The best moments come with two bravura and ultra-realistic chase sequences through grotty, dimly lit back allies, and director Na Hong-Jin also does his best to toy with expectations whenever possible. This playfulness, however, backfires massively in the second half when coincidence and unforeseen consequence conspire uneasily with bloody, messy results.

Like four or five Harry Potter books squeezed into a single movie: it makes precious little sense.

At the human level, this is shallow, and Chadha clumsily fuses political drama with romantic melodrama.

Writer-director Pablo Fendrik takes the whole thing terribly seriously, punctuating the action with ponderous slo-mo and laughably pompous discussions about Bernal’s spirit jaguar.

Unfortunately, the political parallel between the ideological repression of Baby Doc's regime and the stultifying effects of the zombifying fluid is only sketchily developed, leaving us with a series of striking but isolated set pieces.

In attempting to explore the man, Roselyne Bosch's script also embraces the myth, most obviously in some initial exchanges laden with significance. Vangelis' thunderous, intrusive score doesn't help; even more tedious is foppish villain Wincott, fashion victim and confirmed sadist.

Daddy’s Home raises the occasional smile, but it’s not exactly Wahlberg or Ferrell’s finest hour.

Can the trio use their ninja secrets to escape? Will granddad defeat the gun-runner in hand-to-hand combat? If you can't guess the answers to these questions you are under 11 and will absolutely love this film, with its amazing fight scenes, bungling Home Alone kidnappers and thoroughly nasty bad guys. Send mum and dad shopping.

It’s a potent mix for young fans that gets off to an entertaining, action-packed start with bursts of knowing humour. But it’s soon bogged down by an increasingly convoluted plot, an overindulgent running time and absurd dialogue.

Escape Pla’ would have made a perfect vehicle for, say, a Chuck Norris or even a Jean-Claude Van Damme. But these two redoubtable, enormously watchable old-school heroes deserve better.

Franck’s survival and investigation techniques are glossed over in favour of convenient coincidences and sensationalist set-pieces: this hero’s emotional struggles are kept at arm’s length.

The result is an odd, inconsequential but not entirely charmless misfire: an action-horror-comedy-romance with none of the first two and precious little of the third.

The plot’s old, the title’s borrowed and the jokes are blue – but there’s nothing remotely new in this wearying bromantic comedy.

By its attribution of every evil to simple human greed, the melodrama remains hamfisted; while Rosenberg's direction signals 'realism' with crude denim-blue tints in every image. After two hours and ten minutes one is left only with a numbing awareness of Redford's charmless charm, the macho image unable (unlike Eastwood or Reynolds) to even contemplate self-irony.

After a creaky, clichéd start, Need for Speed picks up a bit. The script is still as corny as hell, but the chase scenes are pretty spectacular.

It’s intricate and often mature as drama, but it’s also meandering and at times heavy-handed, even melodramatic, and the tight control of time, place and action which made ‘A Separation’ so gripping is just not there.

This debut feature blows its chances by keeping us waiting way too long for revelations.

After a ruthlessly focused, almost-Hitchcockian first hour, Na’s film fans out into a flabby, multi-stranded gang war and loses all sense of purpose.

Curry’s film hints at the role of media images in determining such self-conscious behaviour on the world’s frontlines, yet misses an opportunity to take VanDyke to task.

The average lifespan of a chipmunk is five years – which means the kids’ cartoon franchise about the trio of singing superstar rodents has already outstayed its welcome.

The Space Between Us is mostly harmless. But it won’t come close to troubling your heartstrings, let alone the space between your ears.

It’s all so horribly cynical, with every line, every twist and every note of music painstakingly focus-grouped to extract maximum cash value from the audience.

It doesn’t even qualify for dumb fun.

The students keep filming when it is insane to do so, and an avalanche of speculative tosh smothers everything except our mocking laughter.

The London scenes are fine but the guys seem far too relaxed in Miami considering death is looming. And we’re given no reason to root for them other than that they’re young and good-looking.

Thanks to ‘Taken’ director Pierre Morel, this too often feels like just another slice of brainless Eurotrash, packed with saw-it-coming plot twists, half-hearted car chases and an angsty hero with mega muscles and zero charisma.

The standard of acting is poor beyond belief. What happened to Grant’s career that he should be in the likes of this?

If the final effect is somewhat less nuanced than his previous work, it's a good deal more vigorous.