Kaufman has rummaged about in Pixar’s Inside Out grab-bag and mussed up the elemental simplicity of Yarlett’s idea. It’s nicely personal as his spin on a Pixar film, but the downside is that he can’t help imitating too many of them at once – which makes it equal parts sweet and hectic, and not a little overambitious.

The action sequences are executed with rhythm and punch, and our heroine swoops and swirls around like Iron Man in a sheath dress. Maleficent may be short on true enchantment, but until we find a superhero who can pull off a black silk cocktail gown in battle, she’s very welcome.

Will & Harper has laudable aims but suffers from a baggy, shaggy structure.

This follow-up to the acclaimed 1992 horror film of the same name has far more substance than your average popcorn chiller.

As metaphors for life go, wine has a very high yield, and Gilles Legrand’s sensitive screenplay tramples out every last drop of juice.

We are never distracted for long from the gaping sadness of the man and Hawke is brilliant at portraying that despair.

Lilo & Stitch has been tamed into one of those naughty-pet family comedies that used to roll off studio production lines with thud-thudding regularity, until the form fell out of fashion somewhere around 1994.

Amalric transcends mere dishevelment here: in some scenes which flash back to the start of his relationship with Sylvia, the former Bond villain looks like a pile of leaves with a coat thrown on top. [Cannes Version]

Its conclusions rarely make your head spin, but it meticulously shows its working out. (If it was an exam paper, it’d be impossible to dock it any marks.)

As a platter for meat-and-potatoes, bump-in-the-night thrills, it’s a little on the shaky side, but they’re still delivered to the table.

Tonally the film is all over the rink, but it leaves you more convinced and entertained than you’d expect.

Slack Bay is half as long as Quinquin, but still feels too long. Major ensemble scenes (a family banquet, a service on the beach) dawdle indulgently, as if waiting for the joke to start.

There are gorgeous things about it, there’s one really good performance, and reminders of Davies’ transcendent style ripple through the film. But it also feels broken and cumbersome, weighed down by a number of decisions that simply don’t work.

With something to say about the suffocating social mores of the time, it is one of the better-surviving chic-flicks of the Forties. [05 Jan 2013, p.32]

“We’ll tell it, but with one fewer death” is an odd way to go about this tale – which ends up as a solid flexing exercise for its cast, but puts us through a family’s annihilation for no other reason it can ultimately decide upon.

A large portion of Star Trek’s audience may well be satisfied by a film that amounts to not much more than an incredibly pretty and sporadically funny in-joke. But think back to the corny romance of that original mission statement, recited by William Shatner on many a rainy school night. Strange new worlds. New life. New civilisations. Boldly going where no man has gone before. That pioneer spirit? It’s gone.

For all the emptiness of Nobody, it’s sleekly watchable.

For a while, the film gets by on silliness alone. But in the end, it all amounts to no more than a sniggery guilty pleasure.

Everything is adequate might not have the same ring to it, but it would make a fitting jingle for The Lego Movie 2.

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.

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 effective use of the split-screen creates a splintered sense of reality and piles on the tension. [04 Jul 2015, p.33]

Would the film have ideally been a bit smarter? Perhaps. But it gets all of the dumb stuff just right.

Very little is out of place in Branagh’s do-over, but that’s almost a problem: there’s a feeling, throughout, of going perfectly through the motions. The film is all smoothly-operated crane shots, excellent hair, gleaming teeth. Originality is the glass slipper it never even tries on.

In typical noir fashion, the story is related in flashback and there's a femme fatale, played by husky-voiced Lizabeth Scott, to lure our hero even further into the danger zone. [30 Jul 2011, p.30]

A nicely maintained amiable tone takes the edge off the inevitable lavatorial humour, while the 14-year-old Camp, of Big Little Lies and The Christmas Chronicles, strikes up an impressively plausible emotional connection with her goofy, lolloping co-star (not Whitehall, the dog).

The film’s secret superhero is Maisie Williams as Lucy.

There’s something glib, and occasionally maddening, about the film’s use of loveable fauna in peril to sentimentalise and sweeten what is, after all, an account of real human bravery in the face of an endlessly horrifying historical event.