once – which makes it equal parts sweet and hectic, and not a little overambitious.

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

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.

Society of the Snow is wrenching, deeply harrowing, but crucially dispenses with sappy takeaways about the triumph of the human spirit.

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.