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.

Hall’s marching in lockstep with a lengthy platoon of directors who have already blazed this same path through enemy territory. And though he’s got some upstanding troops at his disposal, his plan of attack lacks that crucial unexpected element that can take an opposing battalion – or an audience – off guard.

Suburbicon is too lightweight and mannered; it lacks proper fury. Watching it is like having your trouser-leg savaged by an energetic small dog.

Despite the panache with which the dance sequences are presented, it is frustratingly inert dramatically.

It’s ultimately a miracle that despite the tortured production process, Dolittle can most generously be described as passable for young, undiscerning viewers. It won’t charm or amuse you particularly but it’s not a catastrophe, the highest praise I can muster.

The film is constantly defining what ugly is: freckles, crooked teeth, excess weight, glasses, clumsiness. At times it feels like an unintentional crib sheet for under-sevens bullying.

Too often City of Tiny Lights is let down by an overeagerness to play up its source material, and hampered by unnecessarily showy direction and inadvisable attempts at gumshoe dialogue.

It comes across as twee, comfy-cardigan film-making. And, Eddie Izzard’s best efforts notwithstanding, it simply isn’t very funny.

Avatar is as gigantically uninteresting and colossally impervious to criticism as ever: a vast, blank edifice that placidly repels objection.

The point of a phoenix, dark or otherwise, is that it rises from the flames. But these are the flames in which this franchise has finally gone down.

Bohemian Rhapsody honours Mercury the showman but never really gets to Mercury the person.

Like so many of Shyamalan’s adventures, Glass starts strongly and fizzles, a dramatic droop which is initially camouflaged by the escalating grandiosity of visual rhetoric, something febrile and high-concept that is visionary in everything except having vision.

Fatih Akin’s mediocre revenge drama In the Fade is the TV movie of the week: feebly uncontentious and un-contemporary.

The remarkable career of artist and photographer Mark Hogancamp has been turned into an elaborate and misjudged movie of baffling pass-agg ickiness and pointlessness.

This is a movie which begins with confidence and style, wearing its influences pretty insouciantly; the film sashays about the screen with a kind of sexy-chic smirk, like the unvarying facial expression of its co-lead Eva Green. But it wobbles at the brink of plot-holes which undermine the vital realistic plausibility of a film like this.

This is an unfinished doodle of a film, a madly self-indulgent jeu d’esprit without substance: a sketch, or jumble of sketches, a ragbag of half-cooked ideas for other movie projects, I suspect, that the director has attempt to salvage and jam together. [Cannes Version]

It’s a wildly dated-looking and derivative film, a quaint adventure in fantasised naughtiness.

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.

Wonderstruck is sometimes sweet and well-intentioned, but more often indulgent and supercilious.

One can never quite tell with Dumont if he’s deadly serious about all this or laughing up his sleeve. That’s sort of what makes his work fascinating, although in this instance, viewer patience is severely tested.

By the end of this relentless, sprawling and bloody crime opera it may be you who is on your knees, begging for the damn movie to just hurry up and end it.

The film periodically livens up, and Oyelowo shows that he can play comedy, but his performance isn’t given much guidance or room to grow and the direction is very flat and uninspired.

Given the calibre of the voice cast, perhaps the biggest disappointment is how humourless the movie is.

What a bland and sugary texture there is to this very conservative, undemanding oldster roadtrip.

It’s Groundhog Day meets Scream, although lacking the first film’s novelty and the latter’s postmodern smarts.

The makers of Proud Mary don’t know what to do with their terrific ensemble cast. Henson may be due for a Taken-style career boost (and Proud Mary may very well be it). But she deserves so much better than this.

The characters at one stage debate the merits of a smooth, fruity wine versus something more taut and acidic: it would be tempting to say that Klapisch goes too predictably for the first option, but the problems here are more with structure than taste.

If the film wasn’t so cheekily self-aware it might be literally unbearable, but every so often it references its own grotesquerie.

The digital novelty is striking for the first 10 minutes, silly for the next 10 minutes, and by the end of the movie you’re pining for the analogue values of script and direction.

Sorkin is spellbound by his subject, fascinated by the many details of her admittedly impressive life, but the magic he clearly feels fails to translate on screen.

Why drag the franchise back now? The screamingly obvious answer is sheer cash-grab cynicism. Or perhaps it’s to cater to the generation of kids who’ve grown up riding the Saw-themed roller coaster at Thorpe Park. Either way, it’s depressing.

For a long time Crocodile Dundee isn't so much a collection of jokes as a stiff-jointed opposites-attract romantic drama goofed up with stereotypes.

It’s a film that should have been a major disaster but ends up being just a minor one instead, watchable enough in parts, with the lowest of expectations, but not enough to warrant the time and money that’s been funnelled into it.

Even though the script might let her down, Schumer does still manage to sell a smattering of the comic moments (the opening scene has a promising knockabout tone), but when she reaches the more dramatic elements, she struggles to convince.

It’s the kind of adaptation that is so misjudged that you end up struggling to see why anyone thought it a good idea to adapt in the first place.

Sadly the acting and dialogue needed a little work.

As well as showcasing the blandest and most tasteful three-way sex scene in history, this movie spreads an odd pall of sentimentality and period-glow nostalgia over a fascinating real-life story.

There’s a reasonable premise to this horror-thriller, but also something straight-to-rental about the look and feel of the whole thing.

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

Watching it is like travelling through a wormhole to a slightly crummier version of 2004.

For all the faith-based platitudes baked into the script, it has to be conceded that directing brothers Andrew and Jon Erwin steer the ship steadily and draw out sincere and persuasive performances from Finley, who really can sing gloriously well, and Quaid, who even with a now ravaged visage is still just as dangerous, compelling and sexy as ever.

It starts feeling fairly mechanised itself, every clank of those boysy Transformer knock-offs further drowning out its wistful heroine.

Five Foot Two never quite shakes the feel of a longform advert for Gaga’s new phase that’s preaching to the converted.

It’s surprising that a film about Deep Throat could be such an anticlimax.

This tennis film feels like a two-hour baseline rally, and it’s not just the rackets that are made of wood.

This time, his journey doesn’t send him to the ends of experience. Instead, he goes on a smug odyssey of know-it-all-ism that yields a scant few factoids we didn’t already learn from his first film.

Escobar is not without interest, sweep or colour, but bears signs of high-level, edit-suite indecision over what sort of movie it wants to be. It’s an alluring product, inexactly cut.

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

There’s something to be admired about a film that can gracefully defy simple genre categorization but Submergence feels like a clumsy melange, a confused adaptation made by people who don’t seem quite sure what they have on their hands.

Loud and zappy, The Jungle Bunch trots out predictable be-kind-be-brave platitudes, but lacks anything distinctive of its own.

Like the first film, it becomes a virtual non-narrative anthology of standard jump-scares that could be reshuffled and shown in any order. The second time around, your tolerance for this is tested to destruction and beyond because, unlike the first movie, it is just so pointlessly long.

It’s a curiously underwhelming, muted, often plodding two hours that fails to reach the emotional highs and devastating lows one would expect from the material.