Kid Like Jake is an earnestly intended, seriously acted film, painful in various intentional and unintentional ways.

The story has a moderate charm, but is less baroque and ambitious than many Japanese animations.

A couple of scenes in Destination Wedding fall so calamitously flat I had the disconcerting sensation I was watching the film dubbed in a foreign language or for a spoofed internet meme.

Filho’s film is never less than heartfelt and strident, like a tale torn from life, or an episode of Jeremy Kyle played as stentorian opera. And this, I suspect, may be part of the problem. Crucially, Angel Face lacks shading, pacing and nuance.

This is a stridently, bafflingly cacophonous movie which despite some smart, shrewd touches, is pretty much content with its single note of shouting acrimony and finishes by immolating itself in martyred self-pity.

It is often poignant and humorous but also placid and complacent, with performances bordering on the self-regarding and even faintly insufferable.

It is a rather slight dramatic experience.

It really is strange, a film with what is actually a pretty good premise for a comedy, but with no interest in actually being a comedy and also no interest in being a thriller, or even that mysterious erotic parable that it seems to be claiming to be.

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 is more than half an hour longer than the Stanley Kubrick film, although it seems more than that – laborious, directionless and densely populated with boring new characters among whom the narrative focus is muddled and split.

This is a film in which you will hear a letter read aloud, with a voice-over saying the words “you dared to dream”, delivered without irony. It is, as they say, what it is. Perhaps most interesting is Walker’s depiction of the mosque congregation. With its politics and divided factions, this part of the film feels utterly authentic and is dramatically interesting.

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

It’s an undemanding watch, easily digestible while on in the background, but even easier to forget.

The twist ending is muddled, and has a rather bland and emollient equivalence between intelligence agencies.

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

There are some heartfelt moments, but this is an opaque and frustrating experience.

Disappointingly, it is a borderline dopey, sentimental children’s adventure mostly without the wit and spark that converted grownups and kids to the Lego films.

This Maleficent is disappointing, although Jolie certainly sells it hard, as does Fanning, who takes it as seriously as anything else in her career.

The spark that was there in the opening section disappears and the film splutters out into something directionless and derivative and dull.

Plotkin’s relentless button-pushing, coupled to the script’s cringe-inducing yooftalk, instead mark Hell Fest as unmistakably the work of middle-aged execs trying to jab suggestible teenagers back into cinemas.

This bland and predictable animation about an outsider kid who makes friends with aliens pinches an awful lot of its ideas from superior family films, without reviving any of their wonder or fun.

This Joker has just one act in him: the first act. The film somehow manages to be desperately serious and very shallow.

Mélanie Thierry does her best in the lead as Duras, but her character is maddeningly flat and dull.

There are good intentions and good performances here, but they’re squandered in a movie that isn’t quite sure what it should be and how far it should go.

There are scenes that snap together nicely with some sharp and nuanced observations. But the film is saddled with uninteresting surface-level characters. There’s a phoniness exuding from the entire project, made all the more discouraging since the plot-light, shaggy dog story is trying to feel so real.

It is a story seemingly meant to be funny but only fitfully successful in this mission, and way too pleased with its own brand of deadpan wisecracking.

It’s a victory lap, which will probably be enough for fans content to share Q’s presence and nothing more. But this movie isa cataloguing of a man who lives in three dimensions. In sticking to recitation of well-known historical fact and flattery it has taken the easy way out.

The romantic relationship with the “good Nazi” is a little too glib (quite as it was in the film version of Suite Française) and the camp scenes have a misjudged sheen of romanticism and come perilously close to the bad-taste border. But Stenberg’s performance is good.