Their singing is robustly and winningly performed, and the whole thing is heartfelt. Nice also to see Maggie Steed as the local pub’s landlady. It’s pretty goofy but fun.

Bogdanovich is a formidable figure, but with this movie he’s just coasting. He surely needs to find a screenplay more attuned to his brilliance, rather than a derivative, low-octane comedy.

As a comedy, it stops being funny and as a horror it never starts being scary with Johnson’s direction far too drab and lifeless for something so cartoonish and schlocky. Big swing, bigger miss.

The script's a drowner, the acting's awash. Again and again Butler returns to the sea. He just about survives the buffeting.

The writing expends more effort on teasing out the logistics of seeing dead people than making the phenomenon frightening or emotionally resonant.

As ever with comedies like this, all the really funny stuff is in the opening 20 minutes. But it's entertaining stuff, with a scene-stealer from Alan Arkin.

The parody versions of the songs here are pretty funny, as is Cage’s solemn devotion to his job, down to his insistence that he takes a pinball game break at intervals throughout the film.

Cherry is a fervent movie, corn-fed with drama and action, but maybe a little less than the sum of its parts.

Something has perhaps been lost in the edit. This never quite comes together.

I'd never want to stand in the way of artists pushing things, but messing with Postman Pat is probably a step too far.

For all his faults as a narrative film-maker, Herzog can at least be counted on to keep his non-documentary excursions unpredictable.

The will-they-won’t-they succeed in carrying out the poisoning plot makes for pretty flat drama, and for a film about people who have suffered so much, this really fails to make us care about the characters.

The film achieves a functioning mediocrity we perhaps might have thought beyond this franchise, offering a modicum of diversion in return for the cash disappeared from your wallet.

Whether you like this movie may depend very materially on how you respond to Franco himself, but I found his casting very astute.

Spiritually, it's closer to a mid-range crowd-pleaser such as City Slickers than Blazing Saddles, too enamoured of genre convention to reach for the comic dynamite.

Bewley is persuasive as the boy who would be king, while Michael Jibson stands out among the support as a foulmouthed berserker, along with Cosmo, who brings a touch of class without ever having to get up from his bed.

Mandy Lane feels bogus and compromised: an unreconstructed horror romp in the guise of a nerdish intellectual.

Sadly the acting and dialogue needed a little work.

Sometimes it works - Brosnan and Thompson are sedately charming, Spall and Imrie are naturally funny together - but there's only so much humour you can squeeze out of Pierce's dicky prostate.

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 a film so cartoonishly outsized that it almost renders the first film restrained by comparison

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

There’s a mega-helping of daftness, silliness and goofiness in this wacky British comedy of Ye Olden Medieval Dayes from screenwriter Andy Riley and director Curtis Vowell.

The mood is light, the stunts impressive and, mercifully, the film is not nearly as cheap-looking nor dull as Netflix brethren such as The Man from Toronto or Lift.

The Legend of Tarzan ends up being a garbled, clunky production that tries to please everyone and ends up pleasing no one.

As an inevitable plot twist leads to an inevitable showdown which leads to an inevitable makeup which leads to an inevitable, and unbearable, all-cast song-and-dance number, you’ll be left wondering how bringing together fabulous women has left us all feeling so utterly unfabulous.

No amount of budget could make up for the sputtering mess of a script, or the dead-on-the-inside expressions of the cast – apart from Rudolph who is consistently watchable.

It might drift out of the memory just as easily as it drifted in, but there’s a goofy likability to Pacific Rim: Uprising, a primal thrill to be had, and a confident slickness behind it that means, despite a nearly two-hour running time, it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

Gal Gadot leads the streamer’s latest ambitious franchise-starter that delivers just about enough dumb summer fun to have us curious for more.

It’s made just-about-watchable by Sandler and Aniston again, whose combined movie star charm proves magnetic enough to carry us through the flatter moments, both nailing some effectively chaotic physical comedy and maintaining a warm, relaxed chemistry.

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.

Grimsby has the occasional laugh and a succession of finely wrought grossout spectaculars which are reasonably entertaining.... But with its cod-Bond and mock-action material it carries a weird overall feel, like kids’ TV but produced on a lavish scale with added filth.

By the end of this 89-minute film, I was absolutely on the edge of my seat. Not due to suspense, but due to my utter disdain for the infantile plotting.

It’s a film that’s good enough that you want it to be better, a rare genre example of less not proving to be more.

Blunt remains committed to the end but even she can’t add a shine to the drab last act, the pleasure of seeing her on screen replaced with the pain of another undeserving project.

This film floats, but, like a synchro-swimmer doing the “egg beater” leg movement, it needs a fair bit of strenuous activity to keep it upright.

Like a great big playful un-neutered pitbull, Matthew Vaughn’s new Kingsman movie comes crashing into our cinematic lives this Christmas, overturning the furniture and frantically humping everyone’s leg before rolling over on the carpet for you to tickle its tummy or anything else that comes to hand.

They could have called it British Pie, but this TV sitcom spin-off updates the teen summer holiday formula surprisingly entertainingly, considering it doesn't subvert it one iota.

The two leads do their best here, but even they cannot scrounge enough feeling out of this desolate sci-fi.

There are a few laughs but, at nearly two hours, Ricky Stanicky far outstays its welcome.

The film is a shoddily made and strikingly unfunny attempt to tell an interesting story in an uninteresting way.

It’s a film tremendously out of step with current tastes, and while I doubt that was its goal, this peculiarity makes it strangely watchable – even enjoyable.

It’s all just too sanitised and safe, a journey that stumbles as it takes us from the unknown to the familiar, a film that plods when it should stride. How did a bracing idea about rebellion, sexual awakening and lawlessness turn out so boring?

Apart from the occasional bit of voiceover from Clean, our hero barely says much at all, leaving it to Brody to do a lot of acting with those big sad eyes. It makes the film feel a bit like a silent movie but not one of the good ones.

The visually overworked Dark Match feels oddly underworked at the same time.

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.

Perhaps there is no great enthusiasm out there for a new version of Dracula from Luc Besson, the French maestro of glossiness and bloat. And yet it has to be said: his lavishly upholstered vampire romance has ambition and panache – and in all its Hammer-y cheesiness, I’m not sure I wouldn’t prefer to it to Robert Eggers’s recent, solemnly classy version of Nosferatu.

The romantic relationship with the “good Nazi” is a little too glib (quite as it was in the film version of Suite Française) and the camp scenes have a misjudged sheen of romanticism and come perilously close to the bad-taste border. But Stenberg’s performance is good.

Its destructive setpieces may loose the odd popcorn kernel on to the multiplex carpet, but it's really just an effects reel: the weather – cloudy wisps turning to massive, fiery hellblasts – is considerably better developed than its quarry. Stick with Twister.

It runs out of steam in the final 10 minutes, but there's some gruesome drama and Cusack is on decent form.

Hang on for the outtake bloopers over the credits and you'll see Aniston momentarily unsure how to take a joke at her expense.

It’s not as if some b-plot threads are left dangling but instead, the entire film is left shoddily unfinished.

The action is clumsy. The writing leans on tropes. The dramatic scenes overestimate the artistic range of a charming rapper-turned-actor like Bridges. And director Millicent Shelton makes some curious stylistic decisions along the way, whether it’s amethyst lighting or montages that have the feel of a R&B music video.

The complete jigsaw doesn’t fit together, hampered by plot implausibilities and unrealities.

The competence of the action sequences compensates somewhat for the underlying lack of wit or humour throughout, unless you count the smile-inducing call backs to ancient 90s technology.

By Allen’s lamentable recent standards, this fitfully entertaining film could be called adventurous, while the reliably cranky Shawn and a stately, vampish Gershon are clearly having a good time and letting us in on it.

It’s tough to take all the hardcore emoting seriously, particularly as the emotional heavy lifting is designed to be done by the occasional maudlin line in brief pauses between the explosions. For a film so concerned with its characters’ inner lives, there’s a fundamental disconnect going on here – enough to make you yearn for the lighter touch of the Marvel films.

This is Where I Leave You is totally aimble, utterly unmoving filler given a major shot in the arm by its cast, people it’s simply a pleasure to watch, even with the creeping feeling they’re better than this.

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

A silly and dated new attempt to transport the classic fighting game to the big screen is a late-night drunk watch at best.

The first act of the film wins some laughs on surrealist shock humour, but at the expense of ever accepting this character and her world as real.

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.

This is far from the bomb some would have envisaged, but neither is it the character illumination one would wish for. Jobs appears so consumed by his work here that little else mattered in his life. That may be true, but we're left none the wiser as to what made the man tick, beyond what we already know.

This is a two-dimensional piece of work.

Epically tiresome. ... What is exasperating about the film is its reluctance to dramatise the teaching: to show the young people themselves simply getting better at acting.

This is not a very good effort, seeming tired without being emotional. It looks like the end of the line...Superman III never flies as it should, or only does momentarily. [31 July 1983, p.21]

Originality may be out of Blood's jurisdiction, but it manages to plod on, dutifully walking a tired old beat.

What sweetness and charm Prom Dates does muster is thanks to Lester alone, whose comic timing is sharp and whose performance of a girl growing comfortable in her sexuality over one crazy night actually conjures the sense of a real person.

Kerry Condon follows up her Oscar nomination with a thankless piece of Blumhouse schlock that tries, and fails, to make swimming pools scary.

This film is making a wheezing, spluttering sound: the sound of a profitable YA franchise running out of steam.

De Angelis offers some muscular film-making, with decent action sequences.

Toning down his usual act in a manner that suggests he’s finally read his reviews, Butler gives it handfuls of dramatic ballast, but this vessel has been badly compromised: any interest seeps out by the frame.

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

Hard to believe that this barely watchable animated cash-in from the heyday of those Robots In Disguise was the cinematic swansong of Orson Welles. [05 May 2007, p.17]

What we have on our hands is a dud, but there are a few grace notes that save it from being an unmitigated disaster.

[Toby Meakins] doesn’t quite take enough advantage of his reality-shifting game sequences (the Englund voice cameo serves to remind us just how wild Wes Craven made those nightmares way back when) but it’s a cut above the average Netflix genre guff.

This is a vacuum-sealed package of fan-orthodoxy that never takes off. The euphoria and uplift aren’t there.

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?

There are imperfections here, especially near the end, but it’s the work of someone striving to stand out, to do something that will linger in the memory rather than fade into the over-populated homepage background.

Equals doesn’t really work as either a plausible attempt at rendering some sort of future society, nor as a really convincing thwarted-love story.

Writer-director Justin P Lange finds a satisfying way to update the possession-exorcist theme for a new generation grown wary of the Catholic church’s old ways, particularly in the wake of the abuse scandals that have shredded the clergy’s credibility in recent years.

It’s watchable enough but let down by a strange lack of interest in presenting Salander as anything but an engine to propel a plot. More female action heroes is by no means a bad thing but forcing Salander into Bond’s shoes feels like a misstep, her intellect and survivalism suited to far more interesting pursuits.

This Maleficent is disappointing, although Jolie certainly sells it hard, as does Fanning, who takes it as seriously as anything else in her career.

It doesn’t help that the film takes itself with Deliverance-like seriousness, and fails to really acknowledge its absurdity.

Even as All I See Is You descends into soapy nonsense, it remains visually engaging.

The initial setup is great, the Ephronesque excitable phone conversation montage is tolerable, but the cliched breakup and makeup plot transition clanks.

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.

It's a bit of a flavourless CGI-fest, without the character and comedy of the Arnie version, and it never really gets to grips with the idea of "reality" as a slippery, malleable concept.

The most intentional fun comes courtesy of N (for Nuptials).

Madres never loses a strong underpinning of social conscience that seeps into director Ryan Zaragoza’s considered shots.

A smarter, sharper film might have explored what happens next in an otherwise happy marriage when the spark goes out. Instead, the comedy here is as broad as it gets, with some wildly unconvincing and unhilarious set-pieces.

One of those agonisingly well-intentioned films whose heart is in the right place, but everything else is wrong.

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.

The drama – featuring the kind of flat, chirruping upper-middle-class English accents that aren’t usually voiced on screen – is intriguing and uncompromisingly high-minded, right on the laugh-with/laugh-at borderline, but interestingly unafraid of mockery.

The director, Renny Harlin, is a competent and experienced hand, so there’s a sturdy workmanlike quality here but, more typically associated with bombastic action movies, he just doesn’t have the patience required to build real, clammy suspense or the awareness of the smaller specificities that are needed to immerse us in an intimate story such as this.

It’s a relentless surge of solemnly ridiculous nonsense in the style of romdram maestro Nicholas Sparks (creator of The Notebook and Message in a Bottle) culminating in a courtroom trial with Edgar-Jones’s free-spirited heroine in the dock as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Murder Suspect.

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.

Live and Let Die borrowed from blaxploitation; The Man with the Golden Gun took a couple of kicks at kung fu, though in a distinctly half-hearted fashion.