Okay for those who dote on ‘classics illustrated’ in the Merchant Ivory line, but not as fluid as all that.

Yet in spite of the affable Mr. Moog, the mood remains distant, too fetishistic to be passionate. Great noises, though.

An encouraging set-up soon descends into a grubby muddle, leaving you wishing you were just rewatching "The Name Of The Rose" instead.

Trying to break expectations isn't always a wise idea and here Disney show how not to do it. With this supposed-family movie, they disappoint on nearly every level. The plot is weak, the action poor and it's got Bette Midler, simply dreadful.

Eddie Murphy’s Dr. Dolittle generated four sequels. On this showing, Downey Jr’s will be a standalone, an uncynical but mostly lacklustre kids’ flick that doesn’t find its voice, animal or otherwise.

A well-meaning look at the issue of arranged marriage, garnished with some Hollywood star power, but it’s too meandering and sluggish to grip.

A turgid action sequel that loses sight of plot and characters in its humourless efforts to impress.

Certainly not Raimi at his best, but some knowing genre nods and an array of great effects make up much of the deficit.

For a while, its crassness is amusing, but as the plot sets in, it gradually turns into a stultifying bore.

If you pay out money to see this, you got fleeced.

Snake Eyes finally speaks, but with frustrating action scenes, a middling story and unearned sequel-baiting, there’s not much here that’s worth listening to, or watching.

A often grim vaudeville parade of Nashville's oddballs and ne'er-do-wells.

Peet works hard with the slight material and there are some cutely kooky moments.

If you’ve never seen Luther, don’t start here. You will be completely lost. Even dedicated fans are likely to be confused by this messy revamp of a story that once felt dangerous but is now merely daft.

Great performances from the young cast just can't make up for the overly familiar plot and pre-teen excesses of the action.

Another shake-and-bake Stath special, boasting the requisite punchy-fighty action and some pleasing sleaziness from Franco and Bosworth, but it's ponderously handled by director Fleder.

It's just not quite as much fun as it should be, despite Pearce's best efforts and some good chemistry with Grace. Unusually for an action thriller, this could have benefited from being just a little longer.

As that Ronseal title suggests, Plane is rarely on the good side of trash. But at least Gerard Butler and Mike Colter offer some solid action-star appeal.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit meets Meets The Feebles, in a disappointing adult comedy that never lives up to the promise of its premise.

Lacks the classic Disney charm that works for adults as well as kids.

A worthy diversion for the very young, but against their more venerable stablemates - notably DuckTales - The Rescuers's identification/memorableness factor remains second division.

Made more than two years ago, this is nowhere near as well thought out as its predecessor ["Boyz N The Hood,"] and is far more strained in making its point.

Despite the odd rip-roaring tune and some sturdy performances, this yuletide tale is as memorable as last year's sprouts.

Astronaut doesn’t have the budget or cinematic ambition to deliver on its premise. Despite the best efforts of Richard Dreyfuss, it reaches for the stars and misses by a mile.

Kids will enjoy the colourful animation and fun characters, but adults will wish it all made a bit more sense.

It livens up a bit in the last reel when Fogg’s inventive brain pulls out all the stops to try to win the bet, but by that point you'll be too jaded to care.

Decent ingredients but, as a whole, this is lacking in choreographic flair and plot substance.

Be warned - Damon isn't in this one.

The target audience - pre-teen girls - aren’t going to notice the many shortfalls behind the camera. What they’ll enjoy, regardless of quality, is some naughtiness true to the spirit of the series, Russell Brand and Girls Aloud. For the rest of us it’s tougher going with mostly Everett and Firth to see us through.

Spader and Cusack go through the motions as political sparring partners in this coming of age drama.

Ultimately lost in it's own contrivances, Big Business still manages a few laughs thanks to it's big name leading lady.

Parts of Outcome work a treat (see: Martin Scorsese). Shame, then, that long stretches give in to blunt parody, leaving the feeling there’s a much better movie in here somewhere.

The vital story of a singular trailblazer is brought to life with surprising ambition and a committed Rosamund Pike, but such inventive methods confuse the crux of Marie Curie’s intelligence, with alienating storytelling rendering her humanity impenetrable.

Benicio Del Toro’s solid screen charisma can’t rescue Reptile, a derivative and lethargic thriller that rarely thrills as it tries and fails to build a case for itself as a meaningful iteration on the detective thrillers that it admires.

Little atmosphere and no surprises.

Beautifully presented but over-long and best appreciated if you already have an idea of van Gogh's life and work.

Peter Bogdanovich's attempt to update the screwball of the Golden Age lacks the requisite elegance, wit and charm.

Bit of a mediocre drama from writer-director Assayas despite some good turns, not least from Nick Nolte and Beatrice Dalle.

Promising source material and a talented cast are squandered in a stale, rigidly formulaic J-horror wannabe. Slender Man equals slim pickings for all but the most undemanding devotees.

An anemic time-waster you've seen before that fails to create tension or generate the suspense this genre cries out for.

Decidely average teen drama but with a few decent dance numbers.

It just scrapes two stars on the strength of Wilson’s best efforts. But for God’s sake, someone give this man a sparring partner.

The kids and Caine are good, but this lacks the magic of its source novel(s). Younger children may enjoy it, but its attempts to entertain older viewers mostly fall flat.

Howell makes the least convincing black guy ever, his eventual contrition feels hollow and forced — much like the laughs.

There is scarcely a laugh to be had unless you are six years old or immoderately fond of such wheezes as depositing dog poop on a white carpet.

The CG does its part of the bargain, but even more than the brighter, breezier original this is a pale imitation of Potter.

At barely 70 minutes long, this still manages to stammer and stall between the meaningless atrocities. It's time this series met Abbott and Costello.

Herrington stages his action efficiently enough - the opening car chase manages to put a couple of spins on a hackneyed cinema staple - but is let down by his own script which seems to have been hanging around in the water so long it's become bloated.

With Eastern Promises and Dirty Pretty Things, screenwriter Steven Knight has proved his ear for London's darker rhythms. Here, though, there's little to raise the pulse.

In the world of Mob Land, nothing good lasts. Disappointingly, despite the cast’s best efforts and a few striking visual flourishes, nothing good lasts in the film itself either.

All along, of course, we are supposed to realise they're made for each other, except that that's a little hard to swallow when there's so little chemistry between them.

It's just too tempting to dismiss it as extremely long and incredibly disappointing. It's challenging, divisive and has moments of beauty but leaves you cold.

Life stinks, Brooks' character stinks and the film, after all the Brooks magic in the past, stinks.

It's hard to care about the characters in this defiantly downbeat drama.

If you can see beyond the eye-scorching neon and don't mind the desecration of a superhero icon, there's a few crumbs of enjoyment to be had.

Eyre’s all-star cast may shine in Allelujah, but even Dame Judi Dench can’t save a film whose third act so spectacularly nosedives into “Batshit-Craziest Story Choices Ever Put On Film Hall Of Fame” territory.

Clever premise, witless execution.

Good fun in places, but dull for the most part, Violent Night is serviceable Christmas viewing. It’s a shame, because with such a fun riff on the Santa story, it should’ve been good for goodness sake!

Messy and unlikeable.

An all-too conventional look at an unconventional man, Big George Foreman is, alas, a swing and a miss.

This is a feel good movie which is too mechanically put together to make you feel anything.

An all-star lineup with some kookie moments, but a bit limp overall.

Another to airbrush out of the De Niro back catalogue.

Arnie still swings that sword with aplomb, but with a story this ludicrous, he's on slippery ground.

Another thriller absent of any real thrills.

As the bodies pile up amongst this testy crowd of horny teens, there remains a vacant hole were someone scary should be. In a strange way, this film stands unique amongst all slasher films as one where the killer is nearly intangible.

Parker has a sensitive approach to the crise d'amour, but his lacklustre leading ladies contribute to an uneven tone.

Sadly, Donald Trump hasn’t quite found his Leni Riefenstahl: this is a film too embarrassed to be what it is. And shorn of capes and costumes, vigilantism is pretty ugly. Though Roth’s gift for the gruesome gives it a small voyeuristic appeal.

If O’Connor’s aim was to recreate a British classic, she has surely failed to reach those lofty heights. Mackey shows further signs of promise, but she’ll be better off elsewhere.

Despite some inventive photography and decent gore for its day, its uneven pace renders it a curio for Coppola fans.

The ambitious, initially intriguing Dead Again fails so spectacularly it may well become the fetish of a camp cult.

Character motivations are glossed over, explanatory scenes are jammed in haphazardly, and the finale relies on a tonally bizarre combination of schmaltz, coincidence and violence that seems to betray the arc of the whole movie.

It has aspirations to be RoboCop but this feels more like autopilot. Pratt is committed and the plotting is sometimes effective, but Rebecca Ferguson’s non-Dredd-ful judge is the only good reason to watch it.

A disappointingly slight offering from a filmmaker that we know is capable of so much more. Shyamalan says that The Happening was his easiest film to shoot. Sadly, it shows.

The fifth Purge outing goes for broke and comes out wanting, working neither as political commentary nor horror-action-thriller. In this case, bigger is definitely not better.

It features more weed than a pot-warming party at Bill & Ben's but offers little more than spliff-glazed promotion for Snoop's reggae reincarnation.

The highschool hijinks may entertain the young, but those more familiar with the Bard will recognise this as a wasted opportunity.

It exists basically as a long showreel for Superman-to-be Henry Cavill, who gets to demonstrate a mastery of run-with-a-gun acting and flex his leading man charisma without really breaking a sweat.

It's mindless entertainment, but its critical and commercial failure doomed the pirate genre to a watery grave.

Sounds great, with this cast of men of a certain age on big scary two wheeled monsters. Unfortunately it only pulls it off in places.

Günther executes stray powerful moments, but his lack of a handle on the material leads to two hours so meandering that the story drifts away in a haze of boredom.

Despite a game cast, The New Mutants’ horror elements aren’t very scary and as a superhero movie it fails to truly excite. A disappointing finale to Fox’s X-Men franchise.

It’s hard to begrudge such an earnest endeavour, but this is missing the wit, nuance, and insight of a book thought by many – correctly, maybe – to be unadaptable.

A few reasonable action sequences are mired in family soap, making this A Good Day To Call It Quits.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with sci-fi films asking Big Questions, but the delivery doesn’t have to be — should never be, in fact — this tedious.

Comes across as more 80s TV movie than 50s period piece.

There are colourful characters and cool moments to keep you entertained on the road to nowhere, but they can’t disguise the fact that this is a shaggy-dog story with no real point.

Utterly implausible and clunkily directed. Rent "Fargo" instead.

An awkward mix of gross-out comedy and big emotional sincerity, which may be authentic to the experience of pregnancy but feels clumsily balanced between these two characters.

Remote, murky and interminable.

Quan is typically charismatic in a film that underserves his talents: an action-comedy with a solid amount of the former, but not much of the latter.

There’s just nothing quite like a good crime thriller. But, despite Banderas’ best efforts and some stylish camerawork, this is nothing like a good crime thriller.

Prepare to cringe and snicker whenever the characters are talking, but gasp when Shyamalan just shows amazing stuff.

This looks lustrous (thanks to cinematographer David Watkin) but it's bankrupt in terms of ideas and execution and both leads seem uninspired.

This all feels a long way from Chandor’s glory days of Margin Call and All Is Lost. Save the occasional flourish, Kraven The Hunter is limp, tired, uninvolving superhero fare.

The thrill of the original is seeing a black-and-white, one-foot-on-the-floor, no-sex-please Hays Code world suddenly explode into a slasher movie. Our loss of innocence has, simply, changed all the rules.

Some outrageous, if hardly original, twists eventually enliven a dreary plot. But even with Margot Robbie in full scheming-vixen mode, Terminal feels interminable.

Die-hard fans may get a kick out of seeing the monstrosities of Silent Hill on the big screen. But this return trip to gaming’s most terrifying town won’t leave you scared — just bored.