Even though it’s largely deeply undistinguished work, credit is due to whoever rustled up some great supporting actors for little roles around the edges, such as Welker White as the mother of one murdered kid, and Samiah Alexander, who is a hoot as a punctilious trucking company secretary.

When it’s all over and the big twist you saw coming in the first 15 minutes has been revealed, you feel empty, a bit depressed, and like you need another cup of coffee.

This horrifyingly yucky, toxically cutesy ensemble dramedy creates a Chernobyl atmosphere of manipulative sentimentality, topped off with an ending which M Night Shyamalan might reject as too ridiculous.

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.

It’s a serviceable, watchable thriller, with very gruesome images.

Films like Bride Hard, proudly recycling well-known popcorn plots without any attempt at originality, rely on heavy-lifting star power but there’s just none of that here.

For all its apparent sombreness and thoughtfulness, The Sea Of Trees is an exasperatingly shallow film on an important and agonisingly painful subject - depression and suicide. This it slathers in palliative sentimentality.

This has been a regular payday for Beckinsale and she certainly gives it her all, but you have to wonder why she bothers, certainly now that we know what she can do with more interesting material.

[A] lazy affair that aims for inspired lunacy but misses the mark by a mile.

This movie is a case in point. It's a film which is so demeaningly bad, so utterly without merit, that there is a kind of purity in its awfulness. There is a Zen mastery in producing a film which nullifies the concept of pleasure.

Despite an idiocy metastasized into the marrow of its script impervious to any radiation, there is, as with many of Sandler’s productions, at least something of an upbeat quality to its reprehensibility.

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.

Rose looks great – her androgynous poise reminiscent of the young Angelina Jolie – and does a capable job carrying Vanquish. But you wonder if this noir-filtered, John Wick-apeing thriller is a little too stripped-back for its own good to advance her career.

These films were always down on women – Armstrong squanders the peerless Krysten Ritter as eye candy – but this slovenly runaround only exposes the low opinion they’ve harboured of their target male demographic. We’re meant to identify with them?

Much improved by its new cut, Revolution is an atmospheric depiction of soldiers' lives in the American revolutionary war – despite its flaws.

What’s left after the gore is stripped away is a mildly bloody, meatless horror.

You watch the resultant, wholly bloodless carnage with brain in neutral and eyes glazing over, as you would a re-run of Police, Camera, Action! at two in the morning.

It’s a nonsensical premise and a pretty incoherent, painfully inept film.

God’s Not Dead 2 is a much better movie than God’s Not Dead, but that’s a bit like saying a glass of milk left on the table hasn’t curdled and is merely sour.

Semen cocktails, broken testicles and dancefloor laxatives are among myriad reasons to avoid this grim grossout comedy.

An odd attempt at genre-surfing that ends up well out of its depth.

A demonic limo, driverless behind its tinted windows, vrooms around killing people in this squashy horror that fails to match other vehicular creepies like Christine and Duel. [24 Sep 1999, p.20]

It is a film so awe-inspiringly wooden that it is basically a fire-risk. The cringe-factor is ionospherically high.

It’s run-of-the-mill, and crassly manipulative.

We have been sold a false bill of goods.

Some laughs – and some unintentional eeeuuuwwws.

You rarely get the sense of Fogelman’s characters being complex figures with internal lives – instead they’re merely there to smile weakly through whatever trauma their sadistic creator puts them through.

The script balances kiddie-friendly winsomeness and knowing winks for grownups, and is more tightly constructed than you’d expect, with even fleeting throwaway gags delivering plot payoffs later on.

Where the first few Hellraisers had an interesting if somewhat icky erotic tang to them – alluding to S&M/fetish culture as much as horror, and featuring female protagonists – Judgment is less about desire than just straight-up misogyny and gory, gross-out money shots.

An evolutionary marvel, Reeves has figured out how to adapt to the hostile environment of mediocrity, and here he takes to the gobbledygook and gaps in logic like a genetically altered fish to water. When the guy’s good, he’s great, and when he’s bad, he’s still serviceable.

This final chapter, like its immediate predecessors, falls somewhere between footnote and outright detritus, like a plastic bag being blown through the multiplex by a stiff breeze.

Each assassination sequence is so ridiculously protracted and inefficiently constructed that it would make a good running gag if the violence wasn’t the one thing the film seemed to take seriously.

It would be risible if it weren’t so offensive, mean-spirited and, frankly, nasty.

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

Movie 43 is sketchy, in every sense. It's a collection of short comedy films in the manner of the 70s cult classic "Kentucky Fried Movie," each with a separate director, in which many very famous actors have been persuaded to take part.

Even the vocal presence of Sean Connery can't lend interest to this tedious, crudely animated, bafflingly conceived cartoon feature, liable to please neither children nor adults, developed from a 2006 short film to which Connery also contributed.

This lifeless, by-the-numbers production is an excruciating exercise in cliche and tedium. Its sole joy is in trying to figure out which of its leads is overacting most.

Nothing about the film comes close to authenticity and it’s largely down to Penn’s remarkably amateurish direction.

The awful truth is that this is a generic derivative horror script.

Novelistic, rich and awfully silly, London Fields – like Ben Wheatley’s take on High Rise - is a long-awaited adaptation of a popular and gloomily prophetic book, that seems unnecessary.

Ban this sick filth.

Oldman delivers his lines with a strange lethargy and tonelessness, as if – just before speaking – he has just realised that income tax will have to be deducted from his fee.

This film is one long biopsy of pure horror: the tumours of sentimentality and bad acting metastasise everywhere, and Bernal, in particular, is horrendously bad.

This week we learned that 99% of Sun readers want a return to capital punishment. I learned that 100% of me wants it for 100% of people involved in this romcom.

Ski Patrol is produced by Paul Maslansky, who was responsible for the Police Academy series. Substitute a ski lodge in Utah for the well-known Academy and you have the film in one the kind of baleful adolescent material that would knock the warts straight off Cromwell's face. [14 Jun 1990]

The Emoji Movie is a force of insidious evil, a film that feels as if it was dashed off by an uninspired advertising executive.

It’s lazy on every level.

This movie is ridiculous.

Bizarre, colossally self-indulgent ... This one feels as if Kechiche has simply given us three-and-a-half hours of his unused beach and nightclub footage from the first film.

Watching this film is a nightmare in all the wrong ways.

All the material about social media looks forced and behind the curve, and nothing about the movie is really convincing or entertaining on any level, making it valueless as drama or satire.

It’s one of those rare, unicorn films that doesn’t have a single redeeming quality. I’m not even sure it qualifies as a documentary, exactly, so much as an elaborate piece of designer taxidermy, horribly overpriced and ice-cold to the touch and proffered like a medieval tribute to placate the greedy king on his throne.

Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party is the cinematic equivalent of a drunk man at a sports bar sucking back whole jalapeño peppers hoping for applause without ever being dared. The amusement in watching doesn’t compensate for the pity one feels for someone so desperate for attention.

Even without the current headlines, United Passions is a disgrace. It’s less a movie than preposterous self-hagiography, more appropriate for Scientology or the Rev Sun Myung Moon. As cinema it is excrement. As proof of corporate insanity it is a valuable case study.

It's not terrible, by any means: just not nearly as funny or cruel as its killer premise suggests.

It's all a bit tame, predictable and muted; the inevitable revelation of German decency seems contrived and there's an outrageous plot cop-out towards the end. It's a reminder of how David Lean exploited this kind of drama with more potency in "The Bridge on the River Kwai."

There are some gruesomely ingenious moments in this gleefully yucky horror-comedy from director Conor McMahon, starring the standup comic Ross Noble. But I have to say it somehow wasn't funny or scary enough – though I do have to admit it is always more than revolting enough.

Fashioned out of well-worn, if not hackneyed, horror tropes, Demonic is no meta-level deconstruction of the genre, but it’s a more than competent, fugue-like manipulation that freshens familiar components with a tricky structure.

This has cosmic charm aplenty.

It makes the text feel newly alive, bristly, radical. A palpable hit, in any language.

The opening section, mixing shots of the Earth from outer space with recollections from astronauts about what it felt like to see it for real, is deeply moving and beautifully edited. However, once the film settles into a groove of guilt-tripping the viewer and trots out talking head after talking head...the experience grows numbingly monotonous and painfully sanctimonious.

Star power aside, it’s a modest, reined-in entertainment, rejecting musical numbers for a simple whistled refrain, and clocking in at just two hours.

Suri is also testing the modern audience’s willingness to suspend disbelief, and the material he’s working with here – unfolding the happenstance-heavy mystery of a woman at the mercy of the men around her – proves barely fit for this purpose, or any other.

ABCD2 is the latest film to recognise that – however you gender your gaze – there is an abiding pleasure in watching bodies in motion, and choreographer-turned-director Remo d’Souza keeps nudging more of them on.

One innovation: the application of thrash metal to fight scenes, which at least hushes the shriller voice artists.

Director Prabhudheva’s idea of comedy is broad and very much soundtrack-led.

If the plot’s familiar, no imagination or expense has been spared in mapping the kingdom it winds through.

Tamasha keeps shapeshifting, in ways both intriguing and self-defeating.

If it’s far from bleeding edge – within days, it’ll look as dated as Tron and The Lawnmower Man do today – it’s a modest upgrade on all those killer-website movies that popped up a decade ago, keeping us at least semi-interested as to who stands and falls.

There are moments when the film aches for focus. This again is down to Galloway. He is, like Blair, charismatic, opportunistic and never entirely consistent. The documentary lives and dies on those strengths and weaknesses.

The film’s technical achievements can’t compensate for a deeply unsatisfying screenplay.

Clinton, Inc.’s director, Bill Baber, can’t even slander a dead woman without coming off like an idiot.

Blinky’s cranked-to-11 embrace of Australianisms feels a little tacky, like looking inside one of those city shops that flog kangaroo keyrings and green and gold bucket hats. But it’s nevertheless refreshing to see an Australian movie so heart-on-sleeve about expressing national character.

Very solid, very sound entertainment, with thumpingly good Pritam songs that make Eye of the Tiger seem like pipsqueakery.

For all its topicality, Step Sisters is a bit underwhelming, although it makes for entertaining lite fare in the vein of Pitch Perfect or Bring It On, and the choreography is first-rate.

Harrelson is an affectionate director, finding memorable bits for performers all across the cast list, and his writing is peppered with arresting phrases.

As must be obvious to real connoisseurs, I am hardly a natural consumer fit with this franchise. It may well play with fans, but will in all probability make no converts.

Post-Slumdog, Hollywood and Bollywood have repeatedly attempted to collaborate, with mixed results: here, they’ve produced a properly expansive and enthralling afternoon matinee.

This is a conversation starter, not especially distinguished as film-making but vital and deeply felt.

[An] affecting and sincere documentary.

Under Slee’s direction, even the teensiest creepy crawlies find themselves noted and taxonomized; it’s encouraging to see a format that generally sets audiences to non-specific gawping attempting to focus and refine our gaze.

This production’s triumph is the room it’s granted Rajamouli to head into the fields and dream up endlessly expressive ways to frame bodies in motion.

Baahubali demonstrates the pleasing, straight-ahead simplicity of certain videogames: whenever our hero accomplishes a task, some new challenge presents itself.

Prolific sports documentarian James Erskine (Pantani, The Battle of the Sexes) here takes on his most ambitious project yet: a study of Sachin Tendulkar – the closest thing Indian cricket has to a living deity – played out over Test session duration to soaring AR Rahman compositions.

It’s a handsome film, but in the end perhaps Wes Anderson’s pastiche approach in The Life Aquatic (in which Bill Murray’s character is a tribute to Cousteau) more vividly brought to life the era of the last great adventurer-superstars.

It’s entertaining enough, but certainly didn’t have me reaching for a jumper.

With its creepy music and only-just-adequate performances, this will serve nicely at future slumber parties for thrill-seeking tweens.

When the comedy becomes less of a focus and will-they-or-won’t-they drama rolls through tropey cogwheels, Alex & Eve loses some of its cheeky lustre and never quite gets its back again.

Everyone here emotes like they’re acting in an electric toothbrush ad.

As a film, it’s altogether keener to Turtle Wax the brand than stop for even a moment to examine what Ferrari the man, logo and company ever stood for.

Antiporno has a kind of energy, but is also shallow and frantic.

Subversive entertainment it ain’t. But nor is this well-paced yarn – with pleasing albeit narrowly scoped performances from a perky cast – bereft of pleasantries and surprises.

Uncommonly alert to small, telling details, while more expansive in its attitudes, the result proves far richer and worldlier than anything previously observed coming down the Khyber Pass.

If October feels more tentative than Piku, which had rock-solid star turns to ground it, its emotion is at the last earned honestly: any structural wobbles will be nothing compared with the audience’s lower lips come the finale.

An opaque, but beautifully composed film.

Even narratively, the new film is a dud.

What could have been a who’s-sleeping-with-who, tangled-web-we-weave drama quickly evolves into something much more compelling as Nation blurs the line between thriller, psychological drama and character study.

This is an enthralling drama: the best and most interesting Australian biopic since Chopper in 2000.