Roher’s willingness to blindly accept any and all of his speakers’ pronouncements leaves The AI Doc feeling toothless. ... Clearly, the filmmakers want to present the material in an evenhanded fashion so that viewers can make up their own mind, but in the name of so-called fairness, the documentary lacks any real perspective or inquisitiveness.

The killer mascots may spring the coop, but this sequel never breaks free of its own conventionality.

The perfunctory martial-arts sequences and convoluted plotting conspire to make this a painfully uninspired proposition.

Modi’s ramshackle romanticism never remotely convinces, and – given that it’s about artists who suffered for their radical modernism – it feels terribly dated, stylistically and in content.

Apart from a few quippy anecdotes, the only thing holding Elton John: Never Too Late together is the songs.

The Crow longs to be edgy and sobering, but the shallow, melodramatic treatment constantly calls to mind an insecure adolescent male who is trying to prove how dark and deep he is by dressing all in black and talking ponderously about death.

The result is a clunky, overwrought thriller which leans heavily on cliche.

For all the punches thrown and buildings pulverised, The New Empire barely leaves an impact.

Despite the tantalising set up, Immaculate is a dull, predictable affair, composed of far too many inconsequential jump scares in lieu of sturdy storytelling.

Unfortunately, this adaptation of the popular 2014 video game fails at delivering scares or cheeky laughs, resulting in a tedious experience that relies heavily on horror’s most cliched tropes.

Logic, though, is not at the forefront of The Nun II which, like its predecessor, attempts to force the fear through endless jump scares and bombastic music rather than take time to build any real tension.

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.

Stitched together from better pictures - all of which viewers would be better advised to check out - The Pope’s Exorcist’s one saving grace is Crowe who still, despite the hound of hell that is this film, is a significant screen presence who commits to some dialogue that only Satan himself could have dreamed up.

Even propaganda also needs to have some spark; Ram Setu is a damp squib.

Despite a few touching scenes in which Sophie and Agatha reassert their bond amidst handsome suiters and devious spells, Good And Evil ends up feeling both too busy and too underdeveloped to let their relationship blossom. There’s no happily ever after awaiting audiences at the film’s end.

Feels manipulative and glib ... Farrelly’s tendency toward simplistic bromides in Green Book is even more egregious here.

The film is adrenalised but familiar, sporting a sarcastic sense of humour in an attempt to mitigate what’s so threadbare about the premise and increasingly over-the-top fight sequences.

It’s not hard to figure out the recipe that resulted in Netflix’s Persuasion arriving half-baked from the streamer’s busy oven. Take one measure from Clueless. Cast an American actor as the lead (Dakota Johnson). Turn Jane Austen’s most mature heroine into a Bridget Jones, slugging red wine from the bottle and winking at the camera. Filter it all through a Regency Britain that comes straight from Bridgerton. Shake, too hard, and try not to cringe as the cake collapses.

Director Gail Lerner’s Cheaper By The Dozen is aggressively cutesy while trying to address real-world issues such as race and class. Lerner’s version feels busy and laboured, its sitcom treatment straining equally for laughs and pathos.

It’s an understatement to say that The King’s Man has a weird, unsettling, tone.

Director Stephen Chbosky badly mishandles the material, resulting in an increasingly frustrating experience in which Evan’s inability to come clean leads to a string of emotional manipulations that sometimes border on cruel.

The film is so weighed down by self-importance that the proceedings are embalmed in solemnity.

While the titular criminal gang at the centre of this action thriller may be presented as supposedly quirky and unconventional, the film in which they operate is as blunt-edged and cliched as they come.

For audiences craving shoot-‘em-up carnage, the sequel contains an abundance of explosions, car crashes and kill shots, although the strained air of hip irreverence soon turns suffocatingly stale.

Attempting to celebrate the power of community and new beginnings, Sia’s directorial debut mostly serves as an unintended cautionary tale about chronic whimsy and outdated ideas.

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.

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

An unapologetic old-school exploiter going full on for thrills and suspense, it’s undeniably polished and energetic, and features a couple of strong performances from young stars Isabel May and Eli Brown – but it feels fundamentally tasteless, indeed just plain wrong.

The New Mutants’ greatest failing is that, even as a spinoff, its drama is puny and its spectacle nonexistent.

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.

This is an earnest, half-baked fairy story drenched in a thick soup of CGI. It’s awkwardly staged, with turgid, expository dialogue that is appreciably tricky for a palpably ill-at-ease young cast to deliver

Fantasy Island is the sort of inept, forgettable disaster that doesn’t even induce so-bad-it’s-good chuckles.

Instead of intriguing ambiguity, this updated version – which had a long and bumpy development – offers only maddening confusion...With false endings within false endings, it’s the sort of movie whose final fade-out will leave audiences groaning in frustration.

Whether it’s Downey’s mannerisms or the dull quipping provided by his menagerie of digital co-stars, Dolittle is a joyless slog trying to pretend it’s a hip, magical adventure.

The downside to a film that includes multiple shots of a clock counting down is that it provides audiences with an unintended rooting interest: we’re just hoping it gets to zero soon so we can leave the theatre.

Never satisfyingly kooky, spooky or ooky, the new animated Addams Family film transports Charles Addams’ lovably macabre clan into the 21st century, resulting in an undistinguished children’s comedy full of dull pop-culture referencing and half-hearted commentary about the importance of inclusiveness.

Despite meticulous visuals and a strong central performance by Mark Rylance, the film feels dramatically ponderous and emotionally inert.

There is beauty in the 35mm black and white landscapes and framings of this painterly widescreen feature, but it stands in stark contrast with the alienating narrative and tone of a film which, like Kosinski’s book, takes a strange relish in charting the descent of simple country folk of a never-named country into sexual depravity and joyless cruelty.

Infuriatingly manipulative and insufferably preachy.

Obvious good intentions are drowned in a hot wash of showboating stars and flooded by self-indulgence.

Kumail Nanjiani and Dave Bautista are a likeable pair that deserve better than Stuber, a strained action-comedy with a clever premise but maddeningly uninspired execution.

Thompson brings her reliably spry comedic talents as a new recruit who discovers all the extra-terrestrials in our midst, but she’s easily overmatched by a witless script, laboured plot and, most depressingly, a badly misjudged performance from her usually-charming co-star.

The script takes forever to get started, and once it’s going, labours to create a single plausible character. Nor can Taylor, who last handled the dreary The Girl On The Train, wring any suspense from his scenes.

Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but Domino dishes it up as a sloppy mess of warmed-over clichés. Instead of his old high style and kinky violence, director Brian De Palma delivers only crude thrills and ugly stereotypes, a soggy bag of junk-food snacks.

While it’s important to have seen Canto Uno in order to savour Intermezzo, this film in itself doesn’t seem remotely essential.

Sometimes a bad film is just a bad film, but Depp is most likely to pay the price.

Come to Daddy starts out like a nasty drama, ends up as a gruesomely gory, coldly comic revenge thriller – and desperately loses its way somewhere in-between.

Between the overblown poor CG, witless dialogue and pervasive, numbing violence, the new Hellboy deserves its own special circle in Dante’s inferno.

No doubt the world needs more paeans to tolerance, but movies as ineffectual as The Best Of Enemies feel profoundly inadequate to the task.

Sequences depicting the Selma marches – the first of which led to violent police attacks that were seen on national TV and helped change the mood of the country – are fairly understated, when a more visceral approach might have given the film more emotional heft.

The filmmakers preserve Seuss’s narrative beats but strain to replicate his whimsical spirit.

Kin never feels like more than uninspired borrowings from other, better genre films; it’s a story about family without any heart.

For all its deft style and sympathetic characters, there’s still something missing in We,The Animals. In its efforts to evoke a young boy’s inner-world, it falls short of fully capturing his emotional reality. Jonah’s story should be heartbreaking, but when we see images of him flying over the forest, it’s just picturesque and lyrical.

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

There’s precious little to care about in a movie that’s neither ingenious nor silly enough to savour.

Guardians of the Tomb, however, takes itself far too seriously, aside from the woeful running commentary provided by the thoroughly expendable Gary as the team plods from one dusty spider-filled room to the next, a sense of repetition quickly setting in.

While we can quibble about the underused lead or the meandering plot, Fifty Shades Freed ultimately authors its own most stinging rebuke, closing on an extended montage highlighting major moments and turning points from the trilogy. Tellingly, none of them come from this film.

Its emphasis on teambuilding makes The Thousand Faces of Dunjia play like a wuxia riff on Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) but its blend of spectacle and humour isn’t nearly as successful.

Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg are a lot less fun this time around, paired with a fumbling John Lithgow and a stiff Mel Gibson as their overbearing fathers who stop by for the holidays.

Goodbye Christopher Robin doesn’t just lack authenticity, it appears to scorn it.

There’s a thin, and very jagged, line between the radical mosaic approach to editing and narrative of a film like Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color and the impressionistic jigsaw vagueness of Woodshock, which simply seems reluctant to commit itself to mere coherence, as if that simply were too unchic.

A film as mindless and disposable as most smartphone apps — and nowhere near as addictive — Sony’s animated The Emoji Movie is a calamitous comedy that inadvertently shows how difficult it is to pull off the witty, imaginative world-building that Pixar makes seem so breezy.

Two Steve Carells most assuredly aren’t better than one in Despicable Me 3, a winded sequel which is cloying when it isn’t exhaustingly frenetic.

This series’ tone-deaf humour and dull nods to selfless heroism have become toxic irritants — a sensation not helped by the film’s collection of clattering, joyless robots and dopey humans.

The film may pretend it’s more sophisticated than the show that spawned it, but its comedic stylings are alarmingly regressive.

Screenwriter Jeff Nathanson (Catch Me If You Can), taking over from series regulars Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, doesn’t make much sense out of the typically (for the franchise) convoluted plot, but does manage to bring out a father-child theme that lends the film a little emotional resonance.

A teen group therapy session disguised as a superhero movie, Power Rangers is numbingly predictable and cynically made, recycling myriad blockbuster tropes but draining their adolescent pleasures in the process.

Any hopes of smart social commentary or unsettling psychological underpinnings are quickly shattered by a clichéd screenplay and amateurish performances.

This low-budget combination of thriller, horror and satire flaunts a smartass tone that proves deadening, and as the body count starts rising, viewer interest quickly begins dropping.

Part space romance, part space thriller and all space corn, Passengers is a messy and unconvincing mash-up that tries to get by on the not inconsiderable charm of stars Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt.

Collateral Beauty never manages to shake off its all-too-deliberate air or willingness to follow the easiest path. Its life lessons are packaged with cloying, overt mawkishness which aren’t quite the feel-good home run Frankel seems to expect.

An agonisingly strained attempt at misanthropic comedy, Bad Santa 2 is puerile when it should be shocking, calculating when it should be transgressive, and listless when it should be liberating.

Most of the story’s credibility goes out the door with the big plot twist.

Flying off the rails at an alarming speed, The Girl On The Train fails as a compelling character study, struggles to satisfy as a psychological thriller and ultimately settles as an overheated potboiler that doesn’t have the courage to go full camp.

This ungainly and glum tale of the man famously known as Tarzan — who returns to the Congo, reconnecting with his past in the process — slavishly adheres to contemporary blockbuster convention, offering not a single spark of inspiration or real daring. A talented cast led by Alexander Skarsgård scowls through the film, held hostage by a solemn script and ghastly amounts of CG.

Zombie’s filmmaking career began with inventive pop videos for his band White Zombie and he can still frame an interesting shot or layer in an unusual and affecting snatch of music, but after six features he still can’t come up with a fresh story, write characters with more depth than their make-up or direct stalking scenes that are suspenseful or moments of gory violence that are shocking.

The film is mostly unmoving, neither the romance nor the social consciousness succeeding in stirring our emotions. Even worse, Penn lets the plight of displaced Africans slip into the background, resulting in yet another well-meaning film that wants to address planetary ills by concentrating our attention on the good-looking outsiders who come in to save the day.

There is an undeniable cheesiness to the closing stage of ma ma that makes it hard to take entirely seriously.

A parade of gaudy CGI and strained whimsy, Alice Through The Looking Glass proves even more manic and grating than its 2010 predecessor.

The film feels like a long succession of incidents that tend to climax in familiar platitudes or weary declarations of the “I can’t handle this!” variety.

The victims of notorious Chilean torture camp Colonia Dignidad suffered more than enough without Colonia adding insult to injury.

Mothers will do anything for their children, but this film’s simplistic brand of horror never makes that devotion compelling or frightening.

Clocking in at just 96 minutes, Sword of Destiny feels heavily truncated, lacking in narrative substance. Scant characterisation and timid action choreography don’t help matters, while an over-reliance on simple sets and CGI landscapes mean Grant Major’s (The Lord of the Rings) production design lacks the resonance of the previous film.

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.

little can be done to disguise the weakness of an undercooked script based on an idea Tornatore apparently had in his bottom drawer for decades.

Like many films designed to double as opening chapters in ongoing screen sagas, The Fifth Wave always feels padded, its focus on establishing a springboard for future sequels rather than satisfactorily exploring its own narrative.

Though it sometimes recalls the irresistibly energetic, genre-bending feel of Lee’s best films – Do The Right Thing in particular – it lacks the assurance and unifying thrust that made those features work so well.

A stunningly misjudged comedy, Rock The Kasbah stretches and strains Bill Murray’s deadpan nonchalance until it snaps, and what results is a singularly unfunny, often infuriating tale.

Despite its rich visual evocation of the eponymous port city as a simmering cauldron of vice, corruption, and barbarity, director Mikael Håfström’s film is undone by its tortuous plot, wooden characterisation, absence of narrative tension, and emotional nullity. It simply lacks conviction.

[A] depressingly inept comedy.

A good cast led by Miles Teller gets swallowed up in a narrative that grows progressively more muddled and tedious.

The Gallows offers up few new ideas and very few genuine scares.

Ted 2 is as subtle as a frat-house flick.

Trying to wring laughs from the nauseating sex-and-stardom exploits of fictional Tinseltown A-lister Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier) and his buddies, Entourage consistently comes across as sour, shallow and misogynistic.

Although Reese Witherspoon and Sofía Vergara do have their fleetingly amusing moments, this road-trip buddy comedy feels like it rolled off the cliché assembly line, offering wan laughs and familiar setups.

The Longest Ride plays like cynical fan service to Sparks’ readers, who, it is assumed, will be content to sit back and enjoy a cheap tearjerker, no matter how mouldy its execution is.

A drearily sincere movie about faith and tolerance, Little Boy boasts plenty of good intentions but very little else.

Hamstrung by lumbering plotting and variable special effects, this first part is an unimaginative hodgepodge which leaves its well-assembled cast stranded across time and space.