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.

With its creepy music and only-just-adequate performances, this will serve nicely at future slumber parties for thrill-seeking tweens.

It’s an interesting concept, but the characters are thin and nothing here feels insightful.

Everyone here emotes like they’re acting in an electric toothbrush ad.

As a film, it’s altogether keener to Turtle Wax the brand than stop for even a moment to examine what Ferrari the man, logo and company ever stood for.

The cast all perform adequately, with Hendricks in particular proving effective, but it’s just difficult to really invest in what happens to any of them. Before long, characters are all making stock horror movie decisions, and there’s no amount of effective craftsmanship that can sell stupidity.

The absurdity and the galaxy of plot holes in the farcical final act just undermine everything.

Antiporno has a kind of energy, but is also shallow and frantic.

It couldn’t be more boring than this. It seems counterintuitive to say it, but there is something pretty soulless about this new Hellboy franchise.

The film always looks good under the eye of cinematographer Roger Deakins, and screenwriter Peter Straughan renders some elegant and amusing dialogue, but this Goldfinch stays earthbound.

“Surprise and speed is the key,” someone comments at one point; the only surprise is how unspeedy and unsurprising this project turned out to be.

There are some lively things about Mortal Engines, and the performances are game enough. Yet in all its effortful steampunkiness, Mortal Engines isn’t a film which is particularly exciting or funny, and the idea of the “traction city” is a stylistic and visual design tic that you just have to take or leave.

The good news is that Ejiofor is great even in the scenes that don’t go anywhere. Those who find heaven here on earth in the form of strong film performances ought to commune with Come Sunday. The rest can sleep in.

If you thought the bogeyman was slender, wait till you see the film.

The pieces of a potential franchise are put in play here without stakes being raised or pulses quickened.

This film looks absolutely gorgeous, but apart from its production design it is basically a disaster.

Art born of outrage has to be more rigorous – and we might also contemplate what merit there is in guaranteeing prospective terrorists a filmed account of their misdeeds.

It seemed overextended and self-conscious.

Even granting the enormous difficulty of adapting such a long and complex book, I do not see how a worse job could have been done. Jack–rabbiting along in fits and starts, it gives one the feeling that the book has been arbitrarily chopped up into an irrelevant series of scenes, attempting an unsuccessful compromise between intimacy and the epic.

There are plenty of great moments, but they jump out amid a jumble of strangely flat scenes. This doesn’t feel like the work of a great master; it’s a discordant brew that just doesn’t blend right.

It’s a film that ostentatiously concerns itself with contemporary, zeitgeisty issues such as digital culture and the internet, and whether this is undermining the world of reading and books. But strip out the strained speechifying on that subject and it could have been made at any time in the last 40 years.

If the historical epic exists as a delivery system for swords-and-shields clashes, panoramas of rolling natural vistas and gruff inspirational speeches to those about to die, then Mackenzie has done his job and then some. But his prior films have set the bar a bit higher than that, and this straightforward, unchallenged take on macho valour doesn’t quite reach it.

As a film-maker, Larson shows promise, and as a comic actor she shows genuine talent. With a less affected, more genuine script, Larson could star in and direct a great comedy. Unicorn Store is not it.

It’s unfortunate that Byrne’s offering such a tremendous performance in a film that is, to put it as bluntly as possible, so very dumb.

No movie with these excellent actors can be a complete dead loss, of course, but it’s the kind of feelgood film that somehow always manages to set a keynote of feel-bad, feel-sad gentility.

The character dynamics are still as rich as when Sherriff first realised them, and C Company’s supporting servicemen add a few complementary hues to this portrait of militarised despair.... And yet Dibb’s direction doesn’t leave the actors enough room to breathe.

This movie is about as subtle as a sledgehammer, with no shortage of cringeworthy moments and an uninteresting lead performance.

There are laughs, but they’re meek.

Branagh brings something spirited and good-humoured to the role of Poirot, but the film’s attempt to create some romantic stirrings to go with the activities of those little grey cells is not very convincing.

Access to the great man has clearly been provided with an undertaking not to challenge, not even to ask questions, in the normal interview sense.

There are sparks of interest and some powerful moments, but it is structurally disjointed, tonally uncertain, unfocused and unfinished, with some very broad drama-improv-class acting from the kids and a frankly unrelaxed and undirected performance from Halle Berry.

Like its fast-moving, attention-deficient hero, this just feels like a rush job.

People will want to make their own minds up about the film, but for me there is something worryingly crass and naive in it.

Anon lacks identity and arrives at the finish line in a desiccated, cerebral, unsatisfying style.

For all the expensive honey drizzled over this script, Forster’s film is just unpersuasively weird for an hour, before it tails off in the softest of focuses.

There are watchable moments, undoubtedly, and it is extraordinary to watch Houston’s sensational performance at the 1991 Super Bowl, singing The Star Spangled Banner with such passion: perhaps the greatest moment of her professional life. Her enigma remains unsolved.

Paradox is choppy and directionless, better seen as an experimental concert film that attempted to do something more ambitious than the average music video.

Watching a couple bicker about the specifics of their relationship can be illuminating when done right, but here it becomes a chore, the problems they encounter feeling contrived and silly.

There’s really not much for the humans to do, other than flash brilliant white smiles, making the film feel like the world’s longest toothpaste advert. And it’s a toothbrush you’ll be reaching for after all so much sugary sentimentality.

An evolutionary marvel, Reeves has figured out how to adapt to the hostile environment of mediocrity, and here he takes to the gobbledygook and gaps in logic like a genetically altered fish to water. When the guy’s good, he’s great, and when he’s bad, he’s still serviceable.

Comedy and irony are not allowed to encroach on the film’s upbeat message, and the drama doesn’t reach out beyond a wrestling fanbase.

It is reasonably inoffensive, a bit like the recent Goosebumps, in which Black played a comparably defanged role, but it looks as if it was produced by some computer programme, devised by accountants and market researchers.

The debate over the utility of violence and the dignity owed prisoners of war has raged since time immemorial, and recent developments have only amplified the decibel level. Operation Finale zeroes in on these complex dynamics, only to erase their nuance.

The humour feels as if it is pitched at kids rather than adults, and for me Johnny English’s wacky misadventures aren’t as inventive and focused as Atkinson’s silent-movie gags in the persona of Bean.

Hart’s brilliant hyperactive comedy has been dampened and smothered in this disappointingly unfunny showcase, which he has produced and co-scripted with five other credited writers.

The problem lies not strictly with what’s on screen – which on its own, reduced terms is basically watchable and not unlikable – but in what’s been elided or forgotten about in the rush to duplicate the original’s surprise success: any sustained wit or personality.

Upper-middle-class white privilege does not exempt you from drug problems, but it looks as if it rates you a premium kind of respectful and sorrowing film treatment, something to do, I suspect, with the tremulous father-son ownership of this narrative.

Forget about chilling to the bone, The Grudge barely drops below room temperature.

It’s good to see Hamilton getting a robust role, although, sadly, she has to concede badass superiority to Davis. This sixth Terminator surely has to be the last. Yet the very nature of the Terminator story means that going round and round in existential circles comes with the territory.

This extraordinary story has unfortunately been turned into a handsomely produced but laborious, drawn-out and dramatically inert movie.