Tom Huddleston

The photography is starkly lovely, the slow drip of information is smartly handled and the central performances are appealingly ambiguous.

It’s all too much too fast, and the cumulative effect is like watching a two-hour trailer – more dizzying than thrilling.

The word "personal" is bandied around a lot in film reviews, but it’s hard to think of a work that better fits the description than avant-garde icon Chantal Akerman’s intimate swansong No Home Movie.

Thank the movie gods for Dwayne Johnson, who delivers a performance of such charm, such unexpected goofiness that the screen practically glows every time he appears.

Unique and intoxicating, an art movie that grips like a thriller.

Director James Wan has his method down. The scares are effective and the camerawork is superb, all lurking long shots and short sharp shocks. Wan is fully aware of the austerity-era parallels in his story, and the period detail is surprisingly authentic.... But there’s little here we haven’t seen before.

[A] calm, reflective, gorgeously uneventful slice of nostalgic romance.

The total absence of originality here is notable, but it needn’t have been a problem: with a tighter plot, a touch of humour and some peppier, less slab-fisted action scenes this might actually have worked – a kind of Guardians of the Galaxy meets Lord of the Rings.

As a story about how hard it is to make your own way in the world, Kiki’s Delivery Service is truthful and scalpel-sharp. That it manages all this while remaining consistently funny, optimistic and exciting – even for little ones – is a mark of Miyazaki’s genius.

If you loved the game, you might enjoy watching the script contort itself into ever more zany shapes to incorporate the necessary elements: giant slings, teetering towers, boomeranging toucans. But it’s not enough to counteract the tiresome, sub-Lego Movie snarkiness of the script or the bright, busy and unengaging animation.

There are no memorable action scenes—the closest we get is a virtual rerun of the time-freeze sequence from the previous movie. And the script is just nonsense, comprised entirely of sarcastic asides, portentous gobbledygook ("The dawn of a new age will rise!" cries Isaac) and insider references that only the faithful will appreciate. Unless that’s you, it’s best to steer clear.

Respect is due to Joe Johnston and his screenwriters for not only fashioning a nifty, highly entertaining slice of pulpy comic-book action, but for making this most divisive of costumed crusaders universally relatable.

It’s ironic, but Keanu might be a better movie if it was more like TV: 90 plotless minutes of Key and Peele just goofing around on the mean streets might’ve been something really special.

It takes a while to find its focus – and takes itself just a little too seriously – but as low-budget Ozploitation goes, it’s snappy and effective.

Perhaps inevitably, the film as a whole doesn't stack up to its central performances.

It’s not a total washout: at least one gag in five is actually funny, and the action scenes set an enjoyably breakneck pace. If you’re an 11-year-old on a week-long sugar jag, you might just love it.

A nagging sense of incompleteness means that Civil War isn’t quite as satisfying as the first ‘Avengers’ (it’s all building up to the ‘Infinity War’ two-parter in 2018). But overall, this is Marvel at their best: a pacey, intelligent super-sized blockbuster and a roaringly fun night out.

The problem is that it all feels like a sixth-form production of the Bourne series. Still, if you’ve ever fantasised about a Luther-Robb Stark crimefighting duo, look no further.

Overall, the film just feels too much like an obligation, as though everyone involved had spent too much time and money to back out, so they forced themselves to grit their teeth and get on with it. You may feel the same.

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).

Overall, there’s just not enough going on in Disorder: largely plotless and set almost entirely in a single, bland location, it doesn’t have enough atmosphere to compensate for the lack of action.

Rock the Kasbah just isn’t remotely funny or smart, and none of the characters come within shooting distance of likeable.

It all leads to a climax so staggeringly lazy and glib that you honestly expect Woodley just to turn to the camera in the final scene, shrug her shoulders and walk off.

Eddie the Eagle may suffice for a brainless Friday night, but an honest account would have been a lot more memorable.

Asking far more questions than it could ever answer, Exposed ends on a note so flat and predictable that it undermines all that went before. But there are strange and memorable moments here, and a mood of eerie foreboding that’s hard to shake.

There may be little here we haven’t seen before – glassy reflections of Michael Mann’s Heat pop up everywhere you look – but it’s all carried off with brashness and momentum by a director who genuinely seems to be having a blast.

There are a few lovely scenes: Mavis listening to a new mix of one of her father’s last recordings is heartbreaking. For old-soul fans, Mavis! is a must.

This is a confident, terrifically enjoyable film, superbly written, shot and performed.

It’s all so horribly cynical, with every line, every twist and every note of music painstakingly focus-grouped to extract maximum cash value from the audience.

What Welcome to Leith does very well is dig deep and expose Cobb – and by extension the entire American neo-Nazi movement – as weak, confused and desperate, using a dying ideology as a way to feel less alone in the world.

Bloody, shallow and oh-so-smug, Deadpool is so eager to offend that it’d almost be sweet if it wasn’t so, well, relentlessly annoying.

It all spins out of control in a final blowout of naff special effects and random shouting, but there’s just enough leftover goodwill to carry it through.

The result is an odd, inconsequential but not entirely charmless misfire: an action-horror-comedy-romance with none of the first two and precious little of the third.

It’ll most likely keep the smaller kids diverted while parents capture a few zzzs.

It’s a strong setup, poorly handled.

Jennifer Peedom’s film is stunningly photographed (how could it not be?) and brilliantly sly: she gives the tour guides and their rich, self-absorbed charges just enough rope to hang themselves, and they duly oblige. But it’s also a heartfelt tribute to the resilience of a people.

The dramatic scenes are a touch overcooked, and there are moments when it feels like a particularly high-end school play, with everyone shouting “Avast!” and “Ahoy!” like they really mean it. The action, though, is consistently impressive: When man and beast go toe-to-tail, your timbers will be truly well shivered.

Too many obnoxious relatives, evil critters and weak gags at the expense of fat kids and foul-mouthed old ladies.

Greater conflict (or simply more probing interviews) might have made for a more gripping movie. But what’s here will delight anyone who dreams of living free, sleeping rough and scoffing beans around the campfire.

This is a solid take on the material, but it could have done with a little less narrative incident and a little more cinematic sparkle.

The film's final moments, in which we discover the source of the film’s intrusive, patronizing voiceover, are simply vile. The result is like stuffing yourself with Christmas pudding: sweet, glutinous, a bit too much.

The film works best when it explores the impact of FGM.... But the film is also trying to be a rousing, celebratory sports story, as the Warriors jet off to London to take part in a cricket tournament. And this is less successful.

This might be the most downbeat blockbuster in memory, a film that starts out pitiless and goes downhill from there, save for a fleeting glimmer of hope in the final moments. It’s a bold statement about the unforgiving nature of war, unashamedly political in its motives and quietly devastating in its emotional effect.

It’s a dour, at times glacial film that perhaps takes itself just a little too seriously, but it’s also grimly convincing and, in a remarkable final scene, shockingly effective.

It’s a wild, at times exhilarating watch – but an exhausting one.

An unbalanced but never less than entertaining film, enthralling and deflating in roughly equal measure, and studded with moments of true, old-school glory.

This is a forceful, initially uplifting, ultimately sobering illustration of how much protest matters, how far those in power will go to stifle it, and how ugly and criminal those efforts look in hindsight.

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

All three actors work hard... and when the melodrama hits fever pitch, Crimson Peak lurches into life. But overall this lacks weight and intensity: a Brontë-esque bauble smeared in twenty-first-century slickness.

There’s nothing here we’ve not seen before, and it all feels a little cheap. But if ‘oi, slag!’ mobster movies are your bag, you could do worse.

Ascher’s aim isn’t simply to inform. The Nightmare wants to be the first properly scary documentary, employing time-honoured horror movie techniques in a concerted effort to spook the viewer. But it’s here that Ascher slightly oversteps himself.

Zarafa never pauses for breath, rattling from one hasty, perfunctory sequence to another.

Give Northern Soul its due: this feisty, frequently amusing chronicle of one young man’s journey through the dancehalls of Lancashire nails its time and place.... A pity, then, that the story is so tiresomely familiar.

For this slick, beautifully paced documentary, director Marc Singer was given unprecedented access to everything from police tapes to trial recordings to Dunn’s own private phone conversations, and the result is a uniquely compelling real-life legal thriller.

A lusty ballad of love and heartbreak sung with passion and power, and just a handful of off-key notes.

There’s wit, integrity and insight here, but it cries out for a lighter touch.

In the closing act, the film sharpens and becomes something far more compelling.

A bizarre, conflicted mess, horrifying when it’s trying to be funny, oddly appealing when it turns the screws.

Cameraman and director Michael Heineman has created a riveting story of how, with awful inevitability, power always corrupts.

In the plus column there’s a small handful of decent gags, a clutch of welcome cameos (Eddie Izzard, notably) and at 85 minutes it doesn’t outstay its welcome. There’s also a fairly solid moral about free will and personal desire. But nothing else here really clicks.

This reboot of the Marvel superhero franchise is a film of two halves: the first likeable and fun, the second tiresome and loud.

This is a busy, moderately entertaining slice of family-friendly fluff. It’s flatly directed and functionally acted.

Ghost Protocol plays it strictly by the book: the characters are bland, the plot is over-familiar and the action sequences are resolutely old school. But animator Bird relishes the chance to play with real people.

Focusing on the personalities rather than the historical context, directors Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville illustrate how both men’s lives were changed by the debates, and how neither could let it go even decades later. The result is perhaps better suited to TV than the big screen, but it’s a timely, thoughtful piece of work.

With its unusual central conceit and awkward, somnambulant pacing, The Cobbler feels like a quirky foreign comedy that’s been mis-translated into English, losing all the subtlety and humour in the process.

First-time feature director Jonas Govaerts handles the shocks and scares competently, and the pace is well maintained. But the characters are a forgettable bunch.

Rogue Nation is an uneven film.

The Choir is decently directed, competently performed and mostly watchable, but it’s saccharine and totally unworthy of its impressive cast.

The action sequences are wild, the jokes relentlessly dumb-but-smart, and the sheer sense of anything-goes daftness...is glorious.

Writer-director Pablo Fendrik takes the whole thing terribly seriously, punctuating the action with ponderous slo-mo and laughably pompous discussions about Bernal’s spirit jaguar.

The script is solid, the period recreation spectacular and the performances muscular, but The Connection suffers from a severe case of overfamiliarity.

Poltergeist, while entertaining, has more in common with slick, audience-goosing spookers like "Insidious" and "Sinister" than with the imaginative original.

Whedon has revealed that his first cut ran for well over three hours, and it shows: Ultron feels excessively nipped and tucked, barrelling from one explosive set-piece to the next, leaving ideas half-formed and character motivations murky.

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.

Good Kill is a dour, claustrophobic film, offering an acute and stunningly photographed exploration of middle-American banality and moral ambivalence.

A smart concept is thoroughly wasted in this cute but grating DreamWorks animated comedy.

If Pedro Almodóvar was hired to direct another "Sex and the City" film, it might end up like Cupcakes. The sort of movie that adjectives like frothy and bubbly were invented for.

The sheer sense of ludicrous, punch-the-air joie de vivre is impossibly infectious.

Thanks to ‘Taken’ director Pierre Morel, this too often feels like just another slice of brainless Eurotrash, packed with saw-it-coming plot twists, half-hearted car chases and an angsty hero with mega muscles and zero charisma.

This hugely entertaining oddity could never be mistaken for the work of any other filmmaker.

Props to director Rob Cohen for making a gender-flipped 'Fatal Attraction’. But The Boy Next Door really should be a lot juicier.

It’s impossible adequately to describe the haunting intensity of It Follows: this is a film that makes a virtue of silence, that lives in the shadowy spaces between the splattery kill scenes that punctuate your average stalk-and-slasher.

The chassis may be slick and speedy, but under the hood Focus lives up to its Ford-produced namesake: sturdy but not exactly stimulating.

The plot’s old, the title’s borrowed and the jokes are blue – but there’s nothing remotely new in this wearying bromantic comedy.

The result is a fascinating – at times illuminating – tightrope act, but rarely an enjoyable one: for all its luminous outsider’s-eye photography and painstaking, perfectly pitched performances, both the film and its shivering heroine prove difficult to warm to.

Overall this is dull, derivative, murky stuff, full of running and shouting but never really going anywhere.

This is one mad mess from start to finish... But the sheer ambition is impossible to ignore, and the sense of fun is infectious: you may fear for your sanity during Jupiter Ascending, but you’ll come out smiling.

Never less than slick, precision-tooled multiplex entertainment, Kingsman hews close to the formula Vaughn and his co-writer Jane Goldman established in their superficially similar "Kick-Ass": hyperspeed action, pithy one-liners and grotesque ultraviolence.

Contrary to appearances, Mortdecai isn’t a total disaster: Depp may be suffering the most catastrophic career slump since Eddie Murphy said yes to Norbit, but he’s still perfectly watchable.

It’s hard to say exactly what’s at fault here: the performances are flawless – Carell fully justifies his unlikely casting, while Ruffalo is as dependable as ever – and the script is astute, intimate and at times shocking. But there’s just no real life in the film.

Taken 3 scores over its predecessor on almost every level: the stakes are higher, the LA locations are nicely photographed and, best of all, there’s an actual plot, with twists and everything.

It quickly devolves into predictable shock tactics, drippy wartime romance and scenes in which the characters leaf tremulously through Victorian photo albums and spout exposition.

This enjoyable-despite-itself horror flick has precisely nothing new to offer - with the arguable exception of a monster in a miniskirt, which may be a first.

Luckily, Jackson’s singular talent for massive-scale mayhem hasn’t deserted him, and the hour-long smackdown that crowns the film gives him ample opportunities to indulge it.

Everyone here deserves better.