Given that Sarandon played this same role so sublimely before in "Moonlight Mile," her devolution into theatrical rending of garments and gnashing of teeth is particularly disappointing, but no one--not Brosnan’s shell-shocked–by-numbers patriarch nor Mulligan’s wide-eyed waif--comes out of this steroidal pity party unscathed.

If this is what passes for contemporary art terrorism, we’ll opt instead for something truly subversive--like genuine art

If violence ever comes into the picture-and considering the illegal millions made from trafficking, it strains credulity to imply it doesn't-we don't hear about it, as Corben wants to paint the subjects as drug-war martyrs.

Incredibly bloated remake, with Mrs Chips an ex-showgirl (allowing for some vacuous songs), a continental holiday (allowing for a travelogue wallow), and Herbert Ross (his first film as director), trying to match Wyler's choreographed camera movements on Funny Girl but failing to make them serve any meaningful purpose.

Teague, meanwhile, is far too busy orchestrating the large-scale action sequences to make anything of the cardboard characters, episodic plotting, or clunking dialogue.

But make no mistake: As a movie, it's Mystery Science Theater 3000 bad: atrocious acting, amateurish camerawork and a hackneyed story line all make for one painful slog.

It's all too much and not enough—a succession of disparate, can-you-top-this episodes inelegantly piling up like skidding cars on a freeway. And that's not even taking into account the action scenes. Lord, those action scenes: Monotonous, loud and relentless, they're a punishing example of the self-satisfied, digitally augmented ephemera that typifies modern Hollywood moviemaking, and House Bruckheimer in particular.

Sonic the Hedgehog is another demonstration of the things that tend to go wrong when a movie is spun out from source material with little plot and skimpy characterisation.

This is a superhero movie that feels like it might have been made by anyone and no one at the same time, simply space-filler before the next big team-up movie.

Reducing an influential genius to a bohemian Zelig with a firearm fetish misses the forest for the flaming metal trees; in Leyser's biographical interzone, the superficial trumps the truly subversive.

Lone Scherfig directs it all as if it were a breezy lark, so a third-act tonal shift makes for an incongruous, excessively moralistic fit with everything that’s preceded. Most insulting, though, is the way in which the climactic passages miraculously tidy up every frayed edge of Jenny’s life.

We see a storybook landscape enchant the pair, but we never feel it.

There are rousing landscape shots, a fair amount of bone-crunching, and a dash of brooding patriotism – and a welcome attempt to look at history from the view of ordinary folk – but the storytelling is downbeat and basic.

A British Blackboard Jungle that bears no resemblance to school life as we know it.

Only the most easily pleased fans of foul-mouthed comedy will respond to these jokes and set pieces, which generally lack cleverness or comic imagination.

If Instant Family manages to land more emotional and amusing moments than it deserves to, that’s thanks in large part to two of the performances.

It starts strongly, with the gory deaths coming thick, fast and often unexpectedly, and Damon Lindelof and Nick Cuse’s script giving the viewer no purchase on the unfolding mayhem. The underrated Gilpin is a steely, lib-owning presence, too. But the surprises soon dry up.

Despite its radical gloss, this over-long, lifeless epic of doomed true love falls into all the predictable traps: excessive pageantry, Monty Python-like peasants, dialogue that drips with sentiment, and even the sight of young lovers running through rural England.

The action here is visceral and slickly handled, especially in the kind of expository opening credits sequence that Snyder is a master of (see also: Watchmen), but the patter is perfunctory and there's little grab to hold onto in this cadre of underdeveloped expendables as they negotiate the Vegas Strip, hotel corridors and the odd dull family dispute. Aliens is also a showcase for the kind of cut-to-the-bone editing Army of the Dead could have really done with. The zombies are fast here; the pacing definitely isn’t.

Sluggishly paced, stodgily scripted and curiously edited, it’s not so much a bullet ballet as a creaky dance across an abandoned saloon.

Departing from Marvel’s snarky, wham-bam formula, Eternals is an attempt to do straight-faced sci-fi. Sadly, the result is over-stuffed and underpowered.

When Phillips’s regular ace Bradley Cooper shows up—as a scowling war profiteer—it just feels like stunt casting and a missed opportunity for levity.

This is merely a vanity project that shamelessly plugs Roitfeld’s new stateside brand.

The gallery of eccentric ex-lovers provides a few yuks, but the fact that the film's trajectory sees going from sexuality-owning independence to conventional respectability as a quantum leap is remarkably depressing, even if Angela's final resolve complicates such an easy progression.

In director Mandel's unsophisticated hands, this all comes over like an amusingly preposterous mix of Kindergarten Cop and Dangerous Minds. But the script, by at least three writers, doesn't have the dialogue, characterisations, plotting, or plain interest to sustain a school-based drama.

This isn’t revisionist history; it’s a key moment in political radicalism reduced to an empty pop-cultural posture.

An eerie resurrection regains some good will, but we'll have to wait for Neshat to catch up with the art of storytelling.

More damagingly, director William Eubank (‘The Signal’) can’t decide if Underwate’ is a disaster flick or a monster movie. It ends up sinking between the two stalls: too unfocused for the former; not scary enough for the latter. All that early promise vanishes into the murk.

Luisito (Perez) is the only vegetarian butcher working in the Dominican Republic-which may, alas, be the only original aspect of this well-intentioned, well-worn revenge saga.

One's heart sinks the moment the trio is picked up by Prince Caspian (Barnes) and deposited on his ship, the Dawn Treader. Suddenly we're in green-screen land, where everything looks cheap, heavily digital and unfortunately postconverted to 3-D-hardly a fantastical otherworld.

Sadly, “Get out of my lab!” is not the new “Get off my plane!”

Onscreen, The Dark Tower serves up a generic, half-baked scenario no different from a slew of better-known YA properties in which young, wide-eyed protagonists discover their connections to a hidden fantastical world.

Deserves some kind of Bizarro World Robert Altman Independent Spirit Award for the Best Ensemble in the Least Interesting Movie.

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

Impassioned, but wearisomely didactic, diaspora drama.

Better to defrost "Alive" or "The Edge" from the video icebox.

Green was meant for quick-witted comedy. Unfortunately, she's becoming a mainstay of painfully sincere slogs.

Nygard’s mildly insipid, occasionally condescending tone makes you long for the bombast of early Michael Moore.

The bulk of the film inspires little more than eye-rolling and impatient finger-tapping.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has more going for it than those MCU B-sides, but it still falls a long way short of recapturing the exhilarating glories of director Ryan Coogler’s 2018 smash hit. The visual and storytelling flaws here are only exacerbated by the seriously unsnappy runtime (they’re really not kidding with the whole ‘forever’ thing).

It’s gory and mildly funny but its joke – that the bear is acting like a serial killer – is the only one the film has. It wears thin very quickly.

It’s a zingy set-up but just as quickly, it hits the skids.

It’s a stylistic flair that looks impressive at first, but the more Zeitlin returns to his same tricks, the more tedious it all becomes.

As often with Antonioni, a film riddled with moments of brilliance and scuppered by infuriating pretensions; full of longueurs, it works neither as a portrait of Swinging London, nor as a bona fide thriller.

The film is set in a celeb-owned Miami restaurant and many of the gags--exploding entrees, the swallowing of a diamond ring, on-the-job drunkenness--feel like leftovers.

A narcotizing movie filled with endless anti-banter (come on, Kumail Nanjiani, you’re better than alien comic relief), it works only as a safe space away from the rain.

The 'camera' takes a conventionally objective viewpoint, perpetually rolling over rolling countryside, which effectively robs the plot of all its terror and tension. And the bunnies are a crudely drawn, charmless bunch, with the final nail provided by the soundtrack's famous voices, who help turn the film into a radio play.

It’s just impossible to get past the core ridiculousness and arm-twisting manipulation of the plot.

The script shoehorns in more identity-grappling this time—half-baked and sub-Westworld though it is—and the squelchy synth score (by Black Swan’s Clint Mansell) supplies a playfulness that’s unearned by the visuals. Find a handy film geek to tell you all about how Ghost in the Shell was a massive influence on The Matrix. Better yet, just rewatch The Matrix.

For an especially egregious bit of miscasting, look no further than Mena Suvari, star of this tony adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's posthumously published novel about a disintegrating marriage.

A down market youth pic with Laughlin as the half-breed Vietnam veteran who stands up for America's misunderstood youth and operates a sort of one-man Countryside Commission.

These guys belong in the avant-odd pantheon. They also deserve a stronger, more penetrating tribute.

The movie sags after Mary’s weak-willed acquiescence to crime, instantly turning her into a dull-eyed monster. You know her procedures are bound to stray from elective, but it’s hard to care.

Trespass is assembly-line product through and through - unabashedly mediocre and instantly forgettable. A Joel Schumacher joint, in other words.

So narratively old-fashioned it creaks.

Lee and Schamus make history blandly palatable; in the process, they rob the times and the people they’re portraying of their complications.

Director James McTeigue (V for Vendetta) films most fights in impenetrable shadow, punctuated by death screams, blood splatters and CGI throwing stars glinting from some unseen light source.

Offers an intriguing outsider's document of Russian culture reinventing itself from the outside in; its main export, however, seems to be good old-fashioned Ugly Americanism.

There’s ambition here, but little in the way of insight or genuine feeling — just a heavy-handed thesis and some extraneous Southern eccentricity.

Vaguely redolent of Salvador, only slowed right down to a walking pace, or The Passenger without its seductive sense of place (and Jack Nicholson), The Stars At Noon is a mercurial thing and, as an unsuccessful Denis film, a rare one too.

Dramatically inert and flatter than a buzz cut, the movie ends up diminishing their moment of heroism by turning it into a defiantly amateurish piece of junior-high-grade theatrics.

With a gung ho script, sometimes rudimentary editing and uninvolving relationships, the whole effect is rather flat. None of the aerial sequences boast the visual thrills of Top Gun, while even the attempt to inject controversy in the shape of Hollywood's first female combatant is half-realised.

As ever with this series, the shocks are cheap but effective, and the shaky-cam aesthetic adds an unsettling layer of realism (if you’re willing to overlook the innate ridiculousness of the film-everything concept).

It’s a 60-minute documentary that feels like days of watching paint dry.

As the screws turn, and the double crosses begin, the film sinks under the weight of its own ridiculousness. (The ever-reliable Cranston’s thick Euro-villain accent actually turns out to be one of the least ludicrous elements.)

The film thankfully doesn’t offer some pop-psychology Rosebud to explain Jobs’s drive or near-sociopathic perfectionism, yet we walk away knowing nothing about what made this revolutionary tick.

The script seems to lose interest in its latter stages and Witcher never evinces a depth of insight such that you sit up and take notice.

The fact that it's far more concerned with burnishing an overly fetishized lit movement than serving as an in-depth exploration of the hotel's inhabitants may make you want to check out early.

Caan can’t seem to play up his strengths. He’s a raw talent who needs an editor for his scripts and a strong hand behind the camera guiding him. Mercy gives our guy neither.

The casting is spectacularly wrong, and even on its own scant merits, writer-director Lorene Scafaria's screenplay has little insight into apocalyptic licentiousness, barring a tart line or two.

Documentarian Jon Foy spent a decade following both the phenomenon and those who've tried cracking the code, and while his film offers little in the way of answers, it says volumes about delusional obsessives.

Craven aims for an archetypal confrontation between childlike innocence and wicked step- parent cruelty, but the results are more grim than Grimm.

Once intriguingly strange, Lisbeth Salander returns as a boring action hero, her rough edges sanded down.

Centrally, the title character remains an impressive piece of propwork, and Leonetti's restraint in never animating it (à la Chucky) is the only thing worth appreciating here.

Ben Affleck steps back in front of the camera in a weighty but weary comeback drama that feels like catharsis.

The scam is so crazy, it just might work…for a throwaway episode of "Law & Order."

This take on Alan Bennett’s pre-pandemic play, a love letter to the NHS set on a geriatric ward in Wakefield’s beloved-but-threatened Bethlehem Hospital (‘The Beth’), ticks along amiably enough for an hour or so. Then, like a hand grenade in a tombola, a harrowing third-act twist detonates beneath it and narrative and tonal destruction ensues.

The performance sequences feel intimate and exhilarating-but in the end, Li's journey is compelling only when he's onstage.

It’s in these parent-free gaps that the film becomes less a vehicle for Paquin or helmer Betz (too benign to critically sketch her criminal mother), and more one for Liberato.

By the time Nick decides to have an emotionally purgative yard sale-the primary holdover from the short story-all the adult ambiguities have been traded in for facile Indiewood profundities.

This isn't the NASCAR-fellating cash grab that is the Cars franchise, but it's still Pixar on preachy autopilot.

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.

Emma Davie and Morag McKinnon’s doc walks the line between a deathwatch film and an uplifting one, rather than simply rubbing the viewer’s nose in the horror of mortality.

While visually stunning and stocked with enviable onscreen talent, this holiday confection falls flat.

As billion-dollar Hollywood franchises go, this is one of the drawn-out dumbest. The stake through the heart comes not a moment too soon.

Within the first half-hour, we've met the baddies (led by a taciturn Carradine), heard Rick and Marianne's teasing banter, and experienced the thrills of a shootout and car chase. As for what follows, this drearily repetitious film offers more of the same with variations in backdrop, all directed in perfunctory fashion by Badham. It does have a nice '60s soundtrack; shame about the rest.

The movie’s only vaguely human presence is Sharon Horgan (the gifted writer and star of TV’s Catastrophe), who gazes upon the manufactured gags with an air of chagrin. If the movie had risen even an inch to her level, Game Night might've had some game.

All the put-upon boorishness of an office drone (Bateman), a chemical-plant manager (Sudeikis) and their sexually harassed buddy (Day) might be forgivable, were Horrible Bosses actually funny instead of sporadically amusing and desperately vulgar.

Marvel at the desperate spectacle of three comic leads-Aniston, Bateman and Watchmen's Patrick Wilson as the original donor-being outperformed by the wide-eyed Robinson, a quiet collector of silences. These stars will never be as young as he is; you wish they'd all stop trying.

There's no sense of the oppression France felt under Nazi rule. It's all just play-acting in period-specific attire. You can almost hear the AD calling lunch.

The badly miscalculated meat of the film is an endless parade of to-camera addresses by performers such as Lindsay Lohan, Viola Davis and Uma Thurman, all reading clumsily from Monroe's recently discovered letters and journal entries as if it were final-exam time at the Actors Studio.

To be fair to first-time feature director Lennart Ruff, he has far less money than James Cameron to pull off this gloomy sci-fi thriller. But that’s no excuse for aiming so low when it comes to your concepts and characterisation.

It’s the opposite of frightening: a sludgy collection of tired jump scares, inexpertly mounted period décor—this time we’re in a too-shiny 1973 Los Angeles—and a continued slump into generic blahness.

A lot of history gets horned into this undeniably inspirational parable, though slick execution and simplistic storytelling make it a lesson suitable only for easily impressed elementary-school students.

Throw in some quirky interludes of a Norwegian quartet singing old American spirituals every so often, and you've got something that's truly messy, messy.

His unauthorised investigation, with partner Jo Christman (Parker), is a routine affair, the film's familial and professional tensions sunk by a script that's all development and no pay-off.

Niccol's attempts at satire are toothless.

Credit the appealingly paired McAdams and Tatum for making this Valentine's-month hokum watchable.