Somehow Road Diary feels like a preamble, a warm-up act before the actual event.

How deep can an authorised portrait of Whitney Houston delve? The answer: not very. I Wanna Dance with Somebody aims, instead, to climb high – to cheer and celebrate as a glitzy biopic, where documentaries have tended to dwell morbidly on Houston’s downfall.

King’s fluid direction of her four actors means the snug setting never feels dramatically constricting, while their jostling performance styles make each combination of voices feels like its own distinct treat.

As a debut, it’s grungy, overscaled and rarely far from cliché. But it also has guts, and there’s a vigour to the acting that pulls it through.

When it finally gets going, it becomes gloweringly compelling, shored up by its strong supporting players (Paddy Considine, Vincent Cassel and Charles Dance also pop up), handsome photography and sheer, clanking momentum.

It’s a powerful testimonial to a fading way of life.

Endless Poetry may not quite live up to its interminable billing, but there’s certainly lots of it, and a little goes a long way indeed. But a long way is the distance Jodorowsky wants to take you.

It’s a breezy watch with nothing insightful to impart about the group or their impact on society. But it is guided by the implicit understanding that any project about the Beatles will inevitably find an audience – and that is an itch it undeniably scratches.

It’s an interesting achievement in many ways.

Even Moore seems quite stranded, given little chance to animate her character except as an unenviable technical exercise. Love is meant to be soaring across parapets, melding destinies with the fluttering elegance of a high B flat, but in Bel Canto, flat is the operative word.

Not a hugely comfortable fit for the silent treatment, Noël Coward's play might have transferred better in the stagey confines of the early sound era. [14 Jul 2012]

Carter, of course, is a paragon of strength, intelligence, ruthlessness, sexual attraction and even a dry sense of humour. Michael Caine does well to portray him impassively, as if he feared to burst out laughing. [12 Mar 1971]

It's too cruel to be all that much fun, and lacks the antagonistic zip of the earlier Dunne/Grant divorce romp The Awful Truth. [08 Nov 2003]

There are fine performances from Donald Pleasence and Delphine Seyrig, but the film fails to build real suspense. [26 May 2015, p.32]

As a two-hander it has some tension and promise.

Every turn Karl Golden’s cheeky-chappie comedy-drama about the early-Nineties rave scene takes is a little less original or convincing.

Hazanavicius has confused sobriety with impact, and mulched down all the stories you might want to tell about Chechnya into a generic, undermotivated wallow.

Shan Khan’s feature debut swaggers into its subject with more cocksure style than cogent analysis, like a tabloid splash designed to grip first and (if at all) illuminate later.

Blue might be the warmest colour elsewhere, but here it’s just a bit tepid.

There is a special cupboard in Purgatory for films that are blissfully unaware of what they’re actually about, and a place is reserved on its shelves for Love Sarah.

This isn’t just lazy, it’s borderline nonsensical. Resurgence inflates the scale of the alien threat to such a preposterous degree – the mothership takes up roughly an eighth of the Earth’s total surface – that the queues of honking traffic and rooftop helicopter rescues we’re supposed to invest in can’t help but feel like microscopic trifles.

Kung Fu Panda’s knee joints these days are creaking like a haunted flight of stairs.

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.

We’ve had two-hours-plus to leaf through this empty life, but Sorrentino makes it amount to almost nothing, except his usual love letter to Napoli, and an added ode to side-boob.

Casablanca Beats just about gets by on restless teenage energy and its bustle of winning young faces. But it’s a new arrangement of a very familiar old song.

It’s a thriller’s engine purring away, while it stubbornly sits in neutral, getting us nowhere.

Telling an audience this stuff is important is one thing: making them actually feel that it is is the magical part, and Grindelwald bungles the trick.

Rather than doing anything novel or surprising with the basic spies-gone-rogue template, The 355 just repackages it in girl-power wrapping: it’s the film equivalent of a high-fructose, corn-syrup-based fizzy drink being passed off as chic in taller, slimmer cans.

This script has not exactly been laboured over into the wee hours, and an audience used to Disney and Pixar will rightly expect better than this, whether they’re under 10 or not.

The one thing there’s no accounting for in The Accountant is taste.

It has a serviceable but stalled quality.

Ford doesn’t give a bad performance, but the dog does: the obvious fakery we can (maybe) overlook in a CG lion is far too glaring when it’s man’s best friend.

That the film ends up floundering is not really their fault. These two belong on screen together: when they’re not completing each other’s sentences, they’re completing them wrongly, which is even better.

The whole thing drips with garish insincerity and preaching to the choir. Irony of ironies, that a show about out-of-touch luvvies swanning down to wave their magic wands at red-state intolerance has become… the spitting image of that, as a home cinema offering from Murphy and team.

Every frame is so obviously green-screened, airbrushed and otherwise climate-controlled that it unfolds without a squeak of peril – the stakes couldn’t have felt lower if an extra-life counter were sitting in the corner of the screen. As for the script, you can almost hear the words NEEDS TO BE FUNNIER written in capital letters in the margins at least once per scene.

As a bouncy childcare aid, it doesn’t exactly fail, but you might be better off asking an eight-year-old about that. It’s witless fare if you want the whole family entertained.

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.

Almost nothing seems to click.

In the end, I was nagged by a question posed by Polley’s sister Joanna in the film’s opening minutes. “I guess I have this instinctive reaction: who cares about our ----ing family?” The answer, of course, is Polley herself, who smilingly tells us that a story like hers can never truly be tied down, even as she screws every last piece into place.

As a thriller, it’s lethargically paced, uninspiringly edited, and hardly raises your pulse even during life-or-death mano-a-mano.

Like the earlier Divergent films, Allegiant is studded with enticing science-fiction ideas, but it keeps such a poker-straight face while presenting them, you often can’t help but crack up.

Disney's centenary animation feels like an attempt, after a wobbly decade, to return the brand to first principles – but it doesn't come off.

Gymnasium attendants may have worked long and hard on Demi's body, but $12.5 million does seem an unconscionable amount for her to show us nothing we haven't seen before. If only half that money had gone on the rest of the film, then we might have had a better rendering of Carl Hiaasen's hilarious novel, which is an excursion into the by-ways of Miami's crazy culture.

Intermittently entertaining but also a rum mix of goofy and pretentious, Glass sets far more problems than it successfully solves: tying various loose threads together, Shyamalan can’t restrain himself from adding more. The result’s a lumpy tangle, and the trilogy’s weakest instalment.

Postman Pat: the Movie doesn’t get a stamp of approval.

It feels less like a real Dante film than a dashed-off counterfeit.

The film tries to scale a gargantuan mountain of a subject – the broken voting system – and just keeps slipping repeatedly down the sides

Far too much of it still feels scaled to the stage. Comic material that in a theatre might have simply played as broad comes across as forehead-smashingly crass, while the dramatic shorthand in the grown-up scenes turns that whole section of the story into a conveyor belt of clichés.

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

But nothing here or in the previous instalment will make you give the slightest fig who wins. Yes, the world of Rebel Moon is richly imagined, even if its origins as an aborted Star Wars project still remain far too obvious. In place of storytelling, though, it’s built on unwieldy lore dumps: we’re given hundreds of details about this galaxy far far away, but no reasons to care about any of them.

Art was a labour of love for Maud Lewis: that much Lewis’s film makes clear. But by zeroing in on both the love and labour of it, the art itself – and the point of Maud’s life story, by extension – gets exasperatingly short shrift.

It’s sludgy, and kind of random, and if you already know you’ll enjoy it anyway, you undoubtedly will.

Tense but formulaic. [16 Oct 2010, p.31]

It takes a special kind of biopic to reduce its subject to the least imaginably interesting version of itself.

So glibly controlled is the entire cruise, you wonder if it’s without a boatman, gliding on tracks underwater.

One of Howard Shore’s routinely excellent moody scores helps our wend through the wilderness. But the irony, for a would-be-macabre mystery about hearts being ripped out, is a flatlined pulse and a puzzling absence of red meat.

At least Watts’s bright-eyed charisma and obvious commitment passes the time – while director Phillip Noyce, who also had Angelina Jolie running for her life in 2010’s Salt, does his best to keep things visually fresh.

Your Place or Mine is thoroughly mild, considerate and well-behaved. But where’s the fun in that?

Vincente Minnelli's fantasy musical is completely barmy and not one of his best. The songs are a mixed bag, but it's fun all the same. [11 Sep 2010, p.30]

The result is an empty film about emptiness, and therefore doubly depressing.

On Chesil Beach is a non-disaster, essentially, until it falls off a cliff.

The film is almost all build-up, though any mounting sense of excitement is dispelled by the monotonously downbeat tone and the cast’s conspicuous lack of chemistry. Nobody looks like they’re having fun, and the gloom is infectious.

You can’t help but wonder if some important people in boardrooms watched the last two Expendables films and, between sips of mineral water, diligently noted all the ways in which the third might be made slicker and more polished, without realising the franchise’s doughy unslickness was the wellspring of its charm.

The film’s major blunder – it’s got plenty of competition – is mistaking Kate Winslet for Rita Hayworth.

Assassin’s Creed is leaps and bounds ahead of kitchen-sink-hurling flapdoodle like X-Men Apocalypse – it’s only the second-worst Fassbender star vehicle of 2016 – but it never allows him a sober moment, as that film did in a hushed Polish forest, where his talent, as opposed to his biceps, gets a stern workout.

It wants to become a cat-and-mouse game between the leads, but the leaky script dampens any real hope of suspense.

The much-vaunted fresh perspective on a notorious figure turns out to have been so much sweet talk.

It’s the opposite of what a Borat film should feel like: business as usual.

It’s a film whose final shape feels dwindled by compromise – not unappealing, but stymied, like a luxury jet which spends two hours taxiing on the runway.

Too hectic to be scary, and with a plot that’s regularly bogged down in optimistic franchise-building spadework, The House with a Clock in Its Walls never quite grasps what made its inspirations tick.

The film sounds actively embarrassed by what it’s trying to pitch, and reverse-engineers its sci-fi elements to fit the default disaster template Emmerich could apply in his sleep. We’re promised the Moon, but sold a lemon.

I’m So Excited! is vertiginously disappointing in the way only bad films from great filmmakers can be.

It’s just a big blue blur – too anodyne to elicit more than heavy sighs, too full of Smurfs not to recommend solely to the under-eights.

This cast of national institutions make fools of themselves with a lack of vanity that’s theoretically fun, but there’s playing to the gallery, and then there’s clambering up there to wiggle your bits at them.

Your ass is constantly braced in readiness and hope, but it remains un-kicked.

It’s a project driven by ideas but made for a mass-market audience, which are always welcome in principle. The problem here is the good ideas are all extremely familiar, and the handful of new ones aren’t much to write home about.

McConaughey cranks his performance up to 11, as if to compensate for the lack of wattage found in Patrick Massett and John Zinman’s script.

The film’s twists, alas, fall into one of two categories – the obvious and the tasteless – and the side-orders of gruesome violence feel like they’ve been delivered to quite the wrong table.

It’s just chilly and uninvolving.

Jones conjured intimacy on the surface of the moon, but in the crowded streets of futuristic Berlin, there’s no real feeling.

Van Sant wanted to study a man drowning in sorrow and guide him towards the light. But the guidance he gets is fake, forced, and unbearably tricksy, a kind of suicide rehab with gotcha devices.

The film is very loud, and festooned with the sort of comic violence far more disturbing than anything in an 18-rated movie.

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.

The latest Marvel title is just dollop upon dollop of dourness, leaving its stars no space to show us what they might bring to the franchise.

Holiff assembled this memoir from his father’s papers and audio diary, although the portrait of Cash that emerges is that of a pill-popping religious nut, and there is next to no insight into his music or creative process.

This tale of epiphanies and religious schooling at a tiny monastery in the 1940s has a woozy, episodic lyricism all Thornton’s own. It’s also fuzzy and unfulfilled, groping for its images without ever precisely knowing what it needs them to say.

Dean Parisot, who made the delightful Galaxy Quest, has a funnier sensibility than the first movie’s director, Robert Schwentke, but he’s still defeated by a script that’s over-complicated and under-sophisticated.

It’s mostly handsomely shot, with painterly vistas of the French countryside and lots of dazzling Versailles interiors. But the central relationship never convinces – it all just feels like a performance, put on for the benefit of the courtiers and by extension, us.

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.

Time and again, the film corrals their characters into situations it lacks the emotional delicacy to get them through unscathed – not least a weirdly frenzied sex scene which begins with so much off-screen grunting and puffing I assumed it must be the set-up to a joke, and the camera was about to pan across to the pair shifting furniture.

So much of the film’s (notably slight) running time is squandered on filler – a subplot involving bickering henchmen consumes around a third of the film – that it’s never able to hit its grindhouse stride.

As a masterclass in having as little fun as possible with an irresistible premise, JT LeRoy is a hard act to beat.

The film’s wobbles begin at this stage and spread unstoppably through the last hour. It’s one of those steep-tumbling disappointments where almost every scene feels like an additional step in the wrong direction.

Bird Box begins with considerable promise but is soon revealed to have feathers for brains.

Nick Cassavetes (John Q, The Notebook) has never delivered a picture that entirely knows what its tone is, and a manic uncertainty duly sucks the fun away.

Norris and his director of photography Rob Hardy have shot it with stylish confidence, but Mark O’Rowe’s script (adapted from Daniel Clay’s novel) feels cramped and over-schematic.

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

Here and elsewhere, you sense the film knows more than it’s prepared to share, which gives it the queasy sheen of a PR exercise.