There are no depths to which The Meg won’t sink. But as trashy cinema goes, it all feels a little too well behaved.

While you couldn’t hold up Sumotherhood to any legitimate standards as good cinema, it’s an entertaining shambles – and far less toxic than anything Clarke made.

As a repeat performance – even a cunningly subversive one – Folie à Deux can’t quite match its predecessor for dizzying impact. But it matches it for horrible tinderbox tension: it’s a film you feel might burst into flames at any given moment.

Dark Glasses is mainly just flat, but it could definitely have done without this all-round disgrace of a dog performance – quite enough to have Uggy from The Artist shielding his peepers with a front paw.

It is vivaciously, even triumphantly, OK. If there was an Oscar for Most Adequate Picture, we’d be gearing up for a sweep.

It’s all thumpingly corny, but in the way good family films often are.

For all the film’s fumbled shortcuts, air of semi-intentional Nineties-ness, and the completely mad bit with a stray flight of doves, it jollies along with some amiability.

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

Halloween is fast approaching and Netflix has very generously stitched together a chilling Frankenstein’s monster of a rom-com sure to keep audiences awake all night in a cold sweat.

The film is unquestionably a curio for converts rather than the meatier exploration it will leave many sceptics (including this one) hankering after, but it leaves you with plenty to chew on – along with that Satanic cadence echoing in your bones.

American Assassin seems to have a certain target audience in mind, and it’s probably not one you’d want to be considered a part of.

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.

The film contains deeply felt work by Hugh Jackman and Vanessa Kirby, but it’s an otherwise drab, simplistic, mechanical thing that wears its workings right on the surface.

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.

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.

There was barely a scene in Dogman that didn’t have me yelping in disbelief.

It feels like a sheepish feature-length retraction of the franchise to date. It’s consistently embarrassing to watch, and features plot holes so yawningly vast they have a kind of Grand Canyon-like splendour: part of you wants to hang around to see what they look like at sunset.

The film’s slightly feeble and teenage ideas about what counts as transgressive quickly drain these outpourings of their capacity to shock.

Sincerity isn’t the film’s problem; it’s more a question of mileage.

The placid, open-ended charm of its video game source material is nowhere to be found in this grindingly generic brand extension.

It’s just all too supremely silly to worry about in the least.

The canon of Alzheimer’s films doesn’t lack for performances piled up with compassion and fine-grained observation, from Iris all the way to Still Alice. But as their faded Winnebago wends its way to the coast, Ella and John show there’s room for two more.

To describe Wonder Park as Paramount Animation's Inside Out would be significantly more of a stretch, but it gets to the heart of what this efficient Easter holidays time-passer is trying to do.

Its central love quadrangle, which straddles two separate time periods with ease, is breezily absorbing thanks to its participants’ plentiful chemistry, while the plot embraces and dodges clichés by turns with quickstepping finesse.

It’s preposterous, but I dare you not to smile at the high-kicking silliness on offer, or the sweetly old-fashioned undertones: as the inevitable final showdown looms, loyalty, hard work and fair play are just as important to the dancers as strutting their stuff.

There’s nowhere near enough horror, threat or intrigue to last the course.

For long periods, it is just Tipton and Teller on screen together and it is testament to the fizzing chemistry between them that their evolving relationship remains compelling.

It has a serviceable but stalled quality.

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

It’s impossible not to come out wishing it were better.

The effects have a pleasingly retro patina, but the action itself is drab, the jokes scarce, while the town itself is both entirely characterless and oddly deserted, giving the impression that nothing’s really at stake. It’s just what we were warned about all those years ago: something weird that don’t look good.

The film’s sincere core is threatened a little by its flashier directorial effects.

For Lynch himself, “the big news was that I’d finally completely killed Twin Peaks with this picture”. But in fact, this exceptional, widely misunderstood film restores it to writhing, screaming life...Far from cheating viewers, this fresh perspective offered them a new way to decode the entire Twin Peaks mythos, with Sheryl Lee’s extraordinary, soul-tearing performance shaking the franchise out of its cherry-pie-munching reverie...Time has passed, and its brilliance is gradually coming into focus, just as Lynch hoped it would.

Angel Has Fallen is almost worth seeing.

Keeps playing its two winning cards over and over again, and is smart enough to realise they are more than enough. The first is the giant animal carnage itself, which crackles with fun ideas and flourishes throughout. The second is the comic chemistry of a superbly picked cast who bring everyone in on the joke.

Even in the realm of scrappy British underdog comedy, there is a clear line between endearingly ramshackle and downright slipshod. Fisherman’s Friends blithely crosses it, never to return, from the moment it chugs out of port.

It’s a hysterical screwball fantasia that openly steals from Lubitsch, Hawks, Capra and Sturges and wants to be caught with its fingers in the till. The result is a highly-sexed Jenga-pile of silliness, to which Bogdanovich can’t resist adding block after teetering block.

Cherry might represent a drastic shift in scale, tone and subject matter for its directors and leading man alike, but there’s a blockbuster-sized gap where its point should be.

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

The ugly and incomprehensible big finish we get appears to have been shot by the Hunchback of Notre Dame and edited by a monkey wearing oven gloves, and if there’s a single clear shot of the Dinozords in action in there, I must have missed it.

MacFarlane’s making no effort to push the envelope, which is something of a relief, but nor is he winning anyone around to his increasingly desperate stylings as a nerd-turned-bully.

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.

It’s more often than not something of a slog, its insights shrug-worthy and its tone jarring in its shifts from candy-coloured whimsy to weepy dramatics.

This crazily overlong and tiresome follow-up...doesn’t seem to have the first idea what to do with itself – not least when it comes to its much-vaunted all-star cast, the majority of whom are barely even in it.

Its fusion of maudlin social commentary and banana-slipping pratfalls is graceless in the extreme: picture an episode of Chucklevision directed by Ken Loach.

Being funny with Dark Age clichés shouldn’t be a challenge, even if you have to trudge off-script and simply cover yourself in mud. The cast of Seize Them!, a plucky shoestring Britcom about a peasant revolution, unfortunately face an uphill battle.

Robbie lights up her scenes with the much more special effect of raw personality.

Watching del Toro’s film felt like playing with toys as big as skyscrapers, but everything about this successor feels trinket-sized.

Some of the action sequences are OK, the cast decent – but this convoluted action-adventure's poor attention to detail is its undoing.

Grimsby doesn’t ever wound quite as devastatingly as Borat or Brüno, but it’s a vital, lavish, venomously profane two fingers up at Benefits Street pity porn and the social division it fosters. I laughed, winced, gagged, then laughed even more.

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

It’s hard to extend much credit for the subject matter when it’s exploited for a “wild ride” that isn’t even wild, hawking a true story that isn’t even true.

From top to bottom, it’s Brydon’s film, and his performance matches the modesty of the surroundings: rarely pushing too hard, he finds just the right groove as a browbeaten Everyman lacking spring in his step (or dash in his breaststroke).

So no, The King’s Man doesn’t take itself especially seriously – until it suddenly, jarringly does.

Those in the market for domestic drama, sexual tension and humorous mishaps against a backdrop of sawing and sweeping would be advised to try any home renovation show over this.

This pensive science-fiction three-hander, adapted by the Lion and Mary Magdalene director and Iain Reid from the latter’s 2018 novel, quickly settles into its solemn, elliptical groove – and then sticks to it so doggedly, it becomes a tonal rut from which the film increasingly struggles to escape.

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 sheer half-heartedness of the whole exercise, though, may still catch you unawares.

After a while, it’s as if Thomas’s self-loathing begins to rub off on the script, which keeps undercutting should-be-resonant moments with smirking references to other films.

Despite its ambitious goal of transposing a dystopian classic to the modern “Young Adult” genre, Voyagers is ultimately about as effective as a leaky space-suit.

Mortal Engines has been thoroughly storyboarded, make no mistake. But here lies the rub – lift-off, personality, and plainly put, direction, aren’t there. All the pieces of the movie slide mechanically into place and wait – and wait – for some spark of soul to turn up and animate them.

Amid the bungles, Collins is a bright spark.

It's pretty standard fare, but it's always uplifting to watch Spitfires stick it to the Stukas. [25 May 2019, p.32]

The key to the film’s success, and the reason it often left me hooting with laughter, is Aniston, and her character’s struggle in vain to maintain her sweetheart persona.

Intertwining, Altman-esque social tapestries are all well and good, but the connections between characters should ideally run a little deeper than having them occasionally stroll past each other in the street.

No major blockbuster in years has been this incoherently structured, this seemingly uninterested in telling a story with clarity and purpose.

The two who do succeed in forging a convincing bond are Bateman and a spry, switched-on Driver, as brothers with a significant age gap who get each other and tend to join forces against the surrounding tumult.

To call the film “repellent” would do it too much credit. The combat itself (sorry, kombat) is so clumsily shot and edited that the fights have no discernible dramatic shape or flow, while the fatalities are rendered in bland, businesslike computer graphics that have you yearning for the honest, artisanal gloop-by-the-bucket of a Hellraiser or Nightmare on Elm Street.

Where the film completely falls down is in director Joshua Michael Stern’s disastrous decision to cast Ashton Kutcher in the central role.

The film’s family-saga pretensions and bombastically overdone characterisation keep hobbling its better elements.

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

The production design and effects for this apocalyptic terrain are way above par for this sort of thing, and evidence of a much higher budget than Ball had first time around.

It offers a selection of sweaty, string-vesty, bulgy-bare-armsy scenes from the life of the real-life submarine commander Salvatore Todaro, played here by Pierfranceso Favino. It isn’t dreadful.

The pacing seems intentionally designed to break your spirits, with a climactic set-piece that rages on forever, despite being comprised of nothing but shouting and torpedos. It makes Crimson Tide looks like a masterclass in international relations.

The film’s a little wobbly on actual charm; stronger on smarm, in-jokes and Bond-riffing action pastiche. Yet whatever their niggles, families can flock to it, relieved to be getting brand new entertainment that entertains.

You see San Francisco and Los Angeles falling apart very loudly and dangerously, and in great computer-generated detail. But there’s nothing memorable or beautiful about the carnage; no specific moments to replay in your head once the film is over.

It’s a gorgeous performance overall – [Ben-Adir's] Marley is so alive to the potential of music as both an art form and cause, it’s as if you can see the creative energy flowing up from the earth through his legs to the tips of his fingers and dreadlocks.

Antebellum doesn’t so much concertina the past and the present as do a leering jig back and forth, then blow you a callous raspberry instead.

The film has so little to say about forbidden love, and gives its stars so little dramatic sinew to flex, that it already feels like a footnote in the genre.

There’s a doomy superficial finesse to the picture, with all its wintry confrontations, skull-trained sniper fire and quick thinking, and it doesn’t take itself as seriously as Fincher’s did. But then, it couldn’t: there’s nothing going on beneath.

It gives you plenty to look at, even if you could say it’s been Avatarred and feathered to within an inch of its life. It’s the big, echoing hole in the middle – insert story, any story – that no one has figured out how to plug.

Though A Family Affair shoots for laughs, it ends up in an uncanny valley of spooky sex and dead-on-arrival jokes.

It feels as though it would have been better served as a six-part sitcom, where its sentimentality, broad comedy and fantasy elements wouldn't rub up against each other so badly.

I admire its courage and the always welcome presence of Harry Andrews (as Earnshaw), Judy Cornwell (as Nellie), Pamela Browne, Rosalie Crutchley. But I can't forgive its dullness. I don't have to believe in Wuthering Heights, I simply ask to be transported by it. [13 Jun 1971, p.14]

Nothing in this feeble psychological thriller rings true for a moment, though its unhinged machinations feel as pedestrian as soap opera in execution.

The Nicolas Cage aficionado carries two hopes into each of the 59-year-old actor’s new films. The first – not often met, truth be told – is that it will be good. And the second, failing that, is that it will be mad. Alas, this thin and lumpy western is neither.

Unlike certain past ventures of Knightley’s, there’s little or no sense of us being given a Big Performance, and she’s often rather moving as a result.

By concentrating on the relationship, the road they’ve taken here is too narrow, but I’m sympathetic to the problem: sharpening your focus always gives biopics more lift-off than vaguely trying to cram everything in.

It’s a series of pointless, boorish skits about two unrepentant lotharios.

Superheroes do progressive politics these days as a matter of course, and here it just feels like shtick – a box to be dutifully checked, rather than a theme to be meaningfully explored.

Visually, narratively, every creative choice forks off down the most obvious route.

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.

The result is a film with the depth and decorative value of an inspirational fridge magnet – yet there is a certain degree of fun to be had in hearing Costner monologuing about tapeworm and then picturing him in the voiceover booth, possibly with his head in his hands.

In the annual way of these things, Office Christmas Party is something you might regret not dropping in on, but you could cut your losses after an hour or so, and only miss sordid carnage and a sore head.

Seinfeld’s affable mugging is no compensation for putting us through a glorified pitch session anyone sane would have nipped in the bud.

It plays like a listless mash-up of every Young Adult franchise movie you’ve ever seen – domineering rulers, anguished, system-smashing teens, and all the purposeful striding through rubble you can handle.

This film’s two hours feel like four.

Every shot is sluiced in flat grey light – the action scenes look like gravel in a food processor – while the dialogue is all botched quips and clichés (“Did somebody order backup?” one Transformer smarms while cocking a rocket launcher), and the human characters timidly written nobodies.