In its earliest stages, Turning Red is bracingly different, and filled with an earnest warmth when it comes to themes of girlhood and the panic-inducing weirdness of the human body. That it becomes a loud and action-driven spectacle seems disappointingly inevitable for a Disney film.

Another Simple Favour has no aspirations beyond being a quick morsel. And a morsel it is.

As Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die gets weirder and weirder, it only further provides the evidence of its own thesis.

This 1950s Hollywood examination of mental illness won an Oscar for Joanne Woodward, who plays a frumpy housewife, a sultry seductress and an urban sophisticate, giving a virtuoso performance which manages to compensate for Nunnally Johnson's flat direction. [25 Jun 1999, p.21]

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a patchwork quilt of familiar notions.

The conclusion that Chaplin remains inscrutable feels neither new nor substantial.

There’s an odd timidity here that borders on self-denial.

Paul Feig nods to ‘Rebecca’ and ‘Vertigo’ in this pulpy adaptation of the Freida McFadden bestseller, which has a secret weapon in the form of a quite brilliant Amanda Seyfried.

Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz’s impassioned and atmospheric direction really takes hold.

It lacks the intimate and the specific. But, hell, Starve Acre does end with one of the oddest, most off-putting images you’ll see at the cinema this year.

It’s a busy catalogue of gruesome absurdities that’s more consciously surrealist than the Final Destination series’s Mouse Trap-style executions, akin instead to the bizarro corpses crowding the afterlife’s waiting room in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (1988), with a splash of Peter Jackson’s early, gore-splattered horror-comedies.

There’s a surprising amount to enjoy here, with director William Brent Bell (behind The Boy franchise, with its equally ludicrous premise centered on a haunted doll), making the smart decision to turn the unintentional camp of Orphan into intentional camp, alongside adding a dose of satire about the corruptive pressures of the nuclear family.

Robert Taylor plays the Roman general and Deborah Kerr the Christian slave he's attracted to, but it's Peter Ustinov, hamming it up a treat as the Emperor Nero, who steals the show in this long and lavish epic. [05 May 2007, p.48]

The Equalizer 3 is about as good as the first film – it neatly counterbalances Fuqua’s baroque, blood-and-guts action with Washington’s ability to command attention while sitting perfectly still.

A film of two halves - and not only because of its use of voguish split screen. The first, filmed faux-documentary style, is a grim police procedural featuring Henry Fonda's grizzled detective. In the second, Tony Curtis puts in a nuanced performance, playing against type as the real-life serial killer Albert DeSalvo, who killed 13 or more women in their homes. [16 Oct 2010, p.26]

Most of Silent Night’s pleasures are to be found in the strength of its cast – Knightley, whose comic talent is frequently underused, can turn on a kind manic perkiness that’s as endearing as it is absolutely terrifying. It’s a smile that says, yes, if I ever were to murder you, they’d never find the body.

It’s a rare achievement contained within an even rarer type of film: a Black-led, British romantic comedy. But there are, unfortunately, limits to how new and invigorating Boxing Day actually feels.

Loach is so cohesive here, in accommodating the expansiveness of all these social ills, that characters have an unfortunate tendency to become mouthpieces.

Stewart’s febrile, sensitive performance and Larraín’s trademark lyricism give it an emotional kick that such predecessors lacked.

Elvis's best film, in which he quite convincingly plays an unsavoury character sent to jail for killing a man in a bar brawl, but is reformed after he's introduced to the music business by his country-singing cellmate and becomes a big star. [18 Oct 2008, p.48]

While it pleads for us to reckon with the ugliest of truths, it shuts the curtains before its own reckoning is done.

It is hard not to wish Wright had made an entire film set in the Soho of the Sixties rather than one that pays tribute to it through the prism of the present day. It is a pity, too, that the magnificent Taylor-Joy’s role wasn’t further foregrounded.

The Card Counter is claustrophobic, certainly – but not always in the right ways.

The irony of Eternals is that, despite its characters explicitly tussling with their own lack of humanity, Zhao has delivered one of the most emotionally grounded entries in the entire franchise. She puts into full view the kind of moral quandaries that Marvel’s only ever really danced around in the past – the cost of individual life, or whether humanity is even worth saving in the first place.

There’s a playfulness there, and a real burst of imaginative thinking, but Gyllenhaal has regrettably pulled a Frankenstein herself. All those ideas, yet they haven’t quite stitched up together to make a beautiful corpse.

It is, at the very least, far more interested in words than ideas – perhaps the defining feature of Sorkin’s work.

Returning director Kevin Greutert knows what’ll satisfy his audience: a few buckets of blood and the gag-inducing sound of crunching bone. Here, they’ll get exactly what they want.

The film’s so plain in its ambitions – in its sense of giddy, well-intentioned fun – that it feels a little pointless to scorn its more superficial choices.

Cameron, at this point, seems interested less in being an artist than a cinematic frontiersman. That’s the point of The Way of Water – it’s not about what the film has to offer us now, but what it tells us about the future.

It’s only regrettable that the film itself didn’t heed one of cinema’s most important lessons – when you put Nicolas Cage in a movie, it’s guaranteed no one will care about anything other than Nicolas Cage.

Fire Island is a true, escapist romcom at a time when audiences are still undernourished when it comes to queer romances that don’t end in death and despair.

Even if 28 Years Later feels like being repeatedly bonked on the head by the metaphor hammer, Boyle’s still a largely compelling filmmaker, and the film separates itself from the first instalment by offering something distinctly more sentimental and mythic than before.

Frozen Empire is a notable improvement on Afterlife – funny, silly, and a little scary, with its pockets full of hand-built doodahs and the occasional excursion into the realm of pseudo-mythology and parapsychology.

Really, all you can do is take what joy you can from Paddington in Peru, because its pleasures are rarer but still sweet.

So much time in The Legend of Ochi is spent traversing these beautiful landscapes looking for something to grab onto – a thought or an emotion – but there’s nothing really here other than the simple conflict between nature and the men quick to whip out their shotguns when faced with the unknown.

True Things isn’t quite as effective as the director’s 2018 debut, Only You, which tracked the fluctuating desires of a couple (played by Laia Costa and Josh O’Connor) undergoing IVF treatment. But it does reiterate Wootliff’s fluency in the unvarnished, messy spaces of female desire, operating in a way that doesn’t sacrifice the actual sexiness of her work.

There is something pleasantly nostalgic about the film’s straightforwardness.

Audiences may spend the running time of All My Friends Hate Me waiting impatiently for the shoe to finally drop. But Stourton and Palmer’s script points heavily at a secret that’s far less satisfying in the reveal than it is in the build-up. Maybe that’s the point. Here’s a film that leaves you with the same sickly, hollow feeling you might get spending time with the ghosts of your own past.

Pretty Red Dress reaches out gently to a few untouched corners of British film – not only in how it tackles gendered expectations, but in how it finds in Candice neither hero nor villain.

It was Gyllenhaal, here in a producer role, who initially bought the rights to Gustav Möller’s Danish film. You could call this a vanity project, but at least his presence adds a dose of originality to this carbon copy remake.

There’s enough warmth to Guerrero’s script, co-written with Shane McKenzie and Perry Blackshear, to paper over the odd rickety effect or wooden performance.

When the real shock occurs, it doesn’t feel cosmic so much as deliberate manipulation by a filmmaker’s hand. The rhythm feels off.

It’s hard to say how these films will be remembered in the grand scheme of comic book history, but, with The Last Dance, we can at least be reminded that sometimes they actually managed to have fun with these things.

Even when Leonard’s chatting away with his semi-captors, his words seem rather weightless, as if they were something simply to fill the air while his mind quietly calculates his next move. He’s like a chess master, in a way, and few actors could maintain that magnetic stillness quite like Rylance, who always seems to express so much while doing so little.

The Last Duel is perfectly engrossing as a slice of historical intrigue, a clash of iron wills and iron swords, all muddied on the battlefields of medieval France. But there’s a tendency here for the film to present basic facts about contemporary gender politics as some earth-shattering revelation.

There are all kinds of deception being practised in this whodunit, then, not least by Alfred Hitchcock. [28 Feb 2009, p.48]

It's not that Paperback Hero is a duff film, exactly. Just a little flimsy, a trifle slight, a mite schematic. The story turns dog-eared midway through. [03 Sep 1999, p.19]

When all roads lead back to Evan, and to Platt’s misstep of a performance, the film becomes one giant gamble that’s quite disastrously failed to pay off.

The 355 is a mark of progress only in how wholly unremarkable it feels.

Does the fact the film largely ignores the book’s treatise on nature and virtue absolve it of all connections to Owens’s real-life controversies? It certainly doesn’t, on an artistic level, improve what’s already contained on the page. Newman’s vision of rural South Carolina is scrubbed so clean you might as well call it #swampcore – the Spanish moss looks bright and pristine, the flower petals on the water almost consciously arranged.

For a film that’s so explicit in how it tackles trauma, it makes for a frustrating experience.

There’s a lot, in fact, to Uncharted that feels haphazard or under-considered.

The Scargiver is at least basic enough to feel relatively inoffensive; the first film’s uncomfortably vague deployment of racist and sexual violence has been reduced to a single reference to the empire’s hatred of “ethnic impurity” (never to be picked up again).

You could claw together some brilliant short films from the best sequences here, but this 36-years-in-the-making follow-up should make us all question Tim Burton’s modern storytelling sense.

And I hate to ask for this, in a world where an excess of lore has been the downfall of so many projects, but Day Shift lacks any sense of context to what exactly this vampire hunter union is or does.

Back to Black is a fitfully enjoyable little package that will do wonders for the careers of Abela and O’Connell. But unlike Winehouse’s oeuvre, it’s not worth taking seriously. It’s just too afraid of the dark.

Clooney and his screenwriter, Mark L Smith, tell their story with rousing traditionalism, reinforced by Alexandre Desplat’s idealist score, but little more.

At no point here – or during the last film – does it feel like anyone actually figured out how Sonic works as the centre of a live-action movie.

A Good Person has a tendency to approach moral complexity as a checklist.

While the newer Bad Boys films have delicately sidestepped the contemporary conversations around law enforcement, Axel F seems happy to offer up its protagonist as a figurehead for the active endorsement of police misconduct. I’d argue you could just let Harold Faltermeyer’s earworm of a theme song drown out that noise – but, alas, for a certain generation, that’s also been ruined by the crazy frog on the invisible motorcycle.

It’s hard to treat Joyride just as a pleasant but easily disposable romp, especially when Reynolds loads up the film with so much cheap symbolism.

Meg 2: The Trench is enthusiastically married to the idea that you must eat your vegetables before you get your dessert. But, really, it’s too little, too late.

While the calibre of star voices here is superb, it seems odd to centre the entire film around Johnson and Hart. So much of their chemistry in Jumanji or Central Intelligence was rooted in odd-couple physical comedy – a guy who’s always cracking jokes about his own short stature versus the closest we have to a living demi-god.

Gadot remains Gadot, and there’s no hope that she might transform into something new because Heart of Stone can’t imagine its existence without her star quality.

There’s not much about Opus, really, that fully convinces.

Marley, as played by Kingsley Ben-Adir, is presented as a centrifugal force in Jamaican art, culture and political thought, but the film also threatens to flatten him into just another tortured male genius.

Apologetic sequel brings back franchise veterans Sylvester Stallone and Dolph Lundgren and ups the violence from ‘Expendables 3’ – but that’s not enough.

Though Dominion marks the end of the Jurassic World trilogy, I can’t imagine this is the last we’ll see of the franchise. As they say, life finds a way. Hopefully next time they’ll have actually figured out what they’re doing.

I guess we should at least be thankful we’ve been spared the monstrosity of a CGI-rendered Judy Garland as Dorothy (that said, there is some extremely disconcerting use of de-ageing tech elsewhere). But, as those witches might say, one good deed hardly changes things for the better.

Their film is so stuffed with incident – all of it preposterous, and occasionally insulting to the intelligence of its central quartet – that it sours what could (and should) have been a joyful celebration of desire and indulgence at any age.

How to Make a Killing is too timid to either defend his actions or to render him genuinely unlikeable, leaving Becket as nothing but a formless pile of dough.

Ultimately this is an expensive Netflix documentary that’s provided maximum exposure to individuals who consider any kind of attention a win. It leaves a bitter, nasty taste in the mouth.

The bigger crisis at the heart of the film is its inability to justify why we should have come back here in the first place.

Coogan doesn’t quite have the earnestness (and perhaps no actor would have the earnestness) to sell the scenes in which Tom monologues to the penguin about his political apathy or the inevitable tragic backstory that made him who he is.

All the pleasures of The King’s Man find themselves inevitably undermined by its hollowness.

Pileggi’s screenplay and Levinson’s scattershot direction, like De Niro, make little out of the clash of ideologies at the film’s centre. What could be biblical, feels passionless.

It Ends with Us is capable of poignancy. Yet it’s also entirely ill-equipped to square such sensitive material up against scenes of diamanté boots being sensually rolled down, an out-of place but very funny Jenny Slate rocking up in a string of Carrie Bradshaw-worthy outfits, or Lively simply revelling in that deep, half-laughing voice that made her an icon of casual cool on TV’s Gossip Girl. This film’s good intentions feel misplaced.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife is simply the things you already knew and liked, but repeated with unearned gravitas.

Affleck and Damon, at least, try to pump a little crotchety humanity into their characters. But any hope of suspense, any genuine mystery over who (if anyone) is on the path of betrayal, is swiftly dashed by how poorly defined these suspects are.

This is a film that’s fun to complain about.

Then again, could a film in which a band of elder statesmen consider a loose collection of half-baked thoughts to be art itself be a satire of how some music legends like to conduct themselves? Maybe. But then you’d think under those circumstances I’d be laughing more.

Alpha has some tremendous moments, but the movie is undermined by its own dense and impenetrable storytelling style. It would surely have worked far better as an immersive installation piece than as a two hour feature.

There’s little effort to make us understand the failed systems that led them to this point, or the new normalcy they’re forced to adjust to – indeed, any of the more subtle, complex facets of this story.

Its self-congratulatory crusade to restore its subject’s reputation has, for the sake of entertainment, distorted reality to the point that it borders on farce.

All that’s really changed is that How to Train Your Dragon is now distinctly less charming and less playful than before, with even its pièce de résistance Toothless losing some of the cute factor (he looks real mean when he growls).

No matter how enticing the prospect may sound on paper, and even with the efforts of director Chris Columbus (of Home Alone and Mrs Doubtfire fame), the whole affair is so flimsy you’ll lose nothing from watching it on an iPad while cooking dinner.

The film has a tendency to circle around the same jokes like a dog chasing its own tail (the film reminds us that they like to do this, too).

Most unwary cinema-goers who see The Magic Flute will vow never to cross the threshold of an opera house as long as they live.

It’s hard to demand all that much from a Mario Bros film when its source material has been historically devoid of plot, but shouldn’t we be allowed to demand a little more than mere competency?

There’s a through line, buried in here somewhere, about how it’s harder to be creative, easier to destroy. Unfortunately, A Minecraft Movie proves its own point. Creativity took too much effort. Easier to destroy the spirit of the video game instead.

This is a toned-down, more limply palatable iteration of William Friedkin’s 1973 classic: the projectiled pea soup is gone, the verbal abuse has been whittled down to a single ‘c***ing’, and any and all acts committed with crucifixes barely register a shock.

There are major moments of pain and betrayal that should feel like a punch but remain curiously ineffective. Sussex’s wonderful secret beaches and pockets of drizzly suburbia somehow seem strangely anonymous here. And Ron Nyswaner’s script is full of lines of clunking portent.

The latest Marvel blockbuster – starring Anthony Mackie and Harrison Ford – has drawn backlash from all political corners. But a film this bland and flavourless doesn’t warrant such handwringing.

Jason Schwartzman, as “weatherman and amateur magician” Lucretius Flickerman, lands some surprisingly good one-liners. Their performances hint at the true narcissism of Panem – something you’ll struggle to find in any of the limp, neutered romantics of The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.

All in all, the film is exactly as you’d imagine a Hollywood remake to be. It’s too po-faced, too stripped of its meanness. And so drearily inevitable.

Whannell has the right idea. Wolf Man just needed a little more time in the lab.

The talent of tomorrow has to play second fiddle to a generation’s inability to let go of the past. And that’s something a quick body swap can’t solve.

In trying to limit the scope – and offer Ridgeley his moment in the sun – Wham! inadvertently becomes a music documentary without much interest in music. Like the band themselves, this is a breezy watch, but if there’s profundity beneath the perms and the cut-offs, the film struggles to find it.