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

While it’s not going to make a star of Pataky or anyone watching a sudden convert to Netflix’s mockbuster oeuvre, it’ll make for a decent summer snack until something better lands.

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.

No songs at all now, and not much fun.

Plaza has found her Ron Burgundy: the vessel of a true imbecile in which to pour her strange genius.

It’s difficult to fault a film for being over-ambitious given the low-effort nature of so many genre films but the sheer, two-joints-in bizarreness of Run Sweetheart Run needed a surer hand to guide us through. As it is, that run to the finish line ends up feeling like a crawl.

Offbeat comedy-drama about a former New York judge convinced he is Sherlock Holmes. Amiable, if a little too clever for its own good. [04 Jan 2000, p.36]

If only they’d put fuller faith in the true nature of their premise, and leaned all the way into the kookier side of body horror. Instead of trying for the sophistication of Cronenberg and coming up short, they’d be better off embracing the near-absurdity of lower-rent cult objects like Basket Case from the start.

Just as in the book, the memorable part of this story is its ripe black-comic business.

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.

Let It Snow is a prime example of what happens when the Netflix algorithm machine spews out something that actually feels like a real movie. It ticks all the right buzzword boxes for the platform (YA, Christmas, romcom, cast filled with recognisable faces) but does so with such ebullience that you’ll fail to notice, or at least care about, the many strings being pulled throughout.

Perhaps any screenwriting teacher could explain why romantic comedies such as this frontload it with all the jokes in the first act, and then get progressively sentimental and humourless. This one becomes gooier and squishier until the comedy has entirely gone.

A film about a virus-ravaged country under lockdown should be able to hit cogent parallels at will at the moment – but a numbing repetition is sadly the main payout.

Boseman carries off the drama with flair and style.

Though Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's handsomely mounted period piece evokes the era with impressive detail, Lovelace's journey remains difficult to tell.

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

The film’s good-natured warmth wins the day, just.

Naishuller’s technique is one that could be well served as a shorter gimmick; a solitary action scene in a larger film. Hardcore is unrelenting and unforgiving in its commitment to be loud, fast, destructive and gross.

The sheer existence of Lou might be a step in the right direction for women over 50 in action movies, but it’s a misstep everywhere else.

If the film finally doesn't tell us anything we did not already know, the approach makes a worn-out old tragedy feel supple and urgent.

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.

Once the bloodletting starts, Calahan interleaves it with witty asides and the pacing picks up a lot, all combining to make this impish if flyweight entertainment.

Outrageous but entertaining pulp-melodrama thriller.

The more British director Sean Ellis prods and provokes, the hokier it all gets, a film about cutting weight that could have benefited from a leaner edit.

It succeeds in walking the tonal high beam without falling into soul-destroying bleakness on one side or a saccharinely fake happy ending on the other. That’s no mean feat.

The gimmicks are unfunny, the romance inoffensive, the happy-ever-after straightforward. For all its waxing poetic on the specific luxury of champagne, no one is pretending this is anything other than a mass market item; the things to hate are also the things to like. One might call a critic’s feelings about it a champagne problem.

Like the junk food that the central characters sell in their convenience store, it’s a strangely moreish brew that you enjoy but feel faintly guilty about consuming, like nachos with cheese-flavoured sauce or a blue slushy ice drink.

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

At a baggy, over-stretched two hours, its welcome is close to being overstayed, but there’s just about enough charm to keep Disenchanted from living up to its title.

You’re never sure what the characters are capable of achieving and the bottled-up energy that comes out of that feeling runs throughout.

Everything about this picture is at such a deliberate arm’s length that it is hard to know what is meant to be whimsical and what is serious melodrama.

This is undoubtedly a vehement and very watchable drama – far superior to Serebrennikov’s previous film, the sprawling and unrewarding Petrov’s Flu. If there is a narrowness in its emotional and tonal range, that gives it force.

The 68-year-old Chan slips down off Red Hare like a limber teenager. But horse aside, he largely retreads old ground here, with a handful of shambolic dustups that, apart from the enterprising use of a wicker rocking chair, are pretty standard Jackie.

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.

The close-knit ethos might well explain the franchise’s gleefully perverse sense of fun, but the truth is this love-in features too much filler.

The transformation scenes are passable – including time-honoured fingernail- detachment moments – but far inferior to comparable scenes devised long ago by John Landis or David Cronenberg. Those estimable performers Garner and Abbott look exposed by a film project that simply feels rushed and undeveloped.

It’s a film about wanderlust and romance that should be a breezy sojourn for those of us who need it right now. Why then does it feel like such a slog?

It’s a political thriller that tells the story matter-of-factly, and is perhaps a little lacking in the pace department. But Isabelle Huppert carries it along with a performance every bit as gripping as you’d expect.

No one in the film is particularly likeable, and while the global implications about epistemology are interesting, the specifics of this particular case, at least rendered here, are quite dull.

The result is funny and plausible, with a fair bit of newly modish Bridesmaidsy bad taste, though I kept getting the sense that the romcom template meant Mazer couldn't really let rip with pure comedy pessimism and cynicism in the way he might have liked.

This is at least concentrated dramatically in being brought to an endpoint. For fans only.

Everything about this clunks.

A handsome crowdpleaser with a big heart.

Despite the franchise being nearly old enough for a legacy sequel, there’s a light musicality to its various feats of showmanship that makes it feel like a scrappy upstart. So does the perpetual feeling that it might disappear in a puff of smoke.

Larson, Harris and Vellani are an entertaining intergalactic ensemble.

It plays as cut-price Le Carré; a recording of a recording of superior films. The picture is fuzzy, and the plot becomes garbled.

[An] amusing but formulaic man-in-crisis comedy.

What begins as a sprightly, shrewd, visually striking satire from Macedonian director Teona Strugar Mitevska deflates in its second act into something unconvincing, sophomoric and dramatically redundant.

A rollicking adventure that mixes Nazis, submarines and dinosaurs cannot be described as anything other than eager to entertain. [27 Jun 2007, p.3]

Tonally pitched between a bloodbath and bath time, a boyish strain of immaturity is the dominant creative force for Sokolov, at times amusingly but more often in commonplace, enervating ways.

It’s overripe and improbable, but you’d need a flinty heart to resist the message of solidarity, that if you spend time with someone, anyone, you’ll find common ground.

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.

The quirkiest thing about it is how much of that time it spends accidentally calling attention to its own overwritten, under-thought weaknesses.

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.

It feels relaxed and sure-footed in its Spielberg pastiche, its big dino-jeopardy moments and its deployment of thrills and laughs. Maybe the series can’t and shouldn’t go on for ever: we need new and original ideas. This one would be great to go out on.

In making the worst stereotypes of America’s political poles as extreme as possible, and America’s divide as literal and violent as possible, The Hunt feigns a viewpoint rather than actually having one. It takes aim at everyone, redeeming no one. Which feels circular, and queasy, and right back where we started: some empty talk about a divided nation, and a film thats probably not worth this much conversation.

Little White Lies unspools as glossy, high-grade tosh, a sun-dappled Big Chill, without the rigour or insight required to make you care about these people and wonder which bed they will eventually wind up in.

You can’t let your heroes be truly, purely horrible. But McDonagh’s moral twist comes in way too late and much too hard. It leaves you dizzy.

Not just cinéma de papa, but cinema de grand-papa.

The film never really carries out its implied deconstruction of the all-American family, but Poitier and Phoenix form an enjoyable bond. [23 Jun 2007, p.53]

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.

The Equalizer pictures operate under a false moral imperative, using the mission of cleaning up the streets as a cover for the same pat hyper-stylized, near-pornographic brutality.

Life After Beth, a frustrating affair due to its waste of resources, feels rushed and under-rehearsed. It is a style of film-making that hopes it can glide its way into your good graces on ad-hoc performance flourishes, a wall-to-wall audio mix and editing patches. One soon recognizes this all a cover for one key issue: a lack of original ideas.

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

Director Jill Soloway's comedy-drama isn't perfect – the leitmotif about open eyes feels over-workshopped, and the ending's a bit pat – but it nails with self-lacerating precision the manners and mores of a certain type of hipster parent, the bourgeoisie's muddled attitudes towards sex workers, and the precarious foundations of friendship.

Prospective future instalments might want to aim higher than mere competency.

It’s a sincerely stupid idea executed sincerely, with seemingly complete buy-in from all involved that yes, this is a movie about a snowman with abs. I’ll take that type of brain freeze, for now.

There are sequences of the four prowling the streets on their boards with a fatalist, sinister beauty that show Caple Jr is more than capable of crafting striking compositions. Unfortunately, the jump from image-making to storytelling in this case fails to stick the landing.

The mechanics of revealing who’s behind it all creak like under-oiled hinges.

Jackson is wise to keep Keener's pushy, desperate Lee in centre focus.

Civil and Exarchopoulos (and Frikah and Wanecque) give it everything they’ve got and that is a great deal. But this can’t prevent Beating Hearts being an unsatisfying experience.

Some interesting material here, but the punches don’t land.

Despite the hefty talent involved, there’s a preposterous pass-agg tweeness to this film.

This romp is just embarrassing.

The movie is not a disaster, just weirdly pointless.

It’s a bit overextended but very watchable with flourishes of exotic invention.

The film has a ragged charm, a Tiggerish bounce, and a certain sweet melancholy that bubbles up near the end.

What an extravagantly muddled, borderline incontinent film this is. You might call it genre-hopping, except that this would imply some degree of intent and control.

Unfortunately both Eisenberg and Stewart, both frequently brilliant, are on unsure footing here. The movie simply doesn't know if it wants to be Jason Bourne or Cheech and Chong.

As hard as Cuoco and Davidson try at chemistry – and Cuoco, at least, seems to be really trying – this umpteenth spin on the Groundhog Day time loop is more irksome than endearing, cutesy than actually cute, a downward spiral of uncomfortably performed neuroticism that devolves into a borderline indefensible ending.

The spark that was there in the opening section disappears and the film splutters out into something directionless and derivative and dull.

Opaque and unrewarding.

Cobwebbed would be more accurate, perhaps: every detail is secondhand, if not downright hoary.

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.

Honestly, there isn’t a single step in Shelter’s plot that isn’t entirely predictable, but to the film’s credit the fight choreography is solid (Waugh was a stuntman himself once) and young Breathnach proves, after her turn as Susanna Shakespeare in Hamnet, that she is a find with a future.

As a mystery, Trash is compelling enough though its milieu and the outstanding performances at the centre of the movie are what set it apart.

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

Given the inherent lack of drama in the kind of unbreakable faith on display here, anyone wishing to tell the story needs to work much harder than this laboured treatment to wring any nuance, conflict or indeed true sublimity from it.

Kraken anatomy differs from human in some aspects, but this is a film with its heart, at least, in the right place.

While the story of an old flame coming alight again can be a very poignant one, especially with an older age attached, there’s very little here to move us; a crippling dearth of chemistry between two likable enough leads who are forced into thin, circumstantial conflicts and overdramatic reactions that feel unearned and at times baffling.

This big-hearted underdog sports comedy runs on rails, with no great surprises, but it’s likable.

Any poignance Stern’s David-v-Goliath fight might have possessed is undermined by a flowery script that’s over-fond of quick comebacks. To hear Bosworth curl her lips around some of these zingers though, almost makes for a fair trade-off.

The stinging tragedy of being gay at the wrong time in history is something that will always prove ripe for emotive, painful drama but director Michael Grandage struggles to pull our heart-strings, an easy target easily missed.

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.

Surely there is a good movie to be made about caring polyamorous relationships, but as with any romantic story the audience needs to fall in love with the idea of these characters being in love.

When the first-time director Bishal Dutta does try to add freshness to the familiarity of formula, he manages to carve his film its own place within two overstuffed subgenres, flashes of intrigue as he veers between schlocky curse and even schlockier monster movie.

Mercifully, Murphy adds a dose of sharpness to the project, wrapping his lines in a delivery so sleek and spirited you’d almost think they were funny. And as for the central couple? The one that just wants to get married, culture clash be damned? They’re nice. So nice. Too nice.

The performances are strong and full of passionate conviction, which somewhat moderates the problematic aspects, while the use of natural light and tacky seaside textures does succeed in generating some atmosphere.