[Farrelly's] latest commits itself to regurgitating every Vietnam cliche with the laziest possible visual diction, led by an emotionally overextended Zac Efron.

Ticket to Paradise may well do great business to those looking for some escapist fun, and that’s entirely understandable. But I found the wacky double-act of George and Julia slightly hard work.

An elegantly horrible coming-of-age.

Everything about this film means well and it is acted with professionalism and commitment. But there is something too easy about it.

The more characters Selick has to work with, the more room there is for his deliciously strange and comic visual craft.

This is an engrossing, well-acted story – disturbing but also tender and sad.

In Dunham’s hands, the throughline of enduring and discovering one’s worth, however historically imagined, is at once a comfort and a lark.

Without revealing which one wins out, I can assure you that a huge amount of murderous mayhem is unleashed, including death by woodchipper.

Beneath the crazy candy-coloured palette, there is actually some real human warmth in the love story, and the acting ensemble features some great comic performers in supporting roles.

It’s a strange film; it rattles fiercely along, but its relentless cynicism and nihilism leaves a sour taste and opinion may divide as to exactly how funny it is. Podalydès gives an entertainingly blase performance as the worldly image consultant, trying to seduce Alexandre over lunch.

Empire of Light is a sweet, heartfelt, humane movie, which doesn’t shy away from the brutality and the racism that was happening in the streets outside the cinema.

There remains a remove though still, Spielberg giving us a slightly too stage-managed version of himself and his family, some gristle missing from the darkest moments.

Johnson’s more extravagant and often indulgent sequel will likely find those who prefer it to the original, it’s so stuffed with so much that it’ll surely prove more fun to those who appreciate getting more bang for their buck. It’s hard not to have fun when Johnson pulls the strings, I just wish he’d not pulled quite so many and quite so hard.

It’s big and clever in a way that so few films of this scale are these days, a pleasure to be shepherded through the easy motions of a romantic comedy by people who know what they’re doing for once, and manages to walk a difficult tightrope without falling, despite the heft of baggage.

Love Life is an inexpressibly tragic and painful human drama about complicated lives, a movie that interleaves the utter desolation with a dry understated comedy and a sense of emotional tangle and chaos, a film that moreover blindsides its leading female character – and us, the audience – with an entirely unexpected coda section.

It’s in the film’s queerest moments that things feel most inventive, narratively and visually, as Bratton steps most firmly outside of the hemmed-in army drama formula and finds ways to make his film sit and thrive in the Venn diagram between military machismo and homoeroticism.

It’s all unavoidably stagey, with talky, tense scenes weighing the pros and cons of the decisions, and while Polley does make some attempts to take us outside the barn, to widen the canvas, there’s still an artificiality to some of the construct that makes us wish we were sitting watching this in the theatre instead.

The action is clumsy. The writing leans on tropes. The dramatic scenes overestimate the artistic range of a charming rapper-turned-actor like Bridges. And director Millicent Shelton makes some curious stylistic decisions along the way, whether it’s amethyst lighting or montages that have the feel of a R&B music video.

Mukerji’s biggest achievement is getting this relationship to flourish, Kapoor and Bhatt being among the precious few real-life couples with palpable onscreen chemistry.

It’s almost too perfectly contoured as a Hollywood narrative.

The film is competently crafted, dutifully acted, clearly labored over with soul, and yet, like its star, lacks a beating heart.

The Son is a laceratingly painful drama, an incrementally increased agony without anaesthetic.

There are depressingly few pleasures to be had here, and one of them is at least, for a while, playing detective trying to figure out just what on earth is buried at its centre.

There’s a very entertaining daftness and theatre nerdery to See How They Run (the title sounds uncomfortably like Run For Your Wife) as director Tom George takes the same approach to The Mousetrap that Ken Russell took to The Boyfriend: playing up the artificiality of it all. The comedy is shallow in the right way, and Rockwell’s bleary world-weariness contrasts nicely with Ronan’s saucer-eyed idealism.

There’s real intimacy and emotional generosity to this psychological mystery from Joanna Hogg – a personal movie which appears to come from the same universe as her earlier Souvenir films – or one very much like it.

This pious work is clearly designed to send believers into a state of ecstasy, but it may be a bit of a slog for the secular.

This schematic but sweet-natured comedy drama drives down a narrative track as straight and comfortingly predictable as an episode of Thomas the Tank Engine.

In short, this is not very good but there are worse things you could be watching as you fall asleep on the sofa after a heavy night’s drinking, which is exactly what it feels like this was designed for.

Saloum does not stop at simply reinterpreting the tropes of the western but wholly retools its influences with local flavours.

The movie noodles along amiably, but in the cold light of day, its quirks begin to feel like flaws.

Directed by Olivia Wilde, it superciliously pinches ideas from other films without quite understanding how and why they worked in the first place. It spoils its own ending simply by unveiling it, and in so doing shows that serious script work needed to be done on filling in the plot-holes and problems in a fantastically silly twist-reveal.

There are plenty of genuine laughs in this movie, but each of them seems to dovetail into a banshee-wail of pain.

Fraser does an honest job in the role of Charlie, and Hong Chau brings a welcome fierceness and sinew to the drama, but this sucrose film is very underpowered.

It is a thoroughly intelligent production, a film festival event that could not exist in the rough-and-tumble of regular movie distribution but will I hope find a home on streaming services.

In a world marred by political hopelessness, Dry Ground Burning literally and figuratively sets the landscape on fire, and out of the ashes there is hope for a new order free from oppression.

Maybe there is a kind of saintliness in the film which is occasionally difficult to take, but it’s an accomplished, tremendously shot piece of work.

The film itself is terrifically accomplished and horribly gripping, with golden-age movie pastiche and dashes of Psycho and The Wizard of Oz.

Baker, with his scrawny frame and ratty features, can actually act, although he’s consistently upstaged by young Reid, as the stronger performer and the one with the more interesting character story here.

It’s spectacular and immersive, with a sensational opening. But it gets bogged down in its own one-note, one-tempo uproar and open-ended parkour camerawork – impressive though that is – and suffers from a number of sneaky false-flag get-out clauses that feel like a cop-out.

Bones And All is an extravagant and outrageous movie: scary, nasty and startling in its warped romantic idealism.

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.

Ava is made with superb technique and real style.

Pushing its luck at two hours, this eventually collapses in a heap of its own symbolism, barely unpacking the missing-persons intrigue it started out with. Nice views en route, but it’s a tale scribbled in haste on the back of a postcard.

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.

It is made with real panache – so much panache, in fact, that you can forgive much of the film’s outrageous narcissism. Iñárritu could, if he chose, tell us an equally painful but less grandiose and auto-mythic story about his own life – but he has exercised his prerogative as an artist and given us this confection instead. It is certainly spectacular.

Love in the Villa is feel-good, not try-hard. Nothing ever rises to the level of unwatchable, but nothing has any distinctive staying power, either – you may catch the whiff of romance here and there, like passing by a bakery storefront, which constitute the most alluring shots of the movie.

It’s a garrulous, yet almost static movie, and weirdly for a film about narrative there is no single overwhelmingly important storyline.

No one but Blanchett could have delivered the imperious hauteur necessary for portraying a great musician heading for a crackup or a creative epiphany. No one but Blanchett has the right way of wearing a two-piece black suit with an open-necked white shirt, the way of shaking her hair loose at moments of abandon, the way of letting her face become a Tutankhamun mask of contempt.

The package is all tightly assembled but sticks to the traditional talking heads and archive clips format.

Baumbach has landed a sizeable white whale in his tremendously elegant and assured adaptation.

The lowish-budget production values, gestural performances and blunt moralism of the scriptwriting puts this very much in the heightened dramatic tradition of mainstream Nigerian cinema, but Emelonye has an accessible style and has picked the topical subject of cybercrime, an approach which might broaden the film’s appeal.

There’s plenty of white-knuckle footage from the archive, as well as reflections of old muckers. Fiennes says that in his darkest, diciest moments in peril he imagined his heroes – the father and grandfather he never met – watching over him.

The film is grimly depressing in places. I covered my eyes during Google Earth time-lapse sequences showing the pace of deforestation in the Amazon; the violence of it is too much. And yet, there is Bitaté: still a teenager, he’s already a skilled communicator.

Calamy gets to show off her astonishing dynamic range as an actor, adept at comedy, anxiety, maternal rage and kittenish coquetry, all in the space of a single scene.

The film would be in the general neighborhood of irresistible if not for the wonky mechanics of story and character that convey a conflicted impression of Hart’s onscreen persona.

It’s a fresh spin that feels awfully stale, a Samaritan less good and more mediocre.

Jones skilfully cranks up the creepiness a notch at a time with an ominous soundtrack and stylish lighting, until the dial is way past 11 and into grand guignol territory by the end.

At 88, Raven is still performing – perched on a stool – as his alter ego Maisie Trollette. In this affectionate if slight documentary, he tells a story or two, though perhaps not enough to fill a book.

It’s a very funny film, sending-up human absurdities without being too mean. Cruz is a talented comedian, but she smartly plays it straight-ish here. You never doubt for a moment Lola is the real deal. Nor that Cruz is either.

This tale of freelance underworld fixer Akilla Brown, played with careworn wisdom by Saul Williams, doesn’t live up to its sharp tailoring and has too much faith in fatigued beats from the gangster-film locker.

Mr Malcolm’s List has no great ambitions other than to amuse. But that is always harder than it looks.

The director is Christopher Nelius, himself a surfer, who has done a brilliant job with editor Julie-Anne De Ruvo of assembling the archive to capture the sport at a moment in time, all youth and energy. Smartly, he lets this exceptional group of funny, tough, talented women surfers, now in their 50s, do the talking.

This is a well-made film and nice looking, but there’s a tiresome predictability to a few too many scenes. It is a franchise that feels like it’s hit the rocks.

Bonneville’s performance will linger, the film not so much.

August might be a washout so far for the industry but Beast couldn’t be arriving at a more apt time, a thrilling, if throwaway, reminder of the fun to be had while watching a B-movie bringing its A-game.

Super Hero gamely tries to explain the backstory a bit at the beginning, but trying to keep up as we are plunged into a world of bad guys with outrageous quiffs, super-skilled preschoolers and green-skinned martial arts masters with droopy forehead antennae is quite futile. If, however, you can relax and just let it wash over you, Super Hero’s eye candy animation is mesmeric.

Here is a documentary for anyone who’s ever suffered from impostor syndrome or ever fantasised about going back in time to their school days, to reverse all those heartbreaks and humiliations. In other words: all of us.

Its affect is warm and reassuring, its methods for affirming that everything’s gonna be all right are cozy and tame, especially in regards to young motherhood.

This romcom set in a Manhattan publishing house is about as bland and as easily consumed as a cone of soft-serve ice-cream on a hot day. It’s essentially a sticky extrusion of sugar, trans fats and trapped air in cinematic form.

The whole thing is performed with relish and high spirits, and the digital fabrications of the Tower itself, rising out of the ground in stages with hair-raisingly dangerous structural work, are entertainingly contrived.

Fizzy and bubbly, the film feels like a cool glass of lemonade on a hot day, leaving us with a pleasant reminder of the thrills that summer can bring.

What makes the film so engrossing is how much attention the film-makers give to Lee’s complicated life after prison.

This is the cinematic equivalent of the stopped clock telling the right time twice a day: a film full of stylistic overkill suddenly runs into the material that justifies it.

The most disappointing thing about the film is that it has none of the spark or originality of the first one and just parasitically drains its source material, incorporating details like the creepy black-light drawings and the borderline paedophilic subtext without adding anything substantial.

The most surprising among them being Gary Oldman. The actor, an English emigrant to California like Muybridge himself, makes some acute observations about Muybridge’s style, technique and mien and adds a bit of Hollywood pizzazz to a story that’s crying out for a biopic.

Fall is the rare three-drinks-in “what if?” elevator pitch that somehow survived the journey to the big screen, made with unusual precision and punch.

The crude, tedious action sequences with their video-game aesthetic are an incredible trial and there is nothing interesting or glamorous about these vampires at all.

Assiduously replicating its predecessor’s strengths and weaknesses, the one thing it risks is that a three-word summary – Hindi Forrest Gump – would tell you all you ever needed to know about it.

The script and direction by prolific low-budget film-maker James Cullen Bressack do spring a few mild surprises and minor twists to spice things up. That doesn’t quite make up for the tackiness elsewhere.

The performance styles of Behrens and Hoya are quite different – Hoya is more opaque – but this is a pointed, candid drama.

An adrenaline-pumping action fest that is ironic in many respects, Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash swerves towards the mystical and the spiritual in the latter half, becoming a earnest and potent critique on the trappings of masculinity.

It’s a deeply uncomfortable film but also weirdly gripping.

It looks and feels like an exceptional student film...Choppy editing and erratic time-shifts tend to undercut rather than enhance the character Ryan has magicked up. [5 May 2006, p.8]

We didn’t need a Predator prequel (have we ever really needed any prequel?) but Prey is a nimble beast, far nimbler than it could have been and while it’s not quite enough to make us crave more from a franchise that’s already given us too much, it’s enough to justify the journey way back.

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 has a stubborn, almost literary feel for character that accumulates a baleful momentum by the time the finale hits.

There will always be room for a good, breezy romcom, and the set-up of an Indian wedding is ripe for one. As churn-able Netflix content goes, Wedding Season is on the better end of the spectrum.

It’s another film to leave you sighing over New York’s lost 70s heyday of gritty reality and creativity and danger.

A film that tries to empathise with everybody runs the risk of pleasing no one, and no doubt there will be viewers enraged by this or that detail or unspoken perspective, but the ambition is nevertheless pretty impressive and on the whole well executed.

Everything about this robotically made movie looks derivative and contrived; the videogame aesthetic is dull and the quirky high concept plays like a pound-shop knockoff of Inside Out and Soul.

It rattles strenuously on and on and on with unexciting and uninterestingly choreographed fights, cameos which briefly pep up the interest and placeholder non-lines where the funny material should have gone.

Whodunnits require so many moving parts to be expertly placed and played with, and, ultimately, the script isn’t as sleek as it needs to be with a board as ambitious as this. The game is a fun one, but you might feel a little cheated once it’s over.

When a writer-director of some undeniable talent throws so much at the wall, it’s inevitable that elements will stick and in Vengeance, there’s just about enough to make us curious to see what happens when Novak learns to tighten his focus. Vengeance is less the film we need right now and more the one he thinks we do but hopefully next time, he’ll figure out how to make something we want instead.

The ending chorus of conclusions wraps up a bit too neatly, though that doesn’t invalidate the enjoyably deranged ride before.

Not Okay is like many “internet movies” before it – approaching uncanny valley, somewhat obvious, just a little off — but this unsettling darkness makes it a solid entry into the canon of just-okay social media films.

True to its animated predecessors, Super-Pets pulls off what other superhero entries have struggled to summon from the CGI universe: lighthearted fun and self-aware humor woven with real evergreen themes – the fear of change, learning to love friends through transitions, trusting that love will remain through the seasons.

Every actor involved sells it hard and it’s good natured, but the unbelievability factor is just too high.

This family could be blown into pieces. And yet an irrepressible defiance and comic energy bubbles under every scene.