Donald Clarke

Mid-grade comedy Drac at best. Diverting for all that.

Nobody with a brain in their heads will compare Dial of Destiny favourably to the first three films. There is a sense throughout of a project struggling to stand beneath the weight of its history. But Mangold, director of Logan and 3.10 to Yuma, knows how to keep his foot on the pedal. The recreations of the 1960s vistas are gorgeous. The agreeable cameos keep coming.

A lovely, pastoral pleasure that admits its share of blood-drawing barbs.

The thing still works well enough as a middlebrow hankie dampener.

The perfunctory attempts to address social issues do not really come off. But it works through its tolerable high concepts with a great deal of verve and charm.

The thing is fun but, if we may be allowed an oxymoron, it is genuinely ersatz from ear to claw.

It works as therapy. It works as an acting showcase. But the dips and flips we demand from narrative art are missing throughout.

What follows is a reasonably ingenious meld of new-generational tomfoolery and the unearthing of ancient characters whose identities we shan’t spoil. There is little original here, but, as has always been the case in this treatise on repeated tropes, that is precisely the point. They can have that get-out clause on me.

Michael B Jordan, who bossed the previous two rounds as Adonis Creed, shuffles behind the camera for a film that intersperses soapy sentiment with first-class acting duels.

For all the disappointments, McQueen has delivered a grand mainstream entertainment that puts pressure on the tear ducts as it uncovers unspoken truths.

Death on the Nile remains the sort of harmlessly enjoyable entertainment they used to make when … well, way back when they made this film.

Few viewers will find themselves unengaged during The Mauritanian, but there are too many middlebrow beats either side of the jarring chords. Definitely worth a stream. Unlikely to change many minds.

It helps that the 1989 flick had a score to equal that of any contemporaneous Broadway hit. And, Bailey, who will surely profit from this opportunity, knows how to build the blowsier numbers through show-stopping crescendos. All that should be enough to satisfy indulgent fans.

The film is very much about male discomfort with tenderness, and Keoghan neatly communicates his internal conflicts in a mature performance. Keough continues to make her case for being one of the era’s great chameleons.

Few film adaptations so awkwardly aligned deliver quite so many full-on belly laughs. It doesn’t exactly work but, no, we won’t throw “bore” at the filmmakers.

Studio 666 is not exactly a good film. It is not a particularly enjoyable one. But it is cheering to know it is out there in the world – merrily not being a tortured autobiographical tale of ghetto life or a compilation of musings on the singer’s sociological concerns.

So Three Days is no great shakes, but it is rarely embarrassing either.

The film fights hard to draw humour from the players’ often eccentric demeanours without holding them up to ridicule. For the most part it succeeds.

We don’t demand hard realism from such a project, but a little more edge would have been nice. Solid, middlebrow entertainment, nonetheless.

For all the extravagant special effects and efforts to tug at our heartstrings, what we get is more of an epic variety show than coherent space opera.

Will & Harper, a natural Netflix entertainment, oscillates between sincere openness and painful artifice.

Cruella plays like the result of an endless script conference that generated only partial answers to the questions being asked.

Sadly, the film’s sardonic edge is dulled by a reliance on stereotypical depictions of philistine self-interest.

If the film has a significant flaw, it is that it doesn’t get the room to breathe. Another 10 minutes to flesh out plots and subplots would have been nice.

Sure, the film borrows shamelessly from Romancing the Stone, but that film was itself slip-streaming behind Raiders of the Lost Ark. Everything about The Lost City is yelling “fun, fun, fun!” in your lughole. You are being dared not to have a good time.

The problem is that, until the closing 15 minutes, the film traces the same path as too many (sad and true) stories before it. Happily, the inevitable redemption is handled with great vim and a shameless determination to cause audiences to punch air and dab eyes. Only those with the coldest of hearts will be able to resist.

It really isn’t worth trying to keep up. Immerse yourself rather in the sillier stunts and the genuinely sparky interplay between committed action stars: Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Jordana Brewster, Cardi B (!).

After the so-so Kingsman: The Secret Service and the unendurable Kingsman: The Golden Circle, one might reasonably assume that Matthew Vaughn had nowhere else to go with the secret agent pastiche. This everything-but-the-kitchen-sink prequel deflates such pessimism in disreputably enjoyable fashion.