Despite a spirited score and a few other redeeming features, The Reckoning is too clumsy, overlong and generally miscalculated to add up to an intelligent commentary on misogyny, or a satisfying riposte to it

It’s not bad so much as lightly feeble – and Pegg acquits himself respectably in a lead role that, for a change, chimes well to his best comic persona: the beta male under alpha pressure.

The whole thing is so roaringly absurd, and delivered with such hands-clasped sincerity, that the only rational response is to laugh the house down.

It is three parts The Mighty Boosh to two parts The Goon Show, which, when mixed with the quite astonishing lack of wit and finesse seen here, makes for pure cinematic strychnine.

The end product is all but unfollowable, thanks either to a screenplay that was incoherent to begin with, or an edit so slicingly brutal that almost every trace of the plot’s connective tissue was chopped out.

Seventh Son would hardly be the first film to use "strong female characters" as a means of waving its misogyny under the radar, but it’s seldom carried off as depressingly as this.

Bad scripting, bad plotting, terrible joke formulation, and not a single character actually having a hangover until part-way through the end credits. What kind of a Hangover movie is this?

The film goes for broke with such a careening lack of inhibition, it definitely ends up in the fun zone.

Forty-three years on, the Cassandra Crossing has aged as only a terrible Seventies movie can. And yet, with its killer virus plot, it has suddenly acquired a horribly relevancy. Four-decades old and creaky even at the time, this five-star clunker nonetheless feels ripped from tomorrow’s headlines.

How can it be possible that nine years have passed since the previous instalment, yet every facet of this one feels so woefully first-draft? Expend4bles: wh4t a lo4d of cr4p.

What fun it is to watch a film this expensive and not be able to quite work out where it’s going – or even if it might just stay put for a bit, and soak up the dustily poetic death-of-the-American century vibe.

If we’re reaching for something, anything nice to say here – and we absolutely are – Theron’s black trouser suit and trench coat is a strong look.

This second Fisherman’s Friends is not without its moments, but the aftertaste calls for a strong menthol lozenge.

The film doesn’t look like the future, or the past’s idea of the future, or anything other than a venal cash grab.

In a golden period for both animation and children’s filmmaking, here is a head-splitting reminder of just how bad those two things can get.

Like most aspects of the film’s mythology, the whole Bright business feels like the non-brainwave of a random plot generator – a will-this-do device Landis barely integrates into his wider story. As a choice for the film’s title, it’s singular, but silly.

What distinguishes the film from last year’s backpacking adventure, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, apart from its lobotomised worldview and charred, corroded soul, are Hector’s philosophical musings – “people who are afraid of death are afraid of life,” is one – that pop up on screen in a handwritten font whenever a lesson has been learnt.

The bizarre achievement of this new film is to make us feel trapped and punished through every phase of the story.

Willis himself could not appear less enthusiastic in the role, and doesn’t phone in his performance here so much as clip it to a nearby pigeon and hope for the best. Yet perversely, his apparent lack of interest works rather well: McClane, after all, is now a grizzled back-number who has bumbled his way into a younger man’s action movie.

Often the film resorts to that unforgivable cheat move of having the supporting cast laugh at its leads’ antics on screen, in the hope of prompting us to do likewise. Instead I found myself curling over in such a paralysing cringe, my body had to be rolled out of the cinema afterwards like a dented bicycle wheel.

The film has about five sets and they never feel like they connect together, but this is less an attempt at disorienting the viewer than simply cutting corners; the grisly, overdone lighting, meanwhile, makes you want to hide behind your fingers for all the wrong reasons.

This would-be-frothy date flick is a sub-"Meet the Fockers" dog’s dinner.

The last scenes aren’t just bungled, they’re hideously sentimental – insults to both viewer intelligence and the touted gravity of the subject matter.

Survivor is about as silly as cinema can get, an explosives-packed thriller for those of you who found The Expendables just a little too understated.

If Sandler can’t find it in himself to be verbally or physically entertaining on set, you start to wonder why he’s there in the first place, although his hollow stare in a number of scenes suggests he may be pondering the same thing.

A psychotically unfunny art-heist romp.

This may be the single worst film I’ve seen all year; it’s certainly the most confused.

If you’re not staggered by the technique on display here – the stuff that sets Bay’s work miles above the Fast & Furiouses, X-Men: Apocalypses and Tom Cruise-chasing Mummies of this world – you’re not paying attention.

The Matrix wants its green-and-black colour scheme back. Cape Fear wants its toxic male combat back. You may well want your money back.

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.

There are snatches of crude enjoyment to be had, if you venture in with basement-level expectations, and manage to ignore some dire third act CGI. Roth’s fetish for gloating nastiness in his other work makes it hard to decry the mutilation of whatever his original vision might have been. For once, he’s at the receiving end of a rusty blade, instead of wielding it

All in all, it’s a new low in a mini-franchise comprised almost entirely of new lows: Venom, Morbius, and now this.

The irresistible comic elegance of the premise – a remarried widower is tormented by the ghost of his first wife – is lost in a mass of pointless embellishments and tinkerings.

Wholly useless, entirely harmless, Stratton would be good clean fun, if it was good or fun.

Each individual moment in the film barely seems to be on speaking terms with the rest.

It’s staged, scored and cut together with an aggressively deadening quality, numbing your senses to the very impact it intends.

No child deserves to be subjected to this kind of blaringly witless branding bombardment; as for adults, I felt like I was being beaten around the head with the Argos catalogue.

It’s utterly ridiculous – and impossible to resist.

There is something utterly perplexing about this British comedy, in which three middle-aged women go on an Interrailing trip with the daughter of a recently departed friend: it’s as if the cast and crew were planning to make a musical, then got to the set and decided they couldn’t be bothered.

Director and co-writer Nick Stagliano tries to wax serious about the business of killing, but the trouble is, he hasn’t written any characters who scan as real people.

I still can’t quite believe it exists, though I may yet find myself shouting about it on the street.

The trouble begins with a seasick lurching between fantasy and reality, it’s redoubled by subject matter that can’t support that, and it hits a whole arpeggio of duff notes with the casting.

The Snowman goes wrong quickly, permanently, and in a spiral, turning into a nonsensical nightmare of Scandi-noir howlers from which you sometimes feel you may never awaken.

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.

Would The Do-Over be a spectacular triumph if it’s two stars had played the material relatively straight? Probably not. But the terrible jokes wouldn’t have got in the way of all that plot.

Almost everything these two say to one other is so wince-worthy you want to crawl under your seat, scuttle along the whole row if possible, and make for the nearest fire exit.

It’s an interesting achievement in many ways.

You can sense what Dahan’s aiming at: by introducing the spectre of Hitch early on, he lays out Grace’s existence as a kind of lived-in Hitchcock thriller... But the acting is so heightened, and the script so thoroughly awful, that Dahan’s idea – his big and seemingly only one – can’t begin to stick.

Geostorm’s disasters are just barrages of drab, anonymous digi-porridge, with a very occasional unhinged flourish thrown in, such as a stadium that’s struck by lightning and immediately explodes.

he film's indulgences are so heart-on-sleeve that it's hard to differentiate watching it from hearing someone pitch their very bad screenplay ideas with no attempt to read the room.

So, what happens in Grown Ups 2? Almost absolutely nothing.

After watching Peter Farrelly’s Movie 43, I was immediately overcome with a sudden rush of emotion: not amusement, anger or even mild irritation, but a profound and faintly tragic sense of pity.

Both the festival and filmmakers might have been better off waiting another week, until the screens were empty and delegates had all gone home, before unveiling this thing, perhaps to a slightly less derisory audience of seagulls.

The whole thing is stupefyingly unfunny and un-tense, and doesn’t end so much as just give up and grind to a halt.

Heard, who certainly has the requisite physical allure for the part, puts in a decent enough turn as the enigmatic Six but, like her on-screen character, can seemingly do the nothing to prevent the brutal murder, either of herself, or of Amis’s bestseller.

None of it works: the inexplicable alchemy between co-stars that can seduce the audience even in an indifferent rom-com doesn't arise between Thurman and Morgan.

It’s not that the film is particularly loathsome, or that Blart is an overweeningly horrible character. What rankles is that he’s barely anything at all; a stereotype of a stereotype; a half-remembered punchline; a stomach with a moustache and wheels. As you watch the film, it’s already forgotten.

The film makes no attempt to grapple with the American school shooting as a nihilistic cultural phenomenon.

As dismal to contemplate as it is persistently horrendous to even look at, there aren’t enough Patrick Stewart-voiced emojis in the world to express what an ugly, artless exercise this is.

Disasters: well, they said it. The new film from Dennis Dugan is a frighteningly inept stab at a romantic comedy in the Nancy Meyers style.

Nothing here looks like a genuine interaction between real human beings: Spacey may be the first actor to give a comedic performance in which his own smile looks like it had to be green-screened in at a later date.

In short, it’s a bum trip and then some. Kechiche has always been an admirer of the female posterior, but here he shifts styles into what could be called gluteus maximalism, filling the screen with frantically gyrating hindquarters for literal hours on end.

There may well be a worse film released this year than this unwatchable British black comedy, although it sets a terrifyingly low benchmark.

It is silly, shoddy and features far too much of rapper-turned-leading man Ice Cube staring at a computer screen while looking as if he’s working through a reasonably urgent digestive ailment. Like a heat-ray in reverse, it leeches all the fun out of what should be an epic tale of alien invasion.

Who knows what it’ll look like down the line as a record of its own premiere – the live-streaming may well have been its oxygen. But we did watch the boundaries crumble outright between live performance and real, on-the-hoof film-making, to amply entertaining effect.

As a drama, Checkpoint is somewhat lacking, but for anyone who appreciates magnificent cars plus various tweed-jacketed Rank contract players saying “Gosh!” it is compulsive viewing.

Gritty, evocative and poignant, this absorbing tale had the twists and turns of a drama.

The film bounces along predictably but charmingly, and parents whose cringe threshold is as low as my own will be relieved to find its sense of humour is gratifyingly un-tacky throughout.

This tale of a Welsh dairy farm that became an unlikely haven for rock stars was an absolute joy from start to finish.

The talking heads offer little but platitudes and clichés, while the endless racing footage is dry in the extreme. Here is a life not sugar-coated by cinema so much as rolled in powdered alum.

If you thought that a film about Mary Quant would be for fashion geeks only, then cast aside those preconceptions. For all the talk of mini skirts and Swinging Sixties glamour, this is the sparky tale of a woman who, from the mid 50s, led the charge of a youthquake which changed the way a whole generation behaved.

For all the contrivances, it’s hard to deny the Colour Room’s charms. Ceramics are cold to the touch and shatter easily – but this film is gooey and generous and sure to impart a warm glow.

It shows so much blood being spilled in the name of democracy, and so many tears shed, that it’s next-to-impossible not to be fired up.

As a critic-turned-partisan who also narrates, Krichevskaya is the right kind of observer here on paper. But there’s too little airing of her own views at the time of walking out, when she didn’t have faith in Dozhd’s true independence.

It’s as much a film about legal process as social injustice, and the nitty-gritty is eye-opening.

Much of the film is unintentionally hilarious.

This quietly courageous debut feature from Anastasia Tsang, which had its world premiere at this year’s Tokyo Film Festival, is an elegy for that lost Hong Kong – and suggests that in certain corners of the city, its old spirit still fizzes and glows.

Harold’s trek has its moments to savour, but Wilton seizes the day by sculpting her own mini Mike Leigh film on the side – armed with only a vacuum cleaner and a face like thunder.

Director Jim Sheridan’s documentary painted a fond but nuanced portrait of a flawed genius. It meandered towards the end but so did O’Toole’s mercurial career.

The Voice’s vengeful motives are ridiculous, and the audience is captive to the special dullness only a suspenseless potboiler can provide.

This agreeable film pushes past the stereotype of Blunt as the second coming of Chris de Burgh and delivers an affecting portrait of a posh pop star who has endured a lifetime of vitriol.

This is like picking holes in a mesh crop-top. The script’s so creaky it often sounds AI-generated.

The film’s forgettable fluff, but perfectly genial, and it’s hard to imagine many hardcore objections to curling up with it.

[Lhakpa's] resilience and sunny disposition light the film up, but it certainly shows a tough life, riven by conflicts, taking its toll.

This makes a better case that she was the first model everyone found relatable.

Ken Loach-style didactic social realism is all well and good, but Loan Ranger looks as if it was shot on a block of processed cheese and written with a bucket and mop.

The evidence is inconclusive, and by the final credits we’re back where we started – confused about Smollett’s guilt or innocence, but aware that somebody on camera has to be lying through their teeth.

It is like watching British cinema undergo a deathbed hallucination.