Clarisse Loughrey

Fire Island is a true, escapist romcom at a time when audiences are still undernourished when it comes to queer romances that don’t end in death and despair.

Even if 28 Years Later feels like being repeatedly bonked on the head by the metaphor hammer, Boyle’s still a largely compelling filmmaker, and the film separates itself from the first instalment by offering something distinctly more sentimental and mythic than before.

Frozen Empire is a notable improvement on Afterlife – funny, silly, and a little scary, with its pockets full of hand-built doodahs and the occasional excursion into the realm of pseudo-mythology and parapsychology.

Really, all you can do is take what joy you can from Paddington in Peru, because its pleasures are rarer but still sweet.

So much time in The Legend of Ochi is spent traversing these beautiful landscapes looking for something to grab onto – a thought or an emotion – but there’s nothing really here other than the simple conflict between nature and the men quick to whip out their shotguns when faced with the unknown.

True Things isn’t quite as effective as the director’s 2018 debut, Only You, which tracked the fluctuating desires of a couple (played by Laia Costa and Josh O’Connor) undergoing IVF treatment. But it does reiterate Wootliff’s fluency in the unvarnished, messy spaces of female desire, operating in a way that doesn’t sacrifice the actual sexiness of her work.

There is something pleasantly nostalgic about the film’s straightforwardness.

Audiences may spend the running time of All My Friends Hate Me waiting impatiently for the shoe to finally drop. But Stourton and Palmer’s script points heavily at a secret that’s far less satisfying in the reveal than it is in the build-up. Maybe that’s the point. Here’s a film that leaves you with the same sickly, hollow feeling you might get spending time with the ghosts of your own past.

Pretty Red Dress reaches out gently to a few untouched corners of British film – not only in how it tackles gendered expectations, but in how it finds in Candice neither hero nor villain.

It was Gyllenhaal, here in a producer role, who initially bought the rights to Gustav Möller’s Danish film. You could call this a vanity project, but at least his presence adds a dose of originality to this carbon copy remake.

There’s enough warmth to Guerrero’s script, co-written with Shane McKenzie and Perry Blackshear, to paper over the odd rickety effect or wooden performance.

When the real shock occurs, it doesn’t feel cosmic so much as deliberate manipulation by a filmmaker’s hand. The rhythm feels off.

It’s hard to say how these films will be remembered in the grand scheme of comic book history, but, with The Last Dance, we can at least be reminded that sometimes they actually managed to have fun with these things.

Even when Leonard’s chatting away with his semi-captors, his words seem rather weightless, as if they were something simply to fill the air while his mind quietly calculates his next move. He’s like a chess master, in a way, and few actors could maintain that magnetic stillness quite like Rylance, who always seems to express so much while doing so little.

The Last Duel is perfectly engrossing as a slice of historical intrigue, a clash of iron wills and iron swords, all muddied on the battlefields of medieval France. But there’s a tendency here for the film to present basic facts about contemporary gender politics as some earth-shattering revelation.

When all roads lead back to Evan, and to Platt’s misstep of a performance, the film becomes one giant gamble that’s quite disastrously failed to pay off.

The 355 is a mark of progress only in how wholly unremarkable it feels.

Does the fact the film largely ignores the book’s treatise on nature and virtue absolve it of all connections to Owens’s real-life controversies? It certainly doesn’t, on an artistic level, improve what’s already contained on the page. Newman’s vision of rural South Carolina is scrubbed so clean you might as well call it #swampcore – the Spanish moss looks bright and pristine, the flower petals on the water almost consciously arranged.

For a film that’s so explicit in how it tackles trauma, it makes for a frustrating experience.

There’s a lot, in fact, to Uncharted that feels haphazard or under-considered.

The Scargiver is at least basic enough to feel relatively inoffensive; the first film’s uncomfortably vague deployment of racist and sexual violence has been reduced to a single reference to the empire’s hatred of “ethnic impurity” (never to be picked up again).

And I hate to ask for this, in a world where an excess of lore has been the downfall of so many projects, but Day Shift lacks any sense of context to what exactly this vampire hunter union is or does.

Clooney and his screenwriter, Mark L Smith, tell their story with rousing traditionalism, reinforced by Alexandre Desplat’s idealist score, but little more.

At no point here – or during the last film – does it feel like anyone actually figured out how Sonic works as the centre of a live-action movie.

A Good Person has a tendency to approach moral complexity as a checklist.

While the newer Bad Boys films have delicately sidestepped the contemporary conversations around law enforcement, Axel F seems happy to offer up its protagonist as a figurehead for the active endorsement of police misconduct. I’d argue you could just let Harold Faltermeyer’s earworm of a theme song drown out that noise – but, alas, for a certain generation, that’s also been ruined by the crazy frog on the invisible motorcycle.

It’s hard to treat Joyride just as a pleasant but easily disposable romp, especially when Reynolds loads up the film with so much cheap symbolism.

Meg 2: The Trench is enthusiastically married to the idea that you must eat your vegetables before you get your dessert. But, really, it’s too little, too late.