Tom Huddleston

So the cast is talented, the director has a decent track record and of course ‘The Secret Scripture’ looks pretty, in a picture-postcard sort of way. But the script is painful, not just horribly clichéd but trite, directionless and unaccountably pleased with itself.

The crude good-girl/bad-girl dynamic between its young leads is just one of many crass elements in this woolly, well-meaning but fatally unconvincing melodrama.

Soul-crushingly unfunny...It’s a movie that assumes that if you repeat ad nauseam an unfunny joke about ass-licking, it’ll magically become hilarious. It’s so grotesquely misogynistic, it makes The Hangover look like Thelma & Louise.

Imagine simultaneously eating wallpaper paste, listening to Coldplay and watching the entire ‘Da Vinci Code’ trilogy back to back and you’ll have some idea how grindingly tedious the experience of watching Rings becomes.

Fans of the Stath and his inimitable oeuvre may find just enough shooting, punching and snarling to keep them satisfied. But those who enjoy proper movies are urged to steer clear.

This is bland, shallow and totally unconvincing, veering between cartoonish overstatement and outright tedium.

It’s time to put this franchise on ice for good.

There are times when Cell feels like a surreal pastiche of po-faced apocalypse movies. But no such luck: this is every bit as bad as it appears.

When great actors meet a misguided script, the results can be hilarious. And so it proves with Criminal, a nutso mash-up of The Bourne Identity and The Man with Two Brains which, despite a laughable plot and ridiculous dialogue, somehow managed to attract Kevin Costner to the lead role, with support from Ryan Reynolds, Tommy Lee Jones, new Wonder Woman Gal Gadot and even Gary Oldman (who really needs to have a word with his agent after this and Child 44).

This is a relentlessly unengaging affair, its derivative and logic-deficient script matched by flat direction and fussy, unconvincing CGI.

Given that it comes courtesy of Adam Sandler’s production company Happy Madison... it’s no surprise that Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 is a lazy, witless, laugh-free experience. But even by their standards, this is a slog to sit through, so glacially paced that at times it achieves an almost zen-like level of anti-comedy.

Child 44 is a striking example of how a single, wrongheaded choice can doom an entire movie.

Drab, silly and mind-numbing, this Dracula is strictly for the suckers.

That a film in 2014 can still get away with depicting all women as either dumb, hapless sluts or ball-busting harridans is frankly unbelievable.

How Knight and Crowley managed to persuade such upstanding actors – not to mention Jim Broadbent, Anne-Marie Duff, Ciaran Hinds and Riz Ahmed – to take part in this fiasco is destined to remain a mystery. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Trite.