Like McCall, [Washington] knows his tools, an arsenal not of guns and blades but of withering stares and crumpled smiles. It’s almost enough to outshine everything else.

It’s an almost entirely unfunny comedy from Debra Neil-Fisher, who edited the Hangover movies and makes her directing debut lumbered with a stinker of a script; it’s not smart enough to work as a grownup relationship movie, and laughs are too few for a proper comedy.

While occasionally emphasising that film-making is a collaborative endeavour, this is a cliche-ridden affair, reiterating the myth of the genius director whose pursuit of perfection is worth the detrimental effects it has on the cast, the crew and even the film-maker himself.

The second film adaptation of the phenomenally successful video game is a disappointment to rival the first.

There’s a whiff of the plane movie emanating from ho-hum Paramount+ comedy Jerry and Marge Go Large, an acceptable half-awake diversion when one has run out of other, better options in the sky but something that’s a little harder to justify on the ground.

Two solid hours of efficient Netflix content is what’s on offer here, the action-thriller equivalent of a conscientiously microwaved Tuscan Sausage Penne from M&S.

The crude, tedious action sequences with their video-game aesthetic are an incredible trial and there is nothing interesting or glamorous about these vampires at all.

Love in the Villa is feel-good, not try-hard. Nothing ever rises to the level of unwatchable, but nothing has any distinctive staying power, either – you may catch the whiff of romance here and there, like passing by a bakery storefront, which constitute the most alluring shots of the movie.

The film would be in the general neighborhood of irresistible if not for the wonky mechanics of story and character that convey a conflicted impression of Hart’s onscreen persona.

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.

A nice, creepy performance from Hemsworth, with Teller gamely going along with the script, but having stretched out the story idea to feature-film length, the film doesn’t really give the sense that it knows where it is going.

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.

Gray has given us tough, sinewy and memorable New York movies in the past such as The Yards and We Own the Night, but this is weighed down with a sentimental and self-regarding staginess.

Somehow it doesn’t all come together, delivering neither the stab of actual fear nor the satisfaction of real, plausible psychological insight.

Strident, derivative and dismayingly deficient in genuine laughs, Ruben Östlund’s new movie is a heavy-handed Euro-satire, without the subtlety and insight of his breakthrough movie Force Majeure, or the power of his comparable Palme-winning spectacle about the art world, The Square.

This is exasperatingly nonsensical and humourless: it is full of grand gestures, gigantically self-important acting, big scenes (though often bafflingly truncated), big emotions and smirkingly knowing dialogue. Yet I admit there is technique and gusto to the way it is put together.

As for Radcliffe, he doesn’t seem to have a funny bone in his body, but then it’s difficult to tell considering the preponderance of unfunniness in this script.

Like many fan favourite follow-ups, Hocus Pocus 2 is stuck, trapped somewhere between different times, audiences and tones, trying to do so much yet, in this instance, achieving so very little.

It’s ultimately a doomed voyage: for the crew, for the audience and for Universal’s monster movie strategy at large.

Sad to say, it goes down like a cup of tepid, milky and over-sugared tea.

Some shocking twists go off like well-timed bombs in the back half of the film, somewhat compensating for what is, in all honesty, a bit of a slog.

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.

White’s decision to focus on human emotion comes at the expense of some loftier concepts bound up in the story.

The clunky script feels like it’s been re-drafted and re-drafted to the point of incomprehension – blowing any chance of conveying a message. However well-meaning, it makes for a surprisingly dull watch. That said, my five-and-three-quarter-year-old (and clearly a few other younger people in the cinema) were a bit scared by some of the dicier moments of action-adventure peril.

The stinging tragedy of being gay at the wrong time in history is something that will always prove ripe for emotive, painful drama but director Michael Grandage struggles to pull our heart-strings, an easy target easily missed.

The script and direction by prolific low-budget film-maker James Cullen Bressack do spring a few mild surprises and minor twists to spice things up. That doesn’t quite make up for the tackiness elsewhere.

Ineffective leading duo and rote script hamper otherwise affecting true story of a couple tackling terminal illness

It is basically droningly reverent, as well as sometimes bland and naive.

While refreshingly centring a British Asian protagonist, Khan’s film is hopelessly bogged down by a thin plot and cliched dialogues.

There are depressingly few pleasures to be had here, and one of them is at least, for a while, playing detective trying to figure out just what on earth is buried at its centre.

This is a laborious movie whose final intertitles rather superciliously assure us that Inter Milan has made greater advances than other European clubs on protecting its young players’ mental health. That claim is as cloudy as everything else.

Traucki manipulates the suspense competently enough, but this film mostly depends on tedious jump-scares for its effect, and has a few too many scenes where someone looks around in terror at the water with a worried expression.

The most disappointing thing about the film is that it has none of the spark or originality of the first one and just parasitically drains its source material, incorporating details like the creepy black-light drawings and the borderline paedophilic subtext without adding anything substantial.

Bonneville’s performance will linger, the film not so much.

Despite the film’s historical interest, it plays like a Carry On film without the gags, and the way it is shot makes it look like a coffee commercial.

[Farrelly's] latest commits itself to regurgitating every Vietnam cliche with the laziest possible visual diction, led by an emotionally overextended Zac Efron.

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.

Every actor involved sells it hard and it’s good natured, but the unbelievability factor is just too high.

There’s an extraordinary story to be told here. It’s just a shame it had to be told in such an ordinary way.

The film is smothered with a syrup of condescension.

Everything about this film means well and it is acted with professionalism and commitment. But there is something too easy about it.

Sobel’s direction feels a little lesser when compared with his leading lady, relying on dream sequences to push us to the edge, never getting anywhere close to the iciness of the original or finding anything distinctive enough to separate the aesthetic of his take.

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.

This is the cinematic equivalent of the stopped clock telling the right time twice a day: a film full of stylistic overkill suddenly runs into the material that justifies it.

As hard as Cuoco and Davidson try at chemistry – and Cuoco, at least, seems to be really trying – this umpteenth spin on the Groundhog Day time loop is more irksome than endearing, cutesy than actually cute, a downward spiral of uncomfortably performed neuroticism that devolves into a borderline indefensible ending.

The sheer existence of Lou might be a step in the right direction for women over 50 in action movies, but it’s a misstep everywhere else.

This is a well-made film and nice looking, but there’s a tiresome predictability to a few too many scenes. It is a franchise that feels like it’s hit the rocks.

It’s solidly acted by Martell and Sutherland, although the latter seems as desperate as we are to let loose and have a bit more fun, and has a confident sense of place as King adaptations often do but it’s all rather unforgivably dull, a call to be swiftly ignored.

There are pieces of Luckiest Girl Alive that seem interested in a life splintered by trauma, in the relief of unburdening, the hunger for certainty over what happened, the thrill of playing on cultural expectations for women. But the story it ultimately tells is an empty, self-serving fantasy.

The lowish-budget production values, gestural performances and blunt moralism of the scriptwriting puts this very much in the heightened dramatic tradition of mainstream Nigerian cinema, but Emelonye has an accessible style and has picked the topical subject of cybercrime, an approach which might broaden the film’s appeal.

Pushing its luck at two hours, this eventually collapses in a heap of its own symbolism, barely unpacking the missing-persons intrigue it started out with. Nice views en route, but it’s a tale scribbled in haste on the back of a postcard.

Fraser does an honest job in the role of Charlie, and Hong Chau brings a welcome fierceness and sinew to the drama, but this sucrose film is very underpowered.

Stingily is relaxed and amiable, but in acting terms there may be nothing else there and the film doesn’t develop in any interesting direction.

Perhaps Schrader will indeed defiantly return to his accustomed theme for his next film – and this brilliant, restless director might well make it work. Sadly, this one doesn’t.

Neither slicing under the genre’s surface, nor dicing the heritage well, this reboot is more an unseemly act of IP cannibalism.

In short, this is not very good but there are worse things you could be watching as you fall asleep on the sofa after a heavy night’s drinking, which is exactly what it feels like this was designed for.

Bailey is the best thing about this film but, despite a team crammed with talent, this live action reworking can’t match the magic of the 1989 classic.

Without revealing which one wins out, I can assure you that a huge amount of murderous mayhem is unleashed, including death by woodchipper.

It’s a fascinating story but the resulting film insists on a kooky relatability that isn’t really there. A misfire.

Grisly sights are paraded before the camera (including a castrated hunter and untold bison gore) but Polsky lacks the visual flair to make the shocks visceral or the suffering anything more than superficial.

However earnest and heartfelt, the film doesn’t tell us nearly enough, or really anything, about Joe.

Only the robust presence of Russell Crowe – and what might conceivably be a sly visual joke about exiled Russian plutocrat Mikhail Khodorkovsky – make this generic slice of superhero action worth watching.

Channing Tatum’s hunky stripper enjoys some sizzling scenes with Salma Hayek but this eccentric threequel feels cobbled together.

The film feels over-determined and self-satisfied.

The Sixth Sense director’s apocalyptic mystery horror is short on both mystery and horror and the ambiguous finale is deeply ridiculous.

The decision to make the film a musical is a genuine head-scratcher, one that’s never justified or even mildly explained given that the two leads are not natural singers and so throughout the lunges into song feel awkward at best.

Even as glossy run-of-the-mill formula, it’s never even close to being as funny or romantic as it needs to be, devoid of fizzy one-liners and hampered by the pair struggling to muster up chemistry during phone conversations that never feel as lived-in as they would for friends with such extensive history.

There’s a little bit of fun and interest along the way and Lange has some fun with her eccentric persona, but this feels under-energised.

A film like Falling for Christmas doesn’t try or need to break the mold, it doesn’t even need to be that good, it just needs to be low-level competent and as these films go, it’s just about passable enough for those who tend to start getting excited about the festive period at least two months early.

No amount of spooky jump-scares can save Kenneth Branagh’s latest Christie adaptation, which wastes its atmospheric setting and stellar cast.

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.

Sadly, this fatally self-conscious and self-aware movie fizzles out– a process that seems to start with the opening credits.

Hanks carries the film with his personality and his easy address to the camera, but this oddity of a film never quite comes to life.

Bar Fight! wants to be the best night out of your life, but – mistaking dodgy drunken acting for ambience – it feels pretty ersatz throughout, like one of those pseudo-Irish bars that has bought in all its decor.

Hounded’s take is caricatural enough to neuter much sense of actual threat and stop it from being the Brit multicultural answer to Deliverance it sometimes feels like it’s stretching for.

Unfortunately, the dialogue sounds as if it was written by one of those newfangled AI chatbots, or maybe an actual human being who aspires to write as well as an AI chatbot but is not there yet.

So if current hit Violent Night sounds a little too classy and mainstream, then here is this shoddily made but tinsel-bright gift for you, the cinematic equivalent of a cheap soap and body lotion set bought at the last minute. It’s serviceable, but not a lot of thought went into it.

Mercifully, Murphy adds a dose of sharpness to the project, wrapping his lines in a delivery so sleek and spirited you’d almost think they were funny. And as for the central couple? The one that just wants to get married, culture clash be damned? They’re nice. So nice. Too nice.

It’s just about diverting enough for the most part but there’s something a little off about its pacing, French director Jean-François Richet (who peaked a while back with his propulsive Mesrine movies) struggling to corral his moving parts, suspense never really arriving as it should.

A lot of True Grit-style grizzled-guy-smart-kid bonding that’s hackily written but reasonably watchable thanks to Cage and Armstrong’s screen chemistry.

A director like Jonathan Demme or David Fincher would have gone for the jugular on this kind of material, but writer-director Matt Ruskin seems a little squeamish and keeps everything on the right side of contemporary taste. The chill of fear is missing.

Joaquin Phoenix is on really uninteresting form, playing to his weaknesses as an actor as he gives a narcissistic performance of pain, sporting a permanently zonked expression of anxiety and torpid self-pity at the misery that surrounds him.

This is an odd combination of broad semi-satirical humour and deeply serious hugging and learning.

It’s all socked over with great and gruesome conviction, but there isn’t the same character-related interest as the TV series could generate.

It’s both by the book and dispiritingly vague.

The chillingly unanswered questions of the story are all given the most obvious answers imaginable and relatability is carelessly tossed aside, along with logic and investment.

At nearly three hours long, The Wandering Earth II is packed with expository science talk, which gets more convoluted and tiring as the clock ticks on.

Shadowy it is indeed, but mastery is more questionable.

Ridley though is consistent and sort of revelatory, an actor who has struggled to find her footing post-franchise as is often the case, delivering a surprisingly nuanced and deeply felt performance.

Snook, of course, is typically excellent, fresh from her turn as Succession’s petulant, scheming Shiv Roy in another spiky role here – but even her performance, as it heightens towards a crazed delirium, recalls Toni Collette’s in Hereditary.

The performances from Hathaway and McKenzie are vehement and watchable, but the film itself is an unsatisfying and anticlimactic oddity.

It’s not that its heart isn’t in the right place, it’s just that its heart has been transplanted from somewhere else.

For all the grand gestures of musical theater, there’s an odd flatness to Theater Camp, a half-hearted and lackluster comedy from a group of Hollywood friends set at a summer performing arts community.

Perhaps this works for gamers, or within the context of the larger Sword Art Online mythos, but it seems a painfully rote instalment – a bit like being stuck watching a particularly garrulous and boring YouTube gamer.

A bafflingly botched misfire ... Quite what the film is and who it’s for remains a head-scratcher, a stilted jumble of somethings boiling down to nothing.

White Men Can’t Jump didn’t miss the first time, and it continues to resonate like a Shaquille O’Neal alley-oop. The reboot, a basic nostalgia play, shouldn’t scam anyone.

This is a film that is trying very hard to be liked, while at the same time complacently assuming its likeability is beyond question.

In the end this feels a bit too much like a knockoff of a superior product, like something one of these guys would sell out of the boot of their car.