It purports to be a “cinematic meditation” on the havoc humans have wreaked on the environment, yet the style-over-substance approach reduces these eco-conscious contemplations to a mere exercise in aesthetics, without any social or political context.

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.

In theory, these are twentysomethings we're talking about. But they walk and talk like fortysomethings or fiftysomethings, such is their dullness and self-absorption.

Mon Roi, directed and co-written by Maïwenn (that is, film-maker and actor Maïwenn Le Besco) is an unendurable confection of complacent and self-admiring nonsense: shallow, narcissistic, histrionic and fake.

There can hardly be a bigger waste of time than this piece of twee nonsense.

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

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.

A clunking underdog/redemption sports movie with a horribly perfunctory and unconvincing script, and a ponderous, half-awake performance from the bearded and stolid Ben Affleck.

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

It’s a dismal TV movie of the week: trite, shallow, cautiously middlebrow and blandly complicit in the cult of female prettiness that it is supposedly criticising.

Synchronic is frankly just silly and tedious, with faintly absurd and jeopardy-free time-travel scenes and a dramatic focus hopelessly split between Dennis and Steve’s separate but equally tiresome lives.

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.

Pesce asks viewers to go along with the absurdity while offering nothing to justify any of it. It’s a murder ballad gone out of tune.

This fantastically muddled and exasperatingly dull quasi-update of the King Kong story looks like a zestless mashup of Jurassic Park, Apocalypse Now and a few exotic visual borrowings from Miss Saigon. It gets nowhere near the elemental power of the original King Kong or indeed Peter Jackson’s game remake; it’s something Ed Wood Jr might have made with a trillion dollars to do what he liked if he’d been given a trillion dollars – but minus the fun.

There’s an odd, disconcerting tone of solemnity to this slice of cultural history.

There is something deeply crass about this facetious nonsense, and everyone involved in this film might want to reflect that Nazi medical experimentation during the second world war did in fact happen, under circumstances other than these. It was a very real thing, not just a death-metal horror movie gag.

This is one to forget: a muddled, tonally misjudged, badly acted, uncertainly directed and frankly dubious drama, something that falls into the so-bad-it’s-bad bracket.

This film just wades into a murky lake of self-consciousness and sinks inexorably to the bottom.

Sadly, Savages plays up to Stone's worst tendencies: machismo, bombast and self-indulgence, and the factor that could conceivably have made this movie tolerable – humour – is off the menu.

Another film might have mined Steinem’s remarkable life for its complications and contradictions, but The Glorias settles for slapdash iconography.

Hamer and Gault won the day in a hail of submachine fire, but even their hagiography can’t hide that they’re history’s losers.

There are no insights to be had – and no laughs.

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.

There are some comedies that seem to have been rubbed all over with an anti-funny, anti-romance Kryptonite. This is one. It’s the cinematic equivalent of elevator muzak – a festival of glam-smug with zero chemistry between any of its three leads.

Scenes have a habit of stopping at any second, with or without whopping soundtrack.

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

An inevitable yet staggeringly unnecessary follow-up to the surprise horror hit turns a nifty concept into an exhaustingly convoluted mess.

The sclerotic staginess of The Dinner means this is one to miss.

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.

The admiration for a woman who knew so much about so much clashes with the unspoken assumption that the audience knows absolutely nothing about anything.

A defiantly unbelievable and drably directed heap of quirk that’s as overstuffed as it is underpowered, a head-scratching failure for all involved.

Revolving around of group of multi-ethnic Gen Z-ers in the American south, this message-heavy film tries hard to tackle urgent issues such as social media, familial conflicts and, above all, gun violence. The film only succeeds at peddling barely tolerable coming-of-age cliches.

This tardy rehash of fairytale tropes finds sometime genre innovator M Night Shyamalan clinging in abject desperation to the found-footage movement’s careworn coattails.

The scenes have no fire or lightness and sometimes they are embarrassing. ... Sachs is such a talented film-maker, but this is a baffling misstep.

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

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.

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 two adjectives in the title should be replaced with "annoying" and "unendurably tiresome".

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.

Remove the subtitles, and it's one of Cameron Crowe's head-in-the-clouds dramas, as scripted by M Night Shyamalan: an insultingly arbitrary reveal, preceded by vast, wailing washes of Pink Floyd and Sigur Rós. A very vanilla sky, this.

Mr Right is Grosse Pointe Blank meets Dexter. Liman meets Tarantino. Derivative idea meets sloppy execution.

The inept script... makes for a perfect bedfellow with Egoyan’s flat TV movie direction and an overwrought score that sounds like a drunk impression of Bernard Herrmann.

Between the atrocious green-screen work, the blatant stock footage helicopter shots of city skylines and painfully obvious Toronto-for-America locations, you would be forgiven for thinking this movie was made in 1992.

A deafening, boring action pile-up that is more Call of Duty than Robocop.

It's leaden, boorish and dull.

This has been painfully de-tusked.

A tedious, misjudged marriage of Olympic opening ceremony, Eurovision half-time show and most recorded nightmares, Worlds Away is set in a mysterious land of make-believe.

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

Dejah, with her seen-it-all-before smirk, is not a very sympathetic heroine, and Kitsch is stolid and dull. And as for the red planet, the answer to David Bowie's famous question is no. What a sadd'ning bore it is.

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

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.

Everything about this clunks.

A film that should feel urgent and of its time, but instead is rendered cliched and dull by Sollet’s amateurish handling of the material.

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 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.

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

This romp is just embarrassing.

The mystery has been dialled down, the treacle dialled up, and what we are left with is basically Eat Pray Love 2.

[A] bafflingly insipid, zestless, derivative film.

It’s an unwieldy and messy thing, drearily directed and boringly written, taking its agenda seriously yet not providing a robust enough framework to surround it.

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.

With much buzzing, beeping and whirring, the Terminator franchise comes to an absolute creative standstill, or even goes clankingly into reverse, with this fantastically dull fourth episode.

Belleville cranks up the colour saturation and ironic Yuletide soundtrack, but all his slo-mo hedonism can’t disguise an otherwise addled story treatment: we chop haphazardly between hemispheres, leaving characters and subplots treading crystal blue water.

A clumsy, unfunny adaptation of a much-loved literary crime series

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.

Abhorrent politics aside, it’s also a terrible movie. The dialogue is atrocious, the performances rote. One could make the case that its incoherence is a grand meta-narrative statement about the fluidity of combat, but I don’t think that’s the case.

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

We should be on the edge of our seat but every should-be set piece falls flat, the choreography always feeling a little off and the editing never works as tightly as it should.

Commerce contaminates the whole endeavour.

One for Hardwicke, and everyone else, to forget.

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.

The New World is a disaster, moans Queen Isabella. Yes, that's about right.

The supposed satirical attitude of Irresistible can’t conceal the fact that it’s contrived, unfunny and redundant.

Masterminds is a bit of an interesting case study, as it is basically a Coen brothers film but put through a mechanism that removes all the wit, visual style or excitement. In its place are tortuously dull set-pieces, rambling dialogue and banal stagings.

Audiences may come to this film expecting the conventional pleasures of a spy thriller – excitement, tension, suspense – along with the additional values associated with the very best of the genre: character nuance, emotional complexity, plausible human dilemma. The Operative utterly defeats all of these hopes, chiefly in being at all times extremely boring.

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.

Doubtless, like The Producers, it will be adapted back into the theatre, some time in 2017, at which time it will be even more bland and tiring.

Interior. Leather Bar ultimately rings hollow in its diatribe and agenda because its chief instigator refuses to open up.

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

Don’t Breathe 2 is not only struggling for air but it’s struggling for purpose and meaning and hopefully this weekend, audiences too.

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 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.

The whole affair is misjudged and sickly sweet.

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.

A truly terrible Working Girl knock-off.

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.

Life of the Party’s predictable and lethargic box-ticking of scenes (accidentally getting high – check; dance off – check), gives it the unremarkable stench of something you’ve half-watched on cable before.

The malfunctioning studio system has foisted many subprime ideas upon us recently, but this opportunistic, Trump-age hybrid of war-on-terror drama and YA fantasy numbers among the junkiest.

Here, we can find a damning summary of modern Hollywood’s default mode – a nostalgia object, drained of personality and fitted into a dully palatable mold, custom-made for a fandom that worships everything and respects nothing.

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

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

The first act of the film wins some laughs on surrealist shock humour, but at the expense of ever accepting this character and her world as real.

This is not a very good effort, seeming tired without being emotional. It looks like the end of the line...Superman III never flies as it should, or only does momentarily. [31 July 1983, p.21]

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 film is making a wheezing, spluttering sound: the sound of a profitable YA franchise running out of steam.

Hard to believe that this barely watchable animated cash-in from the heyday of those Robots In Disguise was the cinematic swansong of Orson Welles. [05 May 2007, p.17]

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.

For the impressively moronic dialogue, Oldman brings a lack of imagination so complete that he could plausibly explain this performance away as a high-concept ironic joke.