Clarisse Loughrey

Blighted by development problems and a star whose downward spiral has been widely dissected by all, this superhero blockbuster emerges just as confused as predicted.

Ambulance is a purely aesthetic beast, made for those who like their films to look like they’ve been edited by someone in the middle of a panic attack.

Wish, clearly, has been made with care, but as its credits offer a whistle-stop tour through Disney’s history, it’s hard not to think – god, wasn’t it great when they made stuff as weird and fun and daring as, say, The Emperor’s New Groove?

Most of the callbacks are played for light humour, not self-importance. Yes, it’s easy to tell you’re being manipulated. But it’s just as easy to respond with: so what?

It’s well-performed and efficiently emotive. Just like the music of Take That, I guess.

Warfare’s violence feels unmoored without its context.

The Boogeyman is conventional horror, comfortably elevated – the same old monster in a shiny, new hat.

The tension of Thirteen Lives is implicit, and ramps up like a vice – how long until all these people’s luck finally runs out? But I do wonder whether all this soberness has prevented a good film from being an extraordinary one.

In Sing 2’s defence, the film is at least enthusiastic about its own overabundance, and the new celebrity voice additions – Halsey’s mollycoddled, rich-girl wolf or Letitia Wright’s street-dancing lynx – fit nicely into the mix.

In The Idea of You, it’s actually fun to buy into the fantasy.

The Nun II, unlike Malignant or M3GAN, is unfortunately tethered to seven previous films of demonic activity, and suffers for it. There are too many established rules to follow. You can almost feel the film squirming around in those restraints, trying its best to claw at something new without violating any preexisting evil nun lore.

Beast represents the apex of low-expectation cinema.

It does, in its DNA, certainly feel like a part of the Wickiverse, even if Reeves’s inevitable cameo feels forced. And while it doesn’t add much depth to the world, it at least gives credence to the amusing suggestion that these films do, in fact, take place in an alternate dimension where every person on the planet is a professional assassin.

It’s a joy to watch Julia Roberts and George Clooney fall in love. It’s an even greater joy to watch them bicker.

All those technical triumphs only complicate what feels like an unanswerable question: how can a film look this good, feel so moving, and still come up lacking?

What’s frustrating about Romulus is to see that the reaction to unpopular ideas wasn’t to come up with more, but to simply recycle the old ones as nostalgia.

True, grief is universal – but To Olivia never embraces the fact that stories draw their power from specificity. It’s what makes them feel real.

The real selling point is a romance so dorky, sweet, and likeable that, well, maybe only Taylor Swift could have written it.

A great actor shouldn’t only be judged on what they can do with a masterful script, but also on how they can take a lesser work and still let it soar. Anthony Hopkins has achieved this with grace in One Life, a somewhat thin, reductively sentimental retelling of the life of British humanitarian Sir Nicholas Winton, which its star has empowered with raw, much-needed complexity.

Ferrari drives determinedly in an uncertain direction.

Boxing Licorice Pizza inside the realm of juvenile memory more often feels like an excuse than a conceit.

Rebuilding, instead, is a lovely rendering of what feels like half a story. It’s not the action its title promises, but the preceding moment of retreat to lick one’s wounds.

No one involved in Murder Mystery 2 seems to have worked with any real sense of direction, since the film is more than happy to let Sandler and Aniston take the steering wheel. There’s an easy chemistry to the pair.

Young Woman and the Sea is pure Hollywood fluff – but it’s hearty, wholesome fluff, of a kind that makes immediate sense once Jerry Bruckheimer’s name pops up in the credits as a producer.

Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers sees fit to both indulge in nostalgia – largely through Ellie’s wide-eyed adoration of the old show – and poke fun at it.

Unfortunately, the further away from Tatum and Bullock you get, the more the film struggles.

What lends Dead of Winter its evocative chill is the way all three women here – kidnapper, kidnapped, and rescuer – are left with nothing but themselves to rely on. There’s no one out here to care for or support them, turning survival into a daily matter of physical and psychological endurance.

The Railway Children Return is part-sequel, part-remake, with a carefully selected smattering of callbacks for the fans.