Wendy Ide

This latest in the ‘personal growth through gentle humiliation’ genre is amiable enough, but does suffer from the over-familiarity of themes and plot-points.

This doesn’t entirely work as a self contained entity; the interest and value to audiences is mainly in the background detail it gives to the story of Grey Gardens.

The lack of a satisfying human connection between key characters is a stumbling block, but Wyatt does deliver plenty elsewhere.

While there is a propulsive energy to some of the film, there is also a sense that a lot of territory is being covered. And not all of it – a nit-picking examination of Tupac’s contractual woes for example – is as dramatically compelling as the central arc of Tupac’s bright-burning stellar rise and fall.

The aims are laudable, but the execution is as baggy as a discarded pair of support tights.

Unfolding over the course of a year, and divided into seasons, the film digs deep into the psychology of dying but is curiously unmoving, despite milking every last cancer-afflicted frame for sentiment.

Timely as it is, this is a film which doesn’t always treat its female characters with the respect that one might hope for, certainly given that it is intended to expose exploitation rather than add to it.

Doggedly conventional in its approach, the film walks an uneasy line between unflinching honesty and crass emotional exploitation, before tipping into the latter in a questionable final act.

While the film is largely content to tread a safe path, it does at least feel full-hearted in its appreciation of the way music can connect lost souls and enrich lives.

Like the strong-minded but somewhat petulant Martina herself, the film delivers plenty of heady sensuality but is mainly skin deep and, ultimately fails to satisfy.

The gimmick for this schlocky action picture is that it’s almost entirely dialogue-free. The story unfolds through ambitious action sequences and montages; the film helps itself liberally to the cheese buffet that is 1970s MOR rock.

Meditative and meandering, this handsomely shot but unfocused picture might present something of a challenge to all but the most dedicated students of Chinese cultural history.

Densely factual and sometimes a little unweildy, this is a film in which good intentions outweigh style and execution.

It’s all very sweet and well-meaning, yet this story of redemption is a naïve and very pastel coloured portrait of a Yakuza veteran.

Atmosphere alone is not enough. Abramenko fails to generate much in the way of empathy with the characters, resulting in tension being diffused by the fact that it’s hard to care very much for their outcomes.

7 Keys is a nervy but uneven thriller that is rather let down by the fact that, while the two central performances are independently strong, there’s little discernible chemistry between them.

It’s certainly a striking location for a story: a blinding white sun-baked blank slate on which anything can be written. It’s just a little unfortunate that the story Herzog chooses to tell is so frustratingly enigmatic and unformed.

The transporting power of art is a difficult thing to capture in cinema at the best of times, and this film struggles to do so, leaning heavily on a score which signposts the emotional content of each scene a little too emphatically.

This is film-making that feels rather dated and, unlike its resourceful protagonist, curiously risk averse.

Despite a sterling effort from Thompson, neither the comedy nor the character arcs are fully satisfying.

Without the crucial performance element – we only see Morrissey on stage once – this ultimately feels like a taster; a prelude to the main story.

Swiss director Baran bo Odar leans heavily on bone-crunching sound design and a percussive score which rumbles over the film like a pursuing helicopter.

For all its originality, the film fails to leave much of an impression.

With its black and white characterisation, the film approaches its complex theme in a way which may seem a little too simplistic to be fully satisfying.

It’s a big-hearted picture, certainly, but one that doggedly labours its message.

Ultimately, it’s a bit of a mess, but it has luridly entertaining moments nonetheless.

The risk-averse approach to the remake extends to the humour. Pratfalls and benign double entendres (“I saw you slip her a sausage!”) rub shoulders with familiar gags and catchphrases which have been lifted wholesale from the original series.

Along with its arresting visual sense – the film is handsomely shot on 35mm – it can boast a robust resistance to the cinematic cliches of portrayal of disability.

Bracing fun as it is to watch, the film is rather an empty thrill.

The Forgiven is a decidedly uneven piece of work.

It looks terrific – as always Hausner’s use of colour and costume is striking and eloquent – but this is a thinly-written picture that operates on a largely superficial level.

On the periphery of the film – in the very interesting dynamics of Sarah Jo’s family, in the tart sarcasm of some of the character details – there is much to admire. While much of this picture misfires, it would be premature to write Dunham off just yet.

The initially taut thriller takes an unexpected tonal shift into overwrought suspense, losing some of its claustrophobic domestic tension along the way.

The screenplay seems a little thin, full of frayed threads which are never properly woven into the story.

Even with author Ian McEwan adapting his own novel for the screen, this somewhat stilted picture struggles to convey the deft emotional complexity of the source material.

Although driven by a robust, screen-filling performance by Brian Cox, who not only captures the voice and mannerisms of Churchill but also the distinctive silhouette, the film is too ponderously paced and conventional to make much of an impact.

With its arch, Lynchian tropes and curiously mannered dialogue, which may be deliberately disengaged from reality or may just be out of tune with the voices of the characters, this film will not be for everyone.

Seyfried is impressive in the role, mercurial and fragile, but with a flinty coldness deep within.

This highly decorative mood piece pays more attention to getting the wafting drapery and soft furnishings just so than it does to the meat of the drama, and audiences may come away feeling a little undernourished.

It’s possible ... that in his affection for and identification with Nicolaou, Ferrera has over-estimated the fascination of his subject’s life story.

Despite the suitably transgressive nature of the subject matter, Catherine Breillat’s first film in a decade is an oddly muted affair: uncomfortable, certainly, but lacking the disruptive, confrontational jab and genuine shock factor of her earlier pictures.

Rather like the ill-fated plane, the comedy struggles to land.

Refn’s gifts as a visual stylist are employed to arresting effect - there’s a luxuriant use of colour which evokes the work of fashion photographer Guy Bourdin. But peel back the glossy, overly groomed surface and there is not a lot of substance underneath.

[A] silly, shallow romcom, which is as thin and predictable as Kat’s tinny pop songs.

It’s a tense, atmospheric piece of film-making but it made me profoundly uncomfortable – and not, I should add, in a good way. There’s a prurience in how the murders are filmed – the camera hungrily scouring the distorted faces of dying women – that borders on dehumanising.

The first third of the picture is promising, if frequently excruciating. But the points are painfully laboured and the jokes run out of steam.

At the core of the film, partially concealed by Bay’s posturing and swagger, is a bracing, slickly executed B-movie.

It’s a humourless drag of a picture, overreliant on clunky exposition and naive geopolitical posturing. Plus it’s ugly, with a greasy murkiness that looks as though the lens was smeared with lard.

This is a film which doesn’t take itself very seriously, and it will work best with an audience which takes the same approach.

Lacking the visual flair of 127 Hours or the satisfying resilience of Robert Redford’s character in All Is Lost, the film leans heavily on Armie Hammer’s performance. And while he is a charismatic leading actor, he is not given enough to work with here to sustain the picture.

The pro-family, anti-tech messaging is designed to play to the parents, but while not entirely unwatchable, the film’s demented levels of energy will recommend it to younger audiences and may trigger stress headaches in anyone over 12.

It’s the cinema equivalent of rubbing cut onions in the eyes of the audience: film-making that is cynically and artificially engineered to make the audience weep.

Despite reported reshoots and a fresh edit after the film’s coolly received premiere last year, its sour spirit and a cluttered, clumsy third act remain a problem.

While I had more time than many of my fellow critics for the two previous movie spin-offs from the Sega video game series, it turns out that you can, in fact, have too much of a good thing.

It’s a pity, then, that this sluggishly paced film, which leans heavily on a fussy, twinkling piano score, is so meandering and listless.

This is an underdog tale straining so hard to be endearing that it’s more likely to pull a muscle than tug a heartstring.

It’s a film that obediently hits the predictable story beats, is regularly punctuated by peppy, disposable musical numbers, but shows no inclination to be much more than a nostalgic marketing vehicle for a collection of anodyne pop songs.

The prosaic anti-escapism of this sprawling American indie thoroughly subverts the expectations of the festive family movie.

Story strands feel half developed; pacing seems erratic.

Of the cast, it’s only Iman Vellani, as Marvel fangirl turned superhero Kamala Khan, who seems genuinely excited to be in the film.

It is blithely unquestioning of what the frenzy over glorified Hacky Sacks actually tells us about society.

Comic actors Steve Zahn and Jillian Bell are uncharacteristically earnest in this achingly well-intentioned but thuddingly heavy-handed family drama.

Choppy editing adds to the sense that this picture is struggling to achieve a tonal balance and work out exactly what it is trying to say.

The yagé trip sequence is overlong, baggy and indulgent. The characters lose all sense of their bodies; the film simply loses its point.

It’s a peppy sugar rush that should please younger audiences, but the appeal of the series is wearing pretty thin.

Swinton is massively overblown and Torres too wispy and diffident to balance things out.

In a tussle between the appeal of the subject and the plodding banality of the approach, the pups are ultimately the losers.

The small-screen tone of the picture makes it feel like a duff episode of Horrible Histories, albeit with considerably more swearing.

It’s an unforgivable waste of Jackie Chan, action-movie legend, reduced here to pratfalls and gurning double takes.

Now in his 60s – not quite old enough to be a US presidential candidate but not far off – the actor lacks some of the hunger and aggression that ignited his career in the 80s, but he remains a uniquely magnetic performer. And somehow he manages to bring a degree of freshness to material that was stale several decades ago.

A superpower movie with a premise absurd even by the far-fetched standards of the genre, iBoy misses out on the opportunity for entertaining mischief with a po-faced approach to the material and a lack of internal logic to the story.

There’s a zesty spark between Patel and James, and for a while the film chugs along happily on the goodwill bought by the soundtrack. Then one honkingly misjudged scene knocks the whole movie off key, heralding a toe-curling, tone-deaf terrace chant of an ending.

The film busts a gut attempting to free itself from the confines of the couple’s home. In this, it’s at least true to the spirit of lockdown, but it feels like a missed opportunity.

For all its affable charm, there’s something slippery and disingenuous about this film.

The vampire genre is, like its toothy protagonists, notoriously difficult to kill outright, but this flat and uninspired film could be a nail in its coffin.

A charmless, CGI-heavy spectacle, Red One falls into an ill-considered audience no man’s land: it’s too intense for little kids (we get to visit Krampus in what appears to be a yuletide S&M dungeon) and too bland to attract teens and genre fans.

Seydoux is as charismatic and minxy as always, but the role of Lizzie is maddeningly elusive and underdeveloped. Perhaps the main disappointment of the picture, aside from its lifeless and conventional approach, is the fact that it is so preoccupied with the leaden Jakob, while his mercurial, treacherous wife is a far more interesting character.

This has the brash swagger of The Wolf of Wall Street, but the labyrinthine intricacies of the case may present something of a challenge to anyone not well versed in stock market manipulation.

It should be stressed that the problem doesn’t lie with Ackie necessarily, but rather with a leaden, by-numbers screenplay from Anthony McCarten, who brings to this film the same box-ticking approach he employed with Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody.

Something slightly disingenuous, perhaps, about the glib anti-corporate message of the film jars. The appeal of the original came from its purity and simplicity. This overcomplicated onslaught of manufactured magic could never really compete.

The clear lines of the elegant 2D animation are not matched by the mythic muddle of the storytelling, an exposition-heavy slog of warring factions, convoluted webs of enchantment and a deadly, wolf-borne pandemic for good measure.

Treasure is a curiously inert work, a film that feels as emotionally grey and underlit as its cinematography.

Unlike the steely resilience in the face of disaster of Robert Redford’s character in All Is Lost, watching Crowhurst slowly crack is the cinema equivalent of filling your pockets with pebbles and chucking yourself into the Solent.

This contemporary adaptation of The Turn of the Screw takes the ornate enigma of Henry James’s gothic novella and whittles it down into something rather more flat and conventional.

The performances are so deadpan (or undeadpan perhaps) that most of the cast seem to be flatlining even before the zombies start chewing chunks out of their faces.

Unfortunately, Perry drenches the tale with his trademark syrupy ineptitude, creating a gloopy, turgid plodder.

Unfortunately the smarts, the sass and the wit of the original MIB is MIA.

The film’s main asset is Jonathan Majors as Kang the Conqueror: his performance, with its velvet-soft line deliveries and unfathomable, boundless rage, is the magnetic core of this incoherent effects-dump of a movie.

The cluttered structure, littered with brusque little flashbacks, repeatedly interrupts the momentum and tension of the story of Nureyev’s most daring leap.

Fans will no doubt find the film fascinating, if a little dispiriting: it may be like eavesdropping on your parents, only to discover that they’re on the brink of divorce.

It’s clearly a passion project for Page, so why then does his performance feel so lifeless and inert?

Mostly, the soundtrack is an unhummable mess of warbled exposition.

The aspect that’s traditionally elevated Pixar animations, the dizzy wit and inventiveness of the screenplay, is missing from this dispiriting trudge through outer space, via some box-ticking messaging along the way.

For all the energetic hurling around of heavy machinery, the movie feels inert and lazy.

It’s a diverting enough way to pass a couple of hours, I suppose, although you’ll need a high tolerance for montage sequences and for the alarmingly priapic personal-space-invading exertions of Mike and his boys.

Despite Willem Dafoe bringing gnarled gravitas to a screenplay which pinballs between oblique portent and grotesque shock tactics, this is an incoherent indulgence.

Unfortunately, Scott is the most persuasive element in a film that is atmospherically photographed by Marcel Zyskind but let down by a clueless screenplay which borders, at times, on the risible.

Unfortunately, kind of a drag.

This picture is impressively designed but low on scares.

The special effects seem shoddy and unfinished and the screenplay struggles to keep up with its own twists and turns.

Even Arterton at smouldering full wattage can do little to hold together a picture in which the chemistry between the two leads is non-existent and many of the directorial choices are decidedly odd.

Michael talks about himself with candour, and the archive footage is extensive. But the choice of interviewees, including a tittering Ricky Gervais honking out off-key witticisms, James Corden and Liam Gallagher, seems a bit random.

It’s a wasted opportunity. Brie is clearly a gifted comic actress who deserves better material than this.

There is little satisfaction to be found in the picture’s messily uninhibited climax.

The film shares far too many tropes with other YA sci-fi properties – The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, Divergent – to make a mark in the unforgiving post-apocalyptic wasteland of the adolescent market. That said, the casting is strong.

Lucy in the Sky is low on real insight and feels like a psychology column in a supermarket tabloid.

This should amuse the younger members of the family, but it's unlikely to offer much more to parents than a couple of hours' respite.

Vampire Clay is clumsily structured and paced, with the gross-out effects dashed off at the beginning and the laboured explanation effectively defusing the tension just at the point when it should be building into a claypocalypse of gore and violence.

It’s amiable enough, but this broad French comedy is not distinctive enough for the arthouse crowd, and too Gallic for the mainstream.

There is a slightly panicky desperation to the cacophonous production design, and a sense of trying to distract from a plot as thin as spun sugar.

Unlike movies such as Black Panther and Shang-Chi, which functioned as self-contained entities, this film requires an encyclopedic knowledge of Marvel minutiae and world-class cross-referencing skills to fully work. And who, outside the diehard fanbase, has the bandwidth for that level of commitment?

There are films that are so thunderously stupid they bypass guilty-pleasure status and end up as a danger to themselves and all around them. Bullet Train falls into the latter camp. It’s so imbecilic, you wouldn’t trust it to cross the road unsupervised, let alone negotiate Japan’s Shinkansen high-speed rail network.

The wildly uneven wedding clash comedy You’re Cordially Invited is certainly in the vicinity of terrible on numerous occasions.

There is a blunt-weapon approach to the film’s themes – the eventual revelation about Amira’s paternity strikes at the very core of her cultural identity, but the film misses the opportunity to interrogate the idea of what actually constitutes this identity.

It’s Statham’s movie – a brisk, slick, ultra-violent action onslaught that yet again demonstrates his ability to redeem just about any old tosh.

Perhaps aware of the limitations of the screenplay, director F Gary Gray deploys an irritating arsenal of flashy camera moves and sleight-of-hand edits, but these only serve to emphasise the emptiness of the spectacle.

There are moments when Abela disappears and Winehouse bursts on to the screen, like a magic eye picture blinked fleetingly into focus. But the film is wildly uneven and prone to catastrophic misjudgments – in that at least it’s true to Winehouse’s spirit.

There’s an edge of panicky desperation to the film-making – the lurching, swooping cameras; the skittish editing; the arcing lens flare. It all seems a little too eager to distract from the fact that top-hatted, frock-coated, mutton-chopped chaps burbling on about the relative advantages of the alternating current versus direct current system does not, in fact, make for electrifying drama.

This is a grimly efficient IP cash-in that defuses any potential scares with a hot-pink colour palette and a bunch of oddly specific and distracting product placements.

The picture, by Mexican director Alejandro Monteverde, is an earnest and well-intentioned attempt to engage with a very real and harrowing issue. It’s also a thunderously crass and manipulative movie that is hampered by erratic pacing, pantomime bad guys and an overfondness for shots of Caviezel weeping God-fearing, manly tears.

Soapy in style and luridly exploitative in its approach to violence, Smaller And Smaller Circles is perhaps not sophisticated enough to appeal to fans of the crime genre outside of the domestic market.

This sluggish US remake trades the generous charm of Sy’s affable screen presence for the niggling irritation of Kevin Hart. Everything that was already wrong with the original film – its sentimentality, its simplicity – is magnified.

The music they create together is emblematic of the central problem. It’s sterile, manufactured and utterly fake production-line pop masquerading as some kind of indie rock spotify sensation.

A handsome period piece, shot in striking black and white, A Forgotten Man tackles an intriguing theme, but it’s a little too airless and inert in approach to bring this murky corner of European history to life.

This sloppy horror comedy under delivers on both shocks and laughs.

Perhaps the question is not whether the film needed to be so relentlessly grim, but rather whether it needed to be made at all.

It’s a fun premise, but Lowe’s follow-up to her deliciously nasty 2016 debut, Prevenge, is disappointingly underpowered and slapdash.

Playing out to the histrionic squalling of a country-infused score, this is film-making that aims to smite its audience into submission.

A film so grating that you long for the sweet release of amnesia.

Fisherman’s Friends is a somewhat tone-deaf comedy drama. With its by-the-numbers storyline of a jaded London music industry exec (Daniel Mays) who finds romance and true meaning in his life in addition to an acapella group, plus a subplot about a village pub under threat from an out of town property developer, the film is wearisomely predictable and parochial in its outlook.

For all the real-estate machinations and nefarious scheming, there are too many inert scenes that drain the energy from this already plodding story.

The only notable development is just how rapidly a satirical skewering of genre formulas can become thuddingly formulaic.

Enthusiastic mugging and gurning from the cast can’t hide a feeble, flailing screenplay that clings to its single idea like a lifebelt.

The scares are sad, puny little things. Even Jamie Lee Curtis seems to have lost the will to fight. It’s time that Myers and his mouldy old mask were laid to rest. Let’s hope nobody decides to disinter him yet again.

It’s visually striking, and at times somewhat overwhelming. Expect numerous sword-based battles, ogres, dragons, ancient curses, distractingly voluptuous supporting characters and, of course, slime.

It’s fair to say that this amiable but almost farcically uneventful adaptation of the 2005 memoir by JR Moehringer is also postcard-thin in its plotting and insight.

Todd Stephens’s film is an amiable little story, and Kier is clearly enjoying himself immensely, but this is as wafting and insubstantial as Patrick’s chiffon scarf.

A film that erases itself so thoroughly from your memory, it’s almost as if Pitt and Clooney had performed one of their bespoke clean-up services on your brain.

The film has a boisterous energy, but it’s puerile, phoney and frequently rather cringe.

Kobi Libii’s film is far too diffident and polite in its approach to leave much of a mark in the conversation about race and representation in US culture.

It’s a wildly uneven mess.

It’s a chipper, self-consciously adorable romp that will no doubt delight existing fans of the television series. It is, however, laser-targeted at the youngest audience members.

For all its big-hitting visual ambition, philosophical window dressing and pick-and-mix literary references, this is a work of screaming emptiness.

It’s almost worth watching just for the way that Cage delivers the word “testicle”: it sounds as though all the syllables got caught in a combine harvester and then had to be reassembled, with the accents and emphases in the wrong places. It is, like much of the film, utterly barmy.

It’s trite and predictable stuff: the laughs are forced; the pathos is over-stewed.

Tiresome stuff.

It’s a bedroom farce with Jihadist jokes; a film which attempts to skewer the preconceptions harboured about its marginalised characters without allowing those characters the leeway to emerge from the margins as fully rounded individuals.

With its Sadeian overtones, and glumly perverse excesses, this is not a particularly enjoyable experience. It will be best suited to the more experimental fringes of the festival circuit and to audiences who thought that Salo: 120 Days Of Sodom was too much fun.

There are moments that catch – a cafe date between Tolkien and his future wife (Lily Collins) is one, and a knockout scene with the mother of his closest friend is another – but for the most part this is stolid film-making that lacks the imagination and creativity of its subject.

Despite Crowe’s commitment to going balls-out nutso in the role, the film unravels, a casualty of slap-dash plotting, lazy directing and a reliance on tired Catholic horror tropes.

Something in the Water is competently filmed, with lots of propulsive underwater shark’s eye shots of the flailing legs of the bridesmaids. But there’s rather too much time spent watching the girls bobbing and bickering in the middle of the ocean as they wait for the next assault from the circling fish.

Despite the best efforts of a game John Cena in the title role, the laughs are a little thin on the ground.

It’s thuddingly predictable stuff that limps through a plot involving nefarious sex traffickers, treachery and a liberal smearing of Miami sleaze.

This is the first film that Mendes has directed from his own screenplay (he had a co-writing credit on 1917), and for all its visual flair, courtesy of veteran cinematographer Roger Deakins, there’s little to suggest that Mendes has the writing chops to match his directing skill.

Plus points include a punchy soundtrack of 90s hip-hop, and Anthony Ramos and Dominique Fishback, heroically holding their own as the hapless humans roped into the Transformers’ thunderous mess.

The murky cinematography further hinders a picture that looks as though it was shot through raw sewage.

It’s an intriguing idea that might, perhaps, have sustained a short film.

This brilliant original thinker is crowbarred into a stolidly conventional “triumph against the odds” narrative. It’s not an entirely terrible film. It’s just not the film that RBG deserves.

Mainly, though, the problem lies with a screenplay that fails to create suspense, or even to persuade us to care who killed a brilliant but unpopular hair stylist. Still, credit to the hair and costume design team for a collection of extravagantly silly creations.

The combat sequences and SUV shootouts are grimly efficient, but the picture is baggily paced.

This glum crime franchise, unfolding against a backdrop of blighted concrete chill and semi-derelict industrial spaces, is evolving into Scandinavia’s anti-hygge.

The character of Magalie is so enraging that you would chuck yourself into the Aegean Sea rather than spend two weeks in her company.

The camerawork is unnecessarily showy, full of swirls and flourishes, which further distracts from the central story.

It’s a world that is so incoherent and inconsistent you almost have to admire the chutzpah, in which buxom lady horse-thieves dress themselves for a night of crime displaying several inches of showy cleavage, contained only by a glorified shoelace.

Watching the cast of Expend4bles, the latest instalment of the thunderously dumb veteran mercenary franchise, sweating and straining their way through the “casual banter” section of the screenplay is like watching contestants on The World’s Strongest Man attempting to climb a ladder while carrying a tractor tyre. It’s painful.

For the most part, however, this romp, which pits Thor against Christian Bale’s cadaverous God-slayer, is superficial stuff – a film that brings a greeting-card triteness to its themes of love and sacrifice; that harvests internet memes (screaming goats) in the service of easy laughs.

What becomes painfully clear is the fact that Bob Marley deserves a better biopic. Still, Lynch’s magnetic presence, and a heartstopping rendition of Redemption Song, almost justify the price of admission.

Decent performances from both McGregors can’t breathe much spirit (alcoholic or otherwise) into the film’s listless and generic screenplay.

Even when Georgie and Lu share the screen, there’s a curious emotional distance which means that this theoretically torrid romance never fully ignites.

It’s an overlong, indulgent slog.

While Sofia Boutella, playing outlaw warrior Kora, brings a balletic elegance to her fight sequences, ultimately this is disappointingly generic stuff.

It’s a curiously inert affair: constrained, corseted, passionless and saddled with a lumpen, Depp-shaped deadweight where there should be a pulse-racing core of power and desire.

Approach with a strong stomach, and don’t bother trying to keep a tally of the body count.

It should be pulpy fun powered by car chases and zippy repartee, but The Instigators is a dispiriting and predictable drag of a movie.

There’s something rather sterile and bloodless in the film’s approach, with its synthetic and soul-sappingly clean-looking CGI. Plus there’s the palpable lack of chemistry between the leads: a kind of brisk civility rather than the ache of eternal longing the title promises.

If we can’t believe the characters, how are we meant to accept the film’s central premise?

Russell’s showy directorial pizzazz is very much in evidence, but there’s an edge of desperation to the chunks of exposition that dam the flow of this already meandering tale.

Every tired war movie cliche is unearthed in a film that brings nothing new but will no doubt please fans of men in uniform yelling at explosions.

The decent quality of the animation of this English-language French production is rather let down by some shockingly poor voice performances and a couple of ear-bleeding musical numbers.

What was intended as an examination of the creative process backfires and becomes instead an inadvertent chronicle of oblivious privilege. Harvey wafts through scenes of poverty and devastation, then returns to her cocoon of a studio.

The whole tone of this glib black comedy, with its cartoon bad guys and conspiratorial wink with each addition to the body count, seems rather dated.

It’s a film that sets out to tackle the impact of degenerative disease, but, barring a few moments of confusion and a forgotten name or two, is infuriatingly evasive when it comes to showing the realities of the condition.

A film about two immaculately groomed women gaslighting and goading each other to the point of madness should be a lot more fun than this.

Dumbed-down and stripped of the symbolic subtext of the earlier movies, the picture is not without seat-shuddering thrills, but it’s like a tag-team wrestling bout for monsters rather than a picture with meaning and even a modicum of thought.

Tim Mackenzie-Smith’s slightly breathless and overstretched documentary aims for a Buena Vista Social Club-style story of late-life rediscovery but gets a little bogged down in a few too many hagiographic quotes from high-profile fans. Still, the music is sublime.

The famous apple incident is a taut centrepiece for Nick Hamm’s picture, and the action sequences are propulsive. The casting, however, is questionable.

Hardy is a highlight, playing Eddie as a man who has had more than enough of the party that’s raging in his head, but Kelly Marcel’s film is a sloppy, incoherent let-down.

In a chase picture that evolves into a war movie, the storytelling is propulsive, but it’s cheapened by crude and manipulative film-making choices.

It’s an alienatingly ugly technique and a mawkish tear-jerker choked up with synthetic sentimentality. You start to envy the dinosaurs their extinction event.

Montages, seesawing Dutch tilts and profligate overuse of lighting gels fail to conceal the fact that the film’s writing doesn’t match the lure of the central idea.

It’s not unusual, unfortunately, for the victims of sexual attacks to find themselves distrusted and even accused. What rankles in the film’s approach is that the audience is also encouraged to question her story.

As Ellie and Abbie respectively, Sophie Hawkshaw and Zoe Terakes make light work of a somewhat heavy-handed screenplay.

The always impressive Spall elevates this low-key mood piece a little, but even his skill as an actor can’t save the stultifying pacing.

If you’re a paunchy, middle-aged geezer with a wholesale cocaine habit, an aversion to “woke”, and hobbies that include beer and punching people, well, have I got a movie for you!

Extravagant camera moves, woozy fish-eye lenses and a full-on assault of CGI fail to give this story of warring inventors much in the way of a dramatic charge.

Strays is a film that leans heavily on gross-out gags and a pre-adolescent fascination with pee and poop.

It’s not unenjoyable, just deeply unoriginal.

The Liam Gallagher of old, with his shrapnel wit and swaggering crusade against being “suckered in by the dickheads”, would have tossed a grenade into the editing suite rather than sanction a doc that is more extended corporate rebranding exercise than it is rock’n’roll.

While the picture looks wonderfully atmospheric throughout, with its frostbitten monochromes and consumptive colour palette, the story disintegrates into a lurid and rather silly final act.

While Wicked: For Good repeats much of the same formula as the first picture, there is a crucial ingredient missing: humour. Without it, the spark is extinguished; the astringency that cut through the sentimentality of the first picture is gone.

Director Miguel Arteta, who brought a bracingly transgressive tartness to indie comedies Chuck & Buck and The Good Girl, delivers sloppily paced hack work here, while Tiffany Haddish and Rose Byrne, two fine comic actresses, are shackled to a screenplay so crassly tone-deaf, it makes you want to chisel off your own ears.

It is, very occasionally, brilliant: a deft reveal in the final 20 minutes ties together the disparate, seemingly unrelated scenes that came before. But with its overuse of fish-eye lenses and the quacking, whimsical brass-heavy score, it’s extremely hard work.

Unfortunately, it becomes clear that the film is all backdrop, a boomer nostalgia trip with little in the way of actual story.

[A] crass and manipulative warsploitation picture.

Performance aside, the key issue is that endless griping about a shitty marriage – even the marriage of arguably the pre-eminent figure of 19th century literature – is a drag.

Save the Cinema is the kind of plucky underdog feelgood slop that the British film industry churns out on a regular basis, largely to the indifference of audiences.

The lazily generic plot devices (yet again, an ancient evil artefact offers unlimited powers to its holder); performances so thuddingly clunky that much of the dialogue sinks like a boulder in the sea; the lack of any humour whatsoever: these are all minor irritations compared with the picture’s glib trivialisation of the climate crisis.

It’s an interesting exercise – a show-don’t-tell action extravaganza. But Woo resorts to such clumsy storytelling devices . . . that the film is scuppered by its own gimmick.

Like its star, The Last Witch Hunter is big, overblown and frequently incomprehensible.

Sofia Boutella shows action-star potential as Kora, a mysterious outsider who has found peace living with the farming commune, but she deserves a better vehicle than this chop-shopped jalopy.

What starts out as a flinty portrait of the influence of a domineering mother over her unworldly son soon loses momentum.

The camera whirls giddily, dizzy from the sparkle and spectacle, but not quite able to conceal the fact that this is an empty bauble of a movie.

Reportedly the most expensive Netflix original production to date, Red Notice would have benefited if some of its $200m budget had been spent on untangling the screenplay.

This is a downbeat slog of a film which tells a not particularly involving story.

Theatrical, both in its single-location setting and its tone, the film manages to be simultaneously laboured but also oddly opaque.

The car chases should be the escapist, high-octane fun part of the movie. But fun is in short supply in a picture which is fuelled by a full tank of ill-will and fury.

The shock value of the dialogue – and it is staggeringly rude at times – is neutered by a rambling lack of narrative drive and, ultimately, a sentimental justification that feels disingenuous.

While there’s a sense that Korine is fully at peace with a lack of meaning in his work, it’s doubtful that he was aiming to be boring.

Coward’s brand of urbane casual elitism is rather past its sell-by date. But the problems run deeper in this energetic but scattershot version of a property which might have been best left to rest in peace.

While The Lego Movie is all about creativity and invention, Playmobil shamelessly steals ideas.

It’s laughably contrived and shamelessly calculating. Dog’s bollocks, but not in a good way.

This is beyond inept.

This crime caper has a certain frenzied energy, but it’s sloppily plotted, crass and so dumb, you wouldn’t trust it to use cutlery unsupervised.

A singularly unattractive animation style, jokes as flat as roadkill and a score that could be used as an instrument of torture are just some of the problems with the latest attempt to squeeze yet more blood from the Addams Family mausoleum.

While the eponymous star of this film is a fairly robust example of the breed, with eyeballs that appear to be securely wedged into its skull, there’s a frisson of anxiety whenever he’s on screen that undermines any attempts at comedy.

The Super Mario Bros Movie is a frantic Easter egg hunt of a film that does the bare minimum to please its loyal existing fanbase. Those less enthralled by the antics of the moustachioed Italian plumber will wonder which of Donkey Kong’s weaponised barrels this joyless, noisy mess was scraped from.

Perhaps there’s an alternative out there, a sharper, smarter, funnier version of a Minecraft movie. One with actual jokes. Or, God forbid, there may even be a worse iteration, although that’s hard to imagine.

It’s formulaic, uninspired stuff, an artless, mirthless mess that leans heavily on the familiarity of the characters – Batman, Wonder Woman and others cameo – while also undermining the integrity of the DC universe.

In the absence of sharp writing, Bautista and Nanjiani adopt the blunt-weapon approach, shrieking their lines at each other as if they’re trying to hold a conversation from opposite sides of an eight-lane motorway. It’s painfully unfunny stuff.

Bickering middle-aged women obsessing over travel arrangements is not entertainment, it’s a living hell.

If anything, the writing in this chocolate-box travelogue of a sequel is even lazier than that of the first film, with much cackling innuendo and sparkly narcissism, a couple of clumsily engineered long-distance domestic crises and interminable heartfelt speeches that made me cringe so hard I nearly dislocated my spine.

It’s cheap and lazy stuff.

It’s quite an achievement to combine career low points for all three of the female leads, but a film that spends so much time capturing shots of characters walking sassily through the streets of 70s Hell’s Kitchen at the expense of characterisation clearly has its priorities fried.

There are no leprechauns in this abysmal romantic comedy. Otherwise, though, pretty much no theme-park Ireland cliche is left unturned.

It all feels rather cursory, subplots as glue to tack together the Cornish tourist board-approved shots of cornflower-blue waters and cloudless skies.

The dismal dialogue wouldn’t matter quite so much if at least the action sequences delivered a few thrills, but the whole thing is so shoddily put together it looks as though it was edited with a strimmer.

It’s a tonal mess, a film that aims to be an adorably quirky romcom but plays out as such a surreally purgatorial ordeal.

This adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, by the theatre director Carrie Cracknell, from a screenplay by Ron Bass and Alice Victoria Winslow, is a travesty.

The effects are so shoddy, you wonder if the entire post-production budget was blown on fine-tuning Cate Blanchett’s cheekbones. It’s so incoherent, you half expect to see the notorious director Uwe Boll’s name on the credits.

It requires a rare ineptitude to take what is famously one of the most terrifying movies ever made, recycle pretty much everything (including Tubular Bells on the score) but neglect to include the scares.

Diwan relocates the action to Hong Kong and remakes Emmanuelle as a glossy but dispiriting treatise on the emptiness of the corporate world, punctuated by lots of panting, lip-chewing abandon.

[An] incoherent, vampire-themed Marvel offcut.

Incoherent, inelegantly choreographed and shot with a colour palette reminiscent of one of those noxious American Candy Stores that have popped up all over London like an outbreak of herpes, this Valentine-themed martial arts action picture is one of the worst of the year so far.

Puerile, imbecilic and imbued with the kind of casual 1970s sitcom homophobia that reads all male friendships as somehow suspect, this slack-jawed grossout comedy represents the nadir of Conan Doyle adaptations.