It’s hard to say which is worse, this romantic drama’s annoying first half, in which Charlize Theron plays a perpetually perky free spirit who cracks the shell of a selfish advertising executive (Keanu Reeves), or the baldly manipulative, tear-jerking climax. Put together, it’s like watching a manic-depressive crash and burn.

Gwyneth Paltrow suffers beautifully again as the depressive daughter of a dying, delusional math professor (Anthony Hopkins) in this adaptation of the stage play she performed in under returning director John Madden (Shakespeare in Love). It’s all very earnest and weighty – with some nice on-location filming at the University of Chicago – but I

This begins as a provocative exploration of class divisions, as a car accident between a hotshot attorney (Ben Affleck) and a poor divorced father (Samuel L. Jackson) escalates into a dangerous feud. Then, as the two men continue to disrupt each other’s lives in increasingly frightening ways, the movie becomes an even more interesting consideration

David Duchovny makes an awkward writing-directing debut with this drama about an artist (Duchovny) recalling his turbulent adolescence in 1970s Greenwich Village. Anton Yelchin is maddeningly idiosyncratic as the artist as a young man – he has the mannered, halting speech pattern of a nervous stand-up comic – while Duchovny’s wife Tea Leoni provides the

Rarely has a bad idea – in this case, remaking a 1950 tear-jerker with Queen Latifah in the Alec Guinness role – arrived on screen with its obvious badness so intact. Everything that sounds wrong about this project is. Latifah plays a mousy department-store salesclerk who embarks on a European vacation when she is diagnosed

Another foreign import founded on the belief that a good meal can solve anything. As it follows an uptight German chef (Martina Gedeck) who runs her kitchen with the rigid precision of a military canteen, the movie doesn’t quite have the joyous effervescence of Like Water for Chocolate or Babette’s Feast. The pleasure, then, comes

A perfectly respectable, perfectly unexceptional movie version of the Charles Dickens novel, this is one of those studious adaptations tailor-made for high school English classes. Charlie Hunnam is a blond bore as the lead, a young country man who must fend for his mother and sister in 19th-century London. Only supporting performances by the likes

This means to play off The Graduate, but any fondness you might have for that 1967 classic will only spoil the fun – not that there is much fun to be had. A misguided premise combined with a high ickiness factor – much of the comic drama comes from Jennifer Aniston’s character believing she may

When this dull adaptation of Natalie Babbitt’s children’s novel, about adolescent love and a fountain of youth, isn’t boring you to tears, it’s causing you to raise an eyebrow. As the two young lovers (Alexis Bledel and Jonathan Jackson, both of whom have the shiny, scrubbed faces of cherubs) frolic in waterfalls and dance under

This is so cliched, cloying and forcibly sentimental, it crushes the very spirit it means to uplift. The title character (Pierrino Mascarino), described as an “elderly Italian peasant” in the press notes, visits his squabbling family in suburban Chicago and teaches them the meaning of life. Mainly he does this by saying things such as