Benjamin Lee

It’s ultimately a doomed voyage: for the crew, for the audience and for Universal’s monster movie strategy at large.

Red, White and Royal Blue just isn’t the fun, brain-disengaged romp it could have been, any praise going toward intention rather then execution.

Gal Gadot leads the streamer’s latest ambitious franchise-starter that delivers just about enough dumb summer fun to have us curious for more.

It’s cheerily done and competently made but broadly sentimental to a fault, the strings being pulled too visible for the film’s many coerced moments of emotion to really work. For a film all about the importance of heat, it’s frankly lukewarm.

Outside of Savage’s visual verve, there’s really little else to The Boogeyman, its attempt to use its central villain as a metaphor for emotional trauma never working quite as well as it did in last year’s Smile (horror as therapy is getting a tad exhausting in general). It ultimately works best as further proof of his ability as a genre film-maker, sleekly gliding from a laptop to the big screen, better things to surely come.

The goofier it all gets, the more one starts to warm to it, leaning further away from its initial A-trappings and nestling into a far more likable B-movie mode.

Lowery’s film mostly plays it safe, only slightly remixing the beats we know a little too well, wrapping them up in a pretty enough package that will get tossed aside and forgotten about once opened. It’s by no means the rockiest trip we’ve taken to Neverland but let’s all pray it’s the last.

Evil Dead Rise is a decent little splatter movie which contains just about enough to justify the franchise resurrection although perhaps not quite enough to demand that much more of it. For all of its gristle, we’re left very little to chew on.

Ghosted is content dictated by algorithm at its absolute, industry-shaming worst, so carelessly and lifelessly cobbled together that we’re inclined to believe it’s the first film created entirely by AI.

It’s made just-about-watchable by Sandler and Aniston again, whose combined movie star charm proves magnetic enough to carry us through the flatter moments, both nailing some effectively chaotic physical comedy and maintaining a warm, relaxed chemistry.

The script does a solid job of making it an accessible world to those not already steeped in it although Goldstein and Daley, writing alongside Michael Gilio, are less effective with the film’s many attempts at comedy.

Tetris finds its fun in the details of contracts and the specifics of deal-making, realising that even when it’s not on a screen in your hands, it’s all one big game.

It’s not quite the toxic disaster it’s being treated as but 65 is nowhere near the giddy lark it should have been, crash-landing somewhere in the middle instead.

It’s the goriest movie of the series so far but without veering into grimness, again that tonal balance perfectly modulated. The last act reveal is as goofy as one would expect but satisfyingly so for reasons impossible to explain without entering spoiler territory.

It’s slick in one moment and a little too scrappy the next but Ritchie’s puppyish insistence that you have as much as fun as his stars is hard to resist. The film’s bizarrely reticent rollout might have already killed any chance of further operations but there have been far, far worse franchise-starters in recent years.

It’s not that its heart isn’t in the right place, it’s just that its heart has been transplanted from somewhere else.

The Rocky spin-off series continues to dazzle with another knockout drama with the magnetic Jonathan Majors.

Even as glossy run-of-the-mill formula, it’s never even close to being as funny or romantic as it needs to be, devoid of fizzy one-liners and hampered by the pair struggling to muster up chemistry during phone conversations that never feel as lived-in as they would for friends with such extensive history.

A bafflingly botched misfire ... Quite what the film is and who it’s for remains a head-scratcher, a stilted jumble of somethings boiling down to nothing.

Rogowski makes for a believably odious yet charming cad while Whishaw and Exarchopoulos neatly underplay their heartbreak, subtly showing the toll of putting up with someone who mistreats you and then putting up with yourself for allowing it.

Ineffective leading duo and rote script hamper otherwise affecting true story of a couple tackling terminal illness

The “more is more” approach (hallucinations, orgies, pissing, stabbing, shooting, splitting, piercing etc) is attention-securing in the moment but oddly forgettable after, like waking up from a nightmare you can’t remember. Infinity Pool is too hectic to truly haunt.

An immensely charming Hewson makes it all seem effortless, though, even as Carney’s manipulative string-pulling threatens to get a bit too forceful, an instinctive and quick-witted actor who drags the film’s sillier, flightier moments back to earth.

Oldroyd never seems entirely sure just how pulpy and weird his material is, unable to decide how far to push, the odd stylistic flourish and burst of lurid music ultimately feeling incongruous in a film that’s otherwise visually quiet.

Song is a writer of elegant restraint and as the final act progressed, I worried that perhaps this restraint might end up a little too delicate for the years that have preceded and the feelings that have amassed. But then in a bar scene for the ages, we find ourselves floored, a slow buildup that finally hits like a bus.

Holofcener and Louis-Dreyfus again make for perfectly pitched partners.

Ridley though is consistent and sort of revelatory, an actor who has struggled to find her footing post-franchise as is often the case, delivering a surprisingly nuanced and deeply felt performance.

Killian’s spiral is intense and unpleasant but we’re not left at the end with much other than respect for technique. The film, like Killian, is all muscle.