While the marriage of fluffy comedy and terminal illness was always going to be an uncomfortable one, this is an understated, genuinely poignant weepie bolstered by a top-drawer cast.

Limp, transparently plotted flight fodder. Jilt it.

That every jibe lands woefully wide is no surprise, though we’ll give leading lady Ashley Tisdale credit for giving her all to a film that mercifully won’t be around long enough to do any lasting damage to her post-High School Musical career.

By the end you will quite possibly hate cats, Spacey, and the ’80s.

It’s poorly made and in poorer taste.

The kills are inventive but Noble’s baggy trousered butcher is too sympathetic, and his teenage victims too generic for this to be in anyway scary.

It's stiff upper lips versus ruthless efficiency in Petter Naess’ modest WW2 drama.

It’s let down by some erratic, repetitive plotting.

Viewed as a Brit answer to ’70s and ’80s exploitation flicks, endless Seagal movies and First Blood (Dyer is rogue SAS; his colonel issues Trautman-esque warnings), it’s surprisingly decent.

Defying all boundaries, Martyrs relentlessly dishes the visceral pain and emerges as a work of not just ceaseless terror but also gravity and beauty.

If the final third’s sudden, Twilight Zone-lite genre relocation seems desperate, the hollow climax confirms suspicions: vital supplies of narrative oxygen are lacking here.

Juggling heartbreaking frankness with uplifting scenes of love and solidarity, this is a sensitive exploration of family, faith and opposing cultures.

An attractive if conventional biopic of French underwater explorer Jacques Cousteau.

A western as inept as it is preposterous.

Blending archive footage, contemporary interviews and dramatic reconstructions, the film reminds us how dangerous the sport could be.

Dennis Bartok’s sparse horror has a spooky central conceit, and just about overcomes its budgetary bumps, while Macdonald excels as the innocent.