If Stevenson's performance were equal to his mammoth physique, the movie might have a shot, but even his broad shoulders aren't up to carrying this much dead weight.

Subversive elements or not, this is essentially little more than a TV soap opera spiced with hot-button topics (gender issues, clandestine gay trysts), and the combo of TV melodramatics and mumblecore-ish aesthetics eventually wears out its welcome.

While he's lying through his teeth or improvising a sales pitch that might save his skin, Williams is funny and convincing; but once he starts getting dewy-eyed and sincere, flesh-crawling embarrassment takes over.

La Syndicaliste is a weird footnote to Huppert’s long career, one that feels hampered by its ‘true story’ status to the point where it can’t really say much about anything. It’s quietly intriguing. But let’s hope her next outing gives her something that’s really worth dressing up for.

It’s made with too much slickness, and you’ll be way ahead of it.

Such manic fumblings and desperate crassness might be more forgivable were any of it actually, y’know, funny, but other than Olivia Colman’s occasional cameos as a raging therapist, the laughs have been granted a leave of absence.

Any longer-in-the-tooth fans of gritty sci-fi action will find this maze a little too easy to escape.

The trek to get there is sluggish at best, torturous at worst. March away, penguins. Far away.

If Last Christmas isn’t quite irresistible in its emotional moments and the cheesiest bits are borderline indigestible, its effervescence makes it a fun enough watch. At the very least, it’ll make you fall hard for its other romantic lead: London.

Despite classy production values, Mulcahy's attempt to emulate the sombre appeal of Tim Burton's Batman movies is too episodic, sketchy and uneven.

But you do take the film home with you - to all your own toys - and that's what decent horror is supposed to do.

Although the quips aren’t always sharp enough and the sleight of hand a little lacking, it takes a hard heart not to cheer as a few young victims of a broken system carve out their own little bit of magic.

With a 105-minute running time, making it practically a short in the MCU, it has just enough good stuff that it doesn’t outstay its welcome. But the intricate plotting that was once a Marvel selling point is now becoming a millstone around its muscular neck, keeping newcomers out instead of welcoming them in.

Remember the "Seinfeld" episode in which Jerry and Elaine try to become friends with benefits, and set up unsustainable ground rules for their new arrangement? Imagine it rewritten by the Romantic Comeditron 2000 as a profanity-laced schmaltzfest, and you've got this tone-deaf dud.

The real scam was the filmmakers tricking Rebecca Hall (and a cameoing Amanda Seyfried) into participating in this blunt instrument of an indie.

Old-school intrigue, informants and assassins, life-or-death pursuits in crowded places, characters who are adults and do not wear capes or pilot robots: This is pretty much what any filmgoer over the age of 13 pines for in the dog days of summer, so this courtroom melodrama/surveillance thriller should be manna.

Too sluggish for farce and too glib for a trenchant social satire, A.C.O.D. is several sessions short of a breakthrough.

Rosman's debut movie was a pretty fair show-reel promising, falsely it seems, more and better to come.

With its bravura camerawork, fetishistic Cenobite designs, nerve-jangling soundtrack, and literate Peter Atkins script, Anthony Hickox's film is a worthy successor to Clive Barker's flesh-ripping original. Forget the disastrous Hellbound: Hellraiser II; this is adult horror to die for.

It starts off promisingly with some stylised and ridiculous heroics involving a German sub, but once the island has been occupied and a few excellent monsters vanquished, the plot settles down to some very ordinary machinations.

Despite making use of Hackman, Christie and Marshall in supporting roles, and actual US newscasters to cover the election results, the film is still a complete mess. Barely held together by Cy Coleman's powerful score, it finally falls apart thanks to the embarrassing amateurism of the party political broadcasts the characters produce, and the Vidal Sassoon world they inhabit.

Though by no means a perfect film, it is a much more coherent work than it is given credit, held together by Siegel's exuberant eye for the incongruous.

But something compelling happens here that shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. Raging in Shange's still startlingly fluid verse like witches casting spells, this powerful cast (especially Jackson, Goldberg and Phylicia Rashad) reaches bravely, if sometimes clumsily, for emotional accountability.

An early twist means that the bloodletting develops a repetitive feel, and there are unfortunate parallels with the recent Ready or Not 2, but the wincing and guilty laughs never quite dry up. Cult status may await.

Antal and his performers’ pure B-movie esprit is undeniable.

The whole thing veers wildly in quality, and no Eastwood-hater should go within a mile of it; but few lovers of American cinema could fail to be moved by a venture conceived so recklessly against the spirit of its times.

For a film which defines its characters entirely in relation to each other, there's a curious lack of chemistry between the leads. Only in the childhood sequences are the undercurrents and tensions of the various relationships explored.

Interminable scenes of macho posturing and mock-Tarantino dialogue (including a lengthy dissection of the word fags!) mark time between a number of ineptly staged car chases that would embarrass the makers of "Cannonball Run II."