Starting off as a strained farce before segueing into a sappy family film, How To Be A Latin Lover has its likeable, goofy moments, although it is consistently undercut by a main character who is very difficult to love.

Spain’s J. A. Bayona is essentially stirring the same Jurassic pot here, with little that’s inspiring from his cast, unless you count the dinosaurs.

Rather than fleshing out its characters, the picture uses them as props to mock our obsession with our phones and, predictably, young people’s inability to interact with the real world.. For a film about the evils of artificial intelligence, Good Luck doesn’t have enough of a human element.

Beckett, though, has better films in its DNA - it is by no means original. What it mostly serves as is a reminder of what is missing from independent cinema - and may well be gone for good.

Director Marc Forster lends this lightweight comedy-drama a crowd-pleasing breeziness, but the picture never cuts particularly deep, especially noticeable when it tries to tackle some darker subject matter. Audiences simply wanting an undemanding, reassuring entertainment may not mind, but Hanks’ change-of-pace role is intriguing enough to wish the material wasn’t quite so mawkish.

For a spell, this sequel to the 2014 hit intrigues because of its insistence on taking time to establish melancholy themes and thoughtful tone. But no amount of Denzel Washington’s weary authority is enough to distract from the fact that this overstuffed, ultimately unsatisfying potboiler merely dresses up its clichés in strained gravitas.

The main audience takeaway here will be the two main performances by Adams and Close.

Sibyl is far less than the sum of its parts, and never manages to shake off a heavy tone which consistently threatens to capsize even the rare funny interludes.

A mixed bag that doesn’t quite work — it’s too jokey, and too tonally erratic — and yet there’s real sweetness, as well as a genuine attempt to not just be another comic-book movie.

Neill Blomkamp puts the pedal to the metal with Gran Turismo, a high-octane underdog sports drama that boasts electrifying race-car sequences but a badly cliched narrative away from the track.

Hyperactive, oddly premised and never quite as endearing as it should be, The Boss Baby is an animated family comedy that seems to have all the right elements but just doesn’t deliver.

This fitfully funny comedy — in which they must come up with the perfect song to stop reality from folding in on itself — offers little beyond nostalgia for an onscreen friendship that was once far more excellent.

As more information is dispensed - much of it in a rush in the final shots – the strength of Owen’s screenplay becomes clear but the issues it raises are largely left un-examined.

Certainly, The Mauritanian doesn’t lack for sincerity or muted rage. But the earnest, pat execution ultimately does a disservice to Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s arduous odyssey. His is a story that needs to be told, but with a little more urgency and ingenuity than what’s brought to bear here.

As sunny as Eddie The Eagle is, its greatest liability is that it never pushes itself, content to let an amiable true-life tale be turned into a generic genre exercise.

Humor does provide some welcome relief from the heaviness of Mohave’s script.

A heartfelt but ultimately hobbled coming-of-age drama.

Comic-book fans have seen much of this film before, but Levi at least tries to make it soar.

Whatever mild pleasure can be derived from seeing Batman and Wonder Woman team up with other costumed crime-fighters quickly dissipates as it becomes clear that director Zack Snyder has again crafted a lumbering blockbuster that dilutes what’s so stirring about these fabled fictional champions.

This film, mostly shot in the UK, is technically suberb. But splitting the pleasures of virtual and reality, Ready Player One never fully satisfies on either front.

While it’s impossible not to be somewhat caught up in these climbers’ life-or-death struggle, Everest is oddly uninvolving — it depicts a horrific scenario in an underwhelming, distancing way.

Dogman may have a more intimate, reflective tone than much of his work – at least until its final man-versus-dog showdown – but it struggles to get past that initial cool pitch.

It’s just so hard to buy into Spaceman.

Silent Night works best as a grim chamber piece that subverts the season’s usual good cheer — or, depending on one’s temperament, serves as a tart distillation of the nagging gloom those who hate the holidays often feel.

Kurosawa remains a master of twilight-zone atmosphere, but this extended metaphor for the grieving process relies too heavily on ambience alone.

This is a film with some grace and exuberance, but a cavalier attitude to period verisimilitude only adds to the impression that, when it comes to facing ugly historical reality, Kiberlain’s approach is naïvely inadequate.

Unlike Entertainment, which had a cracked energy about it, this has such a somnolent pace, blandly desaturated palette and sombre tone that staying the course can be a challenge.

More frustrating than nerve-wracking, Old is hampered by its one-dimensional characterisations within an intriguing set-up.