A variously lukewarm and lugubrious melodrama adapted from a 2008 novel by Sebastian Barry.

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

As trash pleasures go, Serenity’s too ploddingly stretched and lacking in plot curlicues to reach nirvana, but it’s capable of making a whole audience giggle at its wonderfully pretentious gracenotes.

Atlas is a preposterous rollercoaster directed in workmanlike fashion by Brad Peyton (San Andreas, Rampage). However, it is helped hugely by the fact that Lopez (a co-producer) takes it all so seriously.

The Lone Ranger is a grand folly that, in a sane world at least, would never have been made, although I’m really rather glad someone did.

Winterbottom’s shapeshifting spontaneity has long seemed as much limitation as virtue, characteristic of a filmmaker unable or unwilling to commit to his own better ideas. Here, you feel him hedging around his subject, less out of sensitivity than a constitutional evasiveness, an inability to formulate a clear line of argument.

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.

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

It has a weird, half-finished vibe, with a lumpy, repetitive structure, a bizarre colour palette that resembles an exploding Tango Ice Blast machine, and too many scenes that wear on well beyond their natural usefulness.

It has a certain clomping, smart-alecky entertainment value, wedded to the meta appeal of watching three A-listers juggle all the twists with ease, before walking off into the sunset with silly money. Did Netflix never twig that the real heist was on them?

Only God Forgives is the spectacle of a brilliant young director spinning out in style. It’s a beautiful disaster.

Fans of Cage and Cusack, previously paired as unlikely allies in Con Air (1997), may be looking forward to a bit of deranged actorly combat once Hansen is cornered in the interrogation room, but it’s here that this hopeless flick comes up especially short.

As 2017’s gripping and confidently philosophical Life proved, it’s possible to weave an original action movie from the smelly-people-trapped-in-space cliche. Yet The Cloverfield Paradox’s take on the genre is ham-fisted, with deafening bursts of exposition strewn between endless, talky, tedium.

It’s testament to just how bad the original Super Mario Bros Movie was that this sequel can be a noticeable improvement in every respect – animation, storytelling, humour, vocal performances, you name it – while still comfortably qualifying as absolute rubbish.

Baby Invasion, which premiered at Venice tonight, may be the stupidest film I have ever seen. And I use the word “may” only because I’m not entirely sure this thing actually is a film in the first place.

Despite the clumsy writing and production design, Thirlby and Hurt acquit themselves perfectly well, and Jürgen Prochnow makes an enjoyably ripe appearance as a former Nazi who unwittingly helps direct Ari towards his target.

This is pure filmmaking-by-paycheque: you can virtually hear the clock card machine crunching at the start of every scene, as cast and crew punch in dutifully for another shift.

As supposedly taboo-smashing comedy, it’s never on full thrust, settling more for tentative gags with underwear firmly in place.

Occasionally things get a little overcrowded, particularly during a sticky final act, but Pan has a certain timeless buoyancy that keeps it bouncing back.

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.

A lot of the blame for this misfire must fall on novice Brazilian director Afonso Poyart, whose crackpot editing and fondness for irrelevant zooming don’t so much turn this film’s screws as loosen them unrecoverably.

Tom Gormican, the writer and director, mostly uses overlapping dialogue in place of actual jokes, although occasionally he stretches to toilet humour.

Runner Runner starts off with a solid draw, then folds on the flop.

Substance-wise, there might be enough going on here to sustain a five-minute short.

It’s bizarre, unsettling and yet – in the filmmaking equivalent of turning wine to water – bracingly dull to boot.

This is Egoyan’s best film for a very long time: like Reynolds, he needed a hit, and The Captive is a welcome return to the form of The Sweet Hereafter. Its eeriness creeps up on you and taps you on the shoulder, and when you spin around, it’s still behind you.

Every punchline is followed by a quiet pause for audience laughter, the lengths of which might kindly be described as optimistic.

Truth or Dare is the kind of film that must have seemed like a good idea at the time, but its initially appealing premise – what if a demon possessed a drinking game? – quickly falls to pieces under its own self-generated confusions.

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.

An enjoyably silly police thriller,

It’s Mamma Mia!, minus ABBA. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

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

Absurdly, the film ends up flouting its own self-imposed rules to reach a suitably syrupy conclusion – and thereby avoid the more bittersweet, thought-provoking landing you find yourself wondering if it has the courage to go for. Well, it doesn’t: Genie is a sugar-only zone. But then, it is Christmas. Or near enough.

Venom can be quite a lively watch, both as a reminder of why Hollywood stopped making superhero films like this, and also for the occasional glimpse of the off-the-wall, star-driven freak-out that might have been.... But in terms of basic entertainment, let alone as the foundation of a franchise, it is miserably shaky stuff.

We’d give the lazy set-up a pass if sufficiently fun things started happening off the back of it.

The action is slapstick-driven, yet the set-pieces are all so transparently bogus – with fourth-rate CGI and actors’ digital doubles flopping about the place like haunted marionettes – that they play as insulting rather than outrageous.

The switch from male to female leads has been done with so little apparent regard for how it might actually affect the plot that entire tracts of the film, including its finale, now land like poorly tossed pancakes.

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

Leto throws himself into the role with a steely commitment that would be easier to understand if the film surrounding him weren’t so thuddingly generic.

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

The 3D photography is shallow and muddy, although a David Attenborough voiceover helps sustain interest.

This tale, more mechanical than human, is finally beyond [Bier's] skillset: it required ruthless tinkering, not the softly-softly approach.

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.

It’s not the most hideous of premises, particularly in early, ultimately fruitless, moments that suggest Patrick could be some sort of four-legged genie. But the film struggles to congeal, falling back on laboured gags set up with mechanical lack-of-ease.

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.

The actual exorcism sequence, involving three well-meaning cult members and a chicken, is strangely uneventful – and if there’s one thing a movie exorcism should never, ever be, it’s that.

Last orders can’t come soon enough for the whole parade of supervillains, superheroes, or however they’re now choosing to identify. This is rock bottom.

The film gropes around for novel gimmicks – is the killer’s identity being deepfaked this time? – and tries to placate its fanbase with a few moments of gratuitously icky, mean-spirited gore. And goodness, it plods.

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.

The Wedding Ringer is offensive, insincere and far, far too long. Oh, and there is not a single funny moment. In short, it has all the charm of a catastrophic best man’s speech.

It’s hardly fascinating. It doesn’t offer new facts about the Princess’s life. And it certainly doesn’t explain her complexity or contradictions.

This bright children’s adventure, loosely adapted from a picture book about a young boy whose drawings become real, feels like the sort of thing Jim Carrey might have made in his first flush of success. It’s silly, relentlessly amiable, and embraces the low-stakes playfulness of its conceit.

Jack Thorne's screenplay has all the emotional nuance of a Sudoku puzzle; directed by French romcom veteran Pascal Chaumeil (Heartbreaker), it's bouncy and vacuous enough to feel like a light comedy from the planet Neptune.

It’s a sad waste, not a wilful one – a misfire you wish was better in virtually every shot.

There are only so many ways Foxx can hobble around with a stab wound and pick up multiple cellphones before the very sight of him gets silly: after a while, it’s like watching fatigued takes of the same scene over and over again.

Get Hard just gets increasingly hard to put up with, full stop.

The film thinks fame alone is a substitute for wit or charm, and might just as well have outsourced every last role to a hologram.

The general ineptitude is more likely to make you cackle in disbelief.

This whole story pimps out Yuletide as a strictly mercantile fixture, with a sham veneer of goodwill merely sweetening the transaction.

The film mechanically ticks by, while showing no evidence of a soul.

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.

The whole business, this time, is passable eye candy without being any kind of brain candy.

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

Oscillates between the jolting and the absurd, bottoming out with a nonsensical coda.

It’s fun to see Zoolander once more. It seems unlikely that the premise could ever sustain a third film, but if this is Derek’s swan song then he leaves amid a flurry of feathers and bustle – surely all a male model could wish for.

There’s little chemistry and less comic frisson, thanks in part to the weird seams of pettiness and condescension running through the script.

The film’s glib disregard for collateral murder runs to farcical extremes.

It’s all patently ridiculous - and surprisingly watchable.

Incoherent two-hour fantasy epic isn’t quite accurate: it’s more of an incoherent one-and-a-quarter-hour fantasy epic, plus an all-star warm-up.

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.

Some of the jokes here are so bad they may be legally actionabubble, even prosecutabubble, and will cause toes to curl on the feet of the hitherto unembarrassabubble. There are scenes now seared upon my memory through sheer force of murderous un-funniness which I fear may prove to be unscrubbabubble.

A flabby, directionless disappointment, which only occasionally raises the heart-rate.

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.

So many shivery night-time clinches in Moscow fill Despite the Falling Snow’s modest runtime, you wonder what proportion of the budget went on that ever-whirring snow machine.

The longer we spend inside Freddy’s, the duller it gets.

It’s an entirely calamitous turkey, riddled with plot holes and bewilderingly miscast, which steals ideas from films as diverse as The Fly, Avatar, Soylent Green and Prometheus before fumbling every last one of them, and looks as if it was shot in a show home for £99.

The awkward middle course charted by new director James Foley (Glengarry Glen Ross, House of Cards) and his cast is unsatisfying in terms of head, heart and, well, elsewhere. It’s an alleged 18-rated, adults-only filth-fest that behaves like a flustered PG.

Dramatic things keep happening in the love lives of its two central couples, yet handily for Gen-Z viewers who like their protagonists morally spotless, none is responsible for any of it. It sometimes feels as if you’re watching a couple of hours of incredibly bad luck.

Despite the Smith family’s association with Scientology, which unmistakably informs this tale’s belief system (“Fear is a Choice”), as well as its shaky attempts at mythic patterning, it is in no way the laughable shambles that John Travolta’s infamous "Battlefield Earth" was.

The plot is an incomprehensible tangle of dead ends and recaps.

The apocalypse, in its effect on Cassie, mainly takes the form of a been-there, done-that checklist of Young Adult story tropes, and none of these are very scary or original, or bode very well.

Amenábar is no stranger to psychologically vivid thrillers with ghostly overtones, but Regression feels depressingly like journeyman work.

Transformers has ambition and attitude in its pores, and spectacle to spare. Bay shoots cars like they’re women, and people like they’re cars, and tosses around metal like it’s made from thin air. The film wasn’t meant to make you think, but it does. For better or worse, it’s cinema.

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.

The pristine setting never meshes with Jones’s efforts to give emotional reality to his army of characters, who cannot escape their tropes: leader, hero, warrior woman, mystic.

The only realistic way to fix Cats would be to spay it, or simply pretend it never happened. Because it's an all-time - a rare and star-spangled calamity.

Whatever kinship Depp may feel with this tortured, misunderstood, and regularly blotto artist is expressed, unfortunately, as a string of gruelling clichés.

This film, with its endless copying of Assassin’s Creed camera angles and state-of-the-art bullseyes, is an ugly machine, tiring to the eye, monotonously scored, and also weirdly regressive on quite a few levels.

Essentially – astonishingly – the Tom and Jerry sections of Tom & Jerry are a sideshow, used to punctuate the human scheming and blundering around Preeta and Ben’s forthcoming nuptials.

The samurai code of Transporting has been ditched, the budget slashed, the product placement upped through the roof. And it’s the first of a threatened trilogy.

Connoisseurs of the accidentally ludicrous will find much to laugh at here.... But scares and intrigue are both in miserably short supply.

Mawkishness, gay panic, and lazy jokes make Vince Vaughn's workplace comedy considerably less fun than work itself.

In place of Bay’s provocative humour and unparalleled eye for destructive spectacle are brain-numbing quantities of strong language, action scenes that look as if they were edited with a knife and fork, and a blasé attitude towards violence that renders every shootout pointless, since the bad guys are invariably mown down in seconds while the heroes saunter off with barely a scratch.

This is a film in which one of the more emotionally detailed performances is given by a product-placement Audi.

This first half of Snyder’s diptych (the second is due in the spring) is more of a loosely doodled mood board than a functioning film – a series of pulpy tableaux that mostly sound fun in isolation, but become numbingly dull when run side by side.

It has all the charm and personality of a dented traffic cone and features perhaps the single most tin-eared screenplay – in which Papa Smurf is kidnapped by the villainous wizard Gargamel, and Smurfette leads a globe-trotting mission to free him – that I have ever encountered in my two decades as a critic.

It’s just a product that behaves like one – which is a pity, since studio animation is now bolder and more dynamic than it has been for years. Not hellish – but pretty purr-gatorial.

A pound-store Tarantino with the sadism dialled up and the wit switched off, Roth has the very basics of a stomach-clenching suspense sequence down pat. It’s just that the film never provides any rationale for why you’d want to submit to it.