The film is at its best when words are secondary to action.

There’s nothing wrong with a weepie or big emotional moments, but for me Goodbye June is too unreal, too contrived in its sugary farewell.

It’s a bit indulgent but, still, a gentle watch.

Assassination Nation has got some gross-out chutzpah, and the surreal marching band scene over the final credits is inspired.

It’s a rehash that neither develops the character nor betrays him. It simply assumes that we still share his weaknesses and therefore care about the fool.

Schizophrenic performance from the estimable Walter Matthau, playing the central characters of three Neil Simon stories set in New York's Plaza Hotel. His barely contained rage as the dad who finds his daughter refusing to come out of the bathroom on her wedding day is particularly good, but the jokes are thinly rationed. [19 Nov 2005, p.53]

Baldwin has some brilliant moments as he icily dismisses Monica's posturing: his final closeup – heavy-lidded, undeceived – is fascinating and rather chilling.

This is an entirely ridiculous shaggy-dog story, a comedy salted with strangeness and seasoned with surreality.

Many of us have long sensed culture is making a decisive break with the analogue in favour of the (perhaps terminally) online and Fischbach’s film makes that paradigm shift not just visible but visceral; it feels not unlike spending 12 hours on Twitch with all the curtains closed.

It's too airless, too perfect, a dream of connection with humanity that flees contact with actual people.

More meme than movie.

It’s a serviceable, watchable, determinedly unoriginal film.

It is neither suspenseful nor thrilling, but something else: a movie so confidently ridiculous, so stylishly absurd and so self-aware of its mandate for fun that you can’t help but enjoy it, reasonable wariness – and all reason, really – be damned.

Part of what makes Perkins’ film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward theme rather than shooting toward immediacy.

Too many scenes of sub-vaudeville witchy cavorting suggest Kramer hasn’t completely mastered her own poetic register. But it is bracing to watch her reach for the stylised impact needed to carry her ideas about social identity; exactly the kind of the expressive messiness this wing of the post-#MeToo film industry should be engaging in if the old order isn’t going to reimpose itself.

No amount of tool-wielding heroism can save The Dark World from being a startlingly unbalanced movie.

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.

A pacifist parable taking a brave stand against nothing, totally removed from the sociocultural landscape of today’s Sweden, it sounds out like one of Caroline’s screams into the howling Scandinavian wind – impassioned, futile, heard by no one.

The Riot Club hands its audience a ticket, as well as a free pass to pour scorn over proceedings. That's a double-bill which should prove pretty irresistible.

Wilson and Farmiga remain solidity incarnate, capable of enlivening even speculative spiritual dialogue. The film-making pulls no surprises out of the hat, though, and gives no indication that it would if it could.

Shame was erotic compulsion turned into opera, full of sombre vibrato. Thanks for Sharing is probably the more realistic, as well as more mainstream, and there's a generous pinch of very funny lines, mostly bestowed on Robbins.

To All the Boys: PS I Still Love You doesn’t quite match its predecessor for heart fizzing romance – the first film dealt sensitively with loss and grief – but it’s just as entertaining and charming anchored by a supremely likable central performance from Condor.

It is mainly a rather silly high-concept dramedy intercut with maudlin moments, and the sentimental keynote inevitably dominates by the end.

Rare Beasts is a bold experiment in nerve-jangling confrontation: it has the structure and ingredients of romantic comedy but turns everything on its head.

A nice, creepy performance from Hemsworth, with Teller gamely going along with the script, but having stretched out the story idea to feature-film length, the film doesn’t really give the sense that it knows where it is going.

Snyder’s film may be exhausting but it is engaging. Justice is served.

This film certainly chops up a few sacred cows. Could it be that the anti-wind brigade will have to make common cause with climate change scientists?

Good Joe Bell is a generous film about an outsider travelling across the country realising the importance of listening and learning from others (as well as his own guilty conscience).

Mohan handles his audience with care, diligence, attentiveness, creativity, smoldering passion – the mind positively swims with sexual metaphors. That’s the headspace in which this film leaves us: a well-made gutter we haven’t had the chance to visit for far too long.

It’s a hurricane of slapstick (some of it in fact very funny) and age-appropriate energetic fight scenes, but lacks the sweetness and charm of the franchise at its best.

Movements are very fluid, but expressions limited and there are buckets of cartoon gore, in a deep ruddy red that recalls mass-produced tonalities of fake Persian carpets.

In the end, the film looks like something that’s been salvaged in the edit, as it muses boringly on life’s great imponderables.

Each scene needed a jolt of music or energy that just wasn’t there.

As a war movie written by a soldier this material feels oddly lacking in authenticity and authority. And yet it’s a noble attempt to honour the resilience of Ukrainians and the courage of ordinary people like Voronin, fighting for freedom.

It’s a little hammy and soapy, with an occasional Pythonesque sense of its own importance but this film, directed by Richard Laxton, is performed with gusto.

Director Nicole Garcia strains to give this pablum social grounding, but hair and make-up overtake her.

The Evil Of Frankenstein, directed by camera ace Freddie Francis, looks stunning, although much of its budget was clearly spent on the cracking laboratory set. [20 Oct 2007, p.23]

War of the Rohirrim is short on fiery floating eyeballs, wizards harnessing the power of the sun and ghost armies rising from caves – the kind of stuff you’d expect anime to go ham with, but perhaps not in director Kenji Kamiyama’s case.

Ricki and the Flash’s emotional intensity creeps up on you, and it’s all due to the performances. Everyone’s sympathetic, everyone’s got depth.

Ultimately it is all a bit repetitive, derivative (particularly of other Asian horror pics) and somewhat sleep-inducing.

Sacha Baron Cohen's "Borat" set the bar very high for this type of narrative-driven prankery, and in comparison, Bad Grandpa comes across as disjointed and aimless.

One sees film-making like this and can only say: no más.

Even if the skimpy detailing of Sal and Vince’s past leaves the finale verging on sentimentality, rather than fully exposing the self-inflicted wound it’s supposed to be, Salvable’s overall melancholic undertow is hard to resist.

It’s all very easy: a feelgood war tale from what feels like a distant age.

It’s an airport novel that’s now an airplane movie.

There are some decent PG-rated thrills and scares for the preteen audience, but adults are unlikely to find it especially convincing, with clunky dialogue and a generic score letting down a solidly traditional spooky mystery.

It's perfectly workable popcorn entertainment for the school holidays.

The Bad Boys are still providing innocent amusement.

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

It is an entirely outrageous film with a lot of bad-taste laughs along the way, and a bizarrely real dramatic impact when Reggie finally confronts Doug in the horrendous finale.

Director George Kane keeps the energy up throughout, helped along by a game-for-it cast that know exactly how to pitch the material.

It’s a watchable piece of faux history, but the movie does not know what to do with its own heroine, content to leave her to the clutches of its villain: Henry.

The more accomplished the film-making becomes, the more we then expect the script to level up too.

Its arcs and beats are as careworn as your grandfather’s armchair.

Clumsy attempts at comedy are weaved in to try and alleviate the remarkable grimness but all it really does it add to an uneven tone.

It’s an anticlimactic oddity of a film, and a slightly wasted opportunity – but with curiosity value.

It’s sentimental, though the way Kirsty is helped by women boiling with fury at the injustice does feel modern.

Laurent, to her credit as director, is less interested in how a shootout can work as an aphrodisiac, and more invested in how it would affect a female friendship.

The film is glossy, illuminating and frequently exciting. What it lacks is an emotional charge and a fine-grained texture. We need to invest in these people in order to understand their decisions – and care about the consequences of these.

It’s impossible not to enjoy this big-hearted and sweet-natured British family movie.

As the film crashes to a conclusion, early promise fading away, the film has the feeling of a valiant, but misguided, post-Get Out attempt to infuse social commentary within the framework of well-worn genre territory, aiming high but landing low.

The final act is a pineal flooding of baffling explanations and twists. What’s worse is that there is very little drama underpinning it; by this late stage the collected characters are still stuck dredging up their backstories, doing little to propel the narrative forward.

The first movie was a real tough act to follow but Yuzna - who produced the first instalment - has a real handle on the necessary sick OTT humour. [18 Oct 2003, p.83]

The film has an odd teatime glow of cosy-crime sentimentality which deadens the effect, and this period drama can’t quite bring itself to show that, in the 1930s, murder was punishable by death. But McKellen overrides these concerns; his glorious star quality and dash make him the only possible casting.

It doesn’t always work – a two-hour runtime that’s a little too long, world-saving stakes that are a little too big, funny lines that are a little too not funny – but it’s a mostly watchable second-tier event movie that, in a world of inconsequential sequels that fail to justify their existence, will do.

If you’re a parent whose screen-time rules have crumbled in lockdown, under no circumstances watch this film until normal service resumes.

The film is intensely, almost radically humourless, which is hard to ignore and in fact hard to bear, because of this film’s obvious resemblance to recent great movies like Booksmart or Lady Bird and particularly at times the hard-edged classic Election.

The film never quite rings true.

For family entertainment, you could do a lot worse.

Captive State is imperfectly constructed, at times frustratingly so, but it’s trying, doggedly, to do something different and given the bland efficiency of so many wide-releasing sci-fi movies, that’s hard to fault.

This enjoyable silver-spoon romp packs all of its 97 minutes with jokes and bits ranging from the puerile to the genuinely funny, proving that there may yet be more to wring from eat-the-rich satire.

Maybe in the end it's just an exuberant collection of great scenes – but what Big Wednesday has is heart.

The end result is nowhere near as persuasive or grounded in solid screenwriting as Leo Grande is, but Phillips has always been a charmer onscreen and, like Grande’s Emma Thompson, she’s more than willing to use her talent here to make a case for women learning to manage and take charge of their own pleasure.

The package has a nasty little swagger that makes it a nice counterpoint to all the holiday cheer coming our way.

Oblivion goes on for a long time, moving slowly and self-consciously, and it looks like a very expensive movie project that has been written and rewritten many times over. It is a shame: Cruise, Riseborough and Kurylenko as the last love triangle left on Planet Earth should have been quite interesting.

It accomplished what few of its peers have been able to do: make me believe in a teenage romance, actually remember the confusion of growing up and feel satisfied with an ending that points to an open-book future.

As with so many family animations right now, I felt that the script stays on the safe side, with fewer smart lines and ironic gags than I might have wished for, but this is a good-natured entertainment.

It never really feels like we’re on a journey anywhere we haven’t been before, with Spellbound far too bewitched with the past to create any of its own magic.

It’s everything and nothing, a familiar regurgitation of a formula with precious little to add.

At times it looks like a parade of celebs, but the film comes belatedly to the point when it discusses Corbijn's parents, particularly his late father, whose approval Anton sought but perhaps never quite got.

It takes time to grow on you, but for me, there is a demure watchability.

There’s ultimately too much in the film’s rushed 94-minute runtime for anything to really breathe.

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.

Sattler's film leans on its actors too heavily. It heaps too many implausibilities upon their trembling shoulders. After an hour in Camp X-Ray, the strain starts to show.

Like the film around him, [Ritchson] does what he needs to do, everything here just about serviceable for the moment yet never memorable enough for the moment after.

Moore doesn’t want to tear Trump down so much as he wants to build Clinton up, and however much of a dingus he may be (some of his jokes really don’t work), he is sincere in his optimism and empathy. That’s something that you just can’t fake.

Becky’s crazed kills get more and more gimmicky, and there’s nothing in the script to indicate what has turned her into a pint-sized death-dealer.

Profile is a pretty conventional thriller with pretty conventional stereotypes.

Not since Snakes on a Plane has a movie promised so much, but despite a great cast the plot is too tame.

There are pieces of Luckiest Girl Alive that seem interested in a life splintered by trauma, in the relief of unburdening, the hunger for certainty over what happened, the thrill of playing on cultural expectations for women. But the story it ultimately tells is an empty, self-serving fantasy.

With scant visual bite, perhaps it should’ve been called Evil Ear.

There’s a fine line between a slowburn and dull, and this Magnificent Seven frequently finds itself on the wrong side.

It is a strange slo-mo farce, well directed, highly sexualised – shallow, but sleek.

It all goes off the rails in the worst way in the chaotic final act, as Schlesinger invents a farcical, and increasingly ludicrous, way to wrap things up, the truth of what happened proving far too pedestrian for the framework she’s created.

If you were programming a season of the best of the worst from Nicolas Cage’s filmography – in other words, his most interesting/outlandish/crazed performances in low-budget films – this kooky thriller would certainly be a good candidate.

The estimable cast all do their utmost but the overall effect is frustratingly implausible.

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.

It’s a film trapped between a low- and a highbrow version of a story we know all too well, landing firmly in the middle of the road.