GHOSTBUSTERS

Starring: Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones, Kate McKinnon

Writers: Katie Dippold, Paul Feig

Director: Paul Feig

So here it is, the movie which has already been accused of ruining childhoods and destroying a generation's memories of a timeless classic. Apparently this movie is currently causing the gradual breakdown of society and will ultimately trigger the Apocalypse so before we all burn in the fires of Hell I should probably get on with writing a review of this.

Dr. Erin Gilbert (Wiig) is trying to downplay her paranormal past in order to achieve tenure at Columbia University but that's difficult when her ex-colleague Abby Yates (McCarthy) is hawking the book they co-authored years ago. Heading over to Abby's workplace in order to advise her not to continue dredging up their ancient tome, Erin finds herself joining Abby and her new lab partner Jillian Holtzmann (McKinnon) on a trip to a supposedly haunted mansion. Will they discover the existence of ghosts and throw themselves into combatting the spectral menace? Nope, there are no ghosts and the film ends. Come on, of course there are ghosts. The hint's in the title.

As someone who loves (and I mean LOVES) the Ivan Reitman original then maybe I should invoke the spirit of a wronged fanboy and denounce this film as being the spawn of Satan but I can't quite see why a 2016 variation with an all-female Ghostbusters team should in any way tarnish my affection for Venkmann, Stantz, Spengler, Zeddemore et al. Hey, I thoroughly disliked the Point Break remake but it didn't even come close to shattering my fond memories of the Swayze/Reeves incarnation.

In fact, where was the vehement, unrelenting dislike for that remake? I must have missed that meeting. If I didn't know better I'd be tempted to think that the vitriol directed at Ghostbusters was because - shock horror - it's centred on four women who get to crack wise and kick ass and generally save the day without screaming and fainting and waiting for a bloke to turn up and sort it all out. Still, that surely isn't the case because people out there can't be such misogynistic dicks, right?

I also don't understand the argument that women can't be funny. If someone doesn't find a particular person funny, be that person male or female, that's fair enough but to say that all women aren't funny? Really? Well, I laughed at all four distinctly non-male ghoul chasers in this movie and although Wiig and McCarthy have their fair share of amusing lines their characters provide the bedrock upon which the movie is built, generously allowing Jones and McKinnon to grab the biggest laughs in the piece.

Jones' sassy, no-nonsense ex-subway worker is a fine everywoman counterpoint to the scientific babble being spouted by her more science-based colleagues, chiefly McKinnon as nuclear physics expert Holtzmann who is surely one of the greatest nerd creations in the history of cinema. Arguably there's a hint of Egon Spengler about her but Holtzmann is a fully-rounded character, smart without being smart-arsed, quirky without being annoying, kicking serious phantom butt with an ever-more snazzy array of weaponry. McKinnon is, simply put, adorable.

For anyone who thinks any movie which passes the Bechdel Test is destined to be a worthy, joyless plod, firstly: are you kidding me? Secondly, rest easy. The new Ghostbusters boasts plenty of laughs, a few well-timed chills (yeah, they're multiplex-friendly chills but chills nonetheless) and several entertaining action set-pieces. The supporting cast adds to the general air of fun, so you get performers such as Andy Garcia as a Mayor who doesn't take at all kindly to comparisons with his counterpart from a certain 70s movie and Chris Hemsworth as Kevin, the team's hunky but unrelentingly dim secretary.

Then there are the cameos from....actually, I won't say who appears, that would spoil some of the fun. All I will say is that they're sprinkled throughout the movie, including midway through the end credits so don't get up as soon as the end titles start to roll. Arguably there may be slightly too many nods to the original but some of them aren't immediately obvious and there's not so many of them that they get in the way of the updated story.

Speaking of Hemsworth, his character doesn't spend the movie being fought over by the Ghostbusters to see who can date him first. It's clear that Erin takes a shine to Kevin from the get-go but this doesn't form the romantic subplot you'd find in countless other movies because there are other concerns to deal with, such as preventing the Fourth Cataclysm from occurring. Trust me, the Fourth Cataclysm is not good. If it happens, any notion of romance you may have previously had is pretty much null and void.

You may have already taken against this movie because you loved the source material so much, you may have taken against this movie because you're just a big sexist dork. I can't force you into a cinema to watch this and I wouldn't want to. If you want to spend the rest of your life being a whiny, entitled arsehole that's your business entirely. That's kind of a shame because if you approached this film with a clear head then you might just find Ghostbusters a warm, funny, charming experience.

After all of this, if you're still dead set against a bunch of ladies who ain't afraid of no ghost (I know it's a double negative, take it up with Ray Parker Jr. if you have a problem with that), allow me to enrage you further by revealing that the post-credits sequence not only sets up a sequel but sets up one that will probably take the world's biggest dump over the blissful reverie of your youth even more. Who you gonna call about that one?

ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS: THE MOVIE

Starring: Jennifer Saunders, Joanna Lumley, Julia Sawalha
Writer: Jennifer Saunders
Director: Mandie Fletcher

Edina (Saunders) and Patsy (Lumley) are still living the high life in London, despite Edina's dwindling PR client list. Spurred on by an opportunity to represent Kate Moss, Edina pursues the supermodel at an exclusive launch party only for things to go catastrophically wrong, resulting in Kate Moss going missing in the Thames and Edina and Patsy going missing to the French Riviera in an attempt to escape the growing chaos back home...

In the run-up to seeing this I heard people say they loved this and I also heard people say they hated it. Well, I'm going to say that I neither loved nor hated it. Some of this movie works very well and some of it doesn't work at all, which makes for a slightly frustrating experience. I laughed, don't get me wrong, just not as much as I was expecting to.

As you'd expect, Saunders and Lumley have their characters down pat and the interaction between them is terrific. Lumley, as ever, is nothing short of brilliant as the almost permanently sozzled Patsy and she's given plenty of moments to shine, my personal favourite being her chat with a bemused/terrified Jon Hamm.

For fans of the series, it's also a chance to check back in with some beloved characters from the series, notably Jane Horrocks' Bubble, still on another planet, and Julia Sawalha as Edina's put-upon daughter Saffy, still tutting on the sidelines and trying to do the right thing. Saffy has a daughter of her own and this will cause its own set of issues.

One of the problems here is that, Bubble and Saffy (and perhaps Kathy Burke as brutal fashionista Magda) aside, the movie tries to crowbar in so many of the original cast that they're invariably given little more than a glorified walk-on part. Christopher Ryan, Mo Gaffney, Helen Lederer and Harriet Thorpe disappear as quickly as they show up.

Outside of this, it's stuffed to the gills with cameos from models, actors, singers, comedians, news reporters and general celebrities including Lara Stone, Jerry Hall, Poppy Delevigne, Alexa Chung, Lily Cole, Gwendoline Christie, Rebel Wilson (great as a cabin crew member on a budget airline), Emma Bunton, Graham Norton, Kirsty Wark, Sophie Raworth, Sadie Frost, Stella McCartney....and that's just a subset. Was it a competition to cram in as many famous UK people as possible?

And if there are too many celebrity cameos to take, there are way too many supporting characters given sub-plots which a 91-minute movie can't hope to sustain: Robert Webb as a policeman (and boyfriend of Saffy) who's investigating the disappearance of Kate Moss and trying to track down Edina and Patsy after they've gone on the lam; Mark Gatiss as a potential publisher of Edina's memoirs; Celia Imrie as a rival PR guru; Lulu as a vengeful client of Edina's; Barry Humphries as an old flame of Patsy's; June Whitfield as Edina's mum, who's gone to Cannes in order to activate a plot device; a chance meeting with the world's richest woman; Jean-Paul Gaultier wandering the beach with his metal detector...

Actually, Jean-Paul Gaultier's pretty funny but you see what I mean in terms of what's going on here. And yet, most of the plot threads are hurriedly resolved (or, in Imrie's case, jettisoned completely) in a rush to get to the end credits without building to anything resembling a proper climax. In one line of dialogue, that's it. It's over. Quick jump to what happened next. Roll the titles.

Having said that all of this, there are a number of inspired moments and a handful of majorly chucklesome lines but, given the pedigree and general hilarity of the TV series which spawned this cinematic spin-off, it's a bit of a shame that Edina and Patsy haven't quite been given the send-off they deserve. Some sequences are great, some fall bafflingly flat, some seem to belong in another movie. The uninitiated (is there anyone out there going to see this who has never seen the TV show?) may very well wonder what the fuss is about, more forgiving fans of Edina and Patsy might think this is, indeed, absolutely fabulous. What did I think? Not terrible but not much of a reason to break out the Bolly, sweetie darling.

MOTHER'S DAY

Starring: Jennifer Aniston, Kate Hudson, Julia Roberts
Writers: Anya Kochoff Romano, Matt Walker, Tom Hines
Director: Garry Marshall


*** WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS - LIKE THE FACT THAT THIS MOVIE IS ABSOLUTELY F***ING TERRIBLE ***

Sandy (Aniston) is a divorced mum of two who suddenly has to cope with the fact that her ex (Timothy Olyphant) has married a much younger woman. Jesse (Hudson) is trying to hide from her mum the fact that she's married a guy who isn't white. Home shopping channel superstar Miranda (Roberts in an alarming wig - oh God, Julia, I hope it was a wig) is focused on her career and doesn't have kids - or does she? Seems weird that she's in a movie called Mother's Day. Anyway, the lives of all of these characters and more will intersect in a star-filled gala to show all of us exactly what it's like to be a complete Mother...

After Valentine's Day and New Year's Eve, Garry Marshall is back to defile yet another time of celebration, turning in easily the worst film I've seen so far in 2016. I was pretty sure that Dirty Grandpa would be holding on to that title for maybe the whole year but Mother's Day is so astonishingly awful, so lacking in laughs, so devoid of drama that it makes that grubby De Niro/Efron flick seem like Citizen Kane in comparison.

I suppose it's some sort of achievement to amass such an impressive cast and then have them deliver the sort of lines which no actual human being would ever say. The dialogue is so teeth-grindingly terrible it isn't even amusingly bad, it's so jaw-droppingly vapid you have to give the performers credit for trying to sell the frankly ludicrous stuff coming out of their mouths.

Another problem is that the film is so chock full of plot lines that nothing is given particular focus or detail. Oh, there's a problem for Sandy. Oh, now we've switched to a problem for Jesse. Oh, now Miranda is on TV selling something. Oh, now it's Jack Whitehall and his fledgling career in stand-up. Oh yes, I didn't mention Jack Whitehall in this. Jack Whitehall is a British stand-up comedian and here he's playing a British stand-up comedian. And he's not at all bad as far as it goes, but as for the stand-up itself...

Look, I know this movie isn't going for edgy but the stand-ups on display here tell jokes so feeble that you'd be disappointed if you found them in a Christmas cracker. And yet the audience shrieks hysterically and cheers as if they'd discovered the next Richard Pryor. Still, in keeping with the rest of the movie it's just another unrealistic night of stand-up comedy in an unrealistic bar setting in an unrealistic world.

It's the same unrealistic world where "designer" Sandy assembles a scale-model display that looks like something a ten-year-old might produce as a school project and then presents it to Miranda in order to get what sounds like quite a high level job. Of course, in the real world Miranda would think Sandy was taking the piss and chuck her out but no, Miranda gives her the job. I don't care if you think that's a spoiler, it isn't even really mentioned again and if you're still thinking of watching this then there is no hope for you. I watched this so you don't have to.

Oh yeah, Sandy lost her temper before the interview so she destroyed her scale model and threw it in a bin, then had to retrieve it and reassemble it. Anyway, Miranda likes the fact that Sandy was ranting about her ex so she's more interested in a bit of gossip than asking about design experience so hey, let's just give Sandy the job, she'll be fine. What, you're a butcher by trade? This job is for a brain surgeon. Ah, you seem like a nice guy, you obviously know your way around sharp knives, you'll pick it up as you go along.

Anyway, Sandy's got enough problems with her ex and his stunningly pretty new wife so we want her to get that job, don't we, especially as she's living in poverty since Olyphant's character moved out. Oh, hold on, Sandy has a lovely house. Jesse has a lovely house. Miranda probably has an amazing house but we don't get to see it. Bradley (Jason Sudeikis) has a lovely house. Lovely houses are the order of the day here. Oh, I didn't mention that Jason Sudeikis is in this. He's an ex-Marine that was married to fellow soldier Jennifer Garner who passed away tragically - cue queasily bad taste visits to her grave using The Last Post as a motif in the accompanying soundtrack. There is nowhere, however tawdry, this film won't go in its quest to manipulate your emotions.

So Bradley runs into Sandy at the supermarket, they swap unconvicing dialogue and then don't really run into each other again until much, much later in the film when the romantic sparks really don't fly and there's less chemistry going on then when the science class I was in was banned from carrying out experiments when someone thought it would be a good idea to use a Bunsen burner as a flame-thrower. You know who you are so I will not be naming you in this review. So, considering the only reasons that Bradley and Sandy are compatible seems to be that they're single and that they both have kids - oh, and lovely houses - do you think they'll start seeing each other? Let's be honest, who cares?

Still, one thing this film doesn't attempt to do is shoehorn some kind of lesbian relationship into the proceedings just to look like it's being inclusive. No, hold on, it's coming back to me, there is a lesbian relationship shoehorned into the proceedings involving Jesse's sister Gabi (Sarah Chalke) and her wife Max (Cameron Esposito). Actually, Gabi and Max seem to be by far the most interesting characters in this so obviously this flick spends almost no time with them at all except to have Gabi's mother (Margo Martindale in a thankless role) freak out when she discovers that Gabi is married to a woman. Mind you, she also freaks out when she discovers that Jesse has married a guy from India so Martindale gets landed with a character who's both homophobic and racist. Oh, how we laughed.

It's not just poor old Margo Martindale who gets short shrift. Hector Elizondo's trip to the shrift counter is equally unsuccessful, landed with a part so thin that if you held it up to the light you'd easily be able to see straight through. Elizondo is Miranda's agent but you wouldn't especially be aware of this if another character hadn't mentioned it. As mentioned earlier, Sarah Chalke is also the recipient of dubious-length shrift, as is the normally brilliant Jon Lovitz. It's like a fire sale on sub-standard shrift.

Mother's Day failed not only to raise one single solitary laugh, it didn't even make me smile during its 118-minute running time. Yes, it's nearly two hours long and you will feel every grating, mirthless second of it. After just forty minutes I felt like standing up and shouting "PLEASE MAKE IT STOP!" but I clung on for the rest of the film, hoping against hope that it would turn things around with a tremendous second half. What the hell was I thinking? Come to think of it, I may not have laughed but I did cry. Mind you, that was afterwards in the cinema foyer when I thought of the numerous other ways I could have spent those two hours.

My suggestion is that if there is a next "day" to be tackled in this fashion, Garry Marshall should film an enormous pile of dogshit for two hours and release that because it will have the same effect as Mother's Day and there'll be no need to pay out all of that money for those big-name actors. A failure on every conceivable level, it's insulting that someone out there thinks this passes for entertainment. It doesn't. I feel sorry for Jennifer Aniston, I feel sorry for Julia Roberts, I feel sorry for all of the genuinely talented performers cast adrift on this giant floating turd of a movie.

Take your mother out for a nice meal, please don't take her to see this.

ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

Starring: Johnny Depp, Mia Wasikowska, Helena Bonham Carter
Writer: Linda Woolverton
Director: James Bobin

After a pre-title card spot of japery on the high seas which is akin to a low-speed, historical version of Fast and Furious with sailing ships, Alice Kingsleigh (Wasikowska) returns home to find financial problems on dry land and problems in Underland concerning the health of The Hatter (Depp). The poor guy's fading fast and the only solution appears to be for Alice to travel back in time to change the grim fate of the Hatter's family. For this to be possible, she has to convince Time (SBC) to let her borrow a device called the Chronosphere...

James Bobin's film is a visual treat and every scene is sumptuous save for the odd sliver of shaky CGI in which characters appear to be floating over the landscape rather than walking upon it. This is a minor gripe when 99.99% of the action looks so gorgeous and even I was taken in by the 3D version of this despite being no particular fan of the process or the specs I have to wear for a couple of hours. The locations are superbly detailed, the colours vivid, the fantastical setting made very real.

So why didn't I enjoy it more? Well, if only the considerable attention to detail lavished on creating a living, breathing fantasy world had been similarly lavished on giving the story more emotional heft. Despite the fact that the very life of The Hatter is in Alice's hands there's rarely a sense of genuine jeopardy and the tugs at the heart strings feel more manipulative rather than a natural product of the story. It builds to a climactic sequence in which all the protagonists gather to slug it out - in a PG-rated, fisticuff-avoiding way - but even that's resolved in a way that left me thinking "Was that it?".

Before you think I spent most of the movie wanting to go all Red Queen and demanding the heads of all involved, there are many things that I liked about ATTLG. Depp doesn't overdo it with the wackiness as the Hatter and Mia Wasikowska makes for a fine heroine but it's Sacha Baron Cohen as the comically menacing Time who stole the film for me, playing it broadly enough to ensure plenty of laughs but not so much that his antics become tiresome. When he's on screen the proceedings are lively and entertaining and the running gag about how he blames everyone but himself is very well done.

Similarly, Helena Bonham Carter is excellent as the spoiled, unhinged Iracebeth, here given a rather tragic backstory as well which doesn't necessarily excuse all of the frankly psychotic things she does but gives the audience a clear point of reference as to where all of her vengeful plans stem from. Again, the resolution of the conflict between Iracebeth and Mirana (Anne Hathaway) is throwaway and somewhat unconvincing considering what's gone before but HBC gives it her best shot and it's neither her nor Hathaway's fault that the dramatic beats don't resonate as they should.

It's another big-budget blockbuster season movie which falls frustratingly short of its ambitions. It's by no means terrible - in fact, there are flashes of brilliance across the entire running time - but I left the cinema feeling that the movie needed a much stronger emotional core to complement its beautiful look. Curiouser and curioser...

X-MEN: APOCALYPSE

Starring: James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence
Writer: Simon Kinberg
Director: Bryan Singer


*** WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS ***

After being unwittingly released from imprisonment after thousands of years, original mutant Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac) sets a plan in motion to cleanse the world of, well, pretty much everyone except for the four fellow mutants he's recruited, one of which is a revenge-driven Magneto (Fassbender). Trying to prevent Apocalypse from bringing about the, er, Apocalypse is Professor X (McAvoy), along with Mystique (Lawrence) and a group of gifted youngsters from X's academy...

The latest instalment in the X-Men franchise promises much - a more powerful bad guy than ever before, the introduction of new characters, the re-introduction/reboot of old ones - but ultimately doesn't quite deliver. Part of the problem can be spotted with a quick glance at the poster above. Even with a sizable running time of 144 minutes, how can the movie hope to cram in so many characters and do them all justice? The short answer is that it can't.

Established characters are still given the room to breathe, namely McAvoy's Xavier, Lawrence's ever more dour Mystique and Fassbender's Magneto, who goes through a dispiritingly similar arc to previous encounters. He starts off good, a tragic event sends him bad, but will the humanity within him win out in the end? Don't get me wrong, Fassbender's great but can't his character be given something else to do than wrestle with his conscience and tell McAvoy that his willingness to save mankind died long ago?

The new characters are each given their own introductions, with varying degrees of success. Cyclops (Tye Sheridan) and NIghtcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee) elicit some degree of sympathy and hint at bigger parts to play next time out, Storm (Alexandra Shipp) is terrific but under-used and Psylocke (Olivia Munn) has a striking look but is given no depth at all. The new Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) is less dangerous psychic, more grumpy teenager and Angel (Ben Hardy) fares least well of all, only making an impact when he's involved in a high-speed collision with the deck.

As this movie's big bad, Oscar Isaac battles an odd make-up job as Apocalypse and manages a couple of effective moments but considering he's all-powerful the scrap against him never seems desperate enough. There's the requisite amount of destruction - top tip: get away from the bridges linking Manhattan to the other boroughs of New York, they always seem to cop it - and the X mansion is once again the target of some extreme remodelling but most of the big set-pieces are oddly lacking in real X-citement (apologies, I'm an idiot for putting that in).

And yet, in the midst of this unrelentingly average blockbuster there's one sequence which is definitely one of my favourites of the year so far - in which Quicksilver (the excellent Evan Peters) embarks upon a one-man rescue mission to save absolutely everyone in an about-to-be-destroyed building. It's fun, it's inventive, it's thrilling and it hints at what the rest of this movie could have been.

Overstuffed and undercooked, this is a something of a disappointment considering how much I enjoyed First Class and Days of Future Past. It's a long way from being terrible but given the quality of the talent on both sides of the camera it should have been so much better. Oh, and the cameo appearance from a X-Men fan favourite appears to have wandered in from a different and more adult movie.

THE DARKNESS

Starring: Kevin Bacon, Radha Mitchell, David Mazouz

Writers: Shayne Armstrong, Shane Krause, Greg McLean

Director: Greg McLean

*** THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS ***

You know how it is. One minute you're enjoying a family holiday in the Grand Canyon, the next you're back home and the place is plagued with all sorts of supernatural occurrences, No? Well, that's what happens to the Taylors in this movie. Top holiday tip? Don't bring back black rocks with symbols on them as their son Mikey (Mazouz) does. Of course, dad Peter (Bacon), mum Bronny (Mitchell) and sister Stephanie (Lucy Fry) have no idea about the black rocks. If they did, it would have been a much shorter movie...

...which might not have been such a bad thing. The Darkness creaks and trundles its way to the hour and a half mark with no sense of energy or urgency. Certainly by the halfway point I was tempted to shout "Get on with it!" at the screen. You shouldn't shout at the screen though, there are rules of cinema etiquette which must be adhered to. So there I was, internally shouting "Get on with it!" at the screen, with no hope that the film would actually get on with it.

There are many things which make this more disappointing than if it had just shown up out of nowhere with no names attached. The director, Greg McLean, knows how to terrify audiences. I loved Wolf Creek and enjoyed its gorier, dafter sequel. Okay, this isn't pitched at the same audience and it's not surprising that there's nothing here which approaches the ferocity of McLean's outback chillers but there are several serviceable set-ups which promise suspense but don't deliver. There are less cheap jump scares than you'd expect in something like this, which is a blessing, but the over-reliance on creeping around dark places in the house becomes humdrum in a very short space of time.

You can't say they've skimped on the acting talent either. Bacon and Mitchell have been great in other horrors (I'm thinking Stir Of Echoes and Pitch Black) and, to be fair, they're far from terrible here but their characters didn't grab me sufficiently to care too much about them beyond hoping that they weren't bumped off by the spirits from beyond. Marital infidelity is one of the sub-plots and this could have been quite interesting but it's ultimately dealt with in such a perfunctory way that I felt the movie was just ticking off things it needed to resolve before the end credits.

The support's none too shabby either. Jennifer Morrison, Matt Walsh, Ming-Na Wen, Paul Reiser (yes, Burke from Aliens) - all present, all given very little to do. Morrison and Walsh are introduced at the beginning as Joy and Gary Carter, friends of the Taylors who also happen to be holidaying with them and then....that's it. Once Bacon and Co. are back home and the weirdness kicks off, that's it for the Carters. You don't see them again. They don't crop up in conversation. The Taylors don't even call the Carters to see if their house has been possessed too. That's more spooky than the black rocks if you ask me.

Come the end you do get a decent dollop of CGI malevolent ghost action as an attempt is made to cleanse the house of its evil but even then this seemed to be a riff on the climax of the original Poltergeist. Yes, it was by far the most enjoyable stretch of The Darkness for me but couldn't overcome the general feeling of "I've seen this before, and I've seen it done better".

I really wanted to enjoy this movie but it's just another tired studio horror flick which is lacking in inspiration and, crucially, scares. The only reason you'd be looking over your shoulder after this one is to make sure someone hadn't stuck a piece of paper on your back saying "Kick me - I paid money to watch The Darkness". Release Greg McLean from the teen-friendly horror shackles and he can definitely bring the fear but this watered-down chiller risks pleasing absolutely no one.

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I SAW THE LIGHT

Starring: Tom Hiddleston, Elizabeth Olsen, Bradley Whitford

Writer: Marc Abraham

Director: Marc Abraham

The brief, troubled life of singer/songwriter Hank Williams (played by an authentically slim Hiddleston) is chronicled in writer/director Marc Abraham's restrained biopic. Playing to a small audience in a very early morning slot on a local radio show Williams is sure he's destined for bigger and better things, such as appearing at the Grand Ole Opry, but his rise to fame is blighted by relationship problems and health issues.

If you're going to take on the story of Hank Williams then you'd better make damned sure the musical performances are up to scratch and Hiddleston gives us impressive, extremely enjoyable renditions of classic tunes that will make you wish the movie had crammed in more of them. It's a reminder of just how brilliant Williams' compositions were and I'm probably not the only person who watched this and then had Hey Good Lookin' going round their head for the rest of the day.

There's no doubt that the soundtrack is nothing short of amazing and if the rest of the movie had been so engaging I'd have been marking this one as a classic in the making, As it is, the generally low-key approach is at once refreshing and frustrating. It's good to see that the fiery relationship between Williams and wife Audrey (Olsen) is portrayed mostly via pithy, barbed, well-written dialogue rather than screaming matches and thrown crockery but personally I felt that the drama was a little too underplayed for its own good.

Still, there's much to enjoy in the quality of the performances. Hiddleston has the look down pat and the acting chops to match so you won't be wondering why Loki from the Thor and Avengers movies is singing Your Cheatin' Heart. Olsen is terrific so you won't be wondering why Scarlet Witch from that Avengers movie is shacked up with that guy who looks a bit Loki from the Thor and Avengers movies. Cherry Jones is imposing as Hank's formidable mother and Bradley Whitford makes the most of a smaller but significant role as music publisher and friend Fred Rose.

Overall, then, a curate's egg of a movie. The musical numbers are worth the price of admission but the film as a whole left me feeling somehow unsatisfied. There are several effective moments along the way but ultimately it's overlong and lacking the spark to truly captivate. And that's not me playing the steel guitar, as has been suggested elsewhere.