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.

The performances are strong and full of passionate conviction, which somewhat moderates the problematic aspects, while the use of natural light and tacky seaside textures does succeed in generating some atmosphere.

Dirt Music eventually arrives at a deep, thought-provoking moment – but it takes the entire film to get there.

The performances are fine, but the questionable decision to cast not one, not two, but three Brits can’t help but intensify the off-putting sense of Americana cosplay.

It’s at least a short film, clocking it at around 90 minutes, Serkis chopping off any extraneous fat, but it floats by and floats on without ever causing us to sit up and pay attention. Let there be no more.

There are some neat, borderline gory animations to illustrate how concussions work, which for this viewer were a lot more interesting than the endless stretches of racing footage. The anonymous, off-the-peg score of backing music and flat editing, however, still make this a bit of a slog.

This film makes explicit the implied sexuality in the original, which isn’t necessarily a wrong thing to do at all, but everything is very ham-fisted and crass.

He [Sorkin] can also become fantastically ponderous, bloated with finger-waggingly self-important liberal patriotism. Sadly, that is the tone with this exasperatingly dull, dramatically inert and faintly misjudged re-creation of the “Chicago Seven” trial in the US, which Sorkin has written and directed.

Frustratingly, Lowenstein doesn’t let the musician’s talent speak for itself.

It’s amiable, but the real action thrills and the chemistry between the leads isn’t there.

Given that a fair amount of creative licence has been exercised here, it is strange that Bruce Lee has such a small part to play.

Wendy is undoubtedly self-assured and in-your-face, and the gorgeous location photography certainly has an impact. But it’s wrecked by chapters so lengthy they become simply excruciating.

An odd attempt at genre-surfing that ends up well out of its depth.

Harvey is mostly a watchful observer with a notebook; sometimes she reads lines of poetry she’s jotted down on the voiceover. But we barely see her interacting with anyone on the ground, which gives the whole thing an impersonal feel.

Antebellum offers neither a coherent social commentary nor – thanks to its pat, ahistorical ending – a revenge thriller’s catharsis. What else, besides entertainment, could its purpose be?

It’s mostly kind of tolerable in a low stakes, rosé-wine-swigging way, inoffensively middling rather than rotten, an easy, undemanding afternoon watch with nothing of note other than a few laughably dumb moments..

Scalpello’s film is livelier pulp than the absence of advance fanfare would suggest.

Certainly a film which preserved a decent even-handedness on the matter might have been considerably more intriguing. [17 Jun 1993, p.4]

This is a heavy-footed reboot which doesn’t offer a compelling reason for its existence other than to gouge a fourth income stream from Matrix fans, submissively hooked up for new content, and it doesn’t have anything approaching the breathtaking “bullet time” action sequences that made the original film famous.

The story is a real-life political chess game with the makings of a gripping race-against-the-clock thriller; but here it drags out into sluggish, dull and unconvincing melodrama.

There’s a lived-in chemistry that’s missing from the pairing and the film’s great many awkward moments between them don’t feel quite as cutting or as uncomfortable as they should. It’s a dark comedy that feels too light.

There’s something grating about a film which insists on detailing its pseudo-science while also conceding you probably won’t have followed a thing. We’re clobbered with plot then comforted with tea-towel homilies about how what’s happened has happened.

The film is gorgeous to look at, all alpine meadow flowers and glorious green mountains. But the drama loses momentum pretty early on.

This is a long, laborious movie whose every scene feels hackneyed at some level and which is always drifting towards its own misjudged secular gospel of simplistic salvation and life lessons learned. But an artist’s life is more complicated than that.

Aside from the singular brawn of its leading man, this would-be springboard has nothing much worth launching. It’s a stack of wormed-over action tropes, and to make matters worse, the movie knows it – and yet does not know enough to spare us its missteps in the first place.

It can sometimes be cute or zany and briefly send itself up, but there is fundamentally something pretty straight in its DNA.

Issa Rae and Lakeith Stanfield can’t save this dreary Valentine’s drama that lacks fizzle and emotional stakes.

It’s brand management dressed up as insight and while it’s not not entertaining, it’s certainly far from particularly revealing, playing more like a PR exercise then a festival-worthy feature.

The ambition of Horse Girl ultimately gets the better of it, turning what could be a dark but insightful depiction on signs missed in a mental health crisis into an agreement on one’s madness – a game of what’s real, and what’s not, that feels unsettling to play.

Haley, who last directed the sweet and underseen Hearts Beat Loud, gives the film a stronger aesthetic than most Netflix teen offerings, and Fanning and Smith work hard at charming us into submission, but their hard-to-buy relationship isn’t quite the immersive ride-or-die love connection it needs to be, given the melodrama of the last act.

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.

Too hip for its own good, the film ends up going nowhere. Only of interest, perhaps, to hardcore St Vincent and Brownstein fans.

It’s hard to know how seriously we’re supposed to take any of this when it’s so unclear what the makers’ intention is and so the film’s deeper cuts fail to truly wound because so much of it is mired in silliness.

The result is as long and as lavish an advert as has ever been produced for the Chinese emergency services. It’s just you might reasonably want your films a little more stirring and challenging, and not quite so obviously rubber-stamped.

Lost Girls is sorely lacking and, ironically, one wonders what a Garbus docuseries could have found instead.

Tom Hanks leads this handsomely shot but stolid and blandly self-satisfied western.

Although the character of Gru is mildly funny, the minions are unfunny without him and have never convincingly attained spin-off hero status. This is another of those intellectual property concepts whose trademarked quirky voices and characters should be laid to rest.

Eisenberg does an honest job with the role of Marceau, but it is a subdued performance. Marceau emerges as animatedly nerdy before the Nazis invade, but when the film has to show his heroism, Eisenberg plays him pretty straight. The result is a performance that could have been turned in by anyone.

The narrative focus is frustratingly split between Ben’s family and Abbie’s, and the result is a non-frightening muddle.

The hits comes thick and fast, tightly arranged and slickly performed, but this lineup of well-preserved mostly male musicians gives the show the bland atmosphere of a celebrity tribute band.

Verhoeven just presents us with the raunchiness, using the religiosity as set dressing.

The adjective in the title is right. It gets old pretty quickly.

There are some cheerfully amusing moments . . . . But really the banter and the elegance needs some substance in the script and it really isn’t here, or not enough of it, and the serious moments seem glazed in a kind of negligent unseriousness.

Weirdly prudish about the intimacy scenes, the sex addiction storyline is a cheap attempt to spice up the romcom formula, but this movie is as vanilla as they come.

Dyer’s intelligent and sensitive performance does wonders for a character who, on the page, looks like a male fantasy: a cool-girl psychiatric case, fun-loving, free-spirited and up for anything.

The formula is so well-trodden that it needed a sparkling jolt of energy to justify Penny traipsing his way through it again. Uncorked isn’t exactly corked but it’s definitely flat.

How Herbig fails to capitalise on the sheer physical terror of their flight – the balloon’s basket is more a flimsily strung boxing ring – makes you wish someone like Werner Herzog had mounted this mad escapade for real.

All the exertion – fleshed out in visuals that veer from Astro Boy-aping cutesiness to interestingly rough closeups, as if the animation itself is fraying in the heat of battle – pays diminishing dividends. The panoply of powers begin to seem interchangeable, the character arcs dim.