Despite a wonderfully witty voiceover and the bullish playing of a willing ensemble, this bawdy romp consistently stumbles over its more contrived excesses.

Utterly stupid and full of lazy plotting and lazier dialogue, this is just idiotic enough to entertain on nights when you want to give your brain a rest.

The first film was imperfect but solid as game-adaps go and fans revelled in its clammy shocks. No such luck this time out. Director Bassett oversees a vaporous horror sequel that rarely raises the pulse.

The only obsession on display here is De Palma's - with Hitchcock. It's an unhealthy one too which results in an out of focus rip-off.

As horror, it's a worn-out succession of gory, meaningless, hard-to-enjoy deaths, and too much of the running time is given over to puppets arguing with each other.

As a mindless summer horror diversion, Crawl is watchable if rarely all that thrilling. The movie’s far from toothless, yet often substitutes easy scares for any real substance, and suffers for that.

Well-intentioned, with a strong performance from Andra Day — but uneven human drama eventually gives way to boringly familiar horror tropes. All round, The Deliverance struggles to deliver.

By turns wry and sarcastic, the film does a good job ridiculing the home shopping phenomenon in general and the audience that supports it, but lets itself down with occasional lapses into lame slapstick, dubious plot twists and the kind of soap opera-isms it elsewhere decries.

A script that suffers the same problem as its characters -- lack of confidence -- is in dire need of a fire being lit under its arse. All involved could do with learning a thing or two from some scoundrels of the 'dirty, rotten' school.

Dull thriller which isn't very thrilling.

One for fans only.

It’s a film that doesn’t so much invite you to switch off your brain as take it out and dump it in the nearest popcorn box.

An idea that must have sounded good on paper looks a lot less smart on the screen.

Mad Max 2 with Thought for the Day thrown in. There’s some ace post-holocaust action, but you can’t help feel you were invited to a party with fizzy pop and cream cake and got suckered into a sermon instead.

Nowhere near as creepy as the original, nor as effective a scarer.

A few old favourites – like the inconveniently wonky torch and the probably-not-quite-killed maniac – deliver the required jolts, but early promise dwindles to hokum.

It admirably avoids many of the pitfalls of adapting this book, but seems to have lost some of the life and pace as well.

Despite some strong moments, Ginger and Rosa fails to really convince.

Here is a film fully xenophobic, abhorrent film, touting guileless version of military honour, but with Jack Cardiff’s furtive camerawork and some excellent editing, it sucks you in to its disturbing heroic sweep.

For its writer-director, Sky Captain was a labour of love. For almost everyone else - including the wooden cast - it’s just a labour.

Hogg stages some scenes with a sure sense of composition and dramatic tension but too often the film feels self-conscious and ponderous.

Brazenly exploitative stuff, stirring in anything which has done the business in kids' movies previously, this, of course, should have its target audience laughing like drains.

A meandering, unfunny, mostly flat effort, Hidden Strike is a disappointing waste of two immensely likeable stars. Head straight to the super-fun outtakes.

The moments of fan service might keep the hardcore happy, but for everyone else over the age of five it’s just a succession of loud, bright things happening without any real point.

A Sheltering Sky-lite romantic travelogue that, despite its two leads, lacks any real spark.

Had this adaptation of the young adult fantasy-romance taken a few more liberties, it might have been a home run.

If even a tenth of the care and attention lavished on the production design and action sequences had been afforded the script, this could have been an adventure of legendary proportions. As it is, this fizzles whenever anyone opens their mouths.

Over-reaching and unintentionally amusing, this is straight-to-video quality inexplicably delivered at blockbuster scale. A thunderous volca-NO.