The Jason Bateman comedy model hasn’t quite been radically altered in Game Night but it’s one of his more entertaining outings. Just don’t count on remembering much of it once the night is over.

A fun, occasionally flabby romp that should find its audience.

If Ferrara is indeed a Van Gogh, then The Driller Killer is his Potato Eaters – an early work that displays, in rudimentary form, all the groundbreaking innovation of the mature works.

Chumbawamba split up in 2012. They’re still mates and come across here as extremely likable, not taking themselves at all too seriously. Scenes of them nattering together, having a giggle now, are lovely.

Zellweger gives us a tribute to Judy Garland’s flair and to that ethos of the show needing to go on being both a burden and driving force. Yet Garland’s terrible sadness is mostly invisible.

Even if much of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is in need of a rethink, it’s hard not to enjoy the scrappy, animated brainstorm taking place in front of us. The mess of it all is at least a very human one.

I enjoyed this more than either of the two earlier filmed versions, with Gene Wilder in 1971 and Johnny Depp in 2005. It supplies the chocolate-endorphins.

The fight scenes are terrific, but the haphazard plotting, off-the-peg characterisations and drippy music elsewhere lack flavour.

The Judge is a thoughtful, sympathetic study.

With a very simple premise, rapper Ice-T – this film's presenter and co-director with Andy Baybutt – has created a very enjoyable and often fascinating movie.

As high-class cheese goes, Truth slips down fine. It’s a noisy, one-note rally for the converted that gets your pulse racing even if you’re rolling your eyes.

Winocour’s ability to build suspense is solid but she’s less confident when it comes to following through. She toys with perversity but sticks to formula.

Lovering coolly sticks to a rule often disregarded by horror movies looking for an instant scare: the weird, tense build-up is just as disturbing as the reveal.

The movie itself is a retread of indie story beats we’ve all seen time and again. Slate’s tornado of a central character doesn’t quite overcome the rote aspects of this production.

This is a fun film constructed in a smart way: an anti-high art picture that happily prioritises embellishing legend over recreating life.

Devane gives a performance of anguished depth, the final carnage is spectacular and it's a time capsule of a movie.

The characters are entirely credible and likable, the simply drawn figures highly effective against the lush background artwork. Time travel has rarely seemed so joyous.

Last Swim looks slightly callow sometimes, but forthright and likable and Hekmat’s performance has delicacy and intelligence.

The film is like an intensively bred hothouse flower that can’t exist in the open air.

Decker infuses Nelson’s screenplay with a potent dose of whimsical fantasy, morphing Lennie’s tortuous bereavement into a lonely house, a romantic musical journey and a garden where other complicated, confusing emotions grow.

Ma Loute is a fascinatingly made film, theatrically extravagant and precise, although perhaps a little over-extended.

It doesn't reflect too deeply on age and aging, doesn't dwell on the sadder and complicated side of things, and perhaps gravitates towards self-conscious eccentricity, but it's affectionate and watchable enough.

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

Another, more textured film might have tried to paint him as more than just lovable rogue but Roofman is too focused on making us feel good rather than bad. I would have settled for conflicted.

It’s not quite on par with Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, the film it undoubtedly wants to be likened to, but it’s infinitely better than it had any right to be.

Mahershala Ali gives a heartfelt performance in this elegant and rather melancholy sci-fi mystery with which Irish film-maker Benjamin Cleary makes his impressive feature debut.

A movie with flair and force.

The minute Joseph steps into this disenchanted forest, tripping over every tree root, you can sense the impending disaster, and the horror that Machoian’s movie is moving towards.

This film may not have all that much new material but it piercingly asks the right questions about Chaplin’s elusive reality.

It drags a little in places, despite the appealing animation style, which really comes into its own during the action sequences.

It’s perilously close to being overstuffed (one more introduction would have tipped it over the edge) but a controlled and nimble script justifies the large ensemble, using each thread to quickly switch back and forth between the anger, ecstasy, disbelief and fear that seeped from conference to dorm room at the time.

The Good Dinosaur looks great, of course, but it’s not in the league we’ve come to expect.

There is without a doubt something uncanny, almost seance-like, in the way Canadian film-maker Kyle Edward Ball evokes childhood fear of the dark.

The whole shebang is quite bizarre but sort of works, thanks to the brisk pacing of the editing and the joie de vivre that directors Zoya Akhtar and Ryan Brophy inject into the proceedings.

Boyega’s performance has an essential sympathy and dignity that are vital to this drama; an unshowy sense of self-worth that keeps it together.

The four-part shuffle keeps it lively, and Naud is an imposing black hole.

Bland, incurious and passionless, this documentary about the great tenor Luciano Pavarotti is like a promotional video licensed by a team of copyright lawyers – and about as challenging as a Three Tenors gig at Wembley stadium.

Hall, always a joy to watch, shows yet another, more subdued, side of her prodigious craft. But the film fails to build real suspense, and the scary scenes feel rote and often inelegant, like ticking off a college-horror-movie shot list.

The Desolation of Smaug is a cheerfully entertaining and exhilarating adventure tale, a supercharged Saturday morning picture: it's mysterious and strange and yet Jackson also effortlessly conjures up that genial quality that distinguishes The Hobbit from the more solemn Rings stories.

Between the kung fu, the gunplay, a gentle romantic subplot and the extreme gastronomy – there's something for everyone.

There are scenes that snap together nicely with some sharp and nuanced observations. But the film is saddled with uninteresting surface-level characters. There’s a phoniness exuding from the entire project, made all the more discouraging since the plot-light, shaggy dog story is trying to feel so real.

It's the successul synthesis of the two – action and emotion – that means this Spider-Man is as enjoyable as it is impressive: Webb's control of mood and texture is near faultless as his film switches from teenage sulks to exhilarating airborne pyrotechnics.

A melodramatic tale at heart, but carried off with some wit and flair. [01 Feb 2000, p.24]

This odd, nasty yet rather funny little film tears apart ideas of sisterhood and female friendship and replaces them with burning hate and gratuitous violence.

Tamahori builds a largely credible aura, supported by uniformly strong performances and Gin Loane’s classy cinematography. But The Convert is one of those films with occasional moments that make you go “huh?”

The big treat is seeing Jett herself talk and watching her still-strong bond with producer and best friend Kenny Laguna: two leather-clad old mates, constantly bickering but inseparable.

It’s a calm, crisply made film (one can again see how it matches the Apple aesthetic) but one about heartache and tumult, and I found myself craving something that felt as difficult and stinging as the feelings it was trying to stir up.

[A] decent retelling of an amazing true-life story.

The Survival of Kindness has static elements of an art installation, a non-narrative dream state that is part arresting, part frustrating.

It is a lovely-looking, lovely-sounding movie, handsomely designed, meticulously shot and impeccably performed — and it also has interesting things to say about the emotional toughness and the Greeneian splinter of ice in the heart, that is needed by a writer. But I have to admit that, despite my liking for slow cinema, I found something a bit indulgent and classy about the unvarying andante pace.

The film’s old-fashioned charm and sweet-natured Yuletide spirit has held up, although it interestingly seems attractive now more for these softer-edged qualities than for the straight-ahead SNL-type Will Ferrell comedy that it seemed to promise back in 2003.

This is detached, flat film-making at its most bare. You figure out which lines of dialogue deserve to be underlined.

It is an involving story, with a strong lead performance.

A brilliantly textured film to be savoured.

The result falls somewhere between a slave-escape drama, an action thriller, a western and even an unexpected kind of superhero film. It’s a winning combination, although Lemmons does not immerse us in the agony and injustice of slavery as such; she puts together a well-crafted movie that is the showcase for an excellent performance from Erivo.

It works for the most part because of Ruben and Cash and the spiky chemistry they share.

Stripping the narrative of its gods and monsters, and almost two-thirds of the chapters, is great but the vacuum isn’t filled with much more than his two magnetic leads and consistently sumptuous cinematography. The Return is gorgeous to behold, but there just isn’t enough there.

The film becomes rather jumbled and preposterous by the very end, but not before some perfectly good action sequences, and the CGI ape faces are very good. This franchise has held up an awful lot better than others; now it should evolve to something new.

As comeback projects go, Blood Father is stellar. It’s a wonder Quentin Tarantino, the king of career resurrection, didn’t get to Gibson first. The actors completely tears into the role of Link, a battered and disgruntled ex-con. Richet matches him, delivering a muscular and deliriously entertaining B-movie that is sure to play like gangbusters with genre aficionados.

That entertainment enchanter JK Rowling has come storming back to the world of magic in a shower of supernatural sparks - and created a glorious fantasy-romance adventure.

This documentary, by the first-time director Jack Pettibone Riccobono, is a deep drink of bleak. But there are incidental moments of beauty or startling surreality to marvel at.

This is Obama’s own film, so we can’t expect any tough scrutiny.

Overall, it’s an entertaining bit of summer fun.

Its outsized mean girl ruthlessness with a candy-coated shell, led by Mendes and Hawke’s commanding performances, is a biting, if overlong, good time.

More than any comedy or even film I’ve seen recently, this is movie driven by the line-by-line need for fierce, nasty, funny punched-up stuff in the dialogue, and narrative arcs and character development aren’t the point. But as with Succession, this does a really good job of persuading you that, yes, this is what our overlords are really like.

The hippo, as a German tour guide tells us at the very beginning, may look fat and placid and rather cute, but it’s fast-moving, aggressive and dangerous to humans; perhaps the film itself, so mysteriously distended with huge digressions and non-narrative scenes, is as exotically fleshy and strange as a hippo. Yet it has bite. And the hippos themselves are entrancing.

A drama suffused with gonzo energy and the death-metal chaos of emotional pain, cut with slashes of bizarre black humour.

The "breathing" of the title becomes a cleverly recurrent motif, and Markovics's script circles around the themes of death and life in thoughtful and elegant ways: it is a well-carpentered screenplay which bears every sign of having been a labour of love, worked on fruitfully over many years.

It’s a movie which reminds us that for all the anxieties, this period of enforced inactivity was for grownups of a certain age and financial security not entirely unpleasant – a reminder of the endless, aimless summer days of childhood, an Edenic existence outside time which workaholic media professionals thought never to see again. A kind of miracle.

The movie’s other major weakness is its continued foregrounding of the white guys at the expense of the consciously inclusive cast around them.

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.

What destinguishes the film is the intensity of the performances, with Steiger giving one of his perhaps over-familiar but still compulsive portrayals of an obstinate man beset by problems which render him almost but not quite paralysed. Those who admired him in The Pawnbroker will do so again in full measure. [27 Jun 1982]

Director Gonzalo López-Gallego creates a strong frame around the characters in both visual and narrative terms, while a lovely score credited to Remate, mixed with well-chosen soundtrack cuts, creates a limpid poignancy.

There is modest craft and genuine heart here, not to mention an eye-catching centrepiece: an actor growing more certain of herself, and more capable than ever of holding an entire picture together – even one as unusual, and sometimes as unlikely, as this.

Although I can’t help wishing Blakeson could have given Pike’s co-star Dianne Wiest more to do in the final act, it is grisly and gleefully cynical entertainment. If Ben Jonson directed films, they would be like this.

The soundtrack's ironic bent might dissuade older viewers (Simple Minds are venerated), but they'd be missing out on one of the best musical comedies since A Mighty Wind. The song's the same, but Pitch Perfect is a great cover version.

I admire it for its craftsmanship and technique, like a machine for creating nostalgia.

Dog Man is packed with goofy gags that whizz past, with no let up from the hectic pace.

The film is very silly and always watchable in its weird way.

Smith and Clark, at the head of a very capable supporting cast, keep the movie on an even dramatic keel, with intelligent, thought-through performances putting life back into some familiar tropes.

The eye-popping gloss of Vivo will probably lure in impressive numbers for Netflix (the animation itself is generic but impressive) but in a genre that promises so much magic, the spell cast by Miranda and co is a brief one.

Nooshin holds on to a strain of logic that doesn't often survive at this level of filmmaking.

The animation is intricate and beautiful but the narrative is clunky and heavy-handed in places.

Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s new film is a hectic, garrulous, breezily agreeable comedy of midlife emotional upheaval, unencumbered by any serious or permanent concern about any of the passion and heartache that it briefly encounters. It’s also a movie that declines to allow its characters to be changed in any way by the excitements and disappointments that life has to throw at them.

This solid roster of acting talent can’t do much about how frankly uninteresting and unfunny The Toxic Avenger is most of the time. As satire or spoof of both superhero movies and scary movies it is abysmally obsolete, and on its own terms as horror-comedy it achieves neither scares nor laughs.

As the couple try to rekindle the bedroom flame the note of cutesy comedy kicks in and the movie gets phonier and phonier.

It’s a thoughtful, dream-like film, but, in the end, I’m not sure what Distant Constellation is saying about age or memory.

On first release, Arthur Penn's 1976 western found itself derided as an addled, self-indulgent folly. Today, its quieter passages resonate more satisfyingly, while its lunatic take on a decadent, dying frontier seems oddly appropriate.

It’s sort of impressive how much director Simone Scafidi allows Argento’s dark side to show through all the hype about his genius.

McConaughey may be a capable driver, but this is an unwieldy vehicle – oversized, overlong and altogether way too many parts to run smoothly.

Whether its spitballing silliness will linger when the lights come up is debatable, but it’s a solid SpongeBob movie.

This is another really entertaining fantasy with fan-fiction energy and attack.

There is tragedy in this story, but the grownup questions of guilt and loss are de-emphasised.

It’s not quite the full grand cru period drama from the Merchant Ivory vintage, but rather a semi-sparkling biopic.

Maybe any biopic risks naïveté in suggesting the agony of postwar Africa can be soothed by a love story about a handsome prince. But this movie has candour, heartfelt self-belief, and an unfashionable conviction that love conquers all - though not immediately.

The opportunistic genre-welding holds together thanks to vivid performances. Bolger makes a slightly implausible character arc completely convincing, graduating from panicky improvisation to grim determination.

It’s all a lot, as they say, but those with a taste for maximalism will swoon over the goods on offer here.

The contemporary half of the film is for me less interesting, particularly in the overextended third act.