Clarisse Loughrey

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie offers very little to audiences, young or old, who don’t already know these characters and spaces like the back of their hand. But, hey, if you take a tequila shot every time something explodes, you’ll have a great drinking game on your hands.

With The Mandalorian and Grogu, Star Wars has lost all sense of wonder.

Emancipation never feels as if it’s truthfully telling the story behind the photograph. Or how one man’s pain became emblematic of an entire nation’s evil.

It’s hard to land on a reason for any of this to exist beyond a goosing up of Nike’s own image.

The Miracle Club certainly seeks to capture a feeling of “home” – but it’s not entirely clear for whom.

Caine, as Bernie, allows his natural, domineering presence to carry most of the performance.

When its conclusions end up so tidy and emotionally pat, you can’t but wonder what it’d be like if Nightbitch were actually allowed to run free.

I Wanna Dance with Somebody strips Houston of her messy, beautiful humanity. All it offers instead is a product to market.

Mendes’s script, his first as a solo writer, deals with a sort of formless empathy – what it’s like to witness injustice and feel very, very bad about it. But it lacks necessary self-interrogation. There’s no real sense of purpose beyond the soothing of a privileged viewer’s guilt. The emotions are too thin, a set of codes to interpret rather than anything raw or real.

The idea that it serves a film like September 5 to tell its story through an apolitical lens isn’t just wrong: it’s laughable.

Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken fails to see its own potential – it’s never quite sharp enough to work as a parody, nor sincere enough to make its adolescent insecurities relatable.

You People carries the unresolved, disjointed tension of a sitcom that’s been stretched to the two-hour mark.

Plane is stifled by just how ordinary it is, and how closely it hews to the standard tropes of action films with longer, more descriptive – yet less ridiculous – titles.

The Oscar-winner behind ‘Moonlight’ and ‘If Beale Street Could Talk’ can barely be found in this dreary and anonymous bit of franchise mining.

‘Spider-Man’ spin-off is too flavourless to even be the wild, untethered disaster some were secretly hoping for.

Run Rabbit Run is certainly fluent in the visual language of eerie, effective horror. Its metaphors, though, are all mumbled.

While Marcellus, an ageing octopus feeling stifled in his imprisonment, is meant to act as a spiritual mirror to Tova, the film ultimately isn’t all that interested in the more delicate work of making peace with what can’t be brought back.

Jimpa is a film about a director who’s too afraid of conflict that is, itself, too afraid of conflict.

While director Joseph Kosinski and cinematographer Claudio Miranda can certainly shoot cars as well as they can planes – it’s all plumes of smoke from the tyres and the bone-rattling rumble of starting engines – F1 represents the spiritually bone-dry, abrasive inverse to all of Maverick’s giddy pleasures.

Good comedies, of course, can make the tragic feel bittersweet, but Ricky Stanicky bungles its tone to the point that the whole affair comes across a little depressing. It’s like watching a bedraggled widower perform close-up magic at his spouse’s funeral.

What should’ve been an intricate, twisted, and absurd treat is demoted to generic horror movie sludge, in no way discernible from any of the other spooky titles lining the October release schedule.

Swiped is far more interested in convincing us that Bumble’s earned its feminist credentials than in exploring what being a “feminist company” actually means when there are billions of dollars on the table.

This is exactly your mother’s Mean Girls – just repackaged with a bunch of TikTok cameos and some of Fey’s B-tier jokes.

Fury of the Gods lands in the frustrating middle: a film that isn’t without promise, but feels far too messy and corporatised to have any real affection for.

The tone here aims for a vague combination of time-travelling romps like Back to the Future and Flight of the Navigator plus time-travelling weepies like Forever Young and The Lake House. It wears both those tones unconvincingly, like a serial killer in a skin suit.

It’s a film that might as well have been the marketing department’s power-point presentation.

It’s hard to imagine what anyone could get out of Damsel that isn’t already liberally covered by Brown’s other projects. There’s a sweetness to Stranger Things’s Eleven, and a wit to Enola, that offer the actor a hell of a lot more to do than Damsel’s mean-mugging to camera.

What’s surprising is that, though Miller’s imagination remains entirely untarnished, Three Thousand Years of Longing stands in defiance of all of Fury Road’s sagest lessons. The film sags where it should speed; it mumbles when it should pronounce; it narrows when it should expand.