As scripted by Bryan Sipe, Demolition buries its lead actor under a rubble of clichés.

The movie's infrequent martial-arts centerpieces deliver the feeblest of punches.

The set pieces are grand—gloriously dumb and never realistic enough to make you wince at the fact that billions of microscopic souls are dying before your eyes. Rather, you wince at everything else.

The trouble with this biopic is that it attempts to convey too many aspects of the Jerry Lee Lewis legend.

Neither totally impartial nor a puff piece, Varon Bonicos's documentary on fashion icon Ozwald Boateng nonetheless evinces a minimal amount of interest in digging into what makes its subject tick.

What Sing 2 does offer is more big musical numbers (‘Bad Guy’ by Billie Eilish backdrops a great visual gag involving a floor polisher), lots of eye-popping animation and a sugar-high ending that will delight kids and U2 fans alike

While there can be no doubt that in true tabloid style Class of 1984 feeds on everything it is condemning, as an energetic comic strip it has considerable fascination.

Even by the stultifying standards of everything's-screwed ensemble movies, Joseph Infantolino's thirtysomething drama feels particularly threadbare.

Any analysis of her philanthropy or character is traded for blind idol worship; only intermittent footage of the subject interacting with the natural environments she hopes to save (hippo habitats, arctic snowscapes) manages to sidestep bland reverence.

Only Jones seems most at home, striking just the right note of low-key malevolence. You’d follow him anywhere — maybe even into a better movie.

The film is regarded in some quarters as a marvellous piece of camp.

The result is not so much a documentary as an engaging, if didactic, travelogue with embedded yuks.

It may be just an hour-and-a-half commercial for the new single, “Best Song Ever,” and a victory lap following a successful arena tour, but credit where it’s due: This behind-the-scenes look at the English-Irish boy band du jour captures the group’s unpretentious stage show and regular-joe nature in all their glory.

Despite a vaguely interesting premise - something like a chaos theory of police karma, the two partners precipitating their own downfall via a series of triggered repercussions - this never rises above the functional.

The profusion of Dudes is - pardon the apt pun - game-changing. By turns a fierce megalomaniac and a Lebowskian monk, Bridges supplies more soul than any sci-fi sequel deserves.

Both Project Greenlight runners-up, directors Michael Aimette and John G. Hofmann get the teen angst and Gaelic aesthetic right; too bad their third-act thuggery isn’t just routine, but ridiculous.

Shared tragedy can bind together the most unlikely of people. Movies often make too much of that truism, but surprisingly committed performances from actors like these can still make it feel like something meaningful.

These filmmakers got halfway there, but Carpenter's genius was about more than just a look.

Though the finale feels a bit anticlimactic, the lysergic atmosphere, synth-heavy score and logic-resistant story line more than earn Beyond the Black Rainbow's concluding quote, borrowed from another classic midnight movie: "No matter where you go…there you are." See the late show.

Brühl, meanwhile, is saddled with the unenviable task of being this hollow movie’s slow-dawning voice of reason: His climactic conversation with newspaper editor David Thewlis (never worse) is one of the most embarrassingly didactic Way We Live Now™ summations ever filmed.

This is poor-man's action cinema with zero characterization.

Unendurable.

The material strung together in a script about urban police work is so familiar from countless cop shows that it's difficult to see who needs this movie.

A syrupy kids' yarn from former Disney animal-movie specialist Tokar, backed by appropriate soundtrack odes from the Osmonds and Andy Williams.

A classic - if not the classic - Minnelli musical, Brigadoon is an explicit statement about (and partial criticism of) the notion that an artist only lives through his art, preferring its reality to the world's.

Call it a strange and unintended benefit, then, that many of these generic characters work better as awkward adults than as teens.

The fully committed Rush, at least, commands our constant attention, and no movie with a kookier-than-usual Ennio Morricone score (dig those staccato-chanting chorines!) could ever be a total waste of canvas.

Joyfully, it shows no interest in brooding and simply throws its all into being as absurdly fun as possible. It’s one of the most enjoyable movies of the year so far and easily the streamer’s best action film yet.

Cutesy and generic, New York, I Love You is almost colossally inept at capturing five-boroughs flavor.

Edited to ribbons so that every peripheral player — Kate Bosworth, Radha Mitchell, Josh Lucas, Henry Thomas — is even more one-dimensional than Kerouac himself, it’s a work that accurately expresses the awfulness of narcissistic self-destruction, and nothing else.

The pity is that the people in People Like Us ultimately don't feel any more dimensional than the archetypes dutifully dotting his lowest-denominator multiplex fodder. He's just picked a different set of clichés to ransack.

When it comes to scenes in which characters are asked to say more than two words, however, the filmmaker's a decided amateur; Moretz, in particular, seems hopelessly stranded as the attitudinal wild child.

Good policy does not ensure good drama; Gerrymandering summarizes an urgent issue but forgets to detail the true fallout.

Adult children and friends watch nervously as Pippa reclaims a measure of spunk; too bad it all feels like one of those pharmaceutical ads for longer, healthier lifestyles.

An ugly movie, with lousy wardrobe to match.

Broken City never asks its gumshoe to repent for the blood on his own hands, and the anticorruption - but pro-vigilantism - ethics here are especially murky.

Missing is Cameron’s signature action modification, best exploited in Aliens: the strapping female heroine. McG’s testosterone-juiced world feels a little doomed without her.

A lively, uncomplicated jukebox movie. Bohemian Rhapsody is a feature-length earworm that leaves “Don’t Stop Me Now,” “We Are the Champions,” “Another One Bites the Dust” and the rest of them wriggling in your cochlea and helping to drown out any inner whisper suggesting that you’ve just had the wool pulled over your eyes by these masters of rock theatrics.

A business-as-usual slog.

It's this desperation, and the racial undercurrent of black versus white, that Horn is keen to exploit. Marshall makes a promising feature debut; and Herrington, pushing beyond the expected triumph-of-the-underdog clichés, underpins the crowd-pleasing Rocky-style fight action with some unobtrusive social comment and confident visual storytelling.

Jet Trash is not unlikeable, but nothing other than the scenery leaves much of an impression.

They don’t make many like this any more; Roger Corman would be proud.

A ludicrously overblown soap opera set in Italian Brooklyn which races from childhood anorexia to adolescent sexual trauma via wife-battering.

Background details of hospital life are handled much more astutely than the main plot. It's a big mystery how Zieff (of Slither and Hearts of the West) allowed it to go off at half-cock.

The new movie is a joke, a toxic cocktail of banal psychobabble, laughably arty slo-mo flourishes and unmotivated sexual violence that only brain-in-jar types could take as a serious statement.

The movie succeeds in generating only mild outrage, tempered by impeccable tastefulness and the safe distance of time.

A shallow, chic confusion of eyes, camera lenses, and saleable images of violence of the sort it now purports to question as an 'issue'.

What’s missing is a bit of heart to make you care, or at least, a sense of knowing how to wrap it up quickly enough, and smartly enough, for it not to matter if you don’t. An amped-up Friday night audience might have fun with Bullet Train once, but it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to ride it again.

Cramming Amsterdam’s myriad subplots and political angles into a coherent two hours ultimately proves beyond Russell. But tight narrative isn’t really what fuels the writer-director. He’s more about arming electric performers with offbeat, talky scenes and catching the lightning that sparks in a bottle. And the bottle here is full to the brim.

If you don't take it seriously, it's a lot of fun.

After the novelty of these backgrounds and comin'-at-ya bits wears off, Mars Needs Moms has to rely on Fogler's obnoxious Jack Black Jr. shtick, a weak subplot involving a '60s-obsessed Martian graffiti artist (Harnois) and rote video-game-y action sequences to carry it along-and that simply won't cut it.

When Downhill works, it’s because the dynamic between Louis-Dreyfus and Ferrell feels recognisably fraught. More often than not, though, this remake gets stuck in the snow.

This sequel, sans Spielberg but obedient to his spirit, simply fails to regenerate the original's gut-grinding fears that make you dread ever scratching a spot again. And the contribution of Giger's design work has only added one near-unwatchable sequence.

Not frightening, just silly.

Say what you will about this collection of less-than-feature-length films: There’s truth in its advertising. The sketchlike movies here are indeed shorts, and stars do lend their presence.

Little wears the theme of black sisterhood on its sleeve, growing into something winsome by prioritizing contemporary concerns over nostalgia.

The whole project, in fact, with its violence and love interest (Nicholson fighting for the leader's 'momma') is schizophrenic, cutting from psychedelia and group sex to private angst and night-time stompings. Rush said that he found the whole bike phenomenon 'distasteful', and it shows in the uneven treatment.

Rice's style is pitched somewhere between Merchant Ivory and Wes Anderson, favoring shots of sad, pretty people looking bereft in elaborately elegant rooms. But it's Jones and Treadaway, both seething volcanoes trapped behind artfully pallid faces, who turn what could've been a candy-coated comedy of manners into a complex, melancholic farce.

None of the chapters use the unifying formal conceit to any real advantage; only one, directed by Timo Tjahjanto and The Raid: Redemption’s Gareth Huw Evans, is worth a rental.

Sentimentality intrudes as Bogdanovich, determined to introduce a hymn to the healing power of friendship, loses the courage of his comic convictions. It all looks good, though, and the actors - epecially Bridges and Potts - are clearly having a ball.

After the first half sets up intriguing racial/political/biological conundrums, the second simply lets them go hang. Energetically directed with a fair smattering of funny lines.

The film, simplistically assuming the book's central metaphor to be imperialism - hence the military slant - retains the bare bones of Gollding's narrative, but that's all. There's little attempt to hint at the deeper issues.

Hard-core fans get the loud noises they came for, but true fear vaporizes.

Flimsy dialogue and fickle characters undercut the weighty historical demons in this fractured family portrait of three generations of men dealing with their emotional scars.

Despite a very corny script from Julius and Philip Epstein which borrows clichés from Casablanca and countless 'American in Paris' yarns, this remains an enjoyable (if heavy-handed) melodrama.

The movie’s not especially urgent or inventive, but it has small moments of grace.

What’s missing is the onstage archival footage that would show us why this humor mattered in the first place—there are only a handful of five-second snippets.

Her (Angela Ismailos) heart's in the right place, but her subjects' ruminations demand a much larger canvas.

Watching this see-in-the-dark muscleman brooding against gorgeous otherworldly vistas, all while crafting pointy homemade weapons and befriending a scene-stealing CGI canine (no joke), is a sci-fi aficionado's delight.

A smooth blend of sentiment and slapstick.

Why anyone would think that home movies of the director and his kids belong in a social-issues doc is a truly WTF question.

The artist formerly known as Aragorn remains an engrossing screen presence, but this campy thriller is a tad too close to simply having him sing the telephone directory.

Favoring style over substance isn’t a mortal sin, but Creevy isn’t as enthrallingly slick as compatriot Guy Ritchie, nor does he have anything like the "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" auteur’s feel for Britain’s criminal class.

Like some state-of-the-art remake of Lifeforce, this is every bit as bad as Tobe Hooper's film, but nothing like as enjoyable. Worst is the transition in the final scenes from snatched glimpses of a woman in a rubber suit to some oddly alienating motion-control effects. Floating like the ghosting on a poorly tuned TV, these are far too clean and artificial to be believable or remotely scary. Deserves extinction.

The class satire, the strongest suit of its Ealing ancestor, is blunter than a burglar’s cosh. The murders should be the juice in this devilish cocktail, especially with Zach Woods, Topher Grace and Ed Harris as the marks. But the deaths are throwaway affairs.

It's a functional sequel, but with all that spirited slicing and dicing, the director could have at least broken a sweat.

You can’t deny the inspirational qualities of the story or Parker’s screen presence, any more than you could accuse the film of subtlety or of masking its conspicuous pro-Christian agenda.

Hollywood does this too; truth be told, Russia’s high-tech whitewash goes down smooth like vodka.

Humankind's fate is left in the hands of several unusually inept and colourless scientists, the ants get the works from the special effects department, and original ideas (so often a casualty in sci-fi cinema) take a back seat.

Modest and affecting, it’s a portrait of the possibility of finding peace, contentment and self through both music and spirituality.

Frightening statistics punctuate the film like death knells.

Gerwig is plenty charming, considering the rote stuff she has to work with. Yet this still feels like a real devolution - hopefully short-lived - after her distinctively eccentric turns in "Greenberg" and "Damsels in Distress."

You have to swallow some inadequacies to get the most out of The Promise. It is appealingly photographed and boasts some stunning location work, yet it’s also saddled with the tone of a biblical epic, invisibly watermarked with the label important.

Overall, the movie has the bantamweight feel of a really long DVD extra: Little details of the director’s ancestral stomping grounds are appealing, but don’t jell into something satisfying.

Though bourgie audiences looking for a sun-warmed romance will be slapped; the movie may look pretty and may plod, but it also leaves a bruise.

With their sloppy slapstick and wet Menudo jokes, one only wonders why more people aren't out to kill them. But Crystal and Hines do flavour the film with genuine warmth, and despite some cheap gags, work well together to produce some truly funny moments.

The repeated sight of people watching video monitors or communicating with others via laptops becomes a stilted, gimmicky affectation, and there are only so many times you can watch a camera panning and zooming over still photos before your tolerance for the Ken Burns effect reaches its limit.

Let’s not dance around it: Nine--is a dud.

It's hard to hate a movie that affectionately references the oeuvre of Kathryn Bigelow (both The Hurt Locker and Point Break!) and uses a whiny Third Eye Blind ballad as an acidic punch line.

Kudos to Evans for making up for the galling lack of gay African-American screen representation while delivering hot-body eroticism, but reducing complex relationship issues to a typical indie-flick blatherathon—complete with performances of varying quality and stilted dialogue—isn’t helping anyone.

There’s no denying the movie’s climactic gathering of females bent on saving the species.

Even this terrifically talented performer can't sell a Shyama-lana-ding-dong of a third-act twist that will make more eyes than heads roll.

It's a pleasure to watch the granite-faced action star do his own stunts, particularly a death-defying leap from a bridge. Yet everything feels hurried.

Protektor is simply another in a long line of diluted stories about life during wartime, one whose diminished returns only further trivialize a legacy of real-life horror.

A thick sheen of luscious lens flares and Terrence Malick–like poetic lulls feel like icing on an undercooked mud pie—Bedford’s script deserves a stronger engagement with its characters’ desperation. Instead they collide in a clichéd ending that feels padded.

Despite some insipid characterisation and one or two lapses, things move along at a fair pace and there's a surprising plot all about property speculation in San Francisco. Can Grandma Steinmetz save her home from the grasping magnate Alonzo Hawk? The comedy is on the whole inventive, occasionally aspiring to almost surrealist heights.

A skilful blend of the familiar (casting, English locations) and the outrageous (the script's mix of whodunit, disaster movie and telekinetic thriller) produces a beguiling entertainment in which half the fun's to be had from constructing a coherent synopsis out of the loony mess of flashback, foresight, eccentricity and even ecology.

Ford has come up with a nifty way of exploring the enduring allure and troubling underside of the superhero myth. It's just too bad his own all-too-human powers aren't quite up to the task.