Robert Downey Jr sparkles as the British comedy giant but Richard Attenborough's film feels somewhat dutiful around him.

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

Too often it’s just silly.

It’s good-natured entertainment, though there is still something weightless and formless about the narrative.

Thankfully, we only see glimpses of the footage of tortured women on the hideously believable nemesis’s camera, so ultimately the movie – just about – feels more like a critique of the character’s woman-hating mindset rather than a vehicle for it.

Like the first one, it's played for laughs in-between bouts of mayhem; most of the gags are off-target, though Mirren's Nancy Mitfordesque assassin gets a pretty good kill ratio.

Clearly marketed as inoffensive feel-good pap, I didn’t go into the film expecting a nuanced commentary on the racing industry. But nor did I expect what often felt like a thinly veiled 98-minute advertisement, interspersed with occasional moments of warmth and humanity.

If some elements of Angel of Mine are simplistic, Rapace’s magnetic performance is anything but.

Director Ron Howard does a solid job of getting the smell of salt off the page and into the picture. The first half works quite well simply as a procedural, but when the action comes we run into trouble. The well-earned seriousness is washed away as we’re broadsided by B-movie tropes.

All the traditional ingredients are there, and I do have to say that the film does a good initial job of being claustrophobic and spectacular at the same time.

Cardboard characters aside, Elevator Game is also pretty sluggish, despite its relatively short runtime. Plodding through an endless string of dull shot/reverse shots between the quarrelling vloggers, the film finally reaches the dreaded fifth floor, but the payoff is tame and bloodless.

The coming-of-age parts of the film centred on Frances work a little better, but for all that, and despite Lithgow and Colman’s commitment, this is very uncertain.

Penn’s aim might be true, but his appetite for adrenaline appears to trump his ability to justify why he occupies a position in the red-hot center of a global crisis.

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.

The movie’s operatic claustrophobia makes its mark. Cult status beckons.

There is no juicy high-concept baddie this time around, but there is a lot of enjoyable hokum and cheerful ridiculousness.

The film is a tonally uneven, genre-shifting hurricane of a thing, wildly careering off the rails and smashing into everything in its view.

To its credit, Lisa Frankenstein wears its inspirations on its black lace sleeves, never feigning true originality but there’s only so much looking back we can handle without things being pushed at least a little bit forward. In bringing a subgenre back from the dead, Cody and Williams could have used a little more life.

It can’t end well. In fact, it ends badly. In every sense. The mystery of Myers has long since become deflated and inert, and when he is unmasked, the camera can’t quite be bothered to show us his pointless old face (unlike the unhelmeting of Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi, which did at least show us what the great villain looked like). The only thing that’s scary is the thought of how long this has all been going on.

Watching all the tried-and-tested elements fail to coalesce just makes us nostalgic for the classics instead. Let us all wish Disney can find that magic again.

While Dauberman manages a handful of effective moments (a morgue scramble with a homemade cross and a drive-in movie light trick are particularly good), he’s never able to capture the slow, escalating dread that a story such as this demands.

Admittedly Guadagnino throws a little too much into the directorial kitchen sink, but what could have been tasteless and exploitative emerges instead as intelligent and dignified, held together by Swinton’s seriousness of purpose.

The New World is a disaster, moans Queen Isabella. Yes, that's about right.

There are some strident cliches alongside redundant self-harming machismo in this sub-Schraderesque movie about New York paramedics.

Leung Chiu-wai has a predatory glint behind the salesman’s grin, and Lau has the beaten look of a man bested for much of the movie. What’s really missing is a Leung/Lau face off, an epic confrontation.

A third-act plot twist is audacious enough to regain our attention, but Reuten and Wolf don’t quite have the charisma to fully carry it off.

The film is a mildly diverting yet strangely dated caper, a watered-down Tarantino rip-off without a soul of its own.

Like watching a statue for two-and-a-half hours, there’s nothing to do but sit back and yawn.

Parked putters, but doesn't go anywhere.

Tonally, it’s all over the place, that aforementioned sap curdled together with Wilson’s trademark crudeness, an R-rated comedy that wants to be both sweet and salty, a balance it never manages to perfect.

For an action-comedy, its timing is lousy.

It all hangs together and the final shot rounds it off nicely enough.

It’s a shame Kenan can’t muster his own bit of gothic shorthand for post-credit crunch America, but the film still has a fluid, 3D-orientated immediacy.

There are some rousing battle scenes, preceded by stirring addresses on the subject of going to Elysium – all cheekily borrowed from Ridley Scott's "Gladiator."

Sometimes it feels like a cross between a film studies lecture and what happens when you leave YouTube to keep autoplaying while the all-powerful algorithm suggests more and more content.

The supposed satirical attitude of Irresistible can’t conceal the fact that it’s contrived, unfunny and redundant.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny isn’t so much a continuation as a Xerox copy with cheap toner.

Masterminds is a bit of an interesting case study, as it is basically a Coen brothers film but put through a mechanism that removes all the wit, visual style or excitement. In its place are tortuously dull set-pieces, rambling dialogue and banal stagings.

It is soulless, like something that has been generated by a computer programme.

Despite the uncomfortable sexism and altogether predictable nature of the film, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t modestly entertaining.

Blade is an entertainingly macabre and excitingly staged action horror, with a propulsive energy and a prototype “bullet time” sequence one year before the Wachowskis made it famous in The Matrix.

The film is never less than amiable, and rather more spirited and nonconformist than the Transformers movies.

This film comes to life in the two scenes when its hushed note of kindly reverence is broken.

The film sags a little towards the end, with a few too many implausible action sequences: characters jumping out of helicopters and fighting on top of speeding SUVs, the choreography glossing over the basics of gravity and physics. Still, the cheers kept coming.

Audiences may come to this film expecting the conventional pleasures of a spy thriller – excitement, tension, suspense – along with the additional values associated with the very best of the genre: character nuance, emotional complexity, plausible human dilemma. The Operative utterly defeats all of these hopes, chiefly in being at all times extremely boring.

It all sort of comes together in the end, but there’s no earthly reason that it should all have taken two hours. Maybe the spoiler is the unfeasible length of the running time.

A disappointment.

In neglecting to vary her routine, she is not unlike the film-makers behind this ninth visit to the Conjuring universe – although “universe” is a misleadingly large word for a franchise that is impoverished in all but its box-office gross.

It’s a still fun yet far sloppier outing, a second round that’s less of a win for us and more of a draw.

Haze is excellent: pacing, weeping, baring his teeth and adding ample unruly emotion to his prison.

Wallace permits some debate as to what this tale represents – miracle? horror show? evidence of declining anaesthesiology standards? – yet that titular conclusion depends entirely on faith: what's on screen peters out.

By the end of the movie few won’t be rolling their eyes or checking their watch, but there’s enough that’s fundamentally good in the meat of film not to wholly reject what The Giver is giving us.

There is a kind of solidity and force to the film in its opening act, but its interest dwindles and we get little in the way of either ambition or moment-by-moment humour.

Auteuil has fashioned hidebound museum pieces that expand the backdrop with sun-dappled glimpses of port activity, while generally resisting any notes of modernity or change of emphasis. What modicum of cosy Sunday-afternoon pleasure they provide stems from the performers.

It’s at least as enjoyable as the much-hyped Mamma Mia! movies.

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.

Comedy gothic isn't exactly novel, and frankly there is a sense here of a movie coasting along on Halloween hype-marketing, without providing as many laughs and ideas as it really could have done.

Doubtless, like The Producers, it will be adapted back into the theatre, some time in 2017, at which time it will be even more bland and tiring.

The graphic novel-inspired world of Gunpowder Milkshake isn’t unique, but it’s admirably committed and Papushado edges his film away from the danger of pastiche thanks to an equally committed cast.

The spell does not get cast.

It's an obvious rip-off of George Romero's superior 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead, but it doesn't take itself too seriously. [12 Apr 2007, p.34]

Director David Verbeek’s script doesn’t quite wield the scalpel with enough sadistic glee. Instead, this film feels ever-so-slightly sluggish and dour in places.

A to-the-point two-hour slab of pulp that slickly glides above a very low bar.

The bizarro plot might help Candy Cane Lane stand out from the bland, busy crowd of new seasonal movies but it’s just as limp and lacking in spirit as the rest of them. Murphy and Ross deserve better, and so do we, and so does Christmas.

This new Shazam film is cordial, with a puppyish good nature and an awareness of its own silliness.

It’s held together by Sandberg, a director who has mastered the art of totally competent studio horror with slick, equally forgettable films like Lights Out and Annabelle: Creation and he again shows himself to be a crisply efficient commercial film-maker again let down by a far less effective script. For a film all about repetition, one viewing will suffice.

Interior. Leather Bar ultimately rings hollow in its diatribe and agenda because its chief instigator refuses to open up.

Lance Henriksen's gaunt, anguished features have rarely been put to better use than in this superior horror story...Pumpkinhead would give the Predator nightmares. [23 July 1999]

Everything about it is heavy-handed and dull: the non-comedy, the ersatz-pathos, the anti-drama.

Extraordinary.

It's imprisoned by its own glibness, grabbing for sensation over emotion, and looking silly whenever it misses.

It’s a bit silly and queasy, but the narrative motor keeps humming.

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.

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.

While some of the nastier lurches in the third act will appease genre fans, the guff that surrounds them will probably confuse and ultimately alienate them, the film’s moving parts never really moving in unison.

Chalk it up to an insufficiently distinctive screenplay and underwhelming plot, but for Travolta, Cash Out feels more like a mercenary case of cashing in.

It’s a movie of big moods and grand gestures, undercut by the banal inevitability of losing.

It is presented with no mystery and scant wonder; instead, we get two hours of flatly professional procedural.

Lowish-level titters are in evidence – mostly care of Kristen Schaal as Dave’s tech aide – while an analogue finale on a scrappy-looking airfield offers passing respite from the multiplex’s usual VFX-bloated city smashing.

This is an entertaining venture with energy, fun and immature bad taste in abundance.

While Something from Tiffany’s is unlikely to rise to the higher regions of any genre fan’s best-of list (it’s too frothy to even rise to the middle), there’s something engagingly earnest about its relative lack of meta self-awareness and robust attempts to look and feel like the studio meet-cutes so many of us were raised on.

The second film adaptation of the phenomenally successful video game is a disappointment to rival the first.

Janney steals the movie in the scene in which she discovers the awful truth.

Sie elicits mostly spontaneous, credible performances from the younger cast, who deliver their wisecracks and banter with aplomb and only occasionally edge into annoying child-actor pertness.

Thinly etched topicality only gets the film so far (the script is very “I read an article once”) and when the action mechanics kick into gear, it’s yet more of the same with very little to distinguish it from the pack.

It's evasive and feeble; Julia Roberts is not a properly funny or satisfying villain, and yet neither is she the interestingly flawed, even sympathetic figure she might have been if the film had kept the all-important question she asks the mirror.

With his work now migrating online and his jerry-rigged methods increasingly outsourced to post-production effects, Jeunet can’t avoid the impending digitization of cinema, nor life. Still, he’s not going down without landing a few good fingers to the ribs first.

Marc Evans's Hunky Dory is sentimental, sweet-natured and daft as a brush.

The film’s best decision is to cast the great Ralph Ineson as an ambiguous local figure of note. With his basso profundo rumble of a voice and air of rough-hewn potency, he’s always a striking figure on stage and screen.

Rebecca 2.0 is sometimes quite enjoyable in all its silliness and campiness and brassiness, and in some ways, gets closer to the narrative shape of the original novel than the Hitchcock film, which rather truncated the third act.

You Should Have Left should have left our nerves frayed and our dreams haunted but instead, it leaves us cold.

[Miller] is a far better director than he is a writer though, and the film is crisply, thoughtfully made, at the least looking like it belongs on the big screen.

The film is smothered with a syrup of condescension.

If you need a charming film headed up by a skilled comic actor about a family going through troubling times then watch Rose Byrne in Instant Family instead because it’s a big no for this one.

It’s hard to stay mad at a movie for refusing to add things up, or resolve its mysteries in any traditionally satisfying ways, when getting lost with Qualley can be such a pleasure.

There are one or two laughs here and an attempt at a queer romance, but no real signs of life.

The reminders of Inception become so distracting that the film starts to border on pastiche. ... It’s overwhelming, even suffocating at times, which is a shame because there are elements here that work independently, without the need for the Nolan playbook to be so obsessively followed.

The weakness is in the material: these are second-string Miller yarns... But the vision remains uncompromising and it dazzles far more than any sequel should.