This Carry-On really could have leaned in more to the classic trappings.

The Chernins are savvy enough to not wrap the whole thing in a neat “just be yourself” bow in the end, but Incoming could have worn a little more of its heart on its sleeve.

The drama is smothered by its own overwhelming sense of importance.

It’s the kind of movie that could be charitably described as “educational”, though probably not as much as the magazine article that serves as its source material. At least we know Perry is true to history in one major way: today, as was the case back then, these women deserve better.

This film is covered in a thick ectoplasm of disappointment.

It’s all more or less sufferable, and it may well keep young children quiet at Christmas … but we surely needed a higher joke content.

The lack of tension, innovative kills or atmosphere is far more of an issue, the film looking every bit as tinny and flat as the very worst that streaming has to offer.

Antoine Fuqua’s demi-biopic of Michael Jackson gives you the chimp, the llama, the giraffe … but not the elephant in the living room. It’s like a 127-minute trailer montage assembling every music-movie cliche you can think of: the producers’ astonishment in the recording studio, the tour bus, the billboard chart ascent, the meeting with the uncool corporate execs in their offices.

With its juvenile humor, fast pace and shaky handle on grownup feelings, Borderlands winds up resembling nothing so much as a children’s film that’s too violent for children to actually watch.

Some good moments and a great cast, but this doesn’t come together.

While we’re compelled along by an urge to know the film’s secrets, convinced that like-father-like-daughter, a twist is on the way, it’s clear from the outset that we are being guided by far unsteadier hands.

From the very beginning, this new Superman is encumbered by a pointless and cluttered new backstory which has to be explained in many wearisome intertitles flashed up on screen before anything happens at all. Only the repeated and laborious quotation of the great John Williams theme from the 1978 original reminds you of happier times.

Little Wing is overall an odd, unaffecting mess, other than, again, the pigeons, who look majestic on camera.

While Dauberman manages a handful of effective moments (a morgue scramble with a homemade cross and a drive-in movie light trick are particularly good), he’s never able to capture the slow, escalating dread that a story such as this demands.

The script seems so focused on the family’s resilience it never really confronts the horror of surviving, and being alive in a world with no oxygen, where nothing grows.

Even the fantastical elements don’t make that much sense, magic with rules that are loose and undefined, leaving us with an eye-roll of an ending we can see from a mile away.

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

Gorehounds will appreciate the film’s many beheadings and bloody murders.

It is a good idea and there are good moments in the film, especially at the very beginning when Anna and Aleks have a bizarre encounter with the old woman herself, Rita Concannon, strikingly played by Olwen Fouéré. But then things begin to slide. There are however some resonant ideas here.

The resulting movie is a technically competent piece of work; but no matter how ingenious its references to the first film (let down, however, by borrowings from the A Quiet Place franchise) it has to be said that there’s a fundamental lack of originality here which makes it frustrating.

It is genuinely mind-boggling, and yet this unsatisfying, naive and fundamentally uncritical documentary, despite careful modern-day interviews with the participants, doesn’t get to grips either with the story’s implications or with the story itself.

The mechanics of revealing who’s behind it all creak like under-oiled hinges.

Here the romance and adventure of the actual Apollo 11 achievement are undermined for a smirking, tonally jarring non-laugh.

Though I was willing myself to enjoy this fourth film, about the heroine’s adventure with a younger man, the Bridget Jones series has frankly run out of steam.

Trap is a thriller that incorrectly thinks it’s fiendishly smart. Maybe if it was more aware of how stupid it actually is, it might have been a lot more fun.

Chalk it up to an insufficiently distinctive screenplay and underwhelming plot, but for Travolta, Cash Out feels more like a mercenary case of cashing in.

[Miller] is a far better director than he is a writer though, and the film is crisply, thoughtfully made, at the least looking like it belongs on the big screen.

Casas has an undeniable nose for middle-class peccadilloes, but tone is everything.

It all amounts to a passable second activity watch at best.

The new biopic Young Woman and the Sea presents Eberle’s life as a broadly inspiring parable of female striving and triumph, its plot points readily mapped onto any struggle to break into a boys’ club.

There are a few laughs in Z2: of course there are. But they are algorithmically generated and corporately approved. It’s the kind of movie you put on an iPad to keep the children quiet on a long plane or train journey; nothing wrong with that of course, but the heart and soul are lacking.

The rangy and trenchant Eckhart does convincingly bring the ruckus in a way that suggests an ageing 007. But if that’s a promising sign for this new phase of his career, he can do better than this dour and charmless parade.

Some passable entertainment here but there’s not much adrenaline.

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.

Of course, Sorrentino’s way with a camera will always be intriguing and exhilarating to some degree. Yet Parthenope simply floats complacently across the screen, like a two-hour ad for some impossibly expensive cologne.

There’s a bit of soft-core humping and salty talk to break up the tedium, a phenomenon that’s fast disappearing from most mainstream films. The ripe naffness on show makes it somehow entertaining, especially as you can tell the film knows it’s naff.

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

Veteran actor JK Simmons (Whiplash) is the main reason to watch this basic horror-thriller, which isn’t as horrific or thrilling as one might hope.

While Sporrer in the lead role is fairly credible, a lot of the line readings by the rest of the cast are stilted in a way that a more experienced or native speaker would have picked up on. The result is that all the other characters except Amanda sound as if they’re in a radio play rather than an actual film.

Director Ali Abbasi has given us fascinating monsters in the past with Holy Spider and Border but the monstrosity here is almost sentimental, a cartoon Xeroxed from many other satirical Trump takes and knowing prophetic echoes of his political future. It’s basically a far less original picture.

Deadwyler remains credibly frazzled, pushed towards monstrousness in ways that will be familiar to anyone who homeschooled during Covid, and the bundled figure closing in on her is genuine nightmare fuel. Yet the rest of this hotchpotch never matches it, and flails in trying to explain it away.

At just under 2 hours, Black Phone 2, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a needlessly long and hugely unconvincing argument for the birth of a new franchise. The next time it rings, I recommend not answering.

Cue group hugs and sappy music as the credits roll.

It’s an indulgent doodle of a film, a self-admiring industry in-joke, an earthbound flight of fancy, unconvincing on a literal level, and unenlightening on a metaphorical level. Yet Deneuve, puncturing her daughter’s affectations and delusions with a wry and bemused smile, injects some real humour.

Civil and Exarchopoulos (and Frikah and Wanecque) give it everything they’ve got and that is a great deal. But this can’t prevent Beating Hearts being an unsatisfying experience.

The performances are exhaustingly unsubtle and undirected and the film’s failure to hit the comic note early on has the added disadvantage of undermining the avowedly serious moments of solidarity and body-positivity at the end.

This is the second highest-grossing movie of the year in Japan, but unless you’re a teenager, an anime junkie or really, really care about volleyball, you’re unlikely to get much out of it.

It’s as if director Warren Fischer has forgotten to write jokes in his script. No one says anything remotely humorous; instead there’s just a parade of lowest-common-denominator gags.

The Lego Pharrell is an intriguing, absurdist high concept, but not nearly as interesting as the real thing.

The tears of Roger Federer, along with the tears of Rafael Nadal and even the tears of Novak Djokovic, are what finally give some point to what is otherwise a pretty bland, officially sanctioned corporate promo for the Federer brand.

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.

These guys know how to hammer out a riff, with traditional chord progressions underpinning melodies that are easy to listen to but equally easy to forget afterwards.

The cranked-up pitchside action is hilarious, like a live feed from inside Cristiano Ronaldo’s head as he replays his own goals reel. . . Translating football into the battle royale format only goes so far, though.

The deaths here are neither funny nor scary or even gross enough to linger, we’re all rendered unshockable far too soon.

While the story of an old flame coming alight again can be a very poignant one, especially with an older age attached, there’s very little here to move us; a crippling dearth of chemistry between two likable enough leads who are forced into thin, circumstantial conflicts and overdramatic reactions that feel unearned and at times baffling.

There are some nice enough performances, particularly from Ken Jeong as JJ’s CIA boss and Anna Faris playing the high school deputy principal leading the choir trip. But tonally the movie is all over the place.

This is erratic storytelling, like a bunch of detached sketches and monologues, that leaves The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat making gestures towards the movie that it never really becomes. Let’s just hope we can see that movie some day.

The more accomplished the film-making becomes, the more we then expect the script to level up too.

Wilson and Farmiga remain solidity incarnate, capable of enlivening even speculative spiritual dialogue. The film-making pulls no surprises out of the hat, though, and gives no indication that it would if it could.

It’s all too silly and the writing too hokey for us to keep up and by the end, truly care about who survives or not.

The grindhouse thought experiments can be engaging, and a sign that the movie is more interested in speculative fiction than in preaching toward a single specific theme. But the movie rampages too quickly and carelessly to really dig into any of its characters.

Here is a toothless, aimless dramedy from Canada, a lo-fi excursion into nothing very interesting; it’s what would happen if Harry met Sally and maybe they weren’t meant to be lovers or even friends and were both a bit bland.

The film drifts along to a strangely implausible non-denouement with impermanent effects; she has all the backstory with work and family and he is weirdly blank in ways that don’t feel entirely intended.

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.

Marshall goes big on the use of freeze-frames, onscreen graphics deployed when introducing characters, and wink-wink meta jokes, all of which feel pretty tired and early noughties British crime drama by this point.

As a movie, Close to You feels too unfocused, a major win and a welcome return for Page yet an opportunity squandered.

At least Sweeney has good enough comic timing to make the thinly written dialogue sound vaguely amusing; he’s also adept at making his many reaction shots exaggerated just enough to tickle without descending into outright mugging.

If only the film were a little bit smarter and less predictable, it might have had a chance of becoming a cult classic.

Despite an intriguing high-concept lo-fi premise, its oddities and uninteresting superfluities mean that it never really emerges from its self-imposed inertia and gloom.

War of the Rohirrim is short on fiery floating eyeballs, wizards harnessing the power of the sun and ghost armies rising from caves – the kind of stuff you’d expect anime to go ham with, but perhaps not in director Kenji Kamiyama’s case.

Intriguingly, but finally a bit frustratingly, Perry is running four ideas at once, a kind of cine-quadriptych with the plurality signalled by the title.

The film is bursting at the seams with archival photos, footage and interviews; not to mention outrageous polka dot and bedazzled costumes. The incredible access is expected since Never Too Late is produced by John’s husband and manager David Furnish, who co-directs alongside RJ Cutler. But perhaps that’s why it also feels so precious and tempered.

Weirdly, I felt that this odd film might have worked better if it was just about the lonely man and the penguin without the Argentinian tyranny – or just about the lonely man and the Argentinian tyranny without the penguin. The real non-CGI bird itself is very sweet.

In plot terms there is something unsubtle, unconvincing and even absurd in where it’s all heading.

James had impressed with her debut, the dementia horror Relic, but any of that film’s texture or creepiness has dissolved on a larger scale.

The more British director Sean Ellis prods and provokes, the hokier it all gets, a film about cutting weight that could have benefited from a leaner edit.

The final half-hour seems to be a neo-western style melee which seems to go on for ever. Odd … and unrewarding.

The film-makers never probe psyches very deeply, not even the parents’. It’s just one contemporary travelogue cliche after another, admittedly beautifully shot in super high definition.

There is an important subject at the centre of this documentary from Korean-American film-maker Sue Kim, co-produced by Malala Yousafzai, but the film is finally let down by a bland and supercilious way of celebrating the women involved as a picturesque eco-feminist folk tradition, without actually tackling the hard questions their work is raising.

Try as writer-director Mike Flanagan might, there’s something coldly unmoving about it all, a disjointed and dry-eyed tearjerker that never rises above Instagram caption philosophy.

Stripping the narrative of its gods and monsters, and almost two-thirds of the chapters, is great but the vacuum isn’t filled with much more than his two magnetic leads and consistently sumptuous cinematography. The Return is gorgeous to behold, but there just isn’t enough there.

Minghella doesn’t seem confident in what he’s really trying to make, his film as plainly, ploddingly shot as a daytime soap with an equally rubbishy score. If he’s trying to do a knowing carbon copy of a bottom shelf VHS horror, then he hasn’t gone far enough into studied pastiche to sell it as such.

Jolie also lays it on thick stylistically, as if compensating for a hollowness at her lavish, sepia-toned film’s core.

Things eventually escalate, the pressure valve of pent-up emotions building and releasing. But it’s a long and demanding ride to get there, full of solemn looks and thousand-yard stares.

The transformation scenes are passable – including time-honoured fingernail- detachment moments – but far inferior to comparable scenes devised long ago by John Landis or David Cronenberg. Those estimable performers Garner and Abbott look exposed by a film project that simply feels rushed and undeveloped.

Paulson’s commitment is unwavering, and it’s refreshing to see her in genre material a little more grounded than what the various American Horror Stories have given her, but she’s an actor in search of better material and, sadly, Hold Your Breath means that search is ongoing.

Matters would have been improved from the audience’s point of view, however, if said digging had happened a little sooner; the film takes its sweet time to get to where we sense it’s going, and then quickly runs out of steam when it does.

The quirkiest thing about it is how much of that time it spends accidentally calling attention to its own overwritten, under-thought weaknesses.

The fight sequences are lethargic and feature a lot of extras waiting patiently for their cue to fall over dead. The Maltese architecture remains as lovely as ever; the dialogue is, however, shockingly bad.

The trouble with Nick Frost’s knowingly cartoonish and silly comedy paying homage to folk horrors such as The Wicker Man and Midsommar is that Frost has done this kind of movie before, and better.

A documentary might have served this material better, or a fiction feature that doesn’t have a made-up character as the lead.

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.

The stunts are duly impressive and filmed with vim, but the party apparatchiks would probably be happy with how thuddingly sentimental the film is, and how conservative it is about family values.

Here is a frustrating film that tries to tell two stories at once, and succeeds with neither.

The Electric State is a fundamentally unsatisfying and muddled film, even leaving aside the deja-vu.

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

Whatever might have made sense on paper just doesn’t translate to screen, a fun little concept that ends up being something of a drag.

For a film about advanced technology, it’s all awfully simple.