The film is like a cheeky seaside postcard with swastikas and cryptography on the reverse.

A shambolic film populated by some of the most aggressively charmless characters ever seen in a blockbuster.

If every last joke in it wasn’t built on the premise that anyone who isn’t a straight, white, able-bodied, middle-class male isn’t intrinsically laughable, it might have made for lively comedy.

The more you scrutinise the society Roth and these screenwriters have created, the more it seems a chintzily self-designed dystopia whose rules and entire infrastructure are pure cardboard.

But the only sense of wonder the film instils is this: if we have to wait so long between movie musicals, who on earth thought it would be a good idea to wait for this one?

It’s a thriller’s engine purring away, while it stubbornly sits in neutral, getting us nowhere.

It needed a director to grapple with all this, deadhead the redundancies and deliver a coherent vision; it’s especially disappointing to watch Christopher Smith struggle to pull it off.

Luck contains all the warmth and ingenuity that was nowhere to be found in Pixar’s own recent Lightyear, and has the attitude – if not always the supreme clarity and craftsmanship – of his old studio’s vintage productions.

It all feels grindingly perfunctory – gloopy with jargon and lore, and with no concessions made to newcomers, the film feels less like a worthwhile film in its own right than an invitation to existing fans to buy a ticket, just to see how things turned out.

Another play Hitchcock was resistant to adapting, this time by John Galsworthy, made for a static but honourable picture. [14 Jul 2012]

The moment-to-moment incoherence of Dashcam makes it maddeningly hard to figure out what’s happening – the “WTF?”s that appear in the chat-box might just as well be our own. There’s a certain delirious energy to it.

The experience is frequently infuriating, but it’s quite clearly supposed to be – it’s about hell being the other people in your own family.

Overegged is the word – there was enough conviction in Radcliffe alone to pull the story through these straits.

It feels like a film that is attracted by the shape of love and pain, but is a long way from understanding the content.

It’s mostly handsomely shot, with painterly vistas of the French countryside and lots of dazzling Versailles interiors. But the central relationship never convinces – it all just feels like a performance, put on for the benefit of the courtiers and by extension, us.

The thing actually docking this unpretentious ride is a nagging shortage of charm, because all the script’s efforts can’t drum up a buddy dynamic between Elba and Madden (both playing Yanks) that’s anything more than strictly contractual.

More than the sets or spectacle, Vikander pulls you into her picture, as if we’ve signed up for a special edition of the game where Lara Croft has only one life to spare, one go to get it right. It’s not rocket science, just an elementary way to make us sit up and care.

For those of us old enough to have been terrorised the first time round, it delivers a nasty-but-nice-enough childhood flashback.

The thrill of the games is matched fleetingly here at best, because it feels like a simulator being put through a simulator, and not all the effects are up to snuff. Script-wise, we don’t just get Formula One, but formulae two through infinity.

If 300’s human touch largely came down to Butler’s roaring and screaming, it’s left entirely to Green to goose the sequel into life. Happily she obliges.

Had Roupenian stretched out Margot’s ordeal into the turgid novella it hereby becomes, we’d never have heard of Cat Person in the first place.

It’s as if the book has been given a full-body massage en route to the screen, teasing away some of the spinal kinks that actually made it interesting.

What sense there is of big ideas being thoughtfully chewed over stems largely from Rapace’s steely, wounded central performance, which often feels like a decade-later echo of her work in the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo films.

Well-informed, enlightening writing on Tolkien’s life and creative process is hardly scarce. But his genius stems from his scholarship, which doesn’t obviously lend itself to cinema, even with Derek Jacobi on hand as a professor-cum-mentor fruitily declaiming in Gothic as he potters around the quad.

If you don’t actually want to make a film out of a Roald Dahl book, this critic’s advice is: don’t.

The movie subverts expectations, and not in a good way, by seeming in a dither about its own identity. The romance is by the by, the comedy as sparse as can be. We’re left with a curious non-film about the pitfalls of higher education assessment. Odd.

Hopkins’ performance isn’t good, exactly, but it’s certainly interesting to watch, as the actor seems to swipe his lines of dialogue from the shelf in passing, as if playing a script version of Supermarket Sweep. Goode is restrained by comparison, but then the film does a lot of restraining on his behalf.

While it wouldn’t be entirely fair to accuse the film of having “bonus DVD content” written all over it, little here is, shall we say, incompatible with the hard sell.