The film is earnest yet hopeful, with crisply drawn characters - but perhaps its full grandeur won’t be fully realised until part two.

This jumbled sequel, which was also directed by Carlos Saldanha, loses most of what made the first film such an infectious entertainment.

The movie is immaculately dressed, but there’s a mannequin blandness lurking beneath: it’s all logistics, no guts.

Shallowly entertaining but the opposite of insightful, this film repeatedly hails the clever USP that Beanie Babies were understuffed on purpose, so they could be “posed” better. As a piece of malleable, threadbare, plasticky content with a plum destiny as digital landfill, their biopic is certainly in a position to know.

Other than sniggering about what an outré stereotype they’ve served up, it’s hard to see how Lee and Copley can justify this performance, which is quite the worst of the year, and sends the whole final act of their movie straight to oblivion.

Inkheart is cheerful and amiable, and in the absence of a Harry Potter film this winter, it fills a gap neatly.

[Aniston's] the one element keeping this unexceptional dramedy halfway watchable.

The Instigators is little more than a stacked cast list on an Apple budget, waiting for a good script to materialise.

There are also moments of more sincere family dynamics, which elevate the production beyond a hackneyed made-for-television movie. But they are too few to prevent a guilty conviction for Dobkin: first-degree, low-grade schlock.

Cinematically, Golda doesn’t altogether avoid a TV-movie stodginess – it looks a bit drab, with some duff effects and uneven staging. But it has a businesslike running time, and doesn’t waste it.

While the Black magic of old was a great fit for Iron Man 3 – the writer-director’s last venture into franchise territory – it turns The Predator into a shrill, murky, retrograde bore, whose handful of punchy ideas get lost in the cracks of its terminally haywire plot.

The film is like a cheeky seaside postcard with swastikas and cryptography on the reverse.

A shambolic film populated by some of the most aggressively charmless characters ever seen in a blockbuster.

If every last joke in it wasn’t built on the premise that anyone who isn’t a straight, white, able-bodied, middle-class male isn’t intrinsically laughable, it might have made for lively comedy.

The more you scrutinise the society Roth and these screenwriters have created, the more it seems a chintzily self-designed dystopia whose rules and entire infrastructure are pure cardboard.

But the only sense of wonder the film instils is this: if we have to wait so long between movie musicals, who on earth thought it would be a good idea to wait for this one?

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

It needed a director to grapple with all this, deadhead the redundancies and deliver a coherent vision; it’s especially disappointing to watch Christopher Smith struggle to pull it off.

Luck contains all the warmth and ingenuity that was nowhere to be found in Pixar’s own recent Lightyear, and has the attitude – if not always the supreme clarity and craftsmanship – of his old studio’s vintage productions.

It all feels grindingly perfunctory – gloopy with jargon and lore, and with no concessions made to newcomers, the film feels less like a worthwhile film in its own right than an invitation to existing fans to buy a ticket, just to see how things turned out.

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

The moment-to-moment incoherence of Dashcam makes it maddeningly hard to figure out what’s happening – the “WTF?”s that appear in the chat-box might just as well be our own. There’s a certain delirious energy to it.

The experience is frequently infuriating, but it’s quite clearly supposed to be – it’s about hell being the other people in your own family.

Overegged is the word – there was enough conviction in Radcliffe alone to pull the story through these straits.

It feels like a film that is attracted by the shape of love and pain, but is a long way from understanding the content.

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.

The thing actually docking this unpretentious ride is a nagging shortage of charm, because all the script’s efforts can’t drum up a buddy dynamic between Elba and Madden (both playing Yanks) that’s anything more than strictly contractual.

More than the sets or spectacle, Vikander pulls you into her picture, as if we’ve signed up for a special edition of the game where Lara Croft has only one life to spare, one go to get it right. It’s not rocket science, just an elementary way to make us sit up and care.

For those of us old enough to have been terrorised the first time round, it delivers a nasty-but-nice-enough childhood flashback.

The thrill of the games is matched fleetingly here at best, because it feels like a simulator being put through a simulator, and not all the effects are up to snuff. Script-wise, we don’t just get Formula One, but formulae two through infinity.

If 300’s human touch largely came down to Butler’s roaring and screaming, it’s left entirely to Green to goose the sequel into life. Happily she obliges.

Had Roupenian stretched out Margot’s ordeal into the turgid novella it hereby becomes, we’d never have heard of Cat Person in the first place.

It’s as if the book has been given a full-body massage en route to the screen, teasing away some of the spinal kinks that actually made it interesting.

What sense there is of big ideas being thoughtfully chewed over stems largely from Rapace’s steely, wounded central performance, which often feels like a decade-later echo of her work in the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo films.

Well-informed, enlightening writing on Tolkien’s life and creative process is hardly scarce. But his genius stems from his scholarship, which doesn’t obviously lend itself to cinema, even with Derek Jacobi on hand as a professor-cum-mentor fruitily declaiming in Gothic as he potters around the quad.

If you don’t actually want to make a film out of a Roald Dahl book, this critic’s advice is: don’t.

The movie subverts expectations, and not in a good way, by seeming in a dither about its own identity. The romance is by the by, the comedy as sparse as can be. We’re left with a curious non-film about the pitfalls of higher education assessment. Odd.

Hopkins’ performance isn’t good, exactly, but it’s certainly interesting to watch, as the actor seems to swipe his lines of dialogue from the shelf in passing, as if playing a script version of Supermarket Sweep. Goode is restrained by comparison, but then the film does a lot of restraining on his behalf.

While it wouldn’t be entirely fair to accuse the film of having “bonus DVD content” written all over it, little here is, shall we say, incompatible with the hard sell.

For a franchise in need of refreshment, it’s anything but a quantum leap.

In its best moments, which tend to involve Gambon lurking at the back with a seedy grimace, or Broadbent looming almost motheringly over a rival’s shoulder, the film’s writing and acting have the grubby energy of good Pinter. In its worst though, it’s business-like and, for all the vivid performances, oddly bland.

If there’s one reason to see Prisoner’s Daughter, it’s Kate Beckinsale.

Like the muddled plotting, risible climax and wearisomely foul-mouthed script, Jolt’s budgetary shortcomings might have been endurable if its action scenes passed muster. Alas, they’re barely community theatre standard.

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.

Things keep barrelling along thanks to both Pugh and the plot’s punchy critique of certain recent trends in the internet’s more testosterone-raddled dark corners. With a smudgy red-lipsticked grin, Don’t Worry Darling drags them out into the blazing desert light.

The only means it can find to be funny is sabotaging its own message, which isn’t a great starting point, let alone finishing point, for a body-positive comedy.

It’s a misguided enterprise all round, and while it’s perfectly possible to applaud everything the film wants to say, you find yourself cringing at the ways it’s saying it.

Oddly bloodless, but thought-provoking in a discussion group kind of way, it’s less successful as a film than as an exercise, but at least it’s a worthwhile one.

Incoming director Michael Dougherty (Krampus) is the one in this unenviable hot-seat, but he can’t competently handle a budget this huge when it’s being poured over an assignment this vague.

This spooky theme-park spin-off has its moments, but the plot is creakier than the floorboards, and why is it over two hours long?

The result is spooky, upsetting and revolting. Although it ends up crossing the line from unsettling to punishing, you still have to take your hat off to it, if only because a makeshift sick bag may be required.

Children encountering the faux-ET format for the first time may enjoy it well enough, but signs of life, extra or otherwise, are low to nil.

As a film, it feels like a bunch of people pretending to be in a film. As a continuation of the show’s faintly ridiculous appeal, it has enjoyable moments.

So many sequences here feel like free-floating trailer fodder: surplus to plot requirements, but too expensive to cut.

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.

The third Night at the Museum film starts strongly, with its heart in the past... It’s an exciting opening, and perhaps too exciting for the film’s own good. It’s hard not to be disappointed when the plot moves back to the present and settles into the time-honoured formula of digitised creatures running riot and famous people in fancy dress doing shtick.

There’s so much incident crammed into this tale of misfortune that there’s never quite enough time to truly tangle with the sheets and sails of its meaning.

When [Penn] steps aside, or simply lets Zelensky talk, the film hits home as a crudely earnest plea for more principled military aid, and you can’t really fault its message. The delivery, though, leaves a lot to be desired.

When A Cure for Wellness goes full wacko, it certainly doesn’t worry about questions of taste. But it hasn’t worried about questions of logic, duration, or novelty, either.

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

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

Monster Hunter is silly, it’s loud, and it has a synth score by Paul Haslinger that pipes away addictively, manoeuvring the film’s tone into an optimal space for this sort of junk. It achieves a kind of jokey bombast.

There’s a leaden-footedness to the direction, too. Where Burton’s camera lurched and crashed, Williams’s has a habit of hanging back sheepishly, fluffing visual gags and sapping scenes of the unhinged energy they need.

Still, there is no denying that the film clicks up a gear when he’s on screen. He says nothing and his motives have not moved beyond “kill, kill, kill”. But he is one of horror’s true stars and, if Halloween Ends often sluggish and silly, Myers powers through the mediocrity one brutal swipe at a time.

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.

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

Midway will never be mistaken for a classic, and even box office success for the $100 independent production looks dicey. Stretches of the film work beautifully, though, and the sinking feeling for Japan’s forces is painted with sympathy, not schadenfreude.

The Hitman’s Bodyguard simply doesn’t put in the effort, with the result that almost every aspect of the film proves wildly irritating, from its central odd couple to the dubious green-screen work that regularly has them pulling nonchalant faces in front of exploding buildings.

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.

Sure, the film is crude, calorific and full of groanworthy half-jokes, but it holds together. It stacks up as an oafish pleasure for an undemanding summer – a rewriting of myths in scrawled crayon, with a nonchalant quality that makes its judiciously brief running time fly by.

The Bird Box beasts may be back in business, and perhaps in films to come we might even get a proper look at one. But it’s hard not to feel the apocalypse has moved on without them.

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

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 trouble with Dean Israelite’s film is that it’s far more excited about the shallow possibilities of cheating the fourth dimension than the infinitely scarier ones of messing it all up.

Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of its cast, the film just isn’t that good.

As a straight-up redemptive sob story with no other purpose, it cooks the books.

High-speed antics have never felt this slow.

Notching up his third entry in what I suppose we’re meant to call the CCU, Michael Chaves looks alive, as often, with the set pieces.

There’s some commendable trippiness towards the end, but for the most part Godzilla Smooch Kong is all too ready to fall back on delivering the bare minimum promised by its title. It’s giant monsters fighting, the thing constantly shrugs: what else do you want? Ideally a bit more than this.

The Alto Knights certainly has the off-screen pedigree you’d hope for. Nicholas Pileggi (Goodfellas, Casino) wrote the script, named after an infamous Manhattan social club. But the circuitous shaping feels off, a problem Barry Levinson’s direction is too flaccid to fix.

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.

Blair Witch styles itself as a love-letter, but it’s pure transcription.

Shallowness permeates all the characterisations, giving it a bland, marshmallowy centre.

In terms of representation, you couldn’t ask for more. And that’s just as well, because in terms of entertainment, you could barely get less.

The movie achieves a take-it-or-leave-it watchability without being much to look at, and as a nominal thrill ride, it’s underpowered.

It isn’t Allen escaping into the past so much as defensively dredging it up, script-wise. And though he’s hired another world-class cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro, to give this the gaudy hypercoloured glow of a pastichey Douglas Sirk melodrama, the film’s look is pushy and unattractive, as if it’s wearing too much lipstick.

Constructed to fool the viewer with layer upon layer of lame cheats and moth-eaten devices, the film has nothing on its mind but sinking you gently into an in-flight stupor.

Somehow, this new animated adaptation of the video game is even worse than the abominable 1993 live-action. Even the CGI is second-rate.

With just a scattering of stumbles, Unlocked could have conceivably ended up as a romp whose flaws and idiosyncrasies gave it character. But there’s only so much character a film can take.

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

In place of classic thriller techniques and mechanisms are a beige aesthetic, limp dialogue and glib let’s-just-vibe-with-it attitude that only grow more maddening as things progress.

There is a noxious undead pong emanating from this latest entry in the 1980s franchise, which is now being necromantically sustained through force of sheer commercial desperation, and nothing else.

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.

Sin City 2 glowers and sulks and is determined to show you the best bad time you’ve had in years. It’s neither high art nor noir, but it’s what a Sin City film should be.

A lot gets packed in here, none of it good.

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

Rather than being any particular person’s bright idea for a girlboss fantasy revenge caper, this lousy romp was obviously hatched by an algorithm, and might just as well have been directed by AI.

Great art it's not – but it's frisky, in charge of itself, and about as keenly felt a vision of this S&M power game we could realistically have expected to see.