Donald Clarke

With the best will in the world, this is thin stuff. The dialogue is written in the awkward, stilted style of a radio play – first-person pronouns dropped in a fashion that never really happens in everyday speech – and the confrontations are too often clunkily contrived.

Nobody without a spear through their head could sincerely describe Willy’s Wonderland as a good film, but it is trash with a commendable pedigree.

For all that good work by a strong cast, the word that hangs over this overlong film is sluggish.

The only distinguishing feature of this exhilaratingly bad film is its apparent close association with London’s tourism authorities.

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.

For all the cast’s best efforts, however, Foe never seems more than a theoretical exercise, a sketch for an uncompleted project.

Based on an acclaimed documentary, the film looks to be asking us to fill in the many gaps in its Swiss-cheese narrative.

Like the Whitney film, One Love suffers greatly from a looming whiff of authorisation.

Sure, you will learn more – and hear more of the original recordings – in Asif Kapadia’s great documentary Amy, but Taylor-Johnson does a decent job of making a tight drama from the same tragic yarn.

Oh, well. Perhaps the best response to junk food is junk cinema.

Some loyalists do still give a fig. They will still get something from the volume and the visual clutter. Nostalgia is a powerful drug. Even the most dedicated will, however, surely baulk at one of the stupidest final shots in the history of cinema. That surely doesn’t count as a spoiler.

Viewing the entire film as it finally arrives to video on demand, one remains staggered that sentient human beings who walk upright and use cutlery believed this was a respectable use of their valuable time.

Unfortunately the characterisation is so thin and the dialogue so clunky that the thing plays more like one of those 1960s surf horrors – Cannibal Martians at Wipeout Cove – that invited drive-in audiences to speculate about which beach denizen deserved to get eaten first (usually a hard question to answer).

Cracknell’s romp is, despite what the purists say, a perfectly pleasant variation of a text that could endure worse, but it feels stranded between two competing approaches. An honourable effort for all the bellyaching.

Astonishingly, Black Adam does seem to have once had ambitions to say something big and important about the world. But any parallel with current unhappiness is drawn and then quickly dropped like the truly scalding potato it is.

Neeson is, of course, perfectly capable of chewing through the quips while carrying the city’s sins on his broad shoulders. But he needs more help from a rigid script to make sense of a character that seems defined by archetype alone.

It is made with respect. It has educational value. But the film-makers, working with a modest budget, have made sure to include much head-splitting action.

In short, domestic viewers in search of outrage may find themselves a tad disappointed.

The attempts to get us interested in fictional NFT art are no more successful than the international cabal of idiots’ efforts to draw us to the real thing. For all that, there is a sort of honest energy to Lift that deserves just a sliver of respect.

It is better to create original action roles for women than to lazily alter the gender of already familiar characters. But there is no other reason for this humdrum film to exist.

As in Green’s latter two Halloween films, we sense a desperate attempt to cut together random footage that stubbornly resists any such amalgamation. One is ultimately left wondering what exactly has been retained from the original project.

Steven Levenson’s book is all about normalising common mental health issues. But the film also reduces the dead character to a cypher and lets the protagonist off the hook too easily.

The film is sometimes too sleazy, but it is, more often, not sleazy enough.

The only noteworthy achievement of Jurassic Park Dominion is to render the dinosaurs mundane and superfluous.

Only a monster could object to the delightful pairing of Byrne and HBC (whose accent isn’t too bad). Get them back together in a better film as soon as possible.

DeVine gets away with a barn-door broadness that, nodding to the Jerry Lewis tendency, chimes with a film that works a surprising amount of explicit violence into its hectic slapstick.

And yet. Howard is so irrepressibly charming that Argylle proves hard to wholly resist. Her inherent warmth and charm add interesting balance to the violence she ultimately gets to inflict on circling maniacs. One must also grudgingly acknowledge Vaughn’s dedication to an epic mayhem that strives towards a blend of Bollywood, Hong Kong action and Golden Age musical.

Most ruinously, there is too much Jared and not enough Matt. No harm to Leto, who wears less makeup as a vampire here than he did as a human in House of Gucci, but he appears to be taking the silly role absurdly seriously. It’s not Willy Loman, dude.