Bullet Train has no shortage of giddy, madcap gusto, hoping to satiate hardcore genre fans with its bloody, over-the-top violence and rising body count. But this lumbering locomotive proves to be neither hilariously amoral nor liberatingly violent — it makes quite a commotion, but mostly just spins its wheels.

Some heartfelt performances and an adorable dog aren’t quite enough to combat the sentimentality and contrivances that follow.

Enfant Terrible is somewhat repetitive – ever more shouting, more hedonism, more tainted glory – but it’s never boring. It’s just not very insightful – full marks for the style, but the substance is best found in the books, and in the various documentaries about the man.

This tale of a bestselling spy novelist who finds herself embroiled in real life espionage has some fun moments, an impressive cast and explosive set pieces (not to mention some strong echoes of classic eighties adventure series Romancing The Stone) but, in its attempts to keep audiences guessing, ties itself up in knots.

The New Zealand landscapes could not be more enchanting, although the story lacks a similar magic.

Both overstuffed and underwhelming, Disney’s spectacle-driven reimagining of the beloved holiday staple tries to serve many masters, and the result is a family film straining to be both timeless and timely, simultaneously old-fashioned yet cheekily irreverent.

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.

In its determination to maintain a glossy, upbeat tone throughout — even when dealing with an event that, as a final sombre title card tells us, saw ‘over 30,000 people killed or disappeared’ — The Penguin Lessons proves to be neither fish nor fowl.

Natasha certainly proves that Khrzhanovsky is a risk-taker, and his actors even more so. But it’s a puzzling, inconclusive drama that doesn’t quite hold its own outside the parameters of the overall project.

Ultimately director Jon M. Chu’s more-is-more approach has a numbing effect, the endless spectacle leaving little room for nuance, depth or genuine feeling.

Lively performances elicit enough chuckles for this Chinese version to pass muster as undemanding entertainment, although erratic pacing prevents the proceedings from ever truly hitting their stride.

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

The Fox doesn’t go far enough, its sombre tone muting its fantastical elements, its weirdness not nearly weird enough to overcome its flaws.

While a few of the new songs are keepers, too often the razzle-dazzle distracts from a familiar but resonant look at the pain and pleasure of adolescence.

For a film that aspires to be a frank look at a middle-aged fighter’s hard road back to glory, Bruised too easily indulges in sports-film fantasy, undercutting the story’s inherent bleakness.

It’s not simply that Uncle Frank becomes just another road-trip comedy — it’s that Ball resorts to clichéd or contrived narrative devices to keep the story going.

This often absorbing opus can be as mighty as Superman himself, but a lack of restraint proves to be its Kryptonite.

Adapted from a chapter in Bram Stoker’s novel, the picture initially has some gory fun with its close-quarters suspense, but Ovredal unsuccessfully tries to elevate his monster movie with flimsy psychological depth and unconvincing emotional underpinnings.

Unfortunately, a glib superficiality hangs heavy over the narrative. Rather than really explore these lost and angry souls who feel destined to be despondent, Wilson settles for simplistic quirkiness, which makes the characters merely bland misanthropic types instead of fleshed-out individuals.

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.

There’s anger but no insight in Vice, a glib portrait of Dick Cheney that preaches to the choir but becomes less persuasive as it goes along.

These characters may be immortal, but the studio’s assembly-line predictability drains the vitality from the proceedings.

Not so much bleeding edge as screeching edge, Gia Coppola’s Mainstream is a frenetic piece of pop-art social satire that strives to be super-current but feels oddly traditional beneath its eye-searing, pixel-popping surface.

Offering predictably heartfelt messages about seizing the day, The Last Word can be very sweet and funny, but its lightness starts to feel cloying rather than ebullient.

The picture has been worked out on a visual level — the immaculately sterile images evoke a future in which life’s pleasures, like having a family, have been wiped clean — but the script never explores those deeper themes.

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.

As punishing as some of The First Omen’s terrors are, they are quickly forgotten in service of answering questions about Damien (and leaving the door open for further sequels) that undercut Free’s gripping turn.

Every thoughtful story beat and every well-observed character moment happens with such predictability and slick professionalism that the whole project seems smothered in bland sweetness.

For a film so tied to a thoroughbred showcase, this broad crowd-pleaser blatantly relies on well-worn parts.

Juliette Binoche may play a seasoned truck driver with a firm grip on the wheel, but Paradise Highway proves to be an unsteady ride, guided by intriguing ideas but hampered by generic tendencies.

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.

Collision Course is a colourful 3D romp that’s heavy on slapstick and cosy family comedy but light on real laughs and affecting drama.

The material may be slicker but the novelty of the format has faded.

In the fun but strained Red One, director Jake Kasdan serves up an effects-heavy action comedy with a disarming sweetness that is undone by an overly complicated plot and some tired blockbuster conventions.

The dynamics of the Claire family (whose daughter is rarely to be seen) are several layers more interesting than the plot, which makes it all the more disappointing when a film that has ballooned its running time with attempts at nuance then bursts into silliness.

Essentially a feature-length version of the cute animal videos that proliferate on social media, Born In China is a feast for the eyes while also being an irritant for the ears.

An episodic string of very uneven vignettes, the film benefits hugely from the unifying presence of artist Pousti — a non-pro, like the rest of the uneven cast — who dominates nearly every scene with a genial, subdued intensity as the thirtysomething, bear-like Mr Amir.

Action fans should savour the spectacularly violent set pieces, but a bland villain and an underwhelming narrative ultimately prove even more lethal than de Armas’s fighting skills.

What The Commuter lacks in nuance, depth, surprises, logic and serviceable dialogue...it can’t make up for in its effective single-location tension or well-choreographed action, though both rank among the film’s modest highlights.

In its more diverting moments, A Working Man echoes its no-fuss protagonist, executing compact action set pieces that eschew flashy CGI in favour of good-old-fashioned shootouts and hand-to-hand fighting. But that spareness too often belies the lack of ingenuity elsewhere.

In the end, for all the plot tension and genre tastiness –underlined by some acidic colour photography and lighting that plays up sickly yellows and purples – there’s just something a little too mannered about the exercise.

There is never any doubting Doillon’s sincerity or artistry but his film is overly cerebral, unfolding in a series of encounters that fade to black and never build a dramatic momentum.

While Eighth Grade may look, on its surface, like a typical adolescent comedy, with its underdog protagonist pitted against popular girls and boy crushes, it is more a piquant series of vignettes that form a singular and focused portrait of youthful angst.

This likeable, terribly contrived charmer is helped by a game cast that almost gets away clean, ultimately hampered by a script that impishly (but not always confidently) switches between tones.

It’s a long, long road cluttered with clichés and stalled in softness, pot-holed by its self-serving use of Alzheimer’s as a narrative convenience.

An initially captivating drama that loses steam once predictability starts to take hold.

The film almost works as a love letter to a seemingly ageless, bikini-clad Stone who invests her character with endless energy and enthusiasm. If she is engaged in a losing battle with the lack of originality or spark in the material, then nobody seems to have told her.

No matter Linklater’s efforts to keep the proceedings grounded in a light realism, this inherently melodramatic, sometimes absurdist material resists his naturalistic tendencies.

Despite a potentially daring twist at the mid-mark, though, the film lacks sufficient chills, or a satisfactory payoff.

As sympathetic as Vikander is in the role, this queen remains a bit opaque, her inner life never brought into sharp focus. Katherine may have survived, but she’s still not fully known.

Love Lies Bleeding makes no apologies for its stylistic boldness or its rising body count, but its swagger cannot hide a nagging hollowness underneath.

Despite committed performances from LaBeouf, Lucas Hedges and Noah Jupe, Honey Boy ends up feeling indulgent rather than searing, settling into its anguish rather than translating it into trenchant drama.

Directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman have crafted a knowingly cheesy action movie that flaunts its adrenalised excessiveness, while Jamie Foxx and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, playing two very different men in search of the pills, never manage to transcend the project’s fundamentally generic, cartoonish design.

The proceedings are often stifling, but not without their prickly pleasures.

The flimsy narrative just about holds together but the jokes, while plentiful, often feel like rehashes of something the Zucker Brothers did better decades ago.

In the early going, the film delivers plenty of chills alongside some sly commentary about the music industry, but eventually Finn succumbs to the trite horror tropes the original picture so nimbly avoided.

The climactic rescue sequence has tension and some thrills, but it’s over fairly quickly and the film settles back into a sentimental lull

Like many would-be debaucherous evenings, Rough Night starts off with great promise, only to devolve into a series of poor decisions, regretful moments and a general sense of disappointment.

The awkwardly executed English-language Loving Pablo is a brash but ultimately anonymous, sub-Scorsesean number from Spain’s Fernando Leon de Aranoa.

Rose Byrne is appealing as a sympathetic, patient person finally sensing she deserves more from her life. But for a film that critiques men’s inability to let go of childish things, this cutesy adaptation of the Nick Hornby novel feels a bit like a fantasy version of how adulthood really is.

Even though there’s an enormous amount to look at and digest, little of this film is truly memorable or thought-provoking.

Despite some sweetness and playful absurdity, this big-screen outing feels mostly like derivative, fussed-over product.

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.

Ultimately, all we have to hold on to in a story that lurches inexorably into CGI absurdity is our emotional connection with Stewart’s lost, lonely character.

The clumsy mixture of nostalgia, scares, set pieces, sincerity and wisecracks never gels.

It’s the tone that’s off here, as it is throughout a film which seems to wink at what it perhaps wants us to see as irony – its soft porn tropes like bondage and flagellation, its over-saturated sci-fi view of a comet’s passing, its horror-influenced vision of the plague – while keeping both eyes firmly open.

While this new film is that rare visually striking indie comedy, the clever dialogue and potentially provocative scenarios eventually fizzle, resulting in an unfocused commentary on the absurdity of modern love that is, itself, far removed from reality.

While never quite predictable, The Electric Kiss lacks the knowing brio of recent French period pastiches such as François Ozon’s The Crime is Mine or Cédric Klapisch’s 2025 Colours of Time, similarly set in Paris bohemia.

Despite a stellar cast led by Julianne Moore and Michelle Williams, After The Wedding never cuts very deeply, staying on the surface of a tale that ought to tear into the viewer’s soul the way it does these tormented characters.

If the humor doesn’t always hit, the film’s darker conspiratorial turns never feel genuinely suspenseful, either. Even when Johnson ups the emotional and physical stakes for his character, the bogusness of the production interferes.

Eisenberg impresses in a role which requires him to keep a great deal beneath the surface. But the screenplay locks up some elements of his character rather too tight and, as dramatic motivations for what follows, they are unpersuasive and somewhat cliched.

The movie is delightfully odd but not consistently inspired, often straining to rewrite the rules of superhero cinema, a mixture of good and bad ideas all mashed together. Where other comic-book movies lumber along with self-importance, this film is a breezy, amoral lark, which proves somewhat refreshing. But that’s not enough to allow Birds’ hit-or-miss pleasure to soar.

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.

Seen at 60 frames per second (fps) on 3D-Plus (2K resolution), Ang Lee’s action spectacular Gemini Man proved a compulsive watch: not for the usual ingredients of can’t-look-away Hollywood cinema such as acting – Will Smith takes a dual role - or plot, both of which fell a little flat, and seemed almost wilfully generic. As a viewing experience, though, this picture delivers as a prototype of future action film-making.

Despite this riveting premise, Padrenostro goes the way of 1970s cuisine in being over-cooked to the level of boil-in-a-bag.

For all its showy, whirring machinations, the film isn’t especially light on its feet — and its murder mystery isn’t very engrossing.

Overall, the film’s treatment of a sensitive scenario lacks subtlety, making for a tough and taxing viewing experience.

This adaptation of Bethan Roberts’ novel is full of repressed emotions and the occasional tearful recrimination, but the stateliness of the proceedings eventually becomes stifling rather than absorbing, draining this doomed love affair of its potential to break the heart.

The film is most effective in simply conveying the agonising practical realities of Galvez’s quest, an operation involving endless telephone calls and long down-time periods of waiting punctuated by brief flurries of frenzied activity.

Director Adam Wingard embraces the towering scale of these showdowns, and a stellar cast that includes Alexander Skarsgard and Rebecca Hall tries to add some gravitas to the proceedings. Unfortunately, the actors fight a losing battle against some impressive special effects to command our attention.

There are more engaging fireworks, or at least small sparks, when the film begins to dig into the feelings, friendships and jealousies of its two main protagonists.

A slight story that aspires to be a thriller but ends up as a rather flat melodrama about a rock-star generation struggling to deal with its twilight years.

Above all, there is the generous, often mischievous performance by Cámara, with a promisingly vivid juvenile lead from Nicolas Reyes as young Quinín, and a nice ensemble buzz from other family members, including Patricia Tamayo as mother Cecilia; otherwise it all comes across as a fondly soft-focus blur.

Comandante is a film designed to make Italians feel good about being Italian – about pasta, sentimental songs and strongly demarcated gender roles – while also telling them how to be good Italians – chiefly by saving people at sea, not blindly following orders and getting on with other Italians whose dialects they don’t understand.

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.

While director Justin Lin’s thriller-inflected approach is periodically absorbing, the scattered structure and episodic nature of the plot works against him as it slides towards an overly sentimental conclusion.

The clichés start to arrive in rapid succession. Even the most moving performances cannot disguise their obviousness.

A mid-budget mis-fire after the director’s promising indie debut, Bang Gang, Girls of the Sun seems more concerned with staging sisterly bonding sessions amidst the rubble than in developing what might have been an intriguing story – about how war can reshuffle social and gender inequality.

An overly precious tone ultimately sinks the writer-director’s attempt to recapture the enchantment of adolescence.

It is hard to decide whether Dumont is treating his genre borrowings with belittling contempt, or getting a kick out of the possibilities offered; it seems safe to assume both. And while the overall weirdness has charm and shock effect, once you’ve got over the surprise of Dumont being this flippantly outre the pleasure wears thin.

Rambunctiously riffing on celebrity, activism, technology and economic inequality, this dark satire works best when the director’s swirl of images achieves a hypnotic, primal rush. At other times, Sacrifice is as muddled as the terrorists’ plan.

There are flashes of the incisive, caustic insight of his Force Majeure and Palme d’Or-winning art-world satire The Square. But this rather laborious take on the excesses of capitalism, depicted as a luxury yacht headed inexorably for farcical disaster, lacks the pitiless ironic cool that made those two films so memorable.

This docudrama, recounting the background to Isabel Wilkerson’s acclaimed 2020 study ’Caste’, is an unwieldy, fragmented hybrid that comes across very much as an educational project, never quite gelling as narrative.

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.

Director Jay Duplass crafts a sensitive portrait of loss and forgiveness but ,for a picture based on actual events, there is an artificiality to the proceedings that undercuts the material’s inherent poignancy.

Boasting a few nifty action sequences and the always-compelling Jackman, Logan self-consciously aspires to retire this iteration of the steel-clawed hero with epic grandeur, and the results are often rousingly bleak. And yet, the risks taken...only make the formulaic redemption story and clichéd emotional underpinnings increasingly frustrating.