3 hours ago
5
Saturday Night
What we said: “Even the superest superfan of the legendary US TV comedy show Saturday Night Live is going to struggle with the unbearable self-indulgence and self-adoration of this exhausting film from director and co-writer Jason Reitman.” Peter Bradshaw
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Snow White
What we said: “Here is a pointless new live-action musical version of the Snow White myth, a kind of un-Wicked approach to the story and a merch-enabling money machine. Where other movies are playfully reimagining the backstories of famous villains, this one plays it straight, but with carefully curated revisionist tweaks. These are all too obviously agonising and backlash-second-guessing, but knowing that at some basic level the brand identity has to be kept pristine.” PB
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Partir un Jour
What we said: “The opening gala of Cannes can be such a gamble: a very exposed festival slot which few films need or want, and whose occupants so often turn out to be the squawking overfed turkeys of the big screen. Such a one, sadly, is this listless and supercilious musical – ostensibly on the theme of heartwarming home town values – which flatlines like a hedgehog run over by an 18-wheeler the moment the female lead opens her mouth to sing one of the film’s many terrible songs.” PB
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Alpha
What we said: “The madly, bafflingly overwrought and humourless storytelling can’t overcome the fact that everything here is frankly unpersuasive and tedious. Every line, every scene, has the emoting dial turned up to 11 and yet feels redundant.” PB
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High Rollers
What we said: “Here is a cheap-ass knockoff of Ocean’s Eleven starring John Travolta that makes the Soderbergh film look like something by Andrei Tarkovsky or Ingmar Bergman … It is a heart-slowing work of staggering stupidity and charmlessness, ineptly made and quite frankly dull except when its flaws become so egregious you can’t help but guffaw.” Leslie Felperin
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Jungle Trouble
What we said: “With a supremely annoying lead character called Mohsen, here is a jungle adventure that feels sewn together like a cruddy Frankenstein’s monster from the corpses of other shoddy animations – which themselves are patched together from far better films.” Catherine Bray
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Jay Kelly
What we said: “In this dire, sentimental and self-indulgent film, George Clooney has the look of a man who has found strychnine in his Nespresso pod and can’t remember which of the cupboards in his luxury hotel suite contains the antidote.” PB
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The Boatyard
What we said: “There’s something dispiriting about The Boatyard’s pointlessness, its lack of wit, empathy or basic film-making skill. The acting achieves such a finely tuned pitch of atrociousness it’s impossible to endure.” LF
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Mission Alarum
What we said: “No one seems to be quite sure what Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson and Jon Voight’s ‘special ambassadorships’ entail, or if any of that troika of rightwing fellow travellers have fulfilled any official duties. But on the evidence of this, Stallone is already letting the side down – by making a film so bad it shames American cinema itself.” LF
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Mr Blake at Your Service!
What we said: “What makes this film such an ordeal to watch is Malkovich’s amazing line-readings in French, in his laboriously slow and unmistakably American accent … He sounds like Dr Hannibal Lecter having smoked a hundredweight of weed, doing a derisive impression of an unctuous French headwaiter he intends to eat.” PB
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Tron: Ares
What we said: “The matrix of pointlessness is reloaded in this mind-bendingly dull sci-fi, more a screensaver than an actual film … there is no drama or jeopardy or human interest anywhere. This franchise now looks about as urgently contemporary as an in-car CD player.” PB
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Christmas Karma
What we said: “Keen though I always am to indulge any and every new riff on Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, and keen also to hear from Bend It Like Beckham director Gurinder Chadha, this cynically Christmassy movie is leaden, unconvincingly acted and about as welcome as a dead rat in the eggnog.” PB
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