A shade more playfulness would have gone a long way. This Orient Express clatters handsomely along, but I left the cinema wishing it had had the nerve to jump the rails.

Somewhere in the specifics of Cronin’s is-he-or-isn’t-he scenario – played with gripping detail by Kerslake and Markey – there’s a decent little midnight chiller.

A lot of the subplots and surroundings, which push the running time to an ungainly two-hours-plus, feel more like ways of stalling for time.

Hail, Caesar! keeps stumbling over its own best ideas as we stop to appreciate them – ditching momentum, preferring gaps for applause.

The one inspired idea here is what happens to the minions when they’re injected with serum by the film’s mystery baddie, and this is enough to give us at least a reel’s worth of anarchic pleasure.

Goosebumps 2 is a lively and colourful ghost train ride, with some well-judged scares that would have been at home in its 1980s Amblin forerunners, such as The Goonies and Young Sherlock Holmes.

It’s a sturdy, straight tribute to an undertaking that feels wacky, quixotic and heroically mad – proving little that it set out to prove, but a great deal accidentally, about resourcefulness and survival in extremis.

It relies on Binoche’s radiance, but also her immense control, to keep any kind of shape, demanding a portrait in shards which she pieces together, like an affecting mosaic.

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.

Jeremy Renner is superb as a reporter ruined by his biggest story, but The Parallax View this isn't.

You wouldn’t call it profoundly scary – the one thing a wiped-clean slate can’t do is instantly defamiliarise us with every iteration of the monster that’s come since Carpenter. But it’s robustly suspenseful and shot with loving care.

Hawke expertly captures Baker’s angular fragility, both in his languidly crumpled face and his voice.

You could abandon Hope for an entire hour in the middle without missing much. There’s no denying the kicks we get either side, but there is a sharper, more satisfying 100-minute film fighting to get out here.

Everything we're meant to feel here is bluntly dictated by the script and delivered with unambiguous, button-pushing direction - it's impossible to miss. [06 Aug 2016]

Both the sweetest and the funniest performer is Love and Friendship’s Tom Bennett, endearingly innocent and dreadfully coiffed as a third-generation British hedgehog gently upgrading from his dad’s tired routines.

The film’s secret isn’t much of a secret at all. It just remembers why Neeson was such an oddly inspired choice for a grimy revenge thriller back in 2008 and does its best to repeat the trick.

Throughout the film [Escalante's] camera tends to be lurking in the middle distance; coolly observing everything that passes through its inquisitive frame, leaving the messy business of reaction to us.

For all its properly surreal mayhem, this flick isn’t quite as nimble or emotionally rounded as its predecessor.

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.

Rather than bionically enhancing all its characters, a better movie might have found ways to celebrate their sloth and slime.

A serious-minded, often beautiful, utterly heartfelt character study that nevertheless lacks its astonishing protagonist’s fleet-footedness and only partly captures what made him tick.

It’s Akhavan’s presence that elevates it above a crowded field. Her film’s a little bit different from the norm, and that – for now – is promising enough.

It comes at you baying and rattling like an early Pedro Almodóvar comedy, threaded through with an infectious love of full-throttle melodrama, and flinging its energy right back to the cheap seats, thanks to Dolan's customarily zippy design choices.

The film’s ambitions might be on the limited side: it’s a clipped survival tale with little of the anguished spiritual dimension that end-of-the-world stories have summoned in the past. But Affleck has certainly surrounded himself with the right people.

It’s an engaging, sometimes touching, slightly narrow depiction of a great filmmaker in the winter of his career who’s intent on somehow recapturing the spring of it.

Angel Has Fallen is almost worth seeing.

In a sickly-sweet genre, it’s almost bracingly sour.

It's an accomplished disappointment: the zealous cast, surplus of attitude and sinewy set pieces never quite compensate for the thinly sketched characters, unfocused plot and general gnawing sense of potential not being met.