A genial, lightweight farce, which largely approximates Hornby's distinctively bittersweet tone.

The movie gets completely lost, unsure if it wants to be a serious exploration of repressed memories or a work of giddy, spooky trash.

The dialogue is at times embarrassingly bad.... On the other hand, the period details are impressive and must have cost a pretty kopiyka or two, and the film benefits visually from being shot on location.

It’s rare that a film so convoluted also manages to be so determinedly boring.

It’s a very minor victory to report that rather than being bad, it’s merely bland, an adequate milquetoast time-waster for a very young and very undiscerning audience.

I don’t believe that Get Hard sets out to be hurtful, and there are some good gags... but it does seem dumb and dated.

There’s undoubtedly a terrifying true story at the centre and it’s easy to see why the film’s producer Charlize Theron optioned the book but there’s something a little too flat in the delivery.

Ghosted is content dictated by algorithm at its absolute, industry-shaming worst, so carelessly and lifelessly cobbled together that we’re inclined to believe it’s the first film created entirely by AI.

Dear Santa is like watching Bad Santa slowly turn into Elf, an unsatisfying attempt to be both naughty and nice, ending up as nothing instead.

It can be a bit soppy, sometimes resembling Sunday-night TV comfort food, but this big-hearted picture wins you over, and there are certainly some marvellous panoramic shots of the Highlands.

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.

This is by-the-numbers stuff, not quite funny enough for comedy or having enough of the crazed seriousness that marks out a successful superhero franchise.

An ingenious idea for a suspense thriller – or maybe even an old-fashioned, "Wait Until Dark"-style stage play – turns out instead to be the pretext for a crass, over-long and tiresome splatter nightmare.

There’s nothing wrong with a big-hearted film for Christmas, but this commercial and formulaic slice of content is a toy destined to be forgotten.

It’s ingenious and watchable stuff, with cheeky twists, although the final escalation to full-on action mayhem is maybe a step too far towards pure absurdity. The film is also a bit lenient on AI: “Human or AI – we all make mistakes.” Uh … yeah. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Raven and Judge Maddox revive their human-digital chemistry for a sequel.

The interplay between animated and live-action elements remains a selling point: Hank Azaria again gives exemplary pantomime as Gargamel.

The studio has managed to deliver a follow-up that’s even weaker than its predecessor. In crude terms: Alice’s second trip to Underland wasn’t worth the wait.

The stakes here are too low and so is the entertainment value.

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

Aiming for more fun is no bad thing but Imaginary is far too dumb and ungainly to move at the pace required and bring the thrills it should, a theme park ride that should be closed for repairs.

Romcom fans deserve something with more heart.

Against considerable odds, a very, very low bar has been met and then shuffled over with this mostly effective and incredibly nasty update, a jolting little slasher that should repulse and satisfy those with a suitably depraved idea of what they are clicking into.

My All American is awful; but it gets points, I suppose, for at least looking professional.

It’s been compiled with enthusiasm, flashes of skill, and a certain devil-may-care cheek – an infusion of newish blood for a Brazilian film industry that’s been badly drained in recent years.

It's as substantial as seeing "The Exorcist" redone on Snapchat – and let's not even consider the implication of casting black and Latino performers as Satan's minions, because clearly its makers haven't.

There are sparks of interest and some powerful moments, but it is structurally disjointed, tonally uncertain, unfocused and unfinished, with some very broad drama-improv-class acting from the kids and a frankly unrelaxed and undirected performance from Halle Berry.

The whole thing is really waxy and sad, like the immobile face of co-star Sylvester Stallone; although the chance to enjoy the always interesting, never-as-big-as-he-should-have-been Matthew Modine, still looking pretty fly with a shock of white-and-gold hair, is very welcome.

Though it supposedly argues against human beings turned into synthetic quasi-droids, Uglies feels like just another throwaway product.

There are always some laughs to be had here, and Ben Stiller’s couture legend now has an endearingly muppety look.

There is a creeping and depressing awfulness to this sentimental silver-years comedy.

As ever with a Sparks story, the action takes place in a sugary vision of small-town America that does not correspond with the real world at any point.

This could provide some small-screen entertainment for bored kids on a rainy day. But really: enough.

This semi-efficient, Belgian-set timewaster fuses Taken with Unknown, and almost works.

It’s a deafening misfire, like the most unbearable, unwatchable daytime TV soap filled with the most awful self-conscious hamminess, parodic emoting and pointless shouting-at-each-other acting.

It’s a ragbag of action scenes which needed to be bandaged more tightly.

Silly but fun adventure starring b-movie specialist Doug McClure as an adventurer trapped on a mysterious island where badly animated dinosaurs roam. [26 Apr 2000, p.24]

20 years later Gans still can’t figure out how to escape the open-ended confinement of gameplay, or even give it the forward momentum of a game with a mission.

Helms, a funny performer, is just the face of a mining expedition for easy yuks out of a recognised title. What that says about our regurgitative culture is rather depressing. There’s so much nostalgia on our screens right now. I could really use a vacation.

As Valentine’s Day treats go, however, Love Hurts is the cinematic equivalent of a wilted bouquet from a petrol station forecourt.

There are no left turns or bumps along the way, just a smooth straightforward journey from cliche to cliche, boredom setting in fast.

This could have been a good premise, but the basic idea of the pandemic and bubbling up itself now feels spurious and dated, and there just aren’t enough funny lines to carry this film through its punishing 126-minute running time.

The Road Chip isn't exactly what I'd call a good film and has almost nothing going on in the visual department, but for those saddled with kids for an afternoon, you could do a lot worse.

A real Christmas miracle would cause every copy of this film to spontaneously burst into flames.

Big but boring, expansive but cheap-looking, Allegiant spins in place, waiting for next year’s Ascendent to come along and offer resolution. In all candour: you can do without it.

There is a spectacular scene in which someone drives a tank off a bridge, and JK Simmons gives the film some ballast as the guys’ scowling commanding officer, but the rest of the time this resembles a TV movie of egregious averageness.

It features laborious acting and directing, and a screenplay whose revelations are uninteresting, even were they not guessable long in advance.

Writer-director Isabel Coixet has taken a real-life love story from 20th-century LGBT Spanish history and turned it into something bafflingly passionless, joyless and excessively tasteful, an anti-alchemy assisted by stately monochrome photography that makes every frame look like a postcard from an art shop.

A competently made yet maddeningly dull attempt to bring the hit video game to the big screen makes for an instantly forgettable night at the movies.

Despite its obvious desire to push buttons, Animal doesn’t have the guts to actually own its transgressions.

Here is a scary movie that is so hammy and so clunkingly written it will reduce your brain to the consistency of muesli mixed with diesel.

Now I understand why Jesus’s childhood remains such a mystery: the story is unbelievably boring.

At least Pacino doesn’t seem to be taking any of it seriously as he phones in an uncharacteristically low-volume performance whose most distinguishing feature is the Mitteleuropean accent that makes him sound as if he’s reprising his performance as Shylock from The Merchant of Venice.

A hammy and facile family drama in the TV-movie-of-the-week mode.

Three big names doing a professional job … but the target isn’t found.

Regretting You seems unsure of its own melodrama, and careens between what should be tear-jerking moments of unfathomable grief and too-cutesy romcom fluff like a teen learning stick-shift.

He's done it again. M Night Shyamalan has done it again. Again. Done it. Again. He has given us another film for which the only appropriate expression is stammering, gibbering wonder that anyone can keep making such uncompromisingly terrible movies with such stamina and dedication.

A good performance from Tom Hollander can’t save this stodgy, ungainly and strangely reactionary family drama from the French writer-director Amanda Sthers.

The stupidity of it all is certainly diverting but it’s all too scattershot and at times stiflingly portentous to cross over into pure camp.

This is film-making at its most cynical. But none of it actually makes much sense.

It’s written to a machine-tooled formula, with two more episodes naturally planned to gouge cash out of the fanbase, and whatever interest this film has dies about five minutes before the closing credits.

This is the film’s grossest crime. It’s dumb, it’s long, it’s dull, but it isn’t quite bad enough to be camp.

A dull and predictable sunshine noir that wastes the time of those involved as well as ours.

There are kernels of something interesting here: an interracial best friendship and business partnership in today’s America, or navigating best friendship on the cusp of middle age, or maintaining the ethics of your business and passion under the growth mandate of capitalism. It would take thought, and jokes constructed with a motivation other than how to include the word coochie. It would take an understanding that women want to see sex and their bodies talked about filthily on screen, but are smart enough to know that’s not always enough.

It’s a crunching disappointment: a dull, crass, formulaic and frankly misjudged chiller.

It’s a film of remarkable idiocy, most notably in the portrayal of the local police who are so incredibly unhelpful that it borders on parody.

This laid-back amusement should not be misinterpreted as competent storytelling. Though some of the jokes land, that’s entirely due to the performances; there’s not one example of clever writing in the entire picture.

Joyless and tedious, a reboot quite without the first film’s audacity and fun... It’s a movie that is going through the intergalactic motions.

There's undoubtedly a good film to be made out of the scramble for oil in the Arabian desert in the 1920s – but this, for all its herculean efforts, is not it.

Director Duncan Jones, a self-professed Warcraft fan, has clearly put a lot of love and care into fleshing out a story, but it’s questionable whether it was ever really merited. There’s a terminal flimsiness, as if this virtually-derived world hasn’t quite assumed three dimensions.

It’s warbling warbling warbling piffle.

It’s a strange, naive work, with something fundamentally misjudged about the drama, characterisation and casting.

The whole thing hangs on a twist that anyone who has ever watched a trashy thriller will have cottoned on to at around the 20-minute mark.

This lavishly produced and costumed European co-production is handsomely cast – but the range of talent here feels wasted on what is a fundamentally dated and stereotypical drama, whose Bohemian passion is diluted.

No one here seems to know what they’re doing and, more importantly, why. A strong contender for 2022’s most pointless movie.

There’s zero, nay negative, fun to be had here, a potentially interesting, if not exactly original, sub-Manchurian Candidate idea (pre-programmed victims/accomplices are activated by a phone call) taken nowhere of interest.

This bloated, featureless, CGI-heavy movie is not so much stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, as stealing from Guy Ritchie, Batman, Two-Face and a few others – and not giving back all that much to the audience.

Just occasionally, the story accelerates to a canter,and Gilbey works hard to deliver some bangs for your buck. But it soon collapses into cliches. "Plastic" just about covers it.

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.

Love Again, by ceding some space to the Queen of Feelings, has moments that play. I can’t say it was good, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it.

This is carelessly made trash but worse, it’s carelessly made trash that thinks it will spawn not just a franchise but a cinematic universe.

The Kindness of Strangers is one of those terrible ideas for a film: ensemble dramas that are superficially attractive because of all the big names shoehorned into the cast-list.

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..

There are some almost-laughs here and there, but please tell me that we aren’t in for The Hitman’s Mother-In-Law’s Agent’s Bodyguard in 2023.

The low stakes of the camp drama and the soundtrack’s indistinguishably familiar pop (adaptations of contemporary Christian hits, plus four original songs) aim for easy, catchy, comfortable fun – a breezy intention which casts some of the script’s insensitive moments in even harsher light.

As usual it’s left entirely up to the beleaguered Johnson to make any of it even remotely watchable. She remains a compelling presence, trying her darnedest with lifeless words, but, again, she’s stranded by the energy-sucking vortex of nothingness that is Jamie Dornan. He’s better than this...but he knows it and his boredom is lazily apparent throughout.

Going mad with power should be at the very least fun, exhilarating in the indulgence of an artist’s most outlandish whims. Instead, Snyder’s would-be magnum opus is merely boring.

You’ve seen this movie before with peppier actors, and not tethered to a visually uninteresting set that looks like a remainder from a 10-year-old episode of CSI.

This very uninteresting and uninspired story plods along for an hour and a half, though there are some almost-interesting surreal scenes when our heroes find themselves in weird alt-universe dimensions.

Young kids will find the second, more action-heavy half of the film entertaining, but everyone else will want to crawl into their shell.

The problem is that Rosenberg's drama all but sinks under the weight of its serious subject matter and ponderous script; and there are too many iffy performances from the big-star cast (Faye Dunaway, James Mason, Orson Welles and all). [04 Feb 2006, p.53]

Rather than screaming for them to go the other way, you'll be urging them to accept fate and die instead.

This shameless shilling comes packaged in an equally offensive story that foists Hollywood’s au courant fixation with intergenerational trauma on to a character heretofore occupied above all with napping and eating.

This could be satire, but Roth and screenwriter Joe Carnahan refuse to take a stance. Ironically, a film about a guy with guts doesn’t have any itself.

It’s competently acted and made – her direction easily trumps her writing – and while there’s nothing close to suspense, there are some effectively visceral moments of gore.

Altogether, this is a dim affair, lacking Hollywood's usual, gooey efforts to convince one of the benefits of family values. [04 Aug 1994, p.T7]