The initially taut thriller takes an unexpected tonal shift into overwrought suspense, losing some of its claustrophobic domestic tension along the way.

The screenplay seems a little thin, full of frayed threads which are never properly woven into the story.

The Angry Birds Movie is fitfully funny but tends towards a madcap mixture of comedy and action which never develops much forward momentum. The joke-a-minute approach misses more than it hits, although the bright animation and adorably-rendered characters are decent compensation.

Pixar’s latest boasts the company’s reliably cheerful disposition and gorgeous visuals, but otherwise this meandering, pedestrian affair is never particularly funny or poignant — the hallmarks that once made this studio the gold standard for Hollywood animation.

A handful of bone-crunching, arrow-whirring, neck-slicing battle scenes allow us some time off from trying to follow the convoluted narrative thread.

Lister-Jones gives a heartfelt performance as this unhappy woman coming to terms with her disappointments, and she’s assisted by Cailee Spaeny as her character’s younger self. But the slim story and wobbly execution ultimately undermine some deft observations about depression, forgiveness and the inner child who needs to be heard.

Director Nash Edgerton never really sinks his teeth into the delectable darkness of his hero’s nemeses, struggling to maintain the right acidic tone.

The fitfully amusing Werewolves Within tries to wring some laughs from that satiric premise, but this horror-comedy isn’t inspired enough in either its commentary or its collection of colourful characters to have much bite.

Jonze’s film (his first full-length feature since 2013’s Her) sits in an awkward gap between live performance and event cinema.

Personal and committed as the film clearly is, it won’t come across as a revelation for adepts of this pensive brand of slow-burning visual poetry - of which this seems a reticent and somewhat old-fashioned example.

After the sorry spectacle and blatant xenophobia of London Has Fallen, it’s almost a relief that Angel is merely a competent, second-rate action vehicle. This trilogy’s ambitions have never been particularly high, but at least this third chapter’s fleeting junk-food pleasures aren’t undermined by base pandering.

Trying to split the difference between trashy and classy, Red Sparrow is a sleek, juiced-up espionage thriller that overdoes everything: its brutal violence, its dramatic flourishes, its hairpin plot twists, and most certainly its sexpot shamelessness.

A heartfelt performance from Chris Evans as the conscientious caretaker of his brilliant niece isn’t ample compensation for a film lacking the same intelligence and inquisitiveness that its young protagonist possesses in abundance.

Even with author Ian McEwan adapting his own novel for the screen, this somewhat stilted picture struggles to convey the deft emotional complexity of the source material.

In Moverman’s hands, it becomes a contemporary American fable about savagery lurking behind civilised facades, about class and racial divisions in a country that calls itself united, and about ethical vacuums in a connected, online society. It’s also an unbalanced, uneven ride, a distracting hot and cold shower of intense scenes featuring four terrific actors and long, meandering passages of flashback filler.

Despite how personally the filmmaker connects with this ambitious riff on the Cervantes novel, the long-time passion project succumbs to the same indulgences and weaknesses that have plagued his recent movies.

For all the big themes rustling around in Hunted, they lack the startling ferocity that develops on Eve’s face — for her, there’s nothing theoretical about this study of predatory male behaviour.

A girl-and-her-horse adventure that never really hits its stride, Spirit Untamed offers undemanding family entertainment alongside some easily digestible life lessons.

Annabelle Comes Home has effective scare sequences, especially as the film ratchets up the tension in its final reels, but this sequel ultimately feels too mechanical, and too familiar, to unnerve as proficiently as previous entries.

Unfortunately, much like the light at the end of the tunnel, the thinness of this situational comedy, which continues to hit the same jokes with diminishing returns, becomes glaringly obvious.

Neither the humour nor the script is particularly sharp, although younger viewers may not mind the slapstick simplicity.

Although stuffed with ambition and the occasionally arresting moment, this 1930s mystery flaunts a freewheeling spirit that far outpaces its convoluted story and dramatically thin protagonists.

The adrenaline never stops pumping in Mile 22, a superficially kinetic thriller that simultaneously attempts to be politically savvy and an ultra-macho shoot-‘em-up. That juggling act proves too sophisticated for director Peter Berg who, in his fourth collaboration with Mark Wahlberg, again demonstrates his sufficient skill at crafting dynamic suspense sequences.

Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg are a likeable duo, and there are some spectacularly overblown set pieces, but this video-game adaptation ultimately feels too familiar, borrowing heavily from Raiders Of The Lost Ark and National Treasure when it’s not riffing on heist films and buddy comedies.

An overly self-conscious somberness infuses the film, keeping this heartrending tale from being as poignant as it could be.

Max is a genial if somewhat old-fashioned tale that’s too clunky to transcend its genre(s) but effective enough within its own limited emotional range.

Although there are plenty of lyrical moments, Zemeckis’ lack of restraint and some questionable narrative choices undo what should be a moving affair.

Adele Exarchopoulos and Francois Civil may be top-billed, but this unapologetically sentimental drama actually works better in its first half when their adolescent counterparts take centre stage, seizing on the irrepressible excitement of first love.

The elegant tone undercuts the material’s inherent bite, ultimately defanging a picture that eventually shifts into a twisty thriller.

A good cast including Sam Rockwell and Jared Harris wander around sincerely in what feels, at times, almost a shot-by-shot remake, and at others, an obstinately wrong-footed exercise in dabbling with the narrative.

Taron Egerton brings a desperate energy to his role as one of those entrepreneurs who discovers how business was conducted behind the Iron Curtain. But director Jon S. Baird fumbles the narrative’s tricky tonal balance, resulting in a glib, convoluted film that is never as engrossing as the game these characters are fighting over.

Neither director Stephen Hopkins nor star Stephan James can bring Owens’ story to passionate life, resulting in a drama that’s well-meaning rather than riveting.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come delivers short-term thrills in an emotionally hollow gore fest.

The gargantuan critters are dwarfed only by the derivativeness in Rampage, a clunky spectacle that, like many Dwayne Johnson vehicles, is elevated by his charismatic presence but not enough to recommend it.

Happy New Year… is vigorous and engaging as dark character comedy, but as drama it never quite builds or coheres convincingly.

Jokey rather than funny, and a bit forced when it’s trying to be sincere, Ant-Man has plenty of enthusiasm but not a lot of inspiration.

The picture’s just-a-lark tone, emphasised by the quick turnaround from script to final product, proves to be a double-edged sword: Locked Down feels like a fleetingly fun experiment that would have benefited from more time.

Piranhas feels a bit like a teen movie that just happens to have a Cammora backdrop, rather than a serious, nuanced drama about the paranza system – essentially, the grooming of underage kids as drug runners and Mafia footsoldiers.

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.

This live-action remake of the 1941 Disney animated classic finds the eccentric, inconsistent filmmaker tapping into his career’s core emotional themes and, on occasion, Dumbo has the magic and wonder of his best work. (And that blue-eyed baby elephant is awfully cute.) But there remains a frustrating impersonality — not to mention an audience familiarity with his well-worn aesthetic — that keeps the film from soaring all that high.

Cherry comes across like a deeply personal passion project for a group of talented filmmakers, and that’s for better and for worse. In its attempts to address Cleveland’s opoid crisis and the devastating trauma of repeated overseas conflicts for young Americans, the Russos’ film can effectively convey the grim desperation of those involved. It is often distracted by its own technique, though. The tone wavers wildly, the attention hovers, and scenes are allowed to ramble on. At times the resulting sense of discomfort can help challenge the viewer, but Cherry isn’t sufficiently fresh to be challenging enough.

Neither a broad farce nor a scathing evisceration of sexism (both then and now), Catherine Called Birdy ends up trapped in a dissatisfying middle ground between those two extremes, a tonal decision that results in only mild laughs and somewhat engaging characters.

As much a biopic of the show as of its stars, Being The Ricardos has a few good performances, and a cleverly structured (if factually challenged) script. But star Nicole Kidman’s performance is shaky, and Sorkin relies too heavily on an overbearing score to deliver the emotions.

Promising Young Woman builds to a truly shocking climax that delivers Fennell’s themes with a dark and twisted sense of humour—and justice. It’s a clever and unexpected turn in a film full of surprises.

The Cured is at its sharpest when drawing acute political parallels. As a zombie film, the shocks are few/

This knowingly excessive brew of cartoonish knockabout and macabre comedy horror just isn’t that funny.

Sporting a flowing mullet and aviator shades, Dinklage perks things up considerably as the story’s comically arrogant bad-boy-turned-good-guy.

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.

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

It’s to Ficarra and Requa’s credit that they try to juggle romance and political commentary, daring to make a studio movie that doesn’t fall into cookie-cutter genre rules. But the overriding problem is that Whiskey doesn’t go far enough in its risk-taking, settling for a story that gets more predictable as it rolls along.

The Kitchen may prove to be a meaningful time-capsule document, but is far less successful as broad entertainment.

Despite some initial swagger, this 1980s-set picture lacks the ingenuity of the previous two chapters – a disappointment made worse by West’s wan attempts to satirise the film industry’s shallowness.

Turbo Kid is a wild enough burlesque that the audience can ignore a few things that don’t seem quite right.... Harder to ignore is that Turbo Kid, which was first made as a short, struggles to sustain its energy for 89 minutes of evisceration.

When the film thoughtfully dissects the fable’s patriarchal attitude, this Cinderella can be touching and light on its feet. But too often, whether because of the subpar songs or the hit-or-miss comedy, Cannon’s rethink struggles to consistently dazzle — it’s a glass slipper that doesn’t quite fit.

Ryan Reynolds is endearingly wholesome as this likeable digital nonentity, but once the story’s initial burst of cleverness fades, director Shawn Levy becomes bogged down in convoluted plotting and the overfamiliarity of his seize-the-day message.

Full of interesting concepts and accomplished animation, Children Of The Sea is less than the sum of its many parts and just seems to lose its way after a very promising beginning.

There are far too many secrets and lies for one film, to the extent that what could have been a simmering tale of political complicity, greed and family disorder becomes just winds up feeling a bit silly.

Poignant and frustrating in equal measure, The Light Between Oceans aspires to be an elegant melodrama, but the intelligence that director Derek Cianfrance and his capable cast bring to bear eventually becomes overwhelmed by the story’s emotional manipulations.

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.

The unflinching rawness of the action has considerable impact while undercutting the dominant jingoistic tone. Despite the team’s tactical strengths, their plans often suddenly unravel because of unanticipated elements, resulting in stomach churning injuries.

Best appreciated as a sensory experience whose deeper meanings aren’t nearly as profound as the filmmaker and cast believe, Song To Song demonstrates that Malick remains a singular artist — albeit one in a palpable rut.

It’s possible ... that in his affection for and identification with Nicolaou, Ferrera has over-estimated the fascination of his subject’s life story.

The comedic sparks and emotional stirrings simply aren’t as potent this time around, despite some colourful animation and an occasionally inspired silly streak.

Boasting some strong performances and clever writing, this breezy overview of the author and his magnum opus, The Catcher In The Rye, fails to fully capture the magnitude of this brilliant author’s struggle for greatness and then, later, his decision to walk away from literary stardom.

Told mostly through the screens that consume the characters’ lives, the feature debut of director Carey Williams has its superficial pleasures as a riff on our media-soaked moment, but the novelty of the approach is hard to sustain, and a fresh-faced cast fails to capitalise on the play’s enduring appeal.

Impeccably crafted but only intermittently gripping, the third instalment in the Fantastic Beasts franchise has the scope and sweep of an epic while suffering from some of the same weaknesses as the first two chapters.

Despite the suitably transgressive nature of the subject matter, Catherine Breillat’s first film in a decade is an oddly muted affair: uncomfortable, certainly, but lacking the disruptive, confrontational jab and genuine shock factor of her earlier pictures.

There’s an observational authenticity that is refreshing in an audiovisual culture whose attempts at self-analysis are too often skewed by melodrama. It’s also heartening to see such delicate stories of ordinary people come to the fore in a country whose filmmakers faces enormous hurdles; technical, financial and bureaucratic.

Twenty years after The Fifth Element, writer-director Luc Besson has once again delivered a widescreen, sci-fi spectacle full of rampant whimsy, lavish effects and creaky social commentary, resulting in a nervy, go-for-broke opus whose audacity is more laudable than its execution.

Using the Great Hunger as a backdrop for a revenge western is an interesting way to exorcise old ghosts, but the end result drains pathos from the tragedy while muting The Proposition-style genre elements.

While this story of a mermaid who gives up her enchanted life to follow her heart onto the land has been given the full cutting-edge CGI treatment, the slow pacing, often-overwrought emotion and undeniably outdated story mean that it fails to make much of a splash.

By betting everything on the chemistry between its two leads, a tired formula and by-the-numbers action, The Hitman’s Bodyguard misses the mark.

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

Young actresses, Lorenza Izzo, who plays the dark-haired vicious vamp, and Ana de Armas, a Marilyn Monroe-like nymphette, are fine as the sociopathic femme fatales, toying with their sexiness like a loaded weapon. But Reeves is the obvious big draw here, and he’s fun to watch, alternating between exasperation, fury and helplessness.

Director Juan Carlos Medina (Insensible/Painless) fails to muster Golem’s many moving parts, and tension leaks from the film like the blood from one of its many savaged corpses.

The Next Level lacks the gleeful inventiveness of Jungle, in which three well-known stars slyly subverted their personas while embodying the insecurities and naivety of their teenage players. Absent that, it mostly feels gimmicky; the cast straining to recapture the hilarious rapport that once seemed so effortless.

I, Olga Hepnarova struggles with its difficult central character, always spiky and occasionally psychotic but never really as intriguing as the filmmakers clearly believe.

London Fields overflows with interesting ideas but they are frequently buried under lurid fantasy sequences, blunt-edged satire and the sense that it is much more amused by its own wild daring than we are.

A Dog’s Journey is certainly manipulative - humans aren’t safe here either, with a significant cancer side-plot. At times, it even seems obsessed by death. Yet there’s something oddly cathartic about sobbing your way through this film, with its mash-up of Buddhism and All-American values.

While a committed Chastain and Hathaway do their utmost to inject some gravitas into proceedings there are some moments which border on the absurd, particularly as it reaches its frenzied climax. Still, there is some fun to be found in the arch campness of it all and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the film looks gorgeous.

Wielding the same grim power as his most obsessive, tormented work, Jack is deeply embedded within its creator’s psyche, and while the results may be cathartic for him, the movie is only intermittently arresting for the rest of us.

Qualley brings the required smoky-sexpot energy, but Julia is so underwritten that the actress turns her into an unintentional parody of a familiar character. Also disappointing is Powell’s glib portrayal of Beckett.

When the film works — or, whenever de Palma brings relatable spirit and charisma to her centrepiece role — it’s a slice of undemanding fluff, serving up an underdog fantasy that probes the difference between the haves and the have-nots without daring to dig too deep.

Everest director Baltasar Kormakur crafts his man-versus-wild-animal drama with some niftily tense suspense sequences that split the difference between compelling and cheesy. But whether it’s the so-so CGI or the threadbare character development, Beast frustratingly refuses to aspire to be more than a competent, disposable actioner.

Seydoux never manages to assemble all of Celestine’s various features into one convincing character, while the social, sexual and political nuances in the script are well-established clichés.

The film’s down-and-dirty nastiness does have its merits, but the bloodshed isn’t nearly as interesting when the characters are as exciting as a spreadsheet.

The film also has plenty of faults. One of the main problems is that Ophelia is still under-written.

Despite the clear compassion the filmmakers have for the title character and those in her orbit, the result is an oddly alienating movie that treats every plot point with hyperbolic life-or-death stakes.

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.

Wanting to honour history, Midway proves to be an oddly polite war film, afraid to be too exciting lest it interfere with the solemn tone.

Last Knights is little more than a dutifully compiled collection of genre conventions, its tale of a group of brave knights seeking vengeance for their fallen leader so undemanding that it’s almost charmingly pedestrian.

The supporting cast takes some of the comic weight off the always likeable Vaughn’s shoulders. But Wilkinson’s character is too sad-sack to be really funny and Franco’s verges on the mawkish.

While it may wish to spark debate, the stance it takes on its messaging is troubling – particularly given a stapled-on coda that seems to suggest we should be putting all of this nonsense behind us.

After the tense opening, coherent drama goes by the board.

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

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.

Despite the keep-it-open ending, it seems clear that Chastain has an idea, and not a franchise; that Simon Kinberg (X-Men) works better as a producer than a director.

Taking the reins from Michael Bay, directing duo Adil & Bilall supply loads of energised style, but without the panache or shamelessness of their predecessor. As for stars Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, they don’t seem rejuvenated by this reunion, mostly re-creating the forced back-and-forth quipping that wasn’t even fresh back when they were younger men.