Clarisse Loughrey

The film’s distractingly scattered in its attempt to capture the full breadth and width of its social commentary. In fact, it’s so stuffed with tangentially related ideas that even its timeline feels confusing and difficult to follow, signalled only by the erratic changes in McKay’s hair colour.

There’s a surprising amount to enjoy here, with director William Brent Bell (behind The Boy franchise, with its equally ludicrous premise centered on a haunted doll), making the smart decision to turn the unintentional camp of Orphan into intentional camp, alongside adding a dose of satire about the corruptive pressures of the nuclear family.

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.

As its intricate hand-to-hand combat sequences play out, the crunch of bones seems to ricochet around the room you’re in – as does the satisfying thud of a throwing axe as it embeds itself into a tree trunk.

Pitt’s funny here – there’s a precise comic timing to the way he shoves a venomous snake down a toilet bowl – but Bullet Train feels so try-hard in its quirky theatrics that it’s a little like watching a kid repeatedly calling for their mother’s attention before they cartwheel into a brick wall.

While the calibre of star voices here is superb, it seems odd to centre the entire film around Johnson and Hart. So much of their chemistry in Jumanji or Central Intelligence was rooted in odd-couple physical comedy – a guy who’s always cracking jokes about his own short stature versus the closest we have to a living demi-god.

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.

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.

It feels like She Will spends its entire runtime on the very cusp of a completed sentence. I was desperate for an explanation, but the film is frustratingly secretive – those answers, it seems, are still buried deep.

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.

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

Everywhere looks so slick and empty that it’s impossible to differentiate any scene from your standard luxury hotel ad.

Above all, at no point during Carrie Cracknell’s directorial debut do you ever get the sense that anyone’s actually read Persuasion.

Of course, Ragnarok’s distinctive humour is carried over, and there’s a blissfully dumb running joke about a pair of giant, heavy metal-screaming goats. But, really, it’s the heart that matters here.

There’s nothing all that special about The Rise of Gru, but it runs like a well-oiled machine.

Nitram is a stark, difficult, but deeply reflective film that asks sincerely why we describe these crimes as incomprehensible at the very same time as we watch the same patterns unfold, again and again.

As with Derrickson’s previous collaboration with Hawke, 2012’s Sinister, the director proves he can deliver an effective jumpscare – slick, and not too telegraphed. But there’s a thematic weight here that elevates The Black Phone above any of his previous work in the genre, a dark reminder of how often moral panics and bogeymen are conjured up in order to turn a society’s eyes away from the real and inescapable violence happening in people’s own homes.

Empowerment is only one piece of the puzzle, which together forms a refreshingly nuanced portrait of sex work, desire and self-perception.

Nostalgia rarely factors into Lightyear, which makes the franchise connection feel almost like a bit of window dressing slapped on to an entirely unrelated sci-fi story. Maybe that’s the only way to get butts in seats these days. Especially to watch what is, at the end of the day, a film that does the job it needs to do but without a crumb of anything more.

Kappel’s astounding performance constantly draws the film’s energy back to her in a way that ensures the audience is never in doubt of Linnea’s own agency, even in her most vulnerable moments.

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.

Though Dominion marks the end of the Jurassic World trilogy, I can’t imagine this is the last we’ll see of the franchise. As they say, life finds a way. Hopefully next time they’ll have actually figured out what they’re doing.

Dashcam is pure chaos, headlined by a character with a maelstrom for a personality.

Garland’s film, at times, feels a little like provocation for provocation’s sake. It suggests that all a male filmmaker needs to do to earn his feminist credentials is to show us men doing bad things. Think Bugs Bunny chomping on his carrot and, with a wink to the audience, declaring, “ain’t I a stinker?”

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.

The Bob’s Burgers Movie proves that more of the same is sometimes the very best thing.

By framing Elvis’s story through Parker’s, Luhrmann’s film is cannily able to take a step back from the intimate details of the musician’s life. Instead it views him as a nuclear warhead of sensuality and cool, someone stood at the very crossroads of a fierce culture war.

Benediction isn’t a cradle-to-grave biopic, nor does it dramatise a single, pivotal event. It’s one man’s breathless search, careening back and forth through the chapters of his life in search of something concrete and true. It’s beautiful, but only in the way it tends to its tragedies with such care.