There is no law that says a movie like this has to be funny exactly, and it needn’t be something in the style of Booksmart – but there is something rather solemn about it.

Given the inherent lack of drama in the kind of unbreakable faith on display here, anyone wishing to tell the story needs to work much harder than this laboured treatment to wring any nuance, conflict or indeed true sublimity from it.

The story has the makings of a gripping adventure, but something is lacking.

It’s a strange movie that can seem mildly interested in tackling bigger issues before swiftly backing down.

The film’s drunken lurch into earnest romance near the end, after leaning on bawdy humour for the most part, requires us to see these characters as something other than farcical chess pieces, an uphill battle for all involved.

This garden is pretty but lifeless.

Hart comports himself with a more dialed-back version of the jittery everyman affability he’s developed over decades in the comedy circuit, a schtick that reads as just that – a pose, a well-honed affectation. There is an immense and documentable falseness at the core of his performance that drags down the salvageable movie all around it, far from the redemption arc clincher his handlers may have had in mind.

A film about a virus-ravaged country under lockdown should be able to hit cogent parallels at will at the moment – but a numbing repetition is sadly the main payout.

It all feels like a heavy meal, and the action scenes and the creature effects are very derivative.

Images and characters bounce around like shapes on a screensaver and only McDonnell and Gad’s performances have any fizz. This is a YA-franchise by numbers.

This is a strained, frustrating concoction that doesn’t do its subject justice. Flynn really can sing, though.

It’s not a movie so much as 159-minute trailer for a film called Elvis – a relentless, frantically flashy montage, epic and yet negligible at the same time, with no variation of pace.

Nothing is really offensive or incompetent, but it never rises to the level of funny or interesting, either.

The action is relentless and laboured with the odd pause for a sentimental lesson or moment of personal growth. StarDog may work its slight charms on young children, but older kids will feel they’ve seen smarter, funnier and cleverer before.

For fans of joyless screaming and stabbing, there might be something here worth your time but for those who expect more thrills from their thrillers or at least something close to a purpose, 7500 is a flight worth missing.

This elaborately contrived story feels as if it has been cobbled together from a dozen others, and it never escapes cliche.

Becky’s crazed kills get more and more gimmicky, and there’s nothing in the script to indicate what has turned her into a pint-sized death-dealer.

This dorky, silly sci-fi feature offers a weird blend of high-grade craftsmanship (especially from the visual effects, cinematography and music departments), and guileless ineptitude, especially in the crucial realms of screenwriting, acting and editing.

What propels us past the cliches of Intuition is a desire to see just how it all ties together, an assumption that a story as busily plotted as this must have an ace up its sleeve. But the last act is all fizzle, played out predictably with a mundanity that no amount of sweeping aerial shots can disguise.

The movie is not a disaster, just weirdly pointless.

At times it really does feel a lot more like an SD card dump than an exercise in storytelling.

Somehow the tacky piano score amplifies the ineptitude of Mary McGuckian’s direction, but even so one can’t fail to be impressed by a scene where Brady’s Gray literally dances about architecture, proving that it really is possible.

It’s difficult to fault a film for being over-ambitious given the low-effort nature of so many genre films but the sheer, two-joints-in bizarreness of Run Sweetheart Run needed a surer hand to guide us through. As it is, that run to the finish line ends up feeling like a crawl.

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

Rather than a heartwarming family favourite-in-the-making, The One and Only Ivan is just a vaguely watchable cookie-cutter caper thrown together by people who should know how to make something far sweeter and substantial, a fleeting attraction for undiscerning young kids and a whelming waste for anyone older.

Very young kids might find some enjoyment in the brightly hued, fast-paced mania of it all, but those with any real affection for the pair of violently opposed animals will leave unimpressed.

An adorable trio pootle around a post-apocalyptic world in this sentimental sci-fi that curiously lacks any sense of danger.

This effort is similarly infuriating and entertaining by turns, and features pretty good performances from a handful of up-and-coming young male actors, including Brenton Thwaites and Kyle Gallner, along with lovable old ham Billy Zane putting in a last-act cameo.

For all its rough edges, there’s a pure-hearted passion for movie-making evident here, that’s often awol in slicker productions.

It’s pretty basic boilerplate, scary-movie stuff, with tropes and tricks that have already been extensively satirised elsewhere.

This film isn’t really sure where it’s taking us and how, or if, it wants to surprise us, and the key scene with Klaudiusz doesn’t work.

An awkward misfire at best and an uneasy and irresponsible one at worst.

Nothing really comes to life and the dialogue is plodding and laborious.

Spree is meant to comment on the shallowness of social media culture; the trouble is, it’s a film with the depth of a puddle.

This is pretty ho-hum stuff, but it could keep very young kids quiet over a lockdown Christmas.

The script’s attempts at wisdom amount to little more than dime-store platitudes, and the internecine turmoil of the Arashikage clan never comes close to anything like emotional heft.

It plays like several plots, genres and mood boards all mashed together, which makes the end result interesting but not entirely successful.

This is paddling-pool-level entertainment.

The movie falls apart with some moral handwringing that will likely infuriate genre fans, and for everyone else, feel like a tired airing of the debate around violence in movies – all the more objectionable in a film with its fair share of mutilated female victims.

Given how much CGI has come along since 2010, you’d expect a more convincing presentation of moving animals’ lips and eye muscles mimicking human expressions, but clearly the budget didn’t reach much beyond the tea budget for Tenet.

Sergio himself has real gentleness and is a lovely character, and there is some amiable comedy about how he is starting to enjoy himself in the home. But he is marooned in a tricksy, gimmicky film.

All of this film’s various moods – erotic, euphoric, tragic – are unearned and despite what is clearly strenuous effort from the performers themselves, the acting is hammy and undirected.

The film is like an intensively bred hothouse flower that can’t exist in the open air.

It’s hard to shake the feeling that a genuinely arresting documentary was cast adrift somewhere along the line.

The restored footage is an intriguing relic – an offcut, raw copy. There’s something pleasingly voyeuristic about the experience of being allowed behind the velvet rope to watch these blusterers hold forth, although I expect their charms may be limited to die-hard devotees.

If all the money in the world is no guarantee of a good story, all the technical innovations – the dressing of sets, the creation of effects, the careful management of what is in and out of the frame – is of course no guarantee of one either.

There is a great, moving story to tell about the real Sam Bloom – but this film only gets part of the way there.

This tale of freelance underworld fixer Akilla Brown, played with careworn wisdom by Saul Williams, doesn’t live up to its sharp tailoring and has too much faith in fatigued beats from the gangster-film locker.

It’s a mismatched buddy film, but not entirely unsuccessful thanks largely to Jenkins, who can play a role such as this with his eyes closed, and McGhie who captures a mixture of righteousness and despondency.

With scant visual bite, perhaps it should’ve been called Evil Ear.

Kulumbegashvili’s style is confident, if derivative. Her technique now has to evolve away from these self-conscious influences.

Just occasionally, Lyne brings the right kind of flash, brash and trash to this fantastically silly and unbelievable story. But the film plods along in such a disconcerting way: there is no ratcheting up of tension, or plausible psychology.

Deadwyler’s soulful performance really grounds The Devil to Pay even as it cranks into revenge-movie mode. That said, if you want a slice of grim Americana to hunker down with, I’d go with Winter’s Bone or Frozen River.

This is a new twist on Home Alone, but not a very convincing one. [01 Apr 1993, p.4]

The directing is serviceable, but some rote imagery – especially the ominous crow of death – also likes to hit us over the head. Reddick should have concentrated on giving the characters that kind of treatment.

Films such as The 355 live and die by the quality of their action set pieces and while there’s a propulsive pace to the proceedings, there’s never quite enough genuine excitement.

There’s a sublime awfulness and condescension to this American vision of Ireland, adapted by writer-director John Patrick Shanley from his Broadway stage hit: a mind-boggling stew of bizarre paddywhackery that makes John Ford’s The Quiet Man look like a documentary about crack dealers.

This is a well-meant story of someone pulling himself up by his bootstraps, with some help from his grandma. But it feels contrived and self-conscious.

The entertainingly frazzled presence of Nicolas Cage provides a reason to pay some attention – but not much – to this otherwise uninspired and by-the-numbers martial-arts action-sci-fi crossover.

It’s all a bit earnest and derivative and sometimes a bit lachrymose, despite some perfectly decent performances.

It’s a sonorously well-meaning film that bathes everything in the bland, buttery sunlight that Disney always produces and in which the human performances are as opaque as the ones given by the horses

By and large, it’s an exasperating, simpering, Hello-magazine-interview of a film, blandly celebrating her “iconic” presence in the horribly overrated Breakfast at Tiffany’s, in which she was absurdly unrelaxed and self-conscious.

Clooney guides the performances competently, but the story drifts pointlessly into space.

There’s a cinematic slickness to the film (it was intended to be released theatrically until the pandemic) that separates it from its more noticeably shoddier fright night competitors but it’s mostly a familiar, if not entirely fruitless, trudge down a well-trodden path, one that takes us into, at times, questionable territory.

Day’s rendition is heartfelt. But the direction and storytelling are laborious, without the panache and incorrectness of earlier Daniels movies such as Precious (2008) and The Paperboy (2012). A cloud of solemnity and reverence hangs over it, briefly dispelled by the music itself.

The scene with a jetski on the edge of a waterfall deserves points, but this feels disposable: the Chinese New Year is earnestly referenced as part of the film’s strident and faintly humourless patriotism.

There are some nice touches here and there, like the whirling little demons with batwings who are devoted to Mandrake. But the script ignores all the interesting bits of the story – who are the witches chasing Earwig’s mum and how does she shake them off?

A Bridge Too Far is a fantastic historical and cinematic achievement but, if you're not a die-hard war obsessive, prepare to snooze.

The autistic characters feel more like dramatic tools to improve the circumstances of neurotypical people, rather than fully-fledged humans who think, feel and act on their own terms.

Where Godmothered should coast, it stumbles – swerving between unwieldy earnestness to something edgier and settling on something duller than it should be.

As the umpteenth time loop movie we’ve seen of late, Boss Level never offers a convincing enough argument for the gimmick to be leaned on yet again, a mish-mash of better movies blended into something a little bland.

More like 92% generic.

It’s a film trapped between a low- and a highbrow version of a story we know all too well, landing firmly in the middle of the road.

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.

Luridly coloured, handheld cinematography seems designed to distract from the shabbiness of the sets, while the muffled dialogue and too-loud backing tracks make it nigh on impossible to work out what the hell is going on.

You wouldn’t want to overstate the film’s achievements, given that a lot of it comes across as weird, self-pitying flapdoodle. But this is, as they say, progress of a kind.

This movie is content with congratulating itself for being on the right side of history, with little attention paid to questions unanswered and history unresolved.

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

Within the first 15 or so minutes of Apple TV+’s Palmer, something clicks in, a feeling of overwhelming familiarity, an inner voice quietly realising, “Ohhh, it’s that movie.”

There’s just not enough here to make it a worthwhile retread through familiar territory, proof of Wright’s basic competency as a director but nothing more.

This film could have done something more convincing with that mode of reverse-vertigo hinted at in its title: that fear and willed blindness about what looms over us. But if the movie helps to do something about climate change, such critical objections are unimportant.

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.

An unthrilling, bland drama.

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

This is another well-intentioned but syrupy and pointless hagiography.

Ultimately it is all a bit repetitive, derivative (particularly of other Asian horror pics) and somewhat sleep-inducing.

As compelling and as complicated as this fraught friendship might be, Hall’s script can’t quite find a way to take it – and the other pieces of Larsen’s novel – and turn them into something deservedly substantial.

The film is intensely, almost radically humourless, which is hard to ignore and in fact hard to bear, because of this film’s obvious resemblance to recent great movies like Booksmart or Lady Bird and particularly at times the hard-edged classic Election.

John and the Hole is well enough photographed and acted, but is really an oppressive and exasperatingly pointless piece of work, without consistency or the courage of its realist convictions.

Together Together suffers a little from being too polite, as a comedy it lacks snarl, and as a drama it lacks, well, event. Nothing much really happens – but maybe that’s the point.

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.

Although the main characters in this romantic tale are meant to be just over 18, this Sky Movies release is manifestly aimed at a much younger market with its sex-free storyline and nice-girls-finish-first morality.

It’s all just one monumental splatterfest, where the zombies’ army of the dead face off against people who aren’t very alive, and all basically without jokes.

A strong whiff of phoniness hangs over the whole thing.

Shepherds and Butchers doesn’t know which it is: the twisty legal drama that’s going to herd us through the issue or the ferocious expose, laying out the quotidian grimness of systemic death. It’s better at the latter. Even though much of the action is penned in the courtroom, the horror – and the interest – are played out in the past.

The result feels a bit like being fed a plate of arthouse vegetables, a collection of not always easy-to-watch films, randomly connected and with a total running time of 58 minutes that, to be honest, is a bit of a slog.

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

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?