Clarisse Loughrey

Then again, could a film in which a band of elder statesmen consider a loose collection of half-baked thoughts to be art itself be a satire of how some music legends like to conduct themselves? Maybe. But then you’d think under those circumstances I’d be laughing more.

Steve is a thoughtful, impassioned film in practice. Yet it’s deliberately made itself secondary to its source material.

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.

This is about as graceful and fitting an endnote as you could hope for.

The Toxic Avenger is funny and charming, with a joke rate as consistent as this year’s The Naked Gun, and snappy editing that mimics the Edgar Wright brand of genre parody.

Whatever the genre, Aronofsky tends to oscillate between two modes: the savagely harrowing or the savagely sentimental. And it’s all there in Caught Stealing, but at such a low simmer that the film feels almost vacant.

The pair operate at a low simmer of hysteria that feels farcical without ever losing believability, while treating sincere emotion like the bursting of a dam that threatens to drown them together. They love as they hate in The Roses, decadently and without restraint.

Sorry, Baby is funny in that confrontational way where your body moves to laugh, but you feel a little guilty for letting it out. That’s life, though. Mining misfortune for a punchline is its own survival skill. And Victor doesn’t chase after subjectivity.

No matter how enticing the prospect may sound on paper, and even with the efforts of director Chris Columbus (of Home Alone and Mrs Doubtfire fame), the whole affair is so flimsy you’ll lose nothing from watching it on an iPad while cooking dinner.

Zach Cregger’s follow-up to the monstrous Airbnb hijinks of 2022’s Barbarian is easily as weird, wicked, and fun – what it’s not, however, is the chilly, nightmare headf**k we’ve been told it is.

The talent of tomorrow has to play second fiddle to a generation’s inability to let go of the past. And that’s something a quick body swap can’t solve.

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.

It’s such relentless comedy that it starts to imitate the beats of a horror film: when there’s no joke on screen, the body starts to tense up in anticipation of what’s inevitably around the corner. You leave the cinema half expecting somebody to have snuck a fart machine into your pocket.

The Bad Guys 2 has just enough wit and spirit that you can take your kids to see it without feeling like you’re doing a disservice to their intellectual development.

In fact, all the ingredients are perfectly lined up here, and, in the right combinations, and with the pure wonderment of Michael Giacchino’s score, The Fantastic Four: First Steps does shimmer with a kind of wide-eyed idealism. And that’s lovely.

Robinson, really, is a genius at all this – the way he extends his “f***”s like he’s watching the fabric of the universe collapse around him, or how his smile can both burn with frightening intensity or the fragility of a lost little child.

The characters are presented in the of-the-moment style of CGI rendered to look like hand-drawn animation, but with a scarcity of detail and a flatness usually associated with preschool television.

The sick body is represented as equally tragic and sexually desirable. It’s complex, but radical, too.

David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan and Nicholas Hoult lead a movie that doesn’t just serve as a referendum for superhero films, but for the cinematic future of DC as a whole.

There is something nostalgic about Rebirth. And yet that cosy feeling is achieved primarily through composer Alexandre Desplat’s targeted deployment of John Williams’s original theme, and through the way Koepp and Edwards lightly pay homage to certain, familiar sequences (there’s a scene of a kid dodging between aisles here, too, just like with the raptors in the kitchen).

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.

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.

You’ll likely catch yourself, by the end, weeping while looking up at an alien squid blob who talks like a British Second World War general, one of the Communiverse’s many oddball residents. But that’s just Pixar doing its job, right?

All that’s really changed is that How to Train Your Dragon is now distinctly less charming and less playful than before, with even its pièce de résistance Toothless losing some of the cute factor (he looks real mean when he growls).

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.

There’s little effort to make us understand the failed systems that led them to this point, or the new normalcy they’re forced to adjust to – indeed, any of the more subtle, complex facets of this story.

It’s a real feat that Griffith always manages to steer the boat away at just the right moment, choosing emotional nuance over manipulation.

With nothing to revamp, Lilo & Stitch instead creates brand new problems for itself.