It’s now commonplace to compare programmatic stuff like this to AI, but this is almost a second evolutionary step downwards; it looks as if humans, using AI, have tried to copy something that was originally AI generated, creating a bland, simplistic template that can be sold in all global territories where it can be dubbed by local voice talent.

It’s one of those rare, unicorn films that doesn’t have a single redeeming quality. I’m not even sure it qualifies as a documentary, exactly, so much as an elaborate piece of designer taxidermy, horribly overpriced and ice-cold to the touch and proffered like a medieval tribute to placate the greedy king on his throne.

It is bafflingly complacent in its sentimentality and its sheer, fatuous implausibility, which makes it valueless and meaningless as drama and comedy.

Like a lot of movies, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 has its own souvenir popcorn bucket. This may be the first one where the bucket is more entertaining than the feature.

This cynically Christmassy movie is leaden, unconvincingly acted and about as welcome as a dead rat in the eggnog.

Even in an oversaturated genre of increasingly diminished returns, Shelby Oaks is about as dispensable as it gets.

There’s really nothing to see here, just another synthetic simulation of a film and a genre we used to love, less maintenance required and more complete overhaul.

There is no drama or jeopardy or human interest anywhere. This franchise now looks about as urgently contemporary as an in-car CD player.

Cine-narcissism like this is always tiresome, and it isn’t any more palatable in a European setting.

It takes work to make Murphy entirely unfunny, and this film manages the job one-handed.

Films like Bride Hard, proudly recycling well-known popcorn plots without any attempt at originality, rely on heavy-lifting star power but there’s just none of that here.

Here is a cheap-ass knockoff of Ocean’s Eleven starring John Travolta that makes the Soderbergh film look like something by Andrei Tarkovsky or Ingmar Bergman.

It is burdened by a trite and naive sentimentality that it doesn’t know how to make realistically plausible or transform into romanticism or idealism.

All told, there’s hardly a single smile in Lilo & Stitch ’25 not generated through the stolen valor of the earlier screenplay, and hardly a poignant moment that’s not more admirably raw in the G-rated version.

The madly, bafflingly overwrought and humourless storytelling can’t overcome the fact that everything here is frankly unpersuasive and tedious. Every line, every scene, has the emoting dial turned up to 11 and yet feels redundant.

This fudged, pseudo-progressive approach is so tiring you’ll want to put your head in your hands.

Everyone’s stumbling along in a vaguely defined universe, which really only serves as a backdrop to catchy musical numbers that evolve from folk to pop rock.

There’s never the satisfying pleasure of problems being solved – just people frantically raising them and things magically coming together, a film that should be about process that doesn’t seem particularly interested in it.

It all could have been fun with a teaspoonful of humour, but everyone concerned behind the camera has calculated (perhaps correctly) that this would be inimical to its commercial success.

There’s nothing wrong with a big-hearted film for Christmas, but this commercial and formulaic slice of content is a toy destined to be forgotten.

For a film about living, Here is a remarkably lifeless endeavour.

A dull and predictable sunshine noir that wastes the time of those involved as well as ours.

The ploddingly unvaried pace and undirected, underpowered performances make this an exasperating experience: a directionless, shallow movie which seems bafflingly unconvincing and inauthentic at every turn.

Though it supposedly argues against human beings turned into synthetic quasi-droids, Uglies feels like just another throwaway product.

The commentary on gender and age feels easy and unspecific and the world of the Vegas showgirl created from too great of a distance to really ring true.

It’s genuinely startling just how utterly wretched the finished product is and how unfit it is for a wide release.

Harold and the Purple Crayon is not funny, not insightful about children, and it costs much more time and money to see than simply reading the books that it tries to turn into a meta-text. It makes imagination seem like a garish endurance test.

It’s easily his worst film to date.

The uplift of a woman triumphing in a male-dominated Stem world isn’t enough to get us through a mess of grindingly unfunny dialogue, too-broad performances and an utter, movie-killing lack of charm.

This splatterfest horror feature is better than its predecessor much in the same way succeeding Covid variants are better than the early, more lethal strains.

This shameless shilling comes packaged in an equally offensive story that foists Hollywood’s au courant fixation with intergenerational trauma on to a character heretofore occupied above all with napping and eating.

Calamy gives it everything she’s got but this film is fundamentally heavy-handed.

Once you get to the big reveal, you feel like you’ve sat through a hundred episodes of a saucy daytime soap with the saucy bits cut out. They could franchise out a sequel: Strictly Confidential in Dubai.

What sweetness and charm Prom Dates does muster is thanks to Lester alone, whose comic timing is sharp and whose performance of a girl growing comfortable in her sexuality over one crazy night actually conjures the sense of a real person.

This unbearably cute joint selfie of a movie is gruesomely indulgent and entitled from the first; it allows Ewan McGregor little or no opportunity to show his natural wit and flair and there is oddly no real chemistry between him and his co-star.

It’s a weird facsimile of a movie – plot with no momentum, plenty of character facts without substance, a pastiche of better movie moments and classic romcom notes. Even for lowered expectations or couch-day fluff, this is a skip.

Jacqueline (Argentine) isn’t just a bad movie – there are plenty of those. It’s infuriating.

There is of course more here to remind us of Lohan’s unwavering charm but that’s not quite enough to distract from just how tired and limply written the whole thing is and how depressing it is to watch her still stuck here.

Aiming for more fun is no bad thing but Imaginary is far too dumb and ungainly to move at the pace required and bring the thrills it should, a theme park ride that should be closed for repairs.

There is nothing gritty or believable about any of it. The film is as dumb and schlocky as the worst of the genre, with lousy network TV effects, uninvolving action and unfunny and inelegant dialogue, its characters drowning in poorly written exposition (even if the much-memed viral line from the trailer is sadly not in the movie itself).

This could theoretically be a fun movie, but it is all so self-conscious and self-admiring, with key action sequences rendered null and void by being played on two levels, the imaginary and the real, so cancelling each other out.

This pointless, aimless mission is expedited by the usual logic-slips, like inexplicably letting fanatical SS officers escape when you have them at your mercy.

Brie and Cena look lifeless and blank-faced; they’ve got no chemistry, and the objectionable dynamics of him manfully rescuing her shrieking from the clutches of the bad guys on repeat feel like a satire of the genre – which this isn’t.

The Aquaman franchise is just flatlining, floating through the dreary depths like the kind of discarded plastic bag which is going to choke the last remaining vaquita porpoise.

Going mad with power should be at the very least fun, exhilarating in the indulgence of an artist’s most outlandish whims. Instead, Snyder’s would-be magnum opus is merely boring.

Despite its obvious desire to push buttons, Animal doesn’t have the guts to actually own its transgressions.

It’s as if everyone involved is terrified of actually making people laugh in case that gives offence somehow, or disrupts the algorithmic calculation that theoretically makes this a palatable piece of content. The whole thing is as bland as cellophane.

In film-making as in gift-giving, it’s the thought that counts, and there’s not much to go around in here.

As comedy writers and movie actors, the members of Please Don’t Destroy – Martin Herlihy, John Higgins and Ben Marshall – are out of their depth. That’s not a knock on their brand of comedy, which works in small doses.

At less than 80 minutes, it’s barely even a movie, more one long montage of bits that never run on long enough to be defined as scenes.

This movie finally ties itself into various knots to prefigure the later world of Katniss, but the time to end the Games came long ago.

When not being used to grind dull culture-war axes, sputtering impotent anger is a comedy staple. It just needs to be funnier than this.

Any stabs at thematic seriousness have an incongruous feel. It’s admirable that Deacon, who has been vocal about his own mental health issues, has made his character bipolar, but the subject isn’t explored so much as mentioned repeatedly.

There’s something equally impressive and depressing about the squandered potential of misfiring period comedy Wicked Little Letters, a joyless waste of cast, premise and setting.

In neglecting to vary her routine, she is not unlike the film-makers behind this ninth visit to the Conjuring universe – although “universe” is a misleadingly large word for a franchise that is impoverished in all but its box-office gross.

This is just a dull and badly acted movie.

The bar was low after the first, a half-assed waste of actors who deserve better, but the sequel is somehow even worse, a maddeningly unfunny string of bad decisions, the worst of which was deciding to make it in the first place.

Commerce contaminates the whole endeavour.

The writing expends more effort on teasing out the logistics of seeing dead people than making the phenomenon frightening or emotionally resonant.

The wittiest thing about The Out-Laws is its title.

One for Hardwicke, and everyone else, to forget.

The first Extraction was entertaining enough but this new one is just cynically about extracting the cash.

An attempt to revive the Hasbro franchise is a careless fumble put together without a hint of effort or interest.

Everything about it is heavy-handed and dull: the non-comedy, the ersatz-pathos, the anti-drama.

It’s a script which shows every sign of having had plenty of rewrites, though perhaps it could have done with a few more.

Ghosted is content dictated by algorithm at its absolute, industry-shaming worst, so carelessly and lifelessly cobbled together that we’re inclined to believe it’s the first film created entirely by AI.

Not only is it as derivative as chatbot-written free verse, it’s also not even pleasant to look at. Walk like an Egyptian very quickly away from the multiplex.

Braff puts us through a gruelling “relapse” montage as Allison hits the pills again after an illusory breakthrough and then a “recovery” montage as she gets it together. And the film’s single valuable lesson – the one about not looking at your phone while driving – is all but forgotten.

The awful truth is that this is a generic derivative horror script.

The cast of True Spirit had no such chance: the schmaltz and mushiness overpower everything. The film’s daytime-soap vibes render an unquestionably inspiring true story into an experience that feels so false, so rinky-dink, I had to remind myself it was based on real life.

Gandhi Godse Ek Yudh is, at the end of the day, a mediocre effort. Deepak Antani’s Gandhi and Chinmay Mandlekar’s Godse do share a startling resemblance with the real historical figures, but their characterisation in this fanciful piece of fiction lacks any real conviction.

It’s Kid Cudi who salvages the picture playing an even more deadpan version of himself. And he carries the second half of the story through a macabre twist that at least makes the 100-minute feature worth finishing.

If the underlying message is to be decent before it’s too late, then be nice to yourself and queue up the berserk and brilliant Muppets Christmas Carol, why don’t you? You only live once.

It’s pretty much a laugh-free film to make you appreciate the work of Nancy Meyers or Richard Curtis; their films may look easy or corny but they have something this doesn’t, a kind of buoyancy or a way of alchemising all the luxury tourist incidentals into something entertaining.

Here is a terribly meagre experience from writer-director Rodrigo García, a silly, pointless movie which never delivers on its promises of drama and comedy and contains not a single funny or believable moment. As a filmic meal, it is pretty much entirely without nutritional or calorific value.

As this narrative advances out of the YA-industrial complex and into the harsher environment of general scrutiny, however, a whole curriculum’s worth of faults become visible to an audience not so readily pandered to, who want for more than worn-out teen-lit tropes to fill some inner content maw.

It can’t end well. In fact, it ends badly. In every sense. The mystery of Myers has long since become deflated and inert, and when he is unmasked, the camera can’t quite be bothered to show us his pointless old face (unlike the unhelmeting of Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi, which did at least show us what the great villain looked like). The only thing that’s scary is the thought of how long this has all been going on.

This feels like something LaBute wrote in an afternoon on the notes app on his smartphone while thinking about something else.

Black church is all about feeling – the building, the people, the message. But Honk has none of that soul. At best, the film is an abstract commentary on a culture it doesn’t fully understand; at worst, it’s half-hearted creative license. And at this late stage, sadly, not even Jevus could save it.

In a way, it is amazing that Flatley is able to fulfil a 12-year-old boy’s fantasy of being a secret agent, with a 12-year-old’s idea of what a secret agent actually does. The acting and writing are like the non-sexy bits that come between the sexy bits in a porn film made in 1985.

The saving grace here should be the win for the Filipino community, commanding a big-screen moment with a cast of undervalued Asian stars. But they’re all short-changed by a hypocritical sense of heritage and pride.

It’s a relentless surge of solemnly ridiculous nonsense in the style of romdram maestro Nicholas Sparks (creator of The Notebook and Message in a Bottle) culminating in a courtroom trial with Edgar-Jones’s free-spirited heroine in the dock as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Murder Suspect.

The film clunks on, acted with no flair or charisma by anyone in the cast and no energy or interest in the direction. A Rodriguez or a Tarantino – or, indeed, a Schrader – might have found something in the film’s episodic structure and its gallery of grotesques, but, as it is, this is just leaden.

A dead-eyed Chris Pratt presides over this convoluted mess of Bond-style villains and toothless action that even the original cast can’t save from extinction.

Tradition of course demands that the pert teen sacrifices in such gore fodder be satisfyingly dislikable. It isn’t easy, though, to make stupidity interesting, and Shark Bait is always one-note in its exploitation of its characters.

No one here seems to know what they’re doing and, more importantly, why. A strong contender for 2022’s most pointless movie.

In the carelessness of its slapdash construction, the off-putting flatness of its style, its brazen resistance to basic foundations of logic, and its hostility toward conventional humor that borders on the avant-garde, the new film (a term generously applied to this haphazard sequence of moving images) has far more in common with the hectic, ugly delirium of online obscurities than the newspaper’s funny pages.

Sophie Marceau delivers the cringe in this clunkingly bad LA dating comedy: tin-eared, cliched, unfunny and misjudged in every horribly unconvincing syllable, sadly sounding as if it has been written by someone who has never been to Los Angeles or met any human beings.

Running a little bit over an hour, it feels like an underdeveloped short that has overstayed its welcome.

It really is an amazingly pointless and dumb film: the good/bad setup between Morbius and Milo is muddled and cancelled by the not-especially-compelling moral struggle within Morbius himself. Both Leto and Smith have to keep doing the evil demonic face-change growling thing, and it is intensely silly. Let’s hope the extended Spider-Man universe extends far enough to include something more interesting than this.

Lemercier’s weirdly grinning, gurning face superimposed on the child’s head creates an unnatural chill that the film fails to shrug off, even after Aline as an adult is supposed to be glammed up with her teeth fixed.

The estimable Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters has bafflingly decided to try everyone’s patience with this insufferable vanity project: a violent gonzo grossout that sadly conforms to the horror-comedy tendency of being neither properly scary nor properly funny.

Jennifer Lopez is radioactively humourless and Owen Wilson is robotically bland in this stinker.

Here the formulaic silliness, sometimes part of the enjoyment, is just tiring.

Bruce Willis continues his campaign of reputation self-ruin – not that he has that far to fall – with this cruddy, derivative action thriller.

Cue all sorts of strangely tired, laugh-free goofiness, with none of the funny lines and wit that come as standard with Pixar/Disney films. I guess it would pacify very young children.

The Commando contains a number of egregious implausibilities and cliches.

[A] cheap and cheerless sci-fi action film.