Donald Clarke

The jokes land with satisfactory regularity. The locations are lovely throughout. But a middle-ranking Working Title rom-com – more Wimbledon than Notting Hill – may not be enough to revivify a spluttering genre.

Nobody could deny that Dominik layers sympathy on Monroe, but the reduction of her life to a catalogue of torments betrays the complicated, intelligent and — God forbid this were acknowledged — funny person we knew her to be. Defining her solely by misery feels like more postmortem abuse.

There is nothing special about the animation. The lead characters are reasonably easy on the eye, but too many of the secondary players look like human beings with animal heads crudely jammed on unwelcoming shoulders.

There are decent jokes all the way through, but, even at a groaning 145 minutes, the film feels overstuffed.

Breakdown: 1975, like the best films of that period, never lets up on entertainment as it pursues a serious end. We don’t get just Network and Harlan County, USA; we also get The Towering Inferno and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. All contribute to sharp analysis of a body politic apparently unaware of its own psychological instability.

The wan characters never find the profane spark we know they would have possessed. One longs for the late Maeve Binchy to give the thing a vigorous shake. She knew how to make such people live.

Sadly, the thing is so chaotically exhausting it proves beyond the talented actors’ saving. It plays like the last 20 minutes of a much-better action film stretched out to the length of a biblical epic.

The Cellar does sag just a little in the middle, but its spooky beginning and apocalyptic denouement set it aside from the horror pack.

It would be nice to say that Judi Dench, inevitably the headmistress, elevates the project, but even she can’t get gas back into the plummeting Zeppelin (wrong war, I know).

The plot is rubbish. Nobody seems comfortable putting tongue anywhere near cheek. If the costumes were any more heightened you’d demand a song and dance number. All of which makes it hard to look anywhere else. But good? Probably not. Bad? Maybe not that either.

There is nothing much to actively dislike here. Reynolds, a hugely experienced editor who won an Emmy for directing the superb documentary The Farthest, keeps the energy high and allows her fine cast to exercise all muscles. But Joyride feels like old-fashioned stuff.

No great blame attaches to Emilia Jones or Nicholas Braun. Both leads do their best with a screenplay that doesn’t allow the creaks in meaning that made the story such a sensation.

The costuming and production design are so crisp one can often overlook the vacuum within the packaging.

There is some spirited work from a consistently fine cast. DeVito cannot fail to be funny. Stanfield delivers a performance more suited to a less-compromised film. Even they cannot save this fatally compromised farrago from sinking into the swamp.

The picture, shot in Ireland and Spain, will prove a blast for those who like their horror propulsive, transgressive and (in a good way) nauseating. Cronin and his team haven’t quite solved the age-old problem of what to do with the Mummy, but they have confirmed that it remains a dilemma worth tackling. The film deserves the pharaoh’s ransom it will undoubtedly make.

It’s not quite as bad as the awful trailer threatened. Just dull, bland and pointless.

Through it all the technical work remains of the highest quality. It seems a shame that Stuart Craig and Neil Lamont’s lavish production design and Colleen Atwood’s gorgeous costumes – both leaning into unreal golden-era Hollywood – are wasted on such an emotionally unengaging slog.

Reviews will be mixed. But it has every chance of being resurrected as a cult classic.

Its backwards glances serve only to remind us how transcendent Disney animation once was – as recently as Frozen – without offering any hopeful signposts to the future. But, yes, cracking songs.

The book may not show its age, but this adaptation feels more ancient than the oceans.

The final impression is of a thesis only partially expanded into satisfactory dramedy, but, thanks to casting in depth and good writing on a line-by-line basis, Irresistible never feels like a chore.

The film does a good job of dragging us from the darkest valleys of tragedy towards the gently sunlit uplands.

A classy film that doesn’t entirely make sense.

One of the more enjoyable dreadful films of the season.

The reverence for the past here does nobody any favours. It is as if a 1984 kids’ film tried to get them interested in the collected lore and backstory of Abbott and Costello. We all need to move on.

A paternoster of strong scenes and strong performances serve only to highlight pedestrian writing elsewhere.

Even if such a proposition didn’t quite work out it would surely be the right sort of failure. Maybe a gloriously camp Jailhouse Rock. As it happens, we have ended up with a drab affair that never gets properly started.

Project X never encounters anything you could call a plot: the party starts off badly, gets wilder and ends in total calamity. An unhealthy strain of misogyny runs through the dialogue, and the film- makers' unquestioning acceptance of high-school one-upmanship fairly turns the stomach. But the film does have a certain impure purity to it.