There are moments that catch – a cafe date between Tolkien and his future wife (Lily Collins) is one, and a knockout scene with the mother of his closest friend is another – but for the most part this is stolid film-making that lacks the imagination and creativity of its subject.

Despite Crowe’s commitment to going balls-out nutso in the role, the film unravels, a casualty of slap-dash plotting, lazy directing and a reliance on tired Catholic horror tropes.

Much of it borders on the inept and the embarrassing, and that goes for the title song sung by Matt Monro, the "singing bus-driver".

Something in the Water is competently filmed, with lots of propulsive underwater shark’s eye shots of the flailing legs of the bridesmaids. But there’s rather too much time spent watching the girls bobbing and bickering in the middle of the ocean as they wait for the next assault from the circling fish.

Kenneth Branagh’s unabashedly feelgood memoir of growing up in Belfast as the Troubles erupted in the late 1960s suffers from a problem of perspective.

The film fetishises female strength, but only in its ability to prop up men; its women remain prettified empty shells.

The performances, especially the brittle Louis-Dreyfus, are admirably grounded, but the script’s comedy wastes time with lazy barbs about European brusqueness and American exceptionalism abroad.

Despite the best efforts of a game John Cena in the title role, the laughs are a little thin on the ground.

It’s thuddingly predictable stuff that limps through a plot involving nefarious sex traffickers, treachery and a liberal smearing of Miami sleaze.

This is the first film that Mendes has directed from his own screenplay (he had a co-writing credit on 1917), and for all its visual flair, courtesy of veteran cinematographer Roger Deakins, there’s little to suggest that Mendes has the writing chops to match his directing skill.

The truth about Treasure: it’s too conventional to satisfy devotees of Lena Dunham and too much of a vehicle for Dunham to please anyone else.

Plus points include a punchy soundtrack of 90s hip-hop, and Anthony Ramos and Dominique Fishback, heroically holding their own as the hapless humans roped into the Transformers’ thunderous mess.

The murky cinematography further hinders a picture that looks as though it was shot through raw sewage.

It’s not subtle, or particularly clever, though Glow’s Betty Gilpin is fun to watch as an ultra-violent ex-military veteran with a southern drawl.

Adams is a vivacious screen presence with a twinkle in her eye, and Jordan can’t quite match her, unable to draw out any real inner turmoil in a character who is respectable to a fault.

There are a few rascally moments, such as Jim Broadbent settingoff roman candles in his back garden, but mostly it’s a staid affair, laden with dragged-outscenes of the gang doing thejob.

It’s an intriguing idea that might, perhaps, have sustained a short film.

Aldrich is at his most crudely anarchic and macho celebrating the saintly community service and childish off-duty antics of Los Angeles's hard-nosed uniformed cops, starring Charles Durning, Perry King et al. [25 Feb 2007, p.6]

The journey is a nice excuse to paint Tom into a cheerily cosmopolitan portrait of the UK.

Merlant’s performance is committed, and the film takes her romantic and sexual fixation with the ride seriously, immersing the viewer in her dazzling, neon-lit world.

Mena Massoud’s boyband haircut brings a certain charm, but like the rest of the film, he’s blandly competent.

This brilliant original thinker is crowbarred into a stolidly conventional “triumph against the odds” narrative. It’s not an entirely terrible film. It’s just not the film that RBG deserves.

Shanley has an Oscar and a Pulitzer (he wrote the sublime Moonstruck, and the stage and screen versions of Doubt). Here, that’s easy to forget, given the cartoon accents and overblown metaphors about horses destined to jump the fence.

At least the CGI is clever, the consistency of Venom’s viscous, hostless form moving between molten metal and melted chewing gum.

Mainly, though, the problem lies with a screenplay that fails to create suspense, or even to persuade us to care who killed a brilliant but unpopular hair stylist. Still, credit to the hair and costume design team for a collection of extravagantly silly creations.

Fans of the band might enjoy watching the movie cycle through their hits (and there are many), but those, like me, hoping for a more robust appraisal of the late Freddie Mercury may find themselves disappointed.

The combat sequences and SUV shootouts are grimly efficient, but the picture is baggily paced.

The film doesn’t understand what mode it wants to operate in; serious thriller with emotional stakes or contrived, cynical satire (a set piece around a Twitter hashtag seems to suggest the latter).

You could make the argument that this film is effective enough as a series of stunt gags in 70s costume, and an alcoholic bear certainly made me crack a smile. But the subplot involving DC’s attempts to bring up his 14-year-old daughter is a saccharine afterthought, and feels oddly out of step with the vacuous nature of the rest of the film’s throwaway laughs.

This glum crime franchise, unfolding against a backdrop of blighted concrete chill and semi-derelict industrial spaces, is evolving into Scandinavia’s anti-hygge.

The character of Magalie is so enraging that you would chuck yourself into the Aegean Sea rather than spend two weeks in her company.

An over-explanatory voiceover seems to indicate a lack of confidence in the script’s jumbled plotting and laggy pacing. The performances aren’t bad (Ameen’s charisma eclipses the expositional dialogue), but the stakes feel low and the characters gangster-movie generic.

The film’s abrupt tonal shifts are jarring.

The camerawork is unnecessarily showy, full of swirls and flourishes, which further distracts from the central story.

Trey Edward Shults’s bombastic third feature crashes and recedes, leaving few revelations in its wake.

It’s a world that is so incoherent and inconsistent you almost have to admire the chutzpah, in which buxom lady horse-thieves dress themselves for a night of crime displaying several inches of showy cleavage, contained only by a glorified shoelace.

Watching the cast of Expend4bles, the latest instalment of the thunderously dumb veteran mercenary franchise, sweating and straining their way through the “casual banter” section of the screenplay is like watching contestants on The World’s Strongest Man attempting to climb a ladder while carrying a tractor tyre. It’s painful.

For the most part, however, this romp, which pits Thor against Christian Bale’s cadaverous God-slayer, is superficial stuff – a film that brings a greeting-card triteness to its themes of love and sacrifice; that harvests internet memes (screaming goats) in the service of easy laughs.

What becomes painfully clear is the fact that Bob Marley deserves a better biopic. Still, Lynch’s magnetic presence, and a heartstopping rendition of Redemption Song, almost justify the price of admission.

Decent performances from both McGregors can’t breathe much spirit (alcoholic or otherwise) into the film’s listless and generic screenplay.

It’s an overlong, indulgent slog.

While Sofia Boutella, playing outlaw warrior Kora, brings a balletic elegance to her fight sequences, ultimately this is disappointingly generic stuff.

It’s a curiously inert affair: constrained, corseted, passionless and saddled with a lumpen, Depp-shaped deadweight where there should be a pulse-racing core of power and desire.

Approach with a strong stomach, and don’t bother trying to keep a tally of the body count.

Sometimes there is pleasure to be found in brainless action, but the extended video game-style finale left me furious and fatigued.

It should be pulpy fun powered by car chases and zippy repartee, but The Instigators is a dispiriting and predictable drag of a movie.

There’s something rather sterile and bloodless in the film’s approach, with its synthetic and soul-sappingly clean-looking CGI. Plus there’s the palpable lack of chemistry between the leads: a kind of brisk civility rather than the ache of eternal longing the title promises.

If we can’t believe the characters, how are we meant to accept the film’s central premise?

Russell’s showy directorial pizzazz is very much in evidence, but there’s an edge of desperation to the chunks of exposition that dam the flow of this already meandering tale.

This bland, sombre love story from the director of The Lunchbox (2013) lacks that film’s flavour.

With Neeson well within the confines of his comfort zone, tailed by corrupt cops and diving out of hotel windows, the film should be better. Yet it drags.

Every tired war movie cliche is unearthed in a film that brings nothing new but will no doubt please fans of men in uniform yelling at explosions.

The decent quality of the animation of this English-language French production is rather let down by some shockingly poor voice performances and a couple of ear-bleeding musical numbers.

What was intended as an examination of the creative process backfires and becomes instead an inadvertent chronicle of oblivious privilege. Harvey wafts through scenes of poverty and devastation, then returns to her cocoon of a studio.

The whole tone of this glib black comedy, with its cartoon bad guys and conspiratorial wink with each addition to the body count, seems rather dated.

For a film about magic, there’s little sparkle to spare.

It’s a film that sets out to tackle the impact of degenerative disease, but, barring a few moments of confusion and a forgotten name or two, is infuriatingly evasive when it comes to showing the realities of the condition.

A film about two immaculately groomed women gaslighting and goading each other to the point of madness should be a lot more fun than this.

Dumbed-down and stripped of the symbolic subtext of the earlier movies, the picture is not without seat-shuddering thrills, but it’s like a tag-team wrestling bout for monsters rather than a picture with meaning and even a modicum of thought.

It’s unfortunate that caricatured villains lessen the impact of the film’s upward punch.

Tim Mackenzie-Smith’s slightly breathless and overstretched documentary aims for a Buena Vista Social Club-style story of late-life rediscovery but gets a little bogged down in a few too many hagiographic quotes from high-profile fans. Still, the music is sublime.

I can’t shake the inkling that it would’ve worked better as straight documentary.

The famous apple incident is a taut centrepiece for Nick Hamm’s picture, and the action sequences are propulsive. The casting, however, is questionable.

Hardy is a highlight, playing Eddie as a man who has had more than enough of the party that’s raging in his head, but Kelly Marcel’s film is a sloppy, incoherent let-down.

A rather charmless remake of Hitchcock's classic 1938 comedy thriller, adding nothing of value and subtracting everything of significance. [04 Dec 2005, p.119]

Tension is frequently punctured by clunky dialogue.

Enitan’s trauma is revelled in but for what? Few new truths are learned here. A rushed, redemptive montage towards the film’s end is presented as ickily aspirational.

Fans will doubtless be dazzled by its meticulous imitation-of-life-in-miniature visual aesthetic, yet I swithered between whimsical amusement, mild curiosity and outright irritation.

In a chase picture that evolves into a war movie, the storytelling is propulsive, but it’s cheapened by crude and manipulative film-making choices.

It’s an alienatingly ugly technique and a mawkish tear-jerker choked up with synthetic sentimentality. You start to envy the dinosaurs their extinction event.

The frenetic pacing, intended to sweep the audience along, can’t draw attention away from Irvine Welsh and Dean Cavanagh’s platitude-riddled script.

Montages, seesawing Dutch tilts and profligate overuse of lighting gels fail to conceal the fact that the film’s writing doesn’t match the lure of the central idea.

It’s not unusual, unfortunately, for the victims of sexual attacks to find themselves distrusted and even accused. What rankles in the film’s approach is that the audience is also encouraged to question her story.

As Ellie and Abbie respectively, Sophie Hawkshaw and Zoe Terakes make light work of a somewhat heavy-handed screenplay.

Simon Kinberg’s film feels aggressively focus-grouped for the girl-boss crowd.

The always impressive Spall elevates this low-key mood piece a little, but even his skill as an actor can’t save the stultifying pacing.

James’s natural charisma should allow the film to soar but he’s bogged down by an avalanche of distracting cameos, from Gremlins to Game of Thrones.

Maslany is magnetic, her coiled fury and sexual energy threatening to erupt as her placid partner plods along beside her.

If you’re a paunchy, middle-aged geezer with a wholesale cocaine habit, an aversion to “woke”, and hobbies that include beer and punching people, well, have I got a movie for you!

Strays is a film that leans heavily on gross-out gags and a pre-adolescent fascination with pee and poop.

The impish Leslie Mann is well cast as his dead wife, Elvira, who provides a jolt of creative inspiration. Judi Dench’s screechy caricature of psychic Madame Arcati is less winning.

Electro-folk song interludes (written by Flynn) offer images about rivers and such that might better suit another film – one that doesn’t feel as if it’s waiting for darkness so that it can finally become a noir.

It’s not unenjoyable, just deeply unoriginal.

Mimicking the relapse-recovery cycle of addiction, the film’s timeline moves in unsatisfying narrative circles that stall the already shallow stakes.

The Liam Gallagher of old, with his shrapnel wit and swaggering crusade against being “suckered in by the dickheads”, would have tossed a grenade into the editing suite rather than sanction a doc that is more extended corporate rebranding exercise than it is rock’n’roll.

While the picture looks wonderfully atmospheric throughout, with its frostbitten monochromes and consumptive colour palette, the story disintegrates into a lurid and rather silly final act.

A generally lacklustre affair. [03 Mar 2013, p.44]

Its writer-director, John Sayles, is one of my favourite American film-makers, when he is pursuing tough social and historical subjects as in Matewan, Eight Men Out and City of Hope. He's that rare being, a political director, but I don't care for Sayles's excursions into lyricism (Passion Fish, for example), and this present exercise in stage Irishry. [11 Aug 1996, p.8]

While Wicked: For Good repeats much of the same formula as the first picture, there is a crucial ingredient missing: humour. Without it, the spark is extinguished; the astringency that cut through the sentimentality of the first picture is gone.

Director Miguel Arteta, who brought a bracingly transgressive tartness to indie comedies Chuck & Buck and The Good Girl, delivers sloppily paced hack work here, while Tiffany Haddish and Rose Byrne, two fine comic actresses, are shackled to a screenplay so crassly tone-deaf, it makes you want to chisel off your own ears.

This is modern gothic, with natural lighting, neatly composed wide shots and the near total absence of a musical score.

It is, very occasionally, brilliant: a deft reveal in the final 20 minutes ties together the disparate, seemingly unrelated scenes that came before. But with its overuse of fish-eye lenses and the quacking, whimsical brass-heavy score, it’s extremely hard work.

Unfortunately, it becomes clear that the film is all backdrop, a boomer nostalgia trip with little in the way of actual story.

[A] crass and manipulative warsploitation picture.

The film’s critiques are unimaginative, tutting at how territories attack first in order to consolidate power, as well as the spectacle of war itself, bystanders crowding the balconies of the ship-like city, shrieking as guns and lasers fire at the wastelands below.

The film’s second half suffers from frantic pacing and overstuffed action sequences.

Save the Cinema is the kind of plucky underdog feelgood slop that the British film industry churns out on a regular basis, largely to the indifference of audiences.

The film isn’t totally unenjoyable, but it isn’t particularly coherent either.