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Susanne Bier is a competent director, but this film is so high concept it hurts, and is filled to the brim with every cliche from every zombie movie you can think of. So despite everything looking fine and some quality actors putting in a solid day's work nothing can really rescue this movie from it's B-movie trappings. Certainly not the pedestrian script, or the ditzy narrative.

Similar to Captain Fantastic but with a much more sombre and realistic approach to the subject matter, Leave No Trace is deliberately paced and the dialogue is sparse, but this gives the film more weight and a sense of authenticity. The performances from McKenzie and Foster are muted but heartfelt, and so mesh well with the film's earthy, understated tone. The slow pace and lack of high drama or conflict may not be to everyone's liking, but there are very few missteps here.

Given Spike Lee's track record one might expect this to be an angry tirade against institutionalised racism in favor of the white man, but this is much lighter fare. The bizarre circumstances here wouldn't be out of place in a sitcom, and it is pretty funny, but there's also some none too subtle social commentary and a smattering of tense drama thrown into the mix, so even though John David Washington and Adam Driver both bring a lot to the table the film as a whole feels quite disjointed.

It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and it takes a while to find it's feet. What little dialogue there is is superfluous and often outright gibberish but damn if this isn't a feast for the senses. The DP has gone all in with the color filters, Cage has his puzzled intensity ratcheted up to eleven and the soundtrack complements the strange goings on perfectly. Ultimately Panos Cosmatos has managed to concoct something crazily hypnotic out of this flimsy revenge flick.

This is one of those movies you could make a nice graph out of. It's so utterly standard and doesn't deviate at any point from the most overused biopic template there is that it feels like you've seen it before while watching it for the first time. Rami Malek does a decent job of capturing Freddie Mercury's attitude to life, but everything's so summarised that it's ultimately like being shown round a city by a holiday rep on autopilot.

More Hollywood junk food made to the same formula as the five - FIVE - previous movies. There really was nowhere for this franchise to go after the third entry, yet here we are with another round of over choreographed fights, interminable chase scenes and silly plot twists. Honestly at this point just throw out a 20 minute stunt reel and save everyone two hours so they can watch something with a bit of soul instead.

Yet another film making masterclass from Lee Chang-dong - a director with an exquisite eye for composition, and an ear for poetic yet natural dialogue that brings the best out of his performers. Lee's blend of obliqueness and directness works seamlessly here in a murder mystery where we're never entirely sure there's even been a murder, and the two halves of South Korean society are brilliantly portrayed through the protagonists. The music is very effective too.

For this to work the audience needs to care about the characters, but the rules of the game are such that we can't do that. There's no backstory and they can't talk so we're left with watching people we don't know busy themselves with the mechanics of avoiding things we don't understand. The end result is that any enjoyment comes merely from appreciating how the director manages to manipulate these artificial elements in a way that's occasionally able to generate tension. That's not a good film.

This film checks all the usual Gaspar Noe boxes, but is too unfocused this time. There is no narrative to speak of, the only direction the cast seems to have received is to say the worst things they can think of, and try to be shocking. The whole thing begins to drag, despite the occasionally brutal burst of violence and dazzling array of technical tricks. It is an assault on the senses to be sure, but in the end all the sturm und drang is simply annoying.

Roma is slow to get going, with nothing of note happening until midway through it's running time. In the meantime, we have some beautiful black and white photography and classy camerawork to admire. Gradually though, things start to coalesce around Cleo's predicament, and this is when the film finds it's stride, essaying the middle class family's upheaval - in a country going through it's own growing pains - in a way that manages to capture the essence of these people and the times very well.

Apart from the costumes this is unlikely to remind you of any other film set in 18th century England, due in part to the extravagant visual style - featuring scenes filmed from bizzare angles and an extensive use of fish-eye lenses to create an intimate and unsettling atmosphere. Emma Stone is good, but most of the intriguing scenes feature Olivia Colman's volatile Queen Anne and Rachel Weisz's Machiavellian Lady Sarah. Court intrigue and sexual chicanery have rarely been so juicily presented.

The writing is uninspired here - to say the least - which goes some way to explain the weak performances. But worse, it's unoriginal and deathly dull, with a bloated running time and lack of ideas. As with so many mysteries these days it becomes less credible as it progresses, the plot twists are telegraphed in such an obvious way that any suspense immediately evaporates, and the ending is silly and trite. In fact this has afternoon TV movie written all over it.

As far as anything interesting goes this is utterly bereft of content. It follows the same tired old biopic formula, Gosling's performance is muted, going on wooden, every scene is a cliche and there's no suspense because anyone interested enough in watching this is going to know how it all pans out. So unless you're a sound engineer there just isn't much reason to watch this dour, by the numbers damp squib of a movie. Oh, and the camerawork is really annoying.

Starts off well enough, and Lively is fun to watch for a while, but whenever our attention is diverted to the plot it becomes tiresome and frustrating, until the oldest cliche in murder-mysteries is thrown in to the mix. Then it plummets downhill fast, decides it wants to be some sort of edgy farce (that's neither smart nor funny but thinks it's both) and finally becomes an embarrassing mess. This one could well end up on the late night so-bad-it's-good circuit years from now.

Schrader's take on Bresson's Diary of A Country Priest is a pretty successful updating, with some scathing commentary about organized religion on the one hand and modern life in general on the other. It's a depressing glimpse into a little pressure cooker of alienation, disappointment and desperation that starts off quietly disturbing and slowly turns the heat up until something has to give - a la Taxi Driver. Hawke anchors the madness with a very nuanced performance.

As much as the title, and John C. Reilly's presence would seem to suggest, there's not much comedy to be had here. Instead we have a somewhat odd and sometimes grim tale of two guns for hire tracking their latest target through Oregon. It briefly heads off into Treasure of The Sierra Madre territory but then changes it's mind and decides to be about nothing at all in the end. It's not bad by any means, and Reilly is excellent, but it does seem kind of pointless when you stop to think about it.

A feelgood movie about race relations in America in the early sixties will likely come off as hokey and cliched, and for the most part that's just what this film does. It's carried by the two central performances though, which while not being totally realistic and tending towards stereotypes - as do most of the supporting characters - are very engaging. The film ticks along in a predictable way and uses overly broad strokes to get it's point across but it does so well enough to be entertaining.

The trick that's pulled off so well in this movie is how grounded the main characters seem, due to a solid script delivered in a naturalistic way by the leads. Cooper in particular is excellent, as is Sam Elliot. They do a great job of presenting as regular people trying to navigate their way through an unusual set of circumstances. So while the tale being told is a cliched one, this is surprisingly easy to get caught up in.

Toni Collette's good, and it doesn't have stupid jump scares and loud music cues to 'scare' the audience, so that's a plus. But that's as far as my good will extends with this humdrum horror hokum. It's cliched from the start, tries far too hard to be 'unsettling' when in reality it's just boring, then it gets dumb and dumber as it progresses until it just becomes annoying trashy nonsense.

Everything's competently done here, but it feels a bit overcooked, and is far from subtle. McKay's passion for exposing what he sees as contemptible individuals in a corrupt system fuels much of the creativity on display, but in the end this evangelical zeal to get his point across in the strongest possible terms just ends up being tiresome, even if you agree with him. As for Bale, his performance impresses initially, starts to feel like a caricature after a while, and becomes wearing over the long haul.