It's loud-mouthed, colourful fun. [18 Apr 2020, p.21]

Mark Chappell’s script has a refreshingly high laugh-rate as these things go, with a seam of pure English silliness that sets it well apart from Knives Out, without gunning for anything like that league of plot ingenuity. It’s closer, really, to doing for Christie what Scream did for the slasher flick – goosing the formula with winks and tickles.

Jeremy Renner is superb as a reporter ruined by his biggest story, but The Parallax View this isn't.

The whole thing unspools at such an unremittingly earnest pitch that it leaves you groping under your seat for a ventilator.

It is pleasantly manic while its vividly bright colours, swirling like a party pack of Smarties upended over your head, will appeal to your own little birds. Yet it misses the curmudgeonly charms of its predecessor, and suffers from the diminishing allure of a video game brand too old to feel fresh, too recent to be wistful for.

Anyone who’s ever wondered who and what made Tony the way he was will be richly rewarded by Alan Taylor’s trip back in time.

The film is led by a performance of thrilling regality and nuance from Saoirse Ronan as Mary.

Allied, swathed in larger-than-life, luxurious imposture, is the real heart-racing deal.

The killings themselves are run-of-the-mill, jump-scare assaults staged with minimal invention or flair, which only makes the film’s box of tricks look emptier: there are even quips about how we’ve seen it all before, at which I found myself duly nodding. It gets almost too meta to function.

For perhaps the first time in the studio’s canon, every idea in this ‘origin story’ of the Toy Story astronaut feels woefully half-baked.

The film suggests Inglourious Basterds dumbed down, pumped up, and ditching all pretension. If only it played like a spirited B-horror hybrid we could all get behind, instead of a ghoulish effects trip for the Resident Evil crowd.

Weakly acted mainly because it’s weakly conceived, Good Boys doesn’t have a sincere bone in its body – or even enough funny boner jokes to compensate.

Fraser’s casting is so moving in part because we can still recognise this beloved figure under the blubber, but it’s also because Fraser’s own performance doesn’t court pity. His Charlie is complex, flawed, funny and otherwise fully and radiantly human: a rounded character in more ways than one.

It’s less an adaptation than a recapitulation.

Only when it reaches for all-out camp does this script truly tickle the pleasure receptors.

Through all the film’s bumps and scrapes, Firth does invest a lot of commendable energy in helping us grasp Crowhurst’s besieged state of mind. It’s a good performance in shaky circumstances, but at least he honours the man’s contradictions, on top of his terror of public failure, and even greater one of exposure as a fraud.

A slight but necessary palate-cleanser, as crisp and tangy-sweet as raspberry sorbet, and Dolan’s most conventional and accessible work to date.

Gibson wisecracks with a weary panache, and the tech credits are sharp: production designer Bernardo Trujillo and director of photography Benoît Debie make El Pueblito look almost as disreputable as their leading man’s pebbledashed phizog.

McCarthy keeps dragging the film away from thriller and procedural territory and back to this blossoming domestic setup – but while Damon and the kid share some cute scenes, it simply isn’t that interesting, and all the would-be colour (see: Virginie’s acting career) adds nothing but extraneous detail.

When the film gets going, it’s hard not to be bustled along with it, thanks mostly to León de Aranoa’s talent for punchy comic dialogue – doubly impressive, given this is his first English-language picture – and the plot’s habit of thwarting your expectations as to where the most morally upstanding course of action might lead.

Cool Runnings is a charming tale of determined underdogs, with plenty of laughs, moments of real tension, and five engaging performances.

So if Wonder Woman 1984 is playing near you, should you pounce? If it even remotely appeals, I’d say absolutely – even though the film itself, a direct sequel to 2017’s Wonder Woman, is a bit of a marshmallowy muddle.

A good cop/bad cop action comedy with the funniest two-women-above-the-title pairing in memory.

This wintry tale of art blooming in adversity is far from a schematic feel-good jaunt. . . it’s an anthem for doomed youth in a familiar Bennett key: wry, melancholic, sneakily profound.

Tomorrowland is half a day having all the fun of the fair, and half a day paying for it back in the classroom.

Love is All You Need has been made for an audience rarely catered for by the film industry: intelligent adults who enjoy perceptive and good-hearted drama.

While Swinton and Elba make smooth work of the fairy-tale-toned dialogue, they simply lack the chemistry to make their tryst convince as romance. And the fantasy flashbacks too often sink into chintz.

With the magnificent Elba to anchor it, the film gradually achieves a sort of grandeur, in the manner of the hero it depicts.

Stripped back to basics, Saw’s appeal (if that’s the word) is certainly clearer than it’s been for a while; the series isn’t really horror at all, but a revenge thriller taken to deliberately appalling test-your-nerve extremes.

The movie doesn’t have a funny bone in its body, clomping from one unoriginal set piece to the next with a head-scratching lack of urgency.

This is a sober, stiff-collared procedural, handsomely shot but also oddly bloodless until the more conventional paranoid-thriller rhythms of its final act kick in.

Beatty’s casting of Collins and Ehrenreich is inspired: it’s easy to imagine both of these beautiful young things thriving in the Hollywood of the 1950s and 60s, in much the same way Beatty himself did.

The tone is almost identical to the Horrible Histories television series, albeit very slightly fruitier, with jokes that should play just as well to intelligent children and immature adults.

The film also has stunning car chases, choreographed like the dancing in a musical, as the Blues Brothers are pursued throughout Chicago, at one point even tearing through a shopping mall, in their 'Bluesmobile', a retired 1974 Mount Prospect, Illinois Dodge Monaco patrol car.

There are cameos from James Franco, Stephen Dorff, a comically moustachioed David Schwimmer and an unrecognisably hirsute Chris Evans as various lowlifes. A pity, then, that nothing else in Ariel Vromen’s movie is remotely on Shannon’s level, from the plodding, Scorsese-clone script to the needlessly lifeless editing and cinematography.

We know that this cast can produce magic together, and that this director can inject pace into unlikely topics. It’s just this one that seems to have feet of clay.

The film itself never exudes much heat: it’s a chilly, impeccable diagram.

If this is Mitchell trying to go full-bore David Lynch – as a zine author and oddball collector, he pointedly casts Patrick Fischler, aka the diner-nightmare guy from Mulholland Drive and a sinister bureaucrat in Twin Peaks – he’s certainly not holding back.

For an action movie to gear-shift between thrilling and comedic everyone must be in on the joke. The absurdity of Hobbs & Shaw is certainly not lost on Idris Elba, having fun as thinly-sketched baddie Brixton Lore.

Ridley Scott's crime drama feels like a soap opera with airs, but its star's sheer chutzpah ensures it's never less than watchably raucous.

You suspect Sorkin relishes the clash between Ball’s fundamentally fatuous show and the razor-smartness of his take on it. And it is smart. It just isn’t much else.

The first film’s very specific pleasures are comprehensively encored.

If you’re in the market for a workaday crime story, Schechter’s film fulfills some of its obligations. You might just wish it had more life.

The film has a scrappy optimism about it that’s often very winning, but it never draws itself up to its full height.

Gradually, the simplicity yields an idiosyncratic charm.

The amatory mechanisms here are so basic they make 1970’s Love Story look like Wuthering Heights, but at least Love Story had the courage to wring every last drop of pathos from its tragic-romance premise.

Throughout the film [Escalante's] camera tends to be lurking in the middle distance; coolly observing everything that passes through its inquisitive frame, leaving the messy business of reaction to us.

It’s stylish, yes, it has verve and swagger and real love for the time and the place. But this is Tommy Shelby and the Peaky Blinders playing their greatest hits on what feels a little like a farewell tour. Those peaks just aren’t as razor-sharp as they used to be.

The Humbling, which was directed by Barry Levinson (Good Morning, Vietnam, Rain Man) and based on a novel by Philip Roth, is such inept, shuffling nonsense that an apter title might have been The Bumbling.

The long-term consequences are depressing, but also low on dramatic tension and life.

Mom and Dad is both a torrid exploitation cinema throwback, and a metaphor for a generation of kids screwed over by their elders.

The film settles into a Forrest Gumpian groove that doesn’t glorify the human spirit so much as sap it.

Collet-Serra’s rigorous craftsmanship and Lively’s muscular-in-every-sense movie-star performance – the film takes Olympic-level pleasure in watching her swimming, leaping, fighting, scrambling, enduring – ensure every attack and counterattack convulses and grips.

This is an exultantly old-school blood-and-thunder retelling of the rise of Robert the Bruce.

The trouble is that Jackson can’t make it mean very much: when every life on Middle Earth is seemingly at stake, few individually grab our attention.

All is True is a tongue-in-cheek title all the same, for a script which fills in factual gaps with its own blatant leaps of imagination: they’re just far more respectful and illuminating leaps.

All in all, a hugely enjoyable, sumptuous adaptation that, while never attempting to break the Christie mould, imbued the story with a pleasingly contemporary feel.

The themes of mob justice and socialised misogyny could have hit a little harder if they’d been explored rather than simply harped on about.

Demonstrating that cheesy low-budget sci-fi can sometimes be more fun than the blockbuster variety is this spiffing deep-space pastiche of The Magnificent Seven, written by John Sayles and exec-produced by Roger Corman. [11 Nov 2012, p.47]

For all its properly surreal mayhem, this flick isn’t quite as nimble or emotionally rounded as its predecessor.

No film has made me ache more for the reopening of cinemas in May than this trashily sublime, visual-effects-driven blare-a-thon, in which a king-sized gorilla and a radioactive lizard settle their differences over the smoking remains of a city or two.

It’s not simply that its various comedic scenarios aren’t funny (though they aren’t); or that all of its would-be snappy one-liners drop on the floor like wet socks (though they do), or that the timing is so off that it feels like the film was edited with a spork. It’s that nobody on screen, Lawrence included, seems remotely invested in the exercise in the first place.

Even those familiar with King’s 2013 follow-up of the same name, more of an absorbing dark fantasy than a horror novel, won’t be prepared for the alchemy of elements cooked up here.

It’s sweet-natured and amusing, with a story to captivate kids; yet the script has enough witty touches to keep adults laughing too.

The result is a film that does perfectly respectable justice to Lomax's ordeal, without ever making a strong case for itself as independently stirring art.

This really is a film in which the creative thinking seemed to start and stop at ‘wouldn’t it be funny if a pig wore a leotard’, and any attempt to inject its aspartame bonhomie with some kind of greater significance feels like trying to push an uncooked sausage through Kevlar.

Fast becoming one of the most reliable character actors we’ve got, Strong gives a quietly heroic rendition of Landau which bolsters White’s performance beautifully.

[A] mildly engaging print-the-legend documentary.

The film’s secret isn’t much of a secret at all. It just remembers why Neeson was such an oddly inspired choice for a grimy revenge thriller back in 2008 and does its best to repeat the trick.

It's a comeback you root for, then, even while it’s wobbling and occasionally falling in the mud. But goodwill gets it home.

Perhaps this meeting of suspicious minds really was an unsung crux of modern American history, but Elvis & Nixon feels like a trifle about a trifle.

There’s something ever-so-chic, a touch too manicured about the film’s despondency, and only rare moments land to touch us, especially. But it’s a gentle, genial watch.

While you can’t imagine the film ever making it to Cannes under anything other than its own steam, the jaunt proves to be a surprisingly worthwhile one.

Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli (Sick of Myself, Dream Scenario) likes his black comedies of discomfort to make us squirm, as does producer Ari Aster. But this film is skimpier on insight than the best work either has done, and Daniel Pemberton’s poignant flute score deserves to be in a more mature film.

Against serene and haunting backdrops, the animation itself has a raucous energy that’s constantly thrilling, and leans into the children’s vulnerability as well as their high spirits.

The Forgiven concentrates on awful people doing awful things they’ll pay for unless they can avoid it, but as morality play it’s stuck in a rut, with an ending that just seems to have stumped McDonagh – it dissipates.

Using home movies and other footage, Kopple provides a discomfiting portrait of a family’s deep-seated dysfunction.

Two decades after dinosaurs ruled the Earth’s cinemas, are we still capable of putting our phones away for two hours and being honestly amazed by them, without a glaze of cynicism or irony to keep us stuck? Trevorrow, his cast and crew would clearly like to think so. And in light of their efforts, you’d have to grinningly agree.

Carlyle shoots the story with a propulsive, page-turning energy that’s enjoyably at odds with the Glasgow backdrop, which is dilapidated to the point of timelessness.

The film could have done with a richer sense of what Milly and Jess really see in each other. It’s as if Barrymore and Collette have been flung into this relationship unprepared, and must hustle to suggest there’s much of a history.

The Banishment may lack the surprise factor of The Return but it's more mature and less wedded to virtuosic technique.

Billed as a “survival thriller” and starring a weirdly underutilised Angelina Jolie, this is a musty amalgam of fire-fighting action flick, John-Grisham-esque conspiracy hokum and outdoorsy bonding adventure. All it lacks is a web search using Ask Jeeves.

Ana de Armas stars as a new, lethally dull trainee assassin, Keanu Reeves makes an emergency cameo, and the film is an absolute stinker.

An unfashionably male art film of Nietzsche-quoting, Tarkovsky-adjacent bent that’s ghoulish, baffling and rather brave.

A part of me found Todd Phillips’s radical rethinking of the Batman villain Joker thrillingly uncompromising and hair-raisingly timely. Another thinks it should be locked in a strongbox then dropped in the ocean and never released.

It serves as a handsome homage while persuasively making the case as its own discrete entity.

The dancing and photography are striking, and the acting’s perfectly fine. But the sum of it all is a moony inertia, lacking any awakening spark of life.

Bono may be his own worst enemy in the one-man show Stories of Surrender, but only just. His second worst is Blonde director Andrew Dominik, who has turned it into a more excruciating film than you might even have surmised.

The mood is one of acid-tipped wackiness, and both Stone and Thompson understand exactly what’s required to bring it to life.

Even when the duo commandeer a luggage cart and trundle around these shiny corridors getting sozzled, we remain prisoners in their departure lounge of the damned.

The film has been put together like a machine to rattle you. It does that. I didn’t care for anyone on screen at all, and can’t say I’ll ever be tempted to watch it again, but here it is, for the delectation of a niche market.

None hold a candle to the main event: pulverising verbal jousts between two stars who can toggle between serious and silly like few others. Watching them cajole, manipulate and savage each other is effervescent bloodsport: you want neither to win, or the fun will stop.

Novocaine may not be based on any pre-existing IP – no comic book or game, say. But that’s not much to crow about, because few flights of the imagination have lately felt lower in altitude.

For all its flashes of ingenuity, The Voices is secretly more scared than scary, lacking the truly disturbing ambition to get real.

In its present form – hyperactive, dopey, and hammered into shape like a Hollywood sitcom – it’s a passable school holiday jaunt.

The plotting meanders its way to the very brink of incoherence, but as the scenes tick past, the vague sense of a many-tendrilled mystery being solved does gradually descend.

A vastly enjoyable theatrical banquet, if perhaps not a profound one, is served up in a bit of a rush here, as if they can't wait to get the next sitting in. But you certainly don't come away feeling hungry.

Skarsgård’s ripe performance, with its wicked childishness and sarcastic self-pity, remains an asset Muschietti knows how to use. But the Losers are a mixed bag, convincing less well as a unit than they did as children.