Amid the bungles, Collins is a bright spark.

It's pretty standard fare, but it's always uplifting to watch Spitfires stick it to the Stukas. [25 May 2019, p.32]

The key to the film’s success, and the reason it often left me hooting with laughter, is Aniston, and her character’s struggle in vain to maintain her sweetheart persona.

Intertwining, Altman-esque social tapestries are all well and good, but the connections between characters should ideally run a little deeper than having them occasionally stroll past each other in the street.

No major blockbuster in years has been this incoherently structured, this seemingly uninterested in telling a story with clarity and purpose.

The two who do succeed in forging a convincing bond are Bateman and a spry, switched-on Driver, as brothers with a significant age gap who get each other and tend to join forces against the surrounding tumult.

To call the film “repellent” would do it too much credit. The combat itself (sorry, kombat) is so clumsily shot and edited that the fights have no discernible dramatic shape or flow, while the fatalities are rendered in bland, businesslike computer graphics that have you yearning for the honest, artisanal gloop-by-the-bucket of a Hellraiser or Nightmare on Elm Street.

Where the film completely falls down is in director Joshua Michael Stern’s disastrous decision to cast Ashton Kutcher in the central role.

The film’s family-saga pretensions and bombastically overdone characterisation keep hobbling its better elements.

Wyatt Russell and Kerry Condon's suburban horror feels like an adaptation of a Stephen King story that he never got round to writing.

The production design and effects for this apocalyptic terrain are way above par for this sort of thing, and evidence of a much higher budget than Ball had first time around.

It offers a selection of sweaty, string-vesty, bulgy-bare-armsy scenes from the life of the real-life submarine commander Salvatore Todaro, played here by Pierfranceso Favino. It isn’t dreadful.

The pacing seems intentionally designed to break your spirits, with a climactic set-piece that rages on forever, despite being comprised of nothing but shouting and torpedos. It makes Crimson Tide looks like a masterclass in international relations.

The film’s a little wobbly on actual charm; stronger on smarm, in-jokes and Bond-riffing action pastiche. Yet whatever their niggles, families can flock to it, relieved to be getting brand new entertainment that entertains.

You see San Francisco and Los Angeles falling apart very loudly and dangerously, and in great computer-generated detail. But there’s nothing memorable or beautiful about the carnage; no specific moments to replay in your head once the film is over.

It’s a gorgeous performance overall – [Ben-Adir's] Marley is so alive to the potential of music as both an art form and cause, it’s as if you can see the creative energy flowing up from the earth through his legs to the tips of his fingers and dreadlocks.

Antebellum doesn’t so much concertina the past and the present as do a leering jig back and forth, then blow you a callous raspberry instead.

The film has so little to say about forbidden love, and gives its stars so little dramatic sinew to flex, that it already feels like a footnote in the genre.

There’s a doomy superficial finesse to the picture, with all its wintry confrontations, skull-trained sniper fire and quick thinking, and it doesn’t take itself as seriously as Fincher’s did. But then, it couldn’t: there’s nothing going on beneath.

It gives you plenty to look at, even if you could say it’s been Avatarred and feathered to within an inch of its life. It’s the big, echoing hole in the middle – insert story, any story – that no one has figured out how to plug.

Though A Family Affair shoots for laughs, it ends up in an uncanny valley of spooky sex and dead-on-arrival jokes.

It feels as though it would have been better served as a six-part sitcom, where its sentimentality, broad comedy and fantasy elements wouldn't rub up against each other so badly.

I admire its courage and the always welcome presence of Harry Andrews (as Earnshaw), Judy Cornwell (as Nellie), Pamela Browne, Rosalie Crutchley. But I can't forgive its dullness. I don't have to believe in Wuthering Heights, I simply ask to be transported by it. [13 Jun 1971, p.14]

Nothing in this feeble psychological thriller rings true for a moment, though its unhinged machinations feel as pedestrian as soap opera in execution.

The Nicolas Cage aficionado carries two hopes into each of the 59-year-old actor’s new films. The first – not often met, truth be told – is that it will be good. And the second, failing that, is that it will be mad. Alas, this thin and lumpy western is neither.

Unlike certain past ventures of Knightley’s, there’s little or no sense of us being given a Big Performance, and she’s often rather moving as a result.

By concentrating on the relationship, the road they’ve taken here is too narrow, but I’m sympathetic to the problem: sharpening your focus always gives biopics more lift-off than vaguely trying to cram everything in.

It’s a series of pointless, boorish skits about two unrepentant lotharios.