Its success may depend on how alert you’re feeling, but for once you can’t complain that a movie hasn’t given your synapses a thorough workout.

The scares are mostly very scary indeed, and that means the film does its job.

This controlled unveiling of a fuller picture is certainly engaging, but the film has the respectful air of a tribute – to Bernheim, as opposed to her father – and its sheer seemliness means it lacks the intellectual and erotic fizz of Ozon’s best work.

With its uncompromising commitment to gross-out injuries, nerdy pop culture in-jokes and inappropriate touching, Deadpool 2 was clearly made to cater to existing fans with every innuendo-filled moment (they should stay through the credits for some important story points that are very nearly thrown away).

Rather than do something freshly cinematic with Saint Laurent’s precise, elegant creations, the film is content to exhibit them.

These characters get ghastly fast. It’s the pace and panic of modernity Moverman grasps best as morally corrosive forces: the soft ping of iPhone email alerts never letting us be, and consciences wiped clean as quickly as the next news cycle whips around.

Whatever Muse drives Malick, whose best work feels both found – in the sense of discovered in the shoot and edit – and profound, he could be accused of cheating on her in Knight of Cups, leapfrogging between unsatisfactory short-term conquests. His career is quite a journey, but this episode has an empty tank.

The film is oddly unmoving as a memorial, but as with Amy Winehouse, it inspires a collective mea culpa for the feeding frenzy of public judgement that only turned to sympathy when it was far too late.

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

Where Fassbinder crafted extraordinary tableaux of self-parodic misery, such as the drunken, prostrate Petra diving for the phone on her white shag carpet, Ozon breezes through this exercise instead with his usual snappy relish. He has plenty to say about the original’s magnificence, but perhaps not an awful lot to add.

I can’t recall the last time I was so staggered by a film’s craftsmanship while feeling almost nothing else about it at all – little fear, less sadness, and barely a spark of actual excitement at anything beyond the high-wire nature of the filmmaking enterprise itself.

You can’t help but feel disappointed that a film with a relatively spicy premise becomes, in the end, so risk-averse.

It’s a witty and affectionate if rather slight archive documentary.

Mostly it’s a scare machine, and in this respect Kenan’s is the more efficient telling, its VFX lubricating all that now creaks about the original.

As an undemanding pas de deux, it’s sweet enough.

The film feels like a personal project for Portman, but thankfully never a vanity one. It’s a fine piece of work – and you sense there’s better to come.

It’s an absorbing but disappointingly tasteful watch.

It’s lots of fun until you notice it doesn’t quite add up.

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.

Something went wrong here – it feels like the final cut of the film is either the victim of duff scripting choices, or made equally duff attempts to fix them. It’s a pity, because it wastes Affleck’s solid efforts, and thwarts the picture Lyne got halfway on screen: a portrait of an affluent marriage as a toxic sham, with all the solidity of a Love Island merger.

The film satisfies all the same, because they’ve figured out what a great stand-up routine Venom can do this time, and Hardy has settled well into being straight man to his own not-at-all-straight alien weirdo.

It's a bureaucratic noir nightmare that may put you more readily in mind of Kafka, albeit with a tone of tongue-in-cheek bleakness that's bracing and funny – at least at first.

The short and salty-sweet Destination Wedding is less of a conventional romantic comedy than it is a high-concept chemistry experiment.

It’s a pity this one isn’t a little more distinctive and sharply honed.

The whole thing remains ridiculous, partly since Avery can’t persuade us we’ve been watching a possessed boy so much as an overtaxed child actor he’s putting through boot camp. This was William Friedkin’s – and Blair’s – quite particular achievement. Think of Avery’s go as a goofy cover version you can indulge just the once.

The film’s nothing if not an argument-starter, with plenty of hot provocations – especially about the bargains underpinning black excellence – to toss out. They’re like firecrackers, though. You come out rattled, but half-certain you’ve been toyed with.

Macdonald and his team pull out enough affecting stories to hold your interest, whose scopes range from sweeping to intimate.

Another play Hitchcock was resistant to adapting, this time by John Galsworthy, made for a static but honourable picture. [14 Jul 2012]

Certainly not free of clichés, Black Flies actually gains an added soul-sickness from being stuck with them as everyday realities.

Chapter 2 does its job entirely ably, without exactly doing much overtime.

This is Holmes intentionally slowed down to a hobbling, reflective, end-of-life pace: dare we call it refreshing? It’s a film to rummage around in, picking up old clues, considering their meaning, and turning them in your palm.

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.

André De Toth's film noir benefits from lovely LA location work and a strong supporting cast, including a scenery-chewing cameo from Timothy Carey. [10 Dec 2011, p.38]

It’s a film about memory which itself feels like the kind of thing you vaguely remember seeing 25 years ago. I’m not sure future slow-burn classic status awaits, but at a time when few studio films even seem to be striving for it, you have to applaud the attempt.

The action sequences here are armrest-gripping fun, and you only wish DeBlois and his animators had been even more confident; held their shots even longer; allowed us to enjoy the whistle of the wind and the curve of the dragons’ flight paths without hurriedly cutting away to another angle, and another, and another. When the film flies, it soars.

It’s all lightly reminiscent of Bride Wars, the cat-fighty 2009 farce with Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson doing very unfeminist things to ringfence their perfect day. You’re Cordially Invited has a little more heart than that: it hits an average yet amiable stride.

The whole package is so sleekly watchable, if risk-averse to a fault, that I can’t recall a recent time at the cinema where I learned more by thinking less.

It has a vigorous sense of entertainment value and a cast relishing every moment.

The style is impeccable. The substance, not so much.

Kaufman has rummaged about in Pixar’s Inside Out grab-bag and mussed up the elemental simplicity of Yarlett’s idea. It’s nicely personal as his spin on a Pixar film, but the downside is that he can’t help imitating too many of them at once – which makes it equal parts sweet and hectic, and not a little overambitious.

The action sequences are executed with rhythm and punch, and our heroine swoops and swirls around like Iron Man in a sheath dress. Maleficent may be short on true enchantment, but until we find a superhero who can pull off a black silk cocktail gown in battle, she’s very welcome.

Will & Harper has laudable aims but suffers from a baggy, shaggy structure.

This follow-up to the acclaimed 1992 horror film of the same name has far more substance than your average popcorn chiller.

As metaphors for life go, wine has a very high yield, and Gilles Legrand’s sensitive screenplay tramples out every last drop of juice.

We are never distracted for long from the gaping sadness of the man and Hawke is brilliant at portraying that despair.

Lilo & Stitch has been tamed into one of those naughty-pet family comedies that used to roll off studio production lines with thud-thudding regularity, until the form fell out of fashion somewhere around 1994.

Amalric transcends mere dishevelment here: in some scenes which flash back to the start of his relationship with Sylvia, the former Bond villain looks like a pile of leaves with a coat thrown on top. [Cannes Version]

Its conclusions rarely make your head spin, but it meticulously shows its working out. (If it was an exam paper, it’d be impossible to dock it any marks.)

As a platter for meat-and-potatoes, bump-in-the-night thrills, it’s a little on the shaky side, but they’re still delivered to the table.

Tonally the film is all over the rink, but it leaves you more convinced and entertained than you’d expect.

Slack Bay is half as long as Quinquin, but still feels too long. Major ensemble scenes (a family banquet, a service on the beach) dawdle indulgently, as if waiting for the joke to start.

There are gorgeous things about it, there’s one really good performance, and reminders of Davies’ transcendent style ripple through the film. But it also feels broken and cumbersome, weighed down by a number of decisions that simply don’t work.

With something to say about the suffocating social mores of the time, it is one of the better-surviving chic-flicks of the Forties. [05 Jan 2013, p.32]

“We’ll tell it, but with one fewer death” is an odd way to go about this tale – which ends up as a solid flexing exercise for its cast, but puts us through a family’s annihilation for no other reason it can ultimately decide upon.

A large portion of Star Trek’s audience may well be satisfied by a film that amounts to not much more than an incredibly pretty and sporadically funny in-joke. But think back to the corny romance of that original mission statement, recited by William Shatner on many a rainy school night. Strange new worlds. New life. New civilisations. Boldly going where no man has gone before. That pioneer spirit? It’s gone.

For all the emptiness of Nobody, it’s sleekly watchable.

For a while, the film gets by on silliness alone. But in the end, it all amounts to no more than a sniggery guilty pleasure.

Everything is adequate might not have the same ring to it, but it would make a fitting jingle for The Lego Movie 2.

It’s a welcome surprise: sharper and funnier than its doom-laden predecessor, with a fantasy setting immersive enough to distract from the narrative’s various chips and cracks.

It's painfully slow at times, but the performances are decent, especially Hanks who teases the talent yet to properly shine. [08 Feb 2022, p.27]

The effective use of the split-screen creates a splintered sense of reality and piles on the tension. [04 Jul 2015, p.33]

Would the film have ideally been a bit smarter? Perhaps. But it gets all of the dumb stuff just right.

Very little is out of place in Branagh’s do-over, but that’s almost a problem: there’s a feeling, throughout, of going perfectly through the motions. The film is all smoothly-operated crane shots, excellent hair, gleaming teeth. Originality is the glass slipper it never even tries on.

In typical noir fashion, the story is related in flashback and there's a femme fatale, played by husky-voiced Lizabeth Scott, to lure our hero even further into the danger zone. [30 Jul 2011, p.30]

A nicely maintained amiable tone takes the edge off the inevitable lavatorial humour, while the 14-year-old Camp, of Big Little Lies and The Christmas Chronicles, strikes up an impressively plausible emotional connection with her goofy, lolloping co-star (not Whitehall, the dog).

The film’s secret superhero is Maisie Williams as Lucy.

There’s something glib, and occasionally maddening, about the film’s use of loveable fauna in peril to sentimentalise and sweeten what is, after all, an account of real human bravery in the face of an endlessly horrifying historical event.

Staying Vertical is a script by a hot talent never quite getting round to being fully written, and instead disappearing down a series of suggestive dead ends.

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

With Statham literally riding shotgun, Ritchie has binned any pretence at subtlety and goes back to basics with an bullet-strewn romp that kicks down the door first and asks questions later. And which is, in the end, nothing more than an excuse for its star to punch as many villains as possible.

Don’t Look Up’s driving thesis – roughly, “look at all these morons!” – is so basic it’s only really possible to respond to it as a hit-and-miss actors’ showcase.

For all Neville's undoubted slickness and poise as a filmmaker, Under The Influence displays a fundamental lack of curiosity about the cackling enigma at its heart.

Barnard once again evokes a grubby, gothic landscape that’ll get right under your fingernails. It’ll stay there for weeks.

Parts of it tingle with a creepy, curtain-parting intimacy.

It’s a thoroughly pleasant if flimsy film – a sleeper hit already in America’s sleepy arthouses – with a distinct perfume of nostalgia wafted towards us, say by the sight of Gitanes lit up on cross-channel flights.

This modest ladcom scores rather higher on the sincerity scale, much like a best man’s speech that fluffs the jokes but semi-accidentally gets a deep sense of friendship across.

Match-making two stars with the natural zing of Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum ought to be a breeze. It’s funny, then, that this 1960s space-race caper specifically fails at being a romcom, because the “rom” keeps dragging us back to Earth.

Michael Chaves, proves himself again to be a shrewd replacement, somehow inviting the viewer to buy into a frankly wacky screenplay by dint of decent acting and committed style.

It’s a hard film to recommend, but it works on its own gutsily perturbing terms.

It’s all impeccably pleasant, just a tiny bit bland.

That tension niggles away within The Highwaymen, a sporadically stodgy, dour production which often seems painfully aware that the really fun stuff is happening out of shot. But then Costner and Harrelson get to talking, the light lands on their features just so, and the film casts its own curmudgeonly spell.

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

This is Penna’s debut feature, and he has set himself a high bar which he just about scrapes over, with Mikkelsen giving the entire project a super-strength leg up.

Stone packs a ton of information in, then lurches to a halt; while he milks Kennedy’s mistrust of the three-letter agencies, his grasp of “what really happened” is still fundamentally guesswork. Still, he does persuade us of smoking guns out there that weren’t Oswald’s, or anywhere near the book depository.

Admittedly modest, but the epitome of jolly, this is like the companionable second volume of an autobiography in film form – you'll whip through it in no time, and come out wanting more.

The relentlessly one-sided emotional manipulation is grating.

Organisationally, the movie has a struggle on its hands not to seem like the contents of a toy chest simply chucked down the stairs, with all the chaos of limbs and accessories that implies.

Wyatt Russell and Kerry Condon's suburban horror feels like an adaptation of a Stephen King story that he never got round to writing.

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 real revelation is Alice Eve, who gives a strikingly direct and affecting portrait of a woman in a desperate situation. Still, after too many pat plot twists and one nauseatingly slow death, I wished the film surrounding her were a little fresher.

At times it edges towards the saccharine. The director asks no challenging questions, and the only other people to appear in the film are Anderson’s supportive sons, Brandon and Dylan.

As in Landon’s terrific body-swap horror comedy Freaky, there’s often a surprisingly thoughtful undercurrent to these zany riffs, and the tone is nicely judged for younger teens. But where Freaky was relatively honed, this rambles to a fault, taking numerous optional detours . . . en route to an emotional climax that doesn’t quite land.

Some of the supporting performances are so hammily spiteful and giggly they let the side down, but the film is perfectly cast in its main roles.

It’s warm, cosy and very Linklater: it definitely exudes more chill than urgency.

Although the access is intimate, what emerges is not particularly surprising.

The Gentlemen is a valiant, often raucous bid to drag the tried-and-true old Ritchie formula into the present, and while the result feels like he got about as far as 2005 – with lip-service acknowledgements of grime music and YouTube – for the purposes of this film, it’s close enough.

The gonzo-Wagnerian backstory the franchise subsequently built up hasn’t been sufficiently pruned – and with so many characters to juggle, the story feels less like a coherent chain of events than a bundle of obligatory subplots.

Unusually for any film top-billed by Adam Sandler these days, there are jokes to please young and old.