Tom Huddleston

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

A fascinating true tale of animal welfare becomes an annoyingly pretentious doc.

The Boss Baby is one of those snarky, post ‘Shrek’ cartoons that desperately wants to appeal to parents as well as kids, but its snappy, pop-culture-referencing script feels workshopped to death.

It’s a shame, because there’s a good, solid documentary to be made about this fascinating, enormously talented, slightly self-congratulatory little man and his unmistakeable ouevre.

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

With solid performances from all three leads and lovely twilight photography, the stage is set for a heartfelt coming-of-age drama – but the dire script has other ideas.

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.

A handful of tense moments and some neat Gravity style effects just about keep Life ticking along. But the direction by Daniel Espinosa (he of the dire Child 44) is seriously shoddy – there's a moment towards the end when everything seems suddenly to happen at once, and not in a good way – and the total lack of originality is disappointing.

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.

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.

As ever with this series, the shocks are cheap but effective, and the shaky-cam aesthetic adds an unsettling layer of realism (if you’re willing to overlook the innate ridiculousness of the film-everything concept).

Precious Cargo isn’t actually as objectionable as your average petrol-station-bargain-bin thriller, thanks to one or two half-decent lines, a plot that vaguely makes sense and an unexpected dearth of outright misogyny. It’s still pretty rubbish, though.

The visual style here is pleasingly simple, with round, Moomin-ish faces and washes of icy pastel colour. But the story is pretty flat, spending ages setting up a rivalry between aristocrats that turns out to have no bearing on the story at all.

This feature-length Mr Peabody and Sherman is by no means unbearable: there are a few decent gags, and the episodic plot just about manages to hold the interest. But there’s little here for any but the most easy-to-please youngsters.

When the best one can say about a movie is that it’s pyrotechnically impressive, something important is missing. In this case it’s tension, originality and memorable characters.

Too much of the humour derives from Emily’s insatiable appetite for booze, food and sex, while the central mother-daughter relationship is predictable.

This is tame, lifeless stuff.

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.

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

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.

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.

All in all, a most unlikeable film.

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.

The script can’t find the right tone, torn between hard-hitting satire on the pitfalls of capitalism and goofy, upbeat we’re-in-the-money clichés. It’s a fine line that ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ walked with ease – but Gaghan, sadly, is no Scorsese.

Like four or five Harry Potter books squeezed into a single movie: it makes precious little sense.

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.

Escape Pla’ would have made a perfect vehicle for, say, a Chuck Norris or even a Jean-Claude Van Damme. But these two redoubtable, enormously watchable old-school heroes deserve better.

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.

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 Space Between Us is mostly harmless. But it won’t come close to troubling your heartstrings, let alone the space between your ears.

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.

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

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

By the end, even Hanks looks a bit bored.

There’s nothing to really hate about Rock Dog, just a creeping sense that – from the writers to the animators to the voice cast – no one’s really put much effort in.

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.

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.

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

With some dire blue-screen effects, dizzying tonal instability and a total absence of suspense or originality, "Wolverine" is something of a disaster.

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.

Extreme cinema aficionados will doubtless get major kicks from Moebius. For others, the cumulative shocks are likely to induce weariness and boredom.

Terminator Salvation isn’t the gritty, futuristic blitzkrieg for which fans of the first two films have been salivating. It isn’t even the slick, entertaining Hollywood blockbuster most were realistically expecting. It is a shambolic, deafening, intelligence-insulting mess, a crushing failure on almost all counts.

Strap on your swordbelt, buckle your sandals and oil up your rippling six-pack, because here comes yet another interminable, CGI-drenched mythic mish-mash with far more money than brain cells.

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

It’s a strong setup, poorly handled.

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.

Thank the gods of war for Antonio Banderas, who single-handedly steals (and almost saves) the show as a loquacious assassin.

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

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.

While Monster Trucks may be bizarre, haphazard and deeply silly, hey, it’s a movie about monsters that live in trucks. It was never going to be Citizen Kane.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

There’s nothing here that works.

There’s really nothing to recommend ‘Sea of Monsters’: the young cast are smug and forgettable; the action sequences barely get going before they’re over; and the whole affair is riddled with product placement and pop cultural references – one girl even seems to possess a magic iPad. Keep the kids at home

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.