Unfortunately a slack screenplay and lack of focus holds the project back from being anything more than an actors’ showcase.

It’s one hell of a yarn, which makes The Lovers and the Despot’s strangely soporific style something of a disappointment.

Her two exceptional stars do their best to convey their animosity via simmering glances. But in the end, Curran’s muted approach does them no favors. Instead of being boldly subtle, Five Nights in Maine just comes off as evasive.

Tom Tykwer’s adaptation is a meandering mess of half-baked storylines that amount to little. Hanks’s affable presence keeps it all afloat.

Bacon, Mitchell and especially young Lucy Fry are all quite effective in these dramatic scenes. But this isn’t a drama. It’s a dumbass, inexpensive horror flick which means anything real is thrown away so that poorly rendered CG ghosts can hover about and smash up windows.

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

The film has an impeccable technical finish, but it is insipid, contrived, solemn, and ever so slightly preposterous.

The Cloverfield Paradox is an unholy mess...As the film bumbles from one confusingly mounted scene to the next, disappointment turns to boredom. The eerie early scenes fade into standard space horror panic and given how crowded that particular subgenre is, The Cloverfield Paradox emerges as a pale imitation.

This movie doesn’t really follow through with its own ideas, either in the natural realm of the ageing couple’s relationship or the supernatural arena of an eerily possible apparition.

Sprinkled among the desultory morass are occasional firecrackers of brilliant schtick-based comedy.

Special Correspondents shows that Gervais has a plausible Hollywood career, but there’s a baffling lack of real laughs and performance chemistry between the leads, and very little of the acid characterisation and cynical discomfort which is vital to his screen presence.

Lights Out is yet another half-baked, PG-13 scare-em snoozer centered on an underdeveloped supernatural concept that won’t even give kids a good nightmare.

Despite an idiocy metastasized into the marrow of its script impervious to any radiation, there is, as with many of Sandler’s productions, at least something of an upbeat quality to its reprehensibility.

There’s something inherently fishy about a movie that claims our facts are drawn from an inefficient data set which then turns around and uses the same methodology.

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.

Each helter-skelter turn throws up story and design elements you’ll have seen better programmed elsewhere.

Considering this is the first biopic of one of the world’s most beloved athletes, it’s too bad such a predictable and ham-fisted kids’ flick was the goal.

There are, indeed, some sparks in this movie. The Vikander/DeHaan romance is a dud no matter how well it’s lit, but the “downstairs” passion between Grainger and O’Connell has a degree of realism and eroticism.

What we have on our hands is a dud, but there are a few grace notes that save it from being an unmitigated disaster.

The Unknown Woman is an odd, dramatically stilted and passionless quasi-procedural concerning a mysterious death; it depends on a series of unconvincing, and in fact borderline-preposterous, encounters and features a bafflingly inert performance from Adèle Haenel, whose usual spark appears to have been doused by self-consciousness.

The film takes on Gabrielle’s listlessness, slumps into an opiated fug. The malady is mysterious and not easily treatable. It just exhausts you. It transforms from a story about release to just another jail. At times it felt like there was no escape.

An incoherent, inconsequential picture which sometimes looks worryingly as if it is being made up as it goes along.

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.

It's atmospheric but derivative, and I didn't find the denouement's Christian imagery convincing.

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 frozen landscapes are undeniably gorgeous and the empty school halls are chilling. There are crafty moments here and there, glimpses of the midnight movie that could have been. February’s big villain is precisely what the film is lacking: a devilish spirit.

Under the workmanlike direction of Mick Jackson (The Bodyguard), what should have been a rousing and ragingly topical crowdpleaser, instead feels more like a Lifetime movie.

More bah-humbuggery – which is a rational response to the wall-to-wall Christmas jumpers – and less zany antics here would have done the job better.

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.

For all its smashed open cuts and swollen eye sockets, Younger’s film remains an oddly sterile experience. For a biopic, it is remarkably featureless.

Throughout Vikander maintains a kind of serene evenness of manner. Blandness is Lara’s theme.

The incessant and eerily unsatirical product placement is enough to give you a migraine: especially the complacent Disney cross-promotion.

There’s not much that glitters in Gold, a lackluster caper that proves that even the priciest ore can bore.

Mark Waters wrings occasional snickers from a patchy script, but the whole feels tamely conventional: misanthropy passed through the usual Hollywood motions.

It’s the film’s racial politics, particularly its stereotypical evocation of willing servitude by an African-American, and its characters’ refusal to acknowledge this imbalance of power, which make it not so much old-fashioned as downright retrograde – and likely to go down even worse with black audiences than Driving Miss Daisy.

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.

Mara and Mendelsohn have a compellingly toxic chemistry together and their initial confrontation is intriguingly tense. But once we’re locked into the meat of the story, the film has nowhere else to go, at least anywhere that’s of interest and the pace becomes laborious as their discussions turn repetitive.

Sheridan’s take on the material is solidly made but sorely lacking in subtlety.

At its core, it’s really just a workplace love story that grows increasingly uninterested in its plucky heroine’s journey in favour of hitting familiar rom-com notes – and to give audiences another reason to love Bill Nighy.

The public and private Rachel are, at first, quite different, until her eventual decision to be an out-of-the-closet believer. Even with this rancid script and amateurish direction, McLain sells this inherently undramatic turn as an emotional triumph.

There are substantial talents involved in this film, but it doesn’t come together.

There are some nice touches, but it unwinds into dullness and silliness and the hi-tech conceit is basically abandoned in favour of low-tech analogue violence and punch-ups.

As a performer, Biller is fearless in her pursuit of perfectly recreated cheesecake, but is a twitchy and not especially charismatic presence. Where her film lets itself down, though, is it's simply not funny.

The film’s technical achievements can’t compensate for a deeply unsatisfying screenplay.

It’s more silly than funny, and audiences can be forgiven for wondering if an actor of restricted growth should have been cast.

Franco deserves points for attempting something with idealism. But the execution falls flat.

There’s something lacking, a touch of the bizarre or the perverse, with just one particularly nasty death to serve as a reminder that you’re watching a Ben Wheatley film.

If The Blair Witch Project signalled a new dawn of horror, Blair Witch is the loud death rattle of a once exciting sub-genre, disappearing into the darkness.

Given the bizarro conceit, there’s something surprisingly, and frustratingly, safe about the film.

It’s commendable that Perkins seems wholly uninterested in the tropes of the genre: there’s only one jump scare, hardly any gore and no final girl. The elusiveness of the narrative, however, grows weary fast.

It’s a strained, dramatically inert and often frankly silly odd-couple bromance fantasy about the Northern Ireland peace process negotiations.

Cranston acts the hell out of the role, like he’s performing Macbeth in a room. Unfortunately his commitment isn’t enough to sell Wakefield as anything more than a hollow character study, with an unappealing tool at its core.

More meme than movie.

The lifeless direction, the unrefined script, the underwhelming cameos, the distinct lack of fizz – there’s a slapdash nature to the assembly of Ocean’s 8 that makes it feel like the result of a rushed, often careless process. It’s made watchable thanks to the cast but star power alone cannot mask creative inadequacy. Stealing a diamond necklace is bad but wasting an opportunity like this is unforgivable.

The Circle is all foreplay, playfully prodding without providing a satisfying payoff.

The complete jigsaw doesn’t fit together, hampered by plot implausibilities and unrealities.

What’s odd is that the movie itself turns out not to be some incendiary provocation, but squarely Bollywood trad, a globetrotting weepie unlikely to offend anyone but the most entrenched.

Trash Fire is too quick to burn through its ideas.

The dialogue is at times embarrassingly bad.... On the other hand, the period details are impressive and must have cost a pretty kopiyka or two, and the film benefits visually from being shot on location.

As things go bad for Wilson, the movie, unfortunately, loses a considerable amount of steam as well.

Even though director Benjamin Ree has accessed the family archive of footage showing young Magnus as a socially awkward prodigy through the years and interviewed him directly many times, the film barely dents his inviolate wall of polite reticence.

The film is tentative and over-protective, as though it’s terrified that a story empowering kids to help good battle evil could give someone a nightmare. It reduces the whole universe to one girl’s self-esteem.

[A] thin, slightly exasperating documentary.

This bloated, featureless, CGI-heavy movie is not so much stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, as stealing from Guy Ritchie, Batman, Two-Face and a few others – and not giving back all that much to the audience.

This is anaemic stuff, though perhaps its target audience won’t care.

It’s a very minor victory to report that rather than being bad, it’s merely bland, an adequate milquetoast time-waster for a very young and very undiscerning audience.

It’s slickly made but shoddily scripted, with sub-reality TV dialogue...and a range of unengaged, soapy performances. There is some fun to be had from the loud and nasty death scenes though, which allow us the pleasure of seeing self-absorbed Facebook addicts get gruesomely murdered.

An Inconvenient Sequel is more a portrait of Gore than a call to arms. It ends with a sort of forced positivity, much of which is recycled directly from the first movie: political change is hard, but we can do it, morality demands it.

A disappointment.

It is an ordeal of gruesomeness and tiresomeness that was every bit as exasperating as I had feared.

It is a film with all the depth of a fridge magnet.

The exuberant comic talents of Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler are largely wasted in this uninspired addition to the frat movie canon, which resembles reheated leftovers of the Hangover, albeit with a curious detour into some heavy bloodletting.

For an action-comedy, its timing is lousy.

What a peculiarly dodgy, conservative film this is – a lazy salute to a good queen and her faithful Indian servant. It’s a film about the Raj era that looks as if it was made back then, too.

This film never gets up a head of steam.

Not so much a documentary, more a sleek two-hour commercial for itself, Reset is a glossily produced non-look behind the scenes at the Paris Opera Ballet.

The acting is wooden and the special effects aren’t all that special, but it’s a spirited effort and doesn’t drag during its 78 minutes. You’ll never approach après-ski in the same way again.

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.

This is a two-dimensional piece of work.

For me the superpower idea can only work with humour and lightness of touch: and there is a persistent and disconcerting joylessness about this.

Patti Cake$ is by no means a hopelessly bad movie, it’s just hampered by its desperate need to be a crowd-pleaser.

There’s little in the way of dramatic conflict or base wit to keep us hanging around to see what happens within each.

As must be obvious to real connoisseurs, I am hardly a natural consumer fit with this franchise. It may well play with fans, but will in all probability make no converts.

The eye is caught and sometimes diverted – with its Slush Puppie palette, Wonder Land is uncommonly pretty – but very little about it sticks.

It feels like a screensaver, a movie generated by an algorithm, the same algorithm that calculated the likely profit on extending the Sing franchise.

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

There is something frustratingly subdued and constrained dramatically about this slow and unsyncopated film, which indulges in quite a few cliches about wartime Paris.

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 by no means the worst of Allen’s later films (Cassandra’s Dream remains unrivaled in that department) and the flashes of brilliance from Winslet and stunning visuals do lift it but there’s an overwhelming, existential pointlessness to it all.

There’s undoubtedly a terrifying true story at the centre and it’s easy to see why the film’s producer Charlize Theron optioned the book but there’s something a little too flat in the delivery.

Not funny enough to be satire, not realistic enough to count as political commentary, not exciting enough to work as a war movie, David Michôd’s supposedly Helleresque romp, released on Netflix, is an imperfect non-storm of unsuccess.

There is something absolutely robotic about Trolls World Tour: the voices, the design, the dialogue, the plot progressions, the break-up-make-up crisis between Poppy and Branch, everything. It’s chillingly efficient, like a driverless car going round in circles.

It features laborious acting and directing, and a screenplay whose revelations are uninteresting, even were they not guessable long in advance.

The Transfiguration is a character study first and foremost, spending all of its time with Milo. Problem is, he’s so opaque that as a protagonist, he’s completely impenetrable.

Even if you go into this film knowing absolutely nothing about the true story on which it’s based...you’ll sense something dreadful is going to happen because so much of it is crushingly dull.

Whatever the reason, Porto – much of the action unfolds in the Portuguese holiday spot – struggles to convey its passions, despite considerable effort from its two leads, an intuitive soundtrack and handsome photography.

The performances of Mara and Phoenix are careful and respectful, though with nothing like the lightning-flash of energy and scorn that they have given to secular roles in the past.

Extinction is a competent, if formulaic film. Its dilemma, like many of the films in Netflix’s growing sci-fi catalogue, is the way its best parts are subdued on the small screen while its worst (dialogue and clunky storytelling) are enhanced.