It is more of a holiday romance and the well-intentioned performances lead nowhere.

Home Alone meets The Lost Boys in this trashy half-way entertaining Christmas vampire movie from director Sean Nichols Lynch; it’s a black comedy with some silly splattery gore.

The unreality of the film never quite equates to dishonesty about what exactly happens when two people not in the first flush of youth decide to be in love, but it takes an effort of will to suspend disbelief and submit to a well-intentioned fantasy.

Franco deserves points for attempting something with idealism. But the execution falls flat.

Some guilty pleasure thrills are what’s on offer but they are frankly annulled by Liam Neeson’s autopilot dullness, a driverless car of a performance from an actor we know to be capable of much more.

Back to Black is essentially a gentle, forgiving film and there are other, tougher, bleaker ways to put Winehouse’s life on screen – but Abela conveys her tenderness, and perhaps most poignantly of all her youth, so tellingly at odds with that tough image and eerily mature voice.

If only the transitions in and out of the dollops of broad sex comedy weren't such a bumpy ride.

The point of a phoenix, dark or otherwise, is that it rises from the flames. But these are the flames in which this franchise has finally gone down.

For the impressively moronic dialogue, Oldman brings a lack of imagination so complete that he could plausibly explain this performance away as a high-concept ironic joke.

As a thriller, this is not really thrilling enough. And as a biopic, it’s not necessarily representative of the spirit of the man. But it’s solid enough film-making in a traditional no-frills mode that will always find an audience – even if it’s not particularly trendy.

This film is no masterpiece, but the franchise has mutated, just a little.

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.

The Circle is all foreplay, playfully prodding without providing a satisfying payoff.

The plot proceeds like a mid-season episode of CSI: Anywhere, just with better cinematography and a mournful cello score.

It’s a bit derivative, with borrowings from a handful of other films, but there are some nasty moments.

Like so many of Shyamalan’s adventures, Glass starts strongly and fizzles, a dramatic droop which is initially camouflaged by the escalating grandiosity of visual rhetoric, something febrile and high-concept that is visionary in everything except having vision.

It’s refreshing to see a genre film-maker do more than rely on simple tricks and although his knack for dialogue might be questionable, he’s more than capable of constructing a nifty set-piece.

Screenwriter Mark Bomback has adapted the three-hankie property from author and movie producer Garth Stein, and Simon Curtis directs. They have created a film aimed with lethal efficiency at your tear ducts like Chuck Norris putting his boot into your kidneys.

Rudd and Black make the new Anaconda easy enough to accept as a comedy with a dash of clunky effects-based creature action, rather than a full-blown horror-comedy.

While a younger audience might be enthralled by the fast pace and bright colour palette, those understandably curious adults sitting nearby will find themselves watching in horror, a deep, sorrowful howl emerging.

It’s a film destined for iTunes rental status, but kept from flatlining with a pretty dependable string of stupid yet funny one-liners, and a nice turn from TJ Miller as Aniston’s slacker brother.

It really is very strange, with every idea, every scene, every moment lavishly garnished with floridly serious, mannered language. A little of it goes a long way.

A very uneasy, uncertain shocker, quite unable to digest the mix of horror and black comedy which became a genre-must after the first TCM.

When not being used to grind dull culture-war axes, sputtering impotent anger is a comedy staple. It just needs to be funnier than this.

It comes across as twee, comfy-cardigan film-making. And, Eddie Izzard’s best efforts notwithstanding, it simply isn’t very funny.

It's been a while since I've seen a silly baddie get the seat of his trousers set on fire, run around squawking, and then sit down in a water trough with an ecstatic sigh.

As a whole, it’s not exactly a masterpiece, but amiable and funny in a way that’s much harder to achieve than it looks.

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.

Escobar is not without interest, sweep or colour, but bears signs of high-level, edit-suite indecision over what sort of movie it wants to be. It’s an alluring product, inexactly cut.

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.

At a time of nostalgia overload (Clueless, Legally Blonde and Urban Legend are next), Robinson finds a way to make her attempt not exactly necessary but unpretentiously pleasurable enough for that not to really matter. There might not be a next summer but this makes for an entertaining last hurrah.

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.

A head-smashingly redundant waste of time, talent, energy and resources, a shockingly early yet entirely convincing contender for worst film of the year.

An attempt to revive the Hasbro franchise is a careless fumble put together without a hint of effort or interest.

Edge of the World fails to do justice to this fascinating and deeply complex chapter in British colonial history.

It takes a good hour or so to get going, but then it builds up some watchable spectacle – although Gray goes way overboard with the moody, fireside lighting, and the rousing orchestral score gets all ceilidh-cutesy for the happy montages.

Transcendence suffers from terrible timing, arriving a few months after Spike Jonze charmed audiences with his semi-futuristic love story "Her," which flipped a century’s worth of technophobia on its back.

This a watchably stylised period film, with interesting visual setpieces and faces looming up at us out of intricately contrived backgrounds.

There is a creepy, undead feel to this lumbering comedy set in the offices of Google, and Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn have a distinct Baron Samedi look in their eyes.

Not even the fierce wattage of Toni Collette’s talent can light up this hokey crime comedy.

The Aquaman franchise is just flatlining, floating through the dreary depths like the kind of discarded plastic bag which is going to choke the last remaining vaquita porpoise.

While The Ice Road might not be quite as cut-and-paste as some of the others (there’s less revenge-taking, skill-listing and name-taking than usual), it’s still familiar enough for it to feel like we’ve seen him do this exact thing before.

Tom Gustafson's film proves genial to a fault.

Frankly, the performances and line-readings are uneven. The couple's journey through night-time London is interesting: both have a painful past that they are at first reluctant to discuss, especially Maya, but these disclosures are not dramatically developed in any really satisfying way.

Once upon a time, this wackiness had some novelty value. Now it’s tedious.

An entertaining showcase for two first-class performers.

Brave it might be, but there’s nothing all that “new” about the world revealed in this latest tired and uninspired dollop of content from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The script gives us less about their emotional connection and to be honest, the will-they-won’t-they-stay-together drama is a bit of a snore. The best scenes are down the rugby club, portrayed with tremendous warmth as a happy-ish semi-dysfunctional family.

Given the nasty taste in the mouth that the film leaves, it seems almost besides the point to worry about plot holes.

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.

It squanders the talents of its star, especially for this particular brand of unsettling, on a bizarrely paced script that adds up to nothing.

It can be overwrought and even absurd but lively and heartfelt.

It’s by-numbers filmmaking that rarely adds up to anything worth the price of admission.

It is smart and surprisingly literate, its only downfall being in that, in riffing on the work of a very talented writer on the subject of men and women, its screenplay could have used a little more of Jane Austen's immaculate sense of storytelling.

Vin, great ridiculous beefcake lunk that he is, does provide us with some fun.

It won’t be remembered as Zhang’s best film, but the director’s artistic touch is on display in his long panoramic sweeps and artful use of colour. Simultaneously futuristic and historic, the visual spectacle carries the film.

Director Denzel Washington and his stars do their best with this bland, shallow and awkwardly structured film.

Robert De Niro does further damage to a reputation much battered by "The Big Wedding."

It’s frustrating to see yet another first-time film-maker overstack their plate in such a way that feels less like the product of impressive ambition and more empty bravado.

It is colossally indulgent, shapeless, often fantastically and unthinkingly offensive and at all times insufferably conceited. Yet it is frustrating precisely because it sometimes isn't so bad. There is something in there somewhere - striking images and moments, and the crazy energy of a folie de grandeur.

These 88 minutes never drag their heels long enough for us to get hung up on their myriad implausibilities. One of those low-expectation releases that’ll see you right if Infinity War remains sold out.

It reduces a complex and extraordinary case to soap. It makes you care less, for all its heavy-breathing and cheapo coaxing.

Well, it’s a good performance from Woodley.

It's always a pleasure to see Collette, a performer who always cranks up the energy, and yet here, as so often, she gives the impression of a ferocious screen intelligence somehow not being used to the full.

Calamy gives it everything she’s got but this film is fundamentally heavy-handed.

Bekmambetov directs with gusto, and the forthright absurdity of the story, combined with its weirdly heartfelt self-belief is winning.

Dosunmu, an established music video director, assembles beautiful shots of longing, pain, yearning, closeness and jealousy between Beauty and girlfriend Jazz (Aleyse Shannon). But strung together by Waithe’s too-spare script, they feel isolated and go nowhere.

Audiences hoping for lashings of graphic violence may be disappointed that not all of these problems involve gallons of blood – this is a relatively gore-free thriller – instead, it’s all aboard and anchors aweigh for some larky tension between likable characters who find themselves plunged into a nightmare scenario.

Jane Austen’s calm, subtle novel gets the Fleabag treatment in this smirking romcom; it has more wrong notes than an inebriated squadron of harpists, including everything but a last-minute rush in a barouche to Bath airport.

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

It is an ordeal of gruesomeness and tiresomeness that was every bit as exasperating as I had feared.

An inoffensive time-filler that’s hard to love but easy to like.

Robert Pattinson has to do an awful lot of hollow-eyed smouldering in this hammily enunciated French period drama, taken from the 1885 novel by Guy de Maupassant.

Braff and Union have passable chemistry, but Union’s charisma and confidence is magnetic in any context including this one. It’s all breezy – there are no bad actors or malicious intent (other than that one Calabasas woman), so the drama is light and the messes are quickly cleaned up.

It's indulgent, but Macdonald's performance is attractive and relaxed.

Night Teeth isn’t quite as dreadful as its truly dreadful title but it’s just as forgettable.

Sally Potter’s The Roads Not Taken is a sad, painful, self-conscious vignette of a film with forthright performances; it’s a chamber piece in many ways, but with bold flashback excursions that come close to causing its emotional engine to overheat.

This movie sure means well, and it’s just entertaining enough to (slightly) slip off the shackles of the great cultural conformity factory it ultimately represents.

It’s a riff or theme-variation on Kieślowski’s A Short Film About Love – with a twist of Hitchcock’s Rear Window – doggedly spinning a spider’s web out of itself. The result is intricate, elaborate, though a little nebulous.

Trash Fire is too quick to burn through its ideas.

Forty years after John Carpenter made the defining slasher movie, director David Gordon Green has made a creditable stab, as it were, at reanimating the title.

The flat-out dullness of Arthur is the point of Dante Ariola's debut feature, but it's also its undoing.

It’s pretty much a laugh-free film to make you appreciate the work of Nancy Meyers or Richard Curtis; their films may look easy or corny but they have something this doesn’t, a kind of buoyancy or a way of alchemising all the luxury tourist incidentals into something entertaining.

A film full of people smiling knowingly and laughing delightedly at each other’s not-especially-funny-or-interesting remarks, and it’s all the more insufferable for things the film gets fundamentally and structurally wrong.

Suburbicon is too lightweight and mannered; it lacks proper fury. Watching it is like having your trouser-leg savaged by an energetic small dog.

This inevitably doesn’t have the charge of the first story, but it is still interestingly weird and dreamlike, and quite disturbing. A commercially driven sequel, sure – but still effective.

Ritchie’s film is at all times over the top, crashing around its digital landscapes in all manner of beserkness, sometimes whooshing along, sometimes stuck in the odd narrative doldrum. But it is often surprisingly entertaining, and whatever clunkers he has delivered in the past, Ritchie again shows that a film-maker of his craft and energy commands attention.

For pure gonzo outrageousness and steroidal silliness, this action spectacular made for Netflix by Michael Bay has a certain amusement factor and thumpingly unsubtle oomph.

Despite the action-comedy bona fides of director Paul Feig, helmer of the far more entertaining Bridesmaids and Spy, and the comedic chops of Awkwafina and John Cena, Jackpot! is an unsteady balance of dark and light, a tinny and discordant mishmash of stunts, ridiculous characters, ludicrous stakes and attempts at zeitgeist.

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.

A misfire not quite bad or powerful enough to undo Janiak’s great work but one that questions whether the world of Fear Street is one we need to spend much more time exploring. If the introductory trilogy started us off on a thrilling journey, here we’re brought to a sudden dead end.

Someday Hollywood will think of women as more than fallopian tubes in heels; until then, we're stuck with this kind of project.

Bill Condon's Candyman II: Farewell To The Flesh is a woefully inadequate sequel with straight-to-video written all over it. [30 Nov 1995, p.T9]

Droll, witty, and proportioned like the proverbial outdoor brick-built convenience, Johnson is well placed to realise the superhero movie’s potential as surrealist action comedy. It’s a shame that all these other DC-ensemble heroes crowding into the action are frankly not really in his class, although Viola Davis’s brief cameo as Task Force X chief Amanda Waller brings the menace.

The Fleabag star’s detailed performance in this missing-child thriller makes its myriad implausibilities all the more dismaying.

There is no romantic tragedy, nor even a visible grit in the oyster: just a dogged, talented, unassuming professional showing us that it’s about the perspiration, not just the inspiration.

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.

Writer-director Kay Cannon’s new Cinderella isn’t bad, and Camila Cabello makes a rather personable lead, carrying off some of the movie’s generous helping of funny lines.