Clarisse Loughrey

It is a messy, convoluted affair with some very contrived plotting.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

Pileggi’s screenplay and Levinson’s scattershot direction, like De Niro, make little out of the clash of ideologies at the film’s centre. What could be biblical, feels passionless.

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

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.

It’s hard to demand all that much from a Mario Bros film when its source material has been historically devoid of plot, but shouldn’t we be allowed to demand a little more than mere competency?

Loach is so cohesive here, in accommodating the expansiveness of all these social ills, that characters have an unfortunate tendency to become mouthpieces.

Their film is so stuffed with incident – all of it preposterous, and occasionally insulting to the intelligence of its central quartet – that it sours what could (and should) have been a joyful celebration of desire and indulgence at any age.

While Honey Don’t! prods at something new and quite poignant, an idea about how survivors see themselves and that loaded word “victimhood”, it ultimately struggles to make much sense out of itself and its oddball cast.

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.

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.

Sumotherhood is, at times, so overstuffed that it starts to wear on the nerves. Yet, Deacon has also found a wholesome, and funny, heart to his film, circling back to the awkwardly desperate performance of masculinity that drove its prequel, and simply doubling it up.

It’s intended to be disarmingly sincere – yet the director-writer-actor is so single-mindedly intent on delivering “wonder” that what he’s ended up with isn’t so much a film but a series of emotional cues. It’s the same experience, really, as sitting down to watch an hour-and-a-half video loop of dogs being adopted.

Sure, there’s a kind of “gotcha” twist here that tethers The Watched back to M Night’s work, but Ishana’s real focus is on where Mina’s sorrows take her, deep into the old, pagan world and its stories of slippery natures and shifting identities. Do we define ourselves or are we defined by others? It’s a pertinent question for the director, as she takes her first promising steps into the future.

The Son is an ugly, blaring question mark of a film, and inexplicably terrible considering the talent involved.

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

There’s a through line, buried in here somewhere, about how it’s harder to be creative, easier to destroy. Unfortunately, A Minecraft Movie proves its own point. Creativity took too much effort. Easier to destroy the spirit of the video game instead.

All in all, the film is exactly as you’d imagine a Hollywood remake to be. It’s too po-faced, too stripped of its meanness. And so drearily inevitable.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife is simply the things you already knew and liked, but repeated with unearned gravitas.

Gadot remains Gadot, and there’s no hope that she might transform into something new because Heart of Stone can’t imagine its existence without her star quality.

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.

All the pleasures of The King’s Man find themselves inevitably undermined by its hollowness.

Any desire to see two of Ireland’s bright, young things – Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal – finally united on screen will be swiftly drained by Foe, a sci-fi drama desiccated of meaning.

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.