Tim Robey

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

The film’s strength is its plainness and melancholy, as it sketches the history of a marriage – ardent, in times gone by, and still movingly dedicated.

It’s a nostalgic exercise in burnishing the Stallone brand, with the star on screen half the time in new interviews, between a slew of clips and outtakes.

Borgli’s scenario might falter as it goes along, but Cage is a dream.

Other directors might have escalated this into the zone of outright horror, with gory payback awaiting. Not Green, who has the level intent of keeping it chillingly real.

The script shuffles romantic complications around in a sub-Clueless manner, but it badly lacks a killer idea, unless bored teenage lesbians repeatedly punching each other (and then the opposing boys’ football team) is everything you could possibly want from a lowbrow comedy.

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.

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

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.

The longer we spend inside Freddy’s, the duller it gets.

With her actors, Belo captures moments of staggering grief that are moving in their restraint: we deal, usually, with the stricken aftermath.

The groundwork is laid here for something potentially high-octane – think La Haine meets Ready Player One – but 20 minutes in, the film enters a holding pattern it never really escapes.

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.

Camping out at the film’s doleful core is a very skilled Baruchel, so crestfallen and cowed as Lazaridis that to watch him is to feel the years ebbing away in virtual real time. Rise-and-fall stories so often gloat after the bursting of the bubble, but this one is all condolences.

The film is all feints for an hour – elegant feints, but far from kick-starting the dramatic motor, they have a habit of stalling it.

Nyad’s theme of women pulling together just about lands – thanks chiefly to Foster. But following the recipe of human interest this slavishly is a fast track to not being very interesting at all.

The film is heroically unabashed about the power of love, expressed through extraordinary photography (by Jamie D Ramsay, who lifted Living), and a quartet of stars bouncing off each other to hit stratospheric acting highs. It shimmers, and it aches.

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

In trying to pretend a blip was a seismic revolution, the film winds up distinctly strained, and more depressing than it quite knows.

As a scratchy string quartet for the four actors, it continues to work surprisingly well – you might hand it back with a B+ in that department. But as a storytelling assignment, it droops little by little into the C zone.

Kenneth Branagh returns as Poirot, but, rather than jazz things up, the film's many Danny-Boyle-esque stylings are a constant distraction.

Nothing at the cinema this year has a hope of beating Past Lives for romantic delicacy, the cosmic yearning it puts into the three words, “I missed you.”

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

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.

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.

The film is mature, relatable and risks being terminally uncool – full of evident chagrin from Holofcener that she can’t be a new voice these days, but also comfortably embracing the old one.

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

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.