Too often the film loudly announces its noble intentions with slogans instead of dialogue.

Annabelle Comes Home is hopelessly light on scares.

It speaks to the extremely low bar set by Falcone and McCarthy’s previous films together that something as forgettable and unfunny as Superintelligence won’t be filed as a total disaster. Instead, it’s just another regrettable waste of her talent and another reminder that the best marriages can lead to the worst movies.

The whole thing is really waxy and sad, like the immobile face of co-star Sylvester Stallone; although the chance to enjoy the always interesting, never-as-big-as-he-should-have-been Matthew Modine, still looking pretty fly with a shock of white-and-gold hair, is very welcome.

There is something basically unsatisfactory about this glassy-eyed biopic of the satanic dreamboat Bundy.

It is weirdly opaque and internalised, and doesn’t ever really come to life.

As with Den of Thieves, Angel falls into the “lively mediocrity” category of Butler schlock, with one or two plot hikes that suggest the script meetings were well-refreshed.

It has an intriguing premise and a gripping first act. But the ending fizzles when it should explode, giving us neither the twisty and suspenseful entertainment that it seemed to promise, nor the serious response to sexual politics in Pakistan that also seemed to be on offer.

The comedy is fundamentally hobbled by the split in narrative focus between Jordan and April. We are never sure who is the heroine here, who has the comedy underdog status, who we are supposed to be rooting for.

But we’re not fooled. This is an elaborate Dadaist joke, the funniest part of which is that it’s not in the least bit funny.

The keynote is vanilla blandness.

It’s a film jam-packed with very good actors and big names, and suffused with a puppyish willingness to please. But where is the bite?

It’s the kind of verbose corporate parable David Mamet would sit down to write after a heavy night on the sauce.

By their very nature, dog lovers may be more forgiving and enthusiastic, but much of it is reaction shots of trained mutts, right through to the closing-credit snapshots of the crew’s Forever Friends, this movie is almost literally all puppy eyes.

Despite fine performances from Gina Rodriguez and Lakeith Stanfield, the debut film from Jennifer Kaytin Robinson never strays from the genre’s cliches.

There’s something so constructed and suffocating about watching a tried and tested formula not working, the over-sentimental string-pulling on show for all to see.

The spell does not get cast.

It’s competently made but utterly vacant, a forgettable indie fading fast.

Once the wounds have healed, Anvari may wish to make a film with the strength and distinctiveness of his debut.

Quite simply, there is not enough Dench, not enough Old Joan, not enough about how she feels about the decades of deceit, and tension, and becalmed ordinariness, far from the drama of espionage.

There’s not much real spark to it.

Bland, incurious and passionless, this documentary about the great tenor Luciano Pavarotti is like a promotional video licensed by a team of copyright lawyers – and about as challenging as a Three Tenors gig at Wembley stadium.

The movie is as tired and middle-aged as Akeem himself; Murphy is oddly waxy and stately, and has no authority figures he can really play off.

Here’s a defanged, declawed yeti in an animation whose every beat, character and narrative component feels as if it has been algorithmically tested for commercial safety by a computer programme.

Writer-director Isabel Coixet has taken a real-life love story from 20th-century LGBT Spanish history and turned it into something bafflingly passionless, joyless and excessively tasteful, an anti-alchemy assisted by stately monochrome photography that makes every frame look like a postcard from an art shop.

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.

Apart from its grisliness, its hopelessness, and its pointlessness, what strikes you most about this true-crime movie is its brownness.

The movie is not without interest, but I found it mannered, derivative and opaque.

The Kindness of Strangers is one of those terrible ideas for a film: ensemble dramas that are superficially attractive because of all the big names shoehorned into the cast-list.

It’s a forgettable film, with a fair few gags that strike a depressingly sexist note.

The fascinating story of Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos scandal is frustratingly underexplored in Alex Gibney’s disappointing new film.

This curious, truncated piece tells us nothing substantial about Zofia Bohdanowiczowa or Józef Wittlin – or, indeed, about anything at all.

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

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

In the new film, by literally creating a bust of the bird – as if a clump of stone or plaster could compare with the natural majesty of wings and feathers – the meaning has been accidentally inverted: a story about how something can never die becomes about how it will never live again.

It’s written and directed by Liam O Mochain with the kind of inoffensive hot-water-bottle-laughs you wouldn’t think possible after Father Ted. Well, I say inoffensive, but one of the vignettes – about an uptight bridezilla whose sole character trait is her desperation to get married – is depressingly unfeminist.

Sometimes, a good legend is all the embellishment you need.

Curiously flat ... From the opening few frames through to a clunky introductory sequence, there’s something frustratingly off-balance about Georgetown.

Like Set It Up before it, Always Be My Maybe hits all of the beats we have come to expect yet fails to do so well enough, as if the mere existence of a technically well-structured romantic comedy is better than nothing.

It needed bigger laughs and more of the big, ironic comedy that Erskine can clearly deliver.

Cheung shows promise as a shotmaker and stager of blunt-force action. If somebody cares to arm him with a script editor and production grants, we could have a discovery of sorts on our hands.

As a comedy, it’s simply not funny and as a horror, it works better in pieces but not with the consistency a film set over one night would require.

Slater didn’t need to get every last Canyon musician on camera, but to avoid mentioning many of them altogether is a total dereliction of duty. Mojo and Uncut magazines do this sort of nostalgic rock history with so much more specificity and impact – spend your money on some real storytellers.

None of this is represented in any compelling dramatic style, and the actors – all very talented and assured – have perhaps not had clear enough direction. It is a mood piece. Whose mood leads nowhere.

Bizarre, colossally self-indulgent ... This one feels as if Kechiche has simply given us three-and-a-half hours of his unused beach and nightclub footage from the first film.

It is a drama that attempts to behave like a tough police procedural in a quasi-Melville vein, but also like a musing prose-poem about the vanity of human wishes.

Fundamentally, Sybil is not funny because it is not convincing, and some of the acting is not of the highest order. Efira’s “drunk” turn is something she may wish to omit from her showreel.

Opaque and unrewarding.

It’s comedy-drama that is not funny enough to count as a comedy and not plausible enough to count as a drama. You’re going to need a very sweet tooth for it – sweeter than the one I have.

Insufficiently diverting ... Lux Æterna shows Noé reverting to the self-parodic silliness that Climax had taken him past.

When The Unseen works it has an interestingly airless atmosphere, a weirdly disconnected, alienated quality that mimics the couple’s fraught emotional state. But the tension and sense of fear were lacking.

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.

Really there is very little chemistry between Bautista and Nanjiani, the cameo from Karen Gillan is disconcertingly fleeting, and if you compare this with something like the Beanie Feldstein/Kaitlyn Dever comedy Booksmart, the dialogue really does sound a bit pedestrian.

Those who appreciated the original for its brutal, sinewy agility have another thing coming: a lumbering, stultifying gargantua of a film willing to kill everything except its darlings.

This Neil Armstrong documentary feels like unrequired viewing coming so soon after two cracking moon landing movies.

It is heartfelt, but its periodic attempts at thriller-style bouts of excitement are redundant, and I wondered sometimes if the film-makers were sure what exactly their story was.

It is crammed with unearned emotional moments and factory-built male characters whose dedication to their sport we are expected to find adorable and heroic by turns.

Anna is not quite pedestrian but it never really feels like the work of someone with anything to say or prove. It’s competent and even complacent at times, a million miles from what one would expect from the director of The Fifth Element.

Its arcs and beats are as careworn as your grandfather’s armchair.

Bharat’s Achilles heel is its desire to pack so much in, at headspinning pace, tossing causality to the wind. Zafar reduces history to one damn thing after another, resulting in a 150-minute fire sale of period costumes and abandoned story beats.

Viewers and critics versed in golf lore can pass judgment on how well this documentary about caddies enhances their knowledge of the sport itself. But on the behalf of those utterly uninterested in golf, I can report that it is moderately interesting.

After a lax first half, Palm Beach slowly settles into a groove, growing in complexity and nuance. However, Ward’s laidback approach is not remotely cinematic (this feels more like a filmed play), and never is there a sense of urgency or stakes.

A good performance from Tom Hollander can’t save this stodgy, ungainly and strangely reactionary family drama from the French writer-director Amanda Sthers.

Our kids deserve storytelling that has more wit, and animation with better design, but I suppose this will do at a pinch.

There are baffling shunts from town to country, while the middle stretch tosses up scenes with no real function or punchline.

A starstruck Jones hardly pushes his interviewees on it, but somewhere in his naggingly monotonous morass of talking heads is the tale of how the Boss gained a social conscience.

Its undemanding nature and flat aesthetic making it an adequate background watch at best. Yet there’s also just enough here to make me wish it had been that bit better, a serviceable watch with a frustrating throughline teasing what could have been.

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.

It might look the part, with the director Paul Feig successfully capturing the glossy, tourist-friendly London one would crave from such a film, but the script feels like a rejected first draft with unfunny filler one-liners and a scrappy, ill-thought through narrative. It’s a beautifully wrapped Christmas gift that’s filled with rotten turkey leftovers.

Berman is guilty of one of the most tiresome cliches in documentary – solemnly playing the audio of a phone conversation, with subtitles, over an exterior shot of the building where it is taking place, giving the impression that this is smoking-gun proof of something sensational, or at any rate interesting, when it is pretty ordinary.

There are some nice touches and an attractive new diversity worn lightly, but this is an underpowered and uncertain film.

It’s oddly safe, given the subject matter, and the humour is similarly sanitised. What Waititi thinks is shockingly audacious is in fact frustratingly timid, he opts for a gentle prod when maybe a punch would do.

An all-star cast and some showstoppingly horrible hair can’t save Ridley Scott’s medieval epic.

It’s less of a film and more of an actors’ workshop, an exercise for everyone involved but meaningless to us.

The ending is unforgivably mawkish, though, and the running time of two-and-a-quarter hours is simply too long.

Well, it’s a good performance from Woodley.

Thewlis keeps the film from sinking completely: the haunted, unhappy man resigned to his unjust burden of guilt and shame.

Nicholson fails to give his film the specificity and emotional depth required to make it seem necessary. We’ve been here before and nothing in the film’s 100-minute length truly justifies why we’re back here again.

Each scene needed a jolt of music or energy that just wasn’t there.

Kristin Scott Thomas and Sharon Horgan saddled with a by-the-numbers script in a well-meaning but hackneyed Brit flick.

While the screenwriter, Brad Ingelsby, does root us in the minutiae of the trio’s day-to-day, it’s never in particularly interesting ways, and over an indulgent 135-minute runtime, we gradually grow tired of them, often questioning exactly why we need to know so much about their lives.

Even with an intelligent, credible performance by David Oyelowo, the daftness and utter implausibility of a smartphone so smart it can make calls to the future is overwhelming.

If you're determined to make a fun, feelgood movie, a marriage between a manipulative bigamist and a terrified minor that spirals off into alcoholism, violence and ruination may not be the ideal subject matter. Even if the music is really, really good.

As dated as its slow-mo zombie-killing opening credits, at times Zombieland: Double Tap feels like it was made directly after the original yet carelessly forgotten about. It’s rushed and dusty, a film more belonging on Crackle than the big screen, more expensively budgeted than the first yet mostly creatively bankrupt.

The film never quite rings true.

It sleepily hits the beats we expect but without the emotion or passion required to make them land, a by-the-numbers exercise from someone with barely enough energy to count.

Weirdly for a film supposedly based on actual events – adapted from Dave Roberts’s football memoir about life as a fan of beleaguered Bromley FC during the 1969-70 season – a persistent whiff of fakeness hangs over it.

A Million Little Pieces is a weirdly unreflective exploration of the destructive force of addiction and, setting a new benchmark for blandness, drags on for what feels like a million not-so-little minutes.

Harryhausen's dinosaurs are well worth a look, but the rest of One Million Years BC will bore the furry pants off anyone more advanced than a Neanderthal.

We get some lovely photography of the Highlands and the breathtaking landscapes all around Inverness, and Hancock is always a potent presence. But she could have done more, conveyed more, with a story that wasn’t so basically simplistic and familiar.

What frustrates me most about Underwater is just how very little it brings to the table. It’s a solid, competently directed regurgitation of an oft-told tale that never manages to justify its own existence

Curiosity might bring you here but boredom will drive you away.

No one in real life speaks the way they do in this film. No genuine drama is this crudely ordered drama, with its telegraphed turnabouts and conveniently-placed confessions, all building to a stage-managed plea for tolerance and unity.

Chalamet gives it his all as the pudding-bowl-hairstyled young king. But so much of the poetry and the sense of loss has gone from this decaffeinated version of the story.

The whole thing is shot and lit in that dull flat way that is mandatory for Hollywood family comedies, and the script is mainly dull, though I concede Key has some nice lines as he gets cross with Brynn’s sarcastic attitude.

The Last Thing He Wanted is a thing that no one wanted.

This is like an over-chewed piece of gum: flavourless.

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.