Woodley and Dern breathe a ghost into the machine. Willem Dafoe has fun, albeit not too much, in a brief, vital role as a creepy writer. Most crucially, the words that survived from Green’s novel did so for a reason.

Scriptwise, it's as stilted as any other 1950s studio horror flick, but De Toth does a great job at making the melting waxworks look genuinely creepy, and, yes, that really is Charles Bronson (credited with his original surnme, "Buchinsky") loping about the museum as Price's deaf-mute assistant Igor. [28 May 2005]

The United States vs Billie Holiday might be all over the shop – a tatty red carpet for its much-ballyhooed star turn. But this other Lady Day still seizes her moment.

[Folman's] film is an alluring curio, a protest against the digital frontier which gets stuck with a knotty internal paradox – it starts out as thoroughly its own experiment, and ends up like a counterfeit of too many others.

The film has whizz, and bang, and you’ll forget it by tomorrow.

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.

McQueen’s work seldom features memorable lines; the moments that stay with you are the ones where nothing is said, and his camera stays fixed on an actor’s face.

You’re left wishing that Adler had focused more on the no-win moral tangle of the handler-informant relationship, and less of the mechanics of its execution.

We all know Smith can deliver barbs like blow-darts, but Parker’s screenplay gives her a too-rare chance to do something more – and when she delivers a bittersweet, profound monologue towards the end of the film, it feels like you’re watching a classic Ferrari reach the end of an average speed check zone and whistle off into the distance.

There’s a coldness in Schrader’s calculations, and disturbingly he seems to swallow the entire myth of Mishima, an extreme right-wing nutjob who wanted to return Japan to samurai values. Philip Glass’s score, however, still takes the breath away.

Imagine Arabian Nights, filtered through a Sofia-Coppola-esque feminist sensibility, but spiced up with camp. That gets you some of the way into 100 Nights of Hero, a British indie romp based on a graphic novel by Isabel Greenberg. It has saucy wit –especially up to the hour mark.

The film fares best when the chief negotiator, a fellow Marine vet played by the late, great Michael Kenneth Williams, steps into the fray. It’s one of his final performances, and a wary, angry one that elevates the material.

Think of it as a slightly self-nobbling version of Enchanted, the wondrous (and original) Disney blockbuster that both sent up and celebrated the Disney princess musical tradition in 2007.

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

Middleweight, non-intelligence-insulting fare right to the core, Bleed For This keeps you squarely in your seat, but barely once excites you enough to leap up out of it.

This long-overdue sequel to the 1980s hit romcom is no masterpiece, but it’s full of slick cameos, zany set-pieces and eye-popping style.

Given his otherwise grim recent form, Allen himself may have simply got lucky with this one, but the charm and sparkle here are real.

The film often rings hollow.

In the end it amounts to not much, but in the moment I laughed a lot.

It’s hard to decide if Black Sea is a good idea put over with sub-par execution, or an iffy idea handled as well as possible in the circumstances.

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.

Lopez is particularly good at this stuff, giving another of the messy lioness performances at which she’s excelled in the past.

Sleekly enjoyable.

It’s Deneuve who musses up the formula and makes the film worth seeing, by generously bringing out her inner vulgarian.

For all the film’s merits, the suspicion persists that McDonagh’s a little too pleased with his own fulminating thesis. Time and again the writing is showing off for effect, delivering a fire-and-brimstone sermon with cocky swagger.

For the microscopic subset of cinema-goers who watch Magic Mike films for the plot, Last Dance may prove disappointing. Returning screenwriter Reid Carolin doesn’t come up with anything novel to do with the hackneyed let’s-put-on-a-show premise.

Strip away the wiring, and Cahill’s film connects most tangibly as a fable about drug addiction – hardly a shock, with all the crystal-obsessed scurrying to make one grey reality bearable, or switch to another outright. He’s had more ingenious ideas, but the whole thing’s strangely charming.

Captain America: The First Avenger is all utility. It has everything you might want from a movie of this kind — bangs, baddies, nonsensical backstories — except for the most important element of all: surprise.