Wendy Ide

Deliberately scattershot and naïve, this engaging, absurdist collage, shot entirely on VHS tape, smuggles a serious message beneath its 80s poodle-permed public access television pastiche.

The picture comes armed to the teeth with slick action sequences . . . and genuinely funny lines. It’s just a pity that both the action and the dialogue are occasionally obscured by the frenzied editing.

While this lively crime comedy doesn’t exactly break new ground, it does, in the form of an appealingly naive central performance from Brown, have a disarming, sweet-natured charm at its heart.

James Hawes, who directed the entire first season of Slow Horses, clearly knows his way around the spy genre. Which is why this disjointed thriller about a brilliant CIA code cracker turned elite operative (Rami Malek) delivers at least some pacy thrills and globe-hopping intrigue, despite numerous issues with the screenplay, structure and casting.

As rambunctiously entertaining as it is crude.

Typically delicate and as gentle as a balm, the film’s well-intentioned earnestness will not endear it to the more cynical end of the audience spectrum. But fans of Kawase’s small scale personal dramas will respond to the film’s wistful tone, as well as the plaintive prettiness of the photography.

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.

While the action set pieces and effects are dizzyingly immersive, the storytelling is fussy and somehow uncompelling.

Director Susanna Fogel handles the action set pieces with gusto but fails to make the chick-chat bonding moments seem like anything more than padding.

Eiffel is not unentertaining – it would pass the time pleasantly enough on a long-haul flight. Together, Duris and Mackey have a corset-twanging chemistry. But the foregrounding of a fictional romance over a feat of engineering does feel like a missed opportunity.

This is not a film which challenges the stereotypes of teen coming of age movies. However the dialogue is sharp, and Powley’s comic timing is well-tuned.

There’s little that’s new in this enjoyable but familiar brush with villainy.

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

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.

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

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.

It’s mildly amusing stuff that delivers no surprises, but may muster a few laughs.

The lack of emotional distance between the filmmakers and the subject – producer Jonathan Cavendish is the son of Robin and Diana – might account for the bracingly celebratory approach. This is understandable, perhaps, but it results in a lack of dramatic light and shade, and an absence of texture in the characterisation.

Rather than a slick, high-concept fantasy action picture in the vein of Everything Everywhere All at Once, here is a B-movie throwback with its roots in the pulpy creature features of the 1950s. Viewed from this perspective, the shonky special effects are just part of the fun.

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.

While Kahn offers no overt criticism, it’s hard not to question the sustainability of an art market that has evolved into a kind of prestige car park for vast quantities of money.

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.

And here’s the problem for Statham’s super spy: for all the Ukrainian gangsters he nuts and helicopters he pilots, Orson Fortune is just not particularly interesting or fleshed out as a character. Plaza and Grant, meanwhile, steal every scene they touch.

A Man Called Otto taps into a seemingly unquenchable audience appetite for stories of cantankerous grumps redeemed by the healing embrace of community.

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.

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

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

The running time is an issue – a punchy seven-inch single approach would have been preferable, rather than this jam session of a screenplay, which doesn’t know how to end. But the tonal blend of goofy and gory is oddly endearing.

The film soon runs out of bite, with a plot that repeatedly chews over the same thumps, bumps and rattled doors, and the same shadowy menace in underlit basements.

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.

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’s a comedy, certainly, but one that leans into the discomfort of the polar differences between the couple.

Key to the film’s appeal is the way that the friendship between the four girls, Dina, Lola, Daisy (Lisa Barnett), and Mari (Eden Grace Redfield), is persuasively brought to life.

Director Jaume Collet-Serra creates a romp of a picture booby-trapped with adventure movie tropes (arcane curses, snakes, evil Germans) which, while they might seem familiar to Indiana Jones fans, still combine to make for a decent family flick.

The latest picture from DreamWorks Animation is a likable if slight story of teen crises.

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

Southcombe deftly threads together the two stories with echoes in the dialogue and in the location.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Like its subject, the film is not particularly revolutionary or groundbreaking in its approach. But again, like its subject, it is a work of unmistakable quality and class.

While there are no surprises whatsoever here, the perky charm remains.

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.

For all the sensory overload – it’s a bit like being trapped inside a first-person shooter challenge being played by a 12-year-old gaming prodigy – The Gray Man is undeniably entertaining.

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

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.

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.

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.

Handsome animation adds to the appeal of this sequel to the 2002 animation Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, but this is family entertainment that’s quite niche in its appeal – pony-mad kids will love it, but it may test the patience of parents.

Although much of the film is effectively claustrophobic, it is too bogged down by exposition to fully take off.

It’s not uninvolving. The picture takes its own sweet time getting going, but a satisfying momentum builds through the multiple, interlinked storylines.

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

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

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.

While Pixar movies tell their stories visually, Luck finds itself wielding densely detailed exposition about the process of deploying luck to the human world. Still, there’s much to enjoy.

Best seen in a cinema with the rowdiest audience you can find.

This odd-couple comedy road movie paints its characters in brushstrokes so broad you could land a jumbo jet on them, while the intrusively affable score lurches into every scene like a drunk with no concept of personal space. And yet Colman saves the picture, her thorny performance gradually revealing a well of pain.

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.

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

Some of the picture’s taut focus and pacing are lost to an unnecessary cancer subplot involving Eli’s family; like the journalists it follows, the film works best when it is tenaciously single-minded.

This picture is impressively designed but low on scares.

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.

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.

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.

It should please family audiences; it’s a handsomely mounted, stirring adventure. It’s just a little bit declawed.

The problem is that Wilde leans too heavily on surface and style, as a distraction from the fact that the story itself is riddled with inconsistencies and barely holds together.

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.

In this third outing, there’s a crucial crackle of chemistry between Mikkelsen and Jude Law’s younger Dumbledore.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

With Bird Box: Barcelona, as with any film of this outlandish ilk, suspension of disbelief and an appreciation of propulsively destructive action sequences is key. Just don’t expect too many fresh ideas.

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

Diane Kruger is compelling in the central role in this pacy procedural thriller which is persuasive in its depiction of contemporary spycraft but less convincing in mounting a case for why she would work for Mossad in the first place.

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.

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.

Tiresome stuff.

Billy’s inane babbling gets a little wearing, but the action sequences, featuring dragon-based mayhem, cyclopes and an army of formidable hell unicorns hopped up on candy, are pacy and fun.

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.

Personally, I would have preferred a little more Wheatley edge, a little less Country Living.

The final message of hope is resolutely upbeat and desperately needed.

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.

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 not unenjoyable, just deeply unoriginal.

It’s not quite Sharknado or Mega-shark Versus Giant Octopus level, but The Meg is certainly on the sillier end of the big, dumb shark-movie spectrum.

Although the gags hit home throughout – as they should, with such a broad target – the script loses focus slightly in the final twenty minutes.

It’s a wildly uneven mess.

While the title seems to promise a dual focus and fresh blood in the form of Gaga’s Lee Quinzel, in practice, she is very much a secondary character who earns next to no screen time on her own and suffers from thin writing and cursory characterisation. It’s a testament to Gaga’s weapons-grade charisma and star quality that despite all this, Lee’s scenes are electrifying and she lands every last line like a punch.

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

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.

F is an engaging kid-pleaser that celebrates the power of imagination and suggests that the key to overcoming the tough times might have been lurking in our minds all along.

Pratt, and in particular Betty Gilpin as his wife, give likable, grounded performances. But the screenplay is a bloated, unwieldy thing that is at least 30 minutes longer than it should be.

Zeller explores how sadness repels; how people involuntarily recoil from depression, perpetuating the isolation of the sufferer.

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.

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

The film’s main appeal is not what it appropriates from other Ghostbusters pictures, but that it’s a nostalgic nod to the Spielbergian family adventures of the same period.

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

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.

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

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

The screenplay is a rudimentary thing – scaffolding to support the set pieces – that starts to creak whenever it attempts any depth of character. But the action is terrific, with a screaming, tyre-shredding extended car chase around Lisbon’s tight, cobbled alleys a breathless and exhilarating highlight.

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.

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.

It’s predictable but glossily watchable. The main redeeming feature is the crackling charisma of Emily Blunt, in the central role of a down-on-her-luck single mum turned pharma marketing genius.

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.

Mescal and Ronan are captivating: her watchful, raw-nerved longing; his stinging sense of betrayal. It almost eases us past an overwrought final twist. Almost, but not quite.

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

Even when he’s not mugging on screen, Waititi’s personality is evident in every frame, which suggests that he is rather overestimating the level of audience goodwill towards him, which has been depleted by the divisive Jojo Rabbit and the mediocre Thor: Love and Thunder.

The film’s slight scattershot structure actually works in its favour, keeping the pace at a full-tilt sprint, the energy sparking and the story moving whenever there’s a risk of it tipping into the realms of the overwrought.

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

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.

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

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.

Like the backdrop – marsh or swamp – it’s all a bit soggy.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The latest from Drake Doremus is a candid, very watchable account of a messy period in a woman’s life.

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

This striking drama vividly captures the sense of uncertainty of transient lives, but loses power in a final act which gets somewhat mired in hallucinatory dream logic.

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.

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.

Whatever else could be said about this competent and generally pretty entertaining latest addition to the series, surprising it is not.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

A testy father-daughter relationship adds weight to the story, all of which Armanet, in her first lead role, tackles with a convincingly frayed and frustrated performance.

The cluttered parallel story structure – the fates of several different individuals over a period of two years are woven together – results in a series of mini-scares rather than a gradual build to a big one. And since we already know the fate of most of them, all the diseased yellow lighting and oppressive sound design in the world can’t engineer much tension.

The Forgiven is a decidedly uneven piece of work.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

It’s slick, unchallenging and perfectly enjoyable, but it’s hard to see the point of a remake of Ron Shelton’s 1992 mismatched buddy movie about a pair of basketball hustlers who reluctantly team up.

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.

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.

[A] crass and manipulative warsploitation picture.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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

Wim Wenders’ latest is a handsome production which, although it is rich with symbolism, is ultimately not quite as satisfying as it should be.

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

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

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.

Very silly, but pulpy fun.

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

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.

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.

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 Grand Guignol riot of rotting animal and Godless creations is great fun. However, of the cast, it is only McAvoy, walking the line between madman and genius, who fully manages to hold his own against the spectacle with which he shares the screen.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

[An] incoherent, vampire-themed Marvel offcut.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Story strands feel half developed; pacing seems erratic.

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.

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’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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

While it may struggle to satisfy diehard Orwell purists, the film still takes a political stance and delivers an emphatic message celebrating equality and the power of the collective – albeit one which permits us a little more hope than was present in Orwell’s 1945 novella.

It’s a droll, perceptive and shamelessly sentimental look at generational tensions.

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.

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.

It’s cheap and lazy stuff.

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

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

This is beyond inept.

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

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.

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.

This stupid person’s idea of a clever movie is keen that we get the point, right down to providing an overbearing, hand-holding voiceover, which guides us through its multiple levels of plot contrivance as if the audience is a not particularly bright toddler.

Despite the slapdash plotting, the film – taken from the point of view of the star – gives an uneasy insight into the celebrity’s co-dependent relationship with the people who make him, and can destroy him.

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

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.

There is no shortage of drama to feed House Of Z.

Ice Mother handles the lives of its older protagonists with sensitivity and admirable candour.

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.

Smart writing and an unflinching relish when it comes to the scenes of violence make for a deftly handled genre piece.

This comic melodrama wrings every last drop of drama from the set up.

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.

Ayushmann Khurrana, playing the good cop who can’t bring himself to look away to preserve “society’s balance”, combines soulful Bollywood heartthrob charisma with an arrestingly intense performance.

The film’s main asset is impressive newcomer Box: veering between bratty backchat and bruised reticence, she’s tossed on unpredictable tides of teenage emotions.

This is storytelling which is as enigmatic as it is compelling. Not surprisingly, the use of music throughout is superb.

Kala Azar is something rather special. It’s foetid and atmospheric, a feral scavenger of a film which sniffs around its themes before sinking its teeth into the meat of a beasts’ eye view of the breakdown of civilisation.

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

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.

Beautifully observed and saturated with warmth, this tender family drama gradually reveals the fact that it is Aharon, as much as Uri, who depends on their relationship.

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

With the help of a couple of outstanding performances from Ziętek and Agnieszka Grochowska, as Jurek’s mother, and its obsessive attention to period detail, the film finally unravels the serpentine coils of corruption.

The film makes its points — about ableism within the world of sport and broader society — as emphatically as any of Nao’s punches.

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.

Mya Bollaers is a magnetic presence in this Belgian-French film that approaches the story of an adolescent trans girl and her estranged father with good intentions but a thuddingly unsubtle directorial approach.

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.

It’s a grimly efficient character study of a flawed and damaged man who is intent on visiting harm to those he perceives as wrongdoers, and an indictment of the system that protects him. Bleak, but grubbily effective.

[An] impressive drama.

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.

It’s eye-opening and rather depressing stuff, but while it stops short of being a rallying call to arms, the film delivers a stark message about the unsustainability of this kind of untrammeled ’progress’ in India.

Part oral history, part archive, this is a thoroughly researched account of the role of the Lancaster bomber in the second world war. It’s solid, no frills film-making, but that’s entirely appropriate given the sobering stories recounted by surviving members of Bomber Command, now in their 90s.

The film works on multiple levels. It’s an indictment of colonial brute force; a critique of masculine entitlement, an observation of the uneasy coexistence between tradition and modernity. But mostly, it’s a rich, engrossing and distinctive approach to African storytelling.

Using a combination of verité and poetic reconstructions, Fiore paints a sobering portrait of a bright, personable kid whose destiny is preordained.

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.

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

While the film’s conclusion is perhaps a little heavy-handed, the delivery of the message – of women’s reproductive rights and agency over their lives and bodies – is an emphatic slam dunk.

It’s dour, certainly, but the sense of bone-tired exhaustion and crushed hope that linger like pipe smoke works rather effectively for this particular case.

The picture also doubles as a fascinating psychological study of fanaticism, with Poots’s expressive performance unpeeling the layers beneath Dugdale’s fervent belief in her cause.

Allan Brown, a textile artist, speaks eloquently of the rich symbolism of taking something that is a source of pain, stripping it of its sting and, over the years, gradually reshaping and repurposing it into a thing of beauty.

There’s a disconnect between her inventive, impressionistic artistic output – Audrey’s actual work is interspersed throughout the picture – and the film’s flat, rather matter-of-fact look.

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.

It’s a robustly entertaining romp.

A delicate gem of a film, with a powerhouse turn from Franky.

Roquet’s intimately textured filmmaking captures not just the hot and cold currents of sentiment between the girls, but how all-consuming and all-important it feels to the sheltered Nora.

This is a film that is precision-engineered to hit the commercial sweet spot between extreme-sports mountain-climbing adventure docs such as Free Solo, The Alpinist and Touching the Void and feelgood tales of overcoming adversity. And as such, it works.

Familiarity doesn’t lessen the impact of this excellent documentary by Peter Middleton, directing solo here, having previously collaborated with James Spinney on the acclaimed Notes on Blindness.

Seedily handsome cinematography captures a city full of secrets and simmering violence.

It’s affecting enough, with both Harris and Stevenson capturing the wrenching, protracted grief of not knowing, but I found myself wishing that the film had maintained a sense of mystery rather than dumping a chunk of inelegant exposition at the end.

Grief and tragedy naturally co-exist with gentle comedy; and Adalsteins leans into both the eccentricity and philosophical density of the source material, with the village itself serving as a somewhat enigmatic narrator.

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.

This lovely, compassionate documentary, which recently won the audience award at the Glasgow film festival, is more than a character study. It’s a portrait of a friendship between Smith and film-maker Lizzie MacKenzie.

It is a fascinating, free-spirited tribute to two men whose lifelong connection to the earth is only rivalled by their bond to each other.