Hannah Strong

With no substance and no style to be found, all that is left in Wicked: For Good is two actresses, doing more than just belting their hearts out by giving genuinely compelling performances.

While Pixar films have included romance before, there has never been an explicit rom-com made by the studio, and Sohn’s ambition is admirable here, as he attempts to bring new ideas to Pixar amid the glut of sequels and prequels the studio has favoured lately.

Road House’s limp, jokeless dialogue leaves the viewer plenty of time to consider how lazy the whole affair feels.

The Bride! doesn’t have a single original thought worth pursuing. The fact that this film appears so shrilly convinced of its radical praxis speaks to a bizarre disconnection from reality.

Alpha is as thorny as her previous two features, but there’s something lonely and longing here too.

Renck’s film floats along with a unique grace, reckoning with the weight of paternal legacy and human folly with sincerity, achieving something quite profound in the process.

There is nothing that resonates below the surface here; this is a half-remembered story dressed in a beautiful gown that seems destined for TikTok fan edits and Pinterest mood boards rather than soul-stirring emotional catharsis. We are guided by the hand, instructed on how to feel at every moment, and trusted with nothing.

While it would be unfair to suggest Hausner is condoning Novak’s actions, there is a sort of nihilistic glibness about the film which leaves a sour taste.

he 93-minute runtime is mostly padded out by a plethora of jokes about dicks and bodily fluids which might amuse a group of nine-year-old boys, but is unlikely to impress anyone whose prefrontal cortex has fully formed.

There’s just nothing here to cement The Boys in the Boat as anything other than a sort of interesting story made in a competent but uncomplicated manner.

What we have is a generic addition to an already oversaturated genre – one that doesn’t even have the sense to make use of Statham’s often underutilised comedic talents.

What could have been a charming odd couple film about a supernatural break-up is tonally mismatched, not quite a comedy, not quite a horror, not quite a crime caper, not quite a romance.

Refusing to take itself too seriously, this spirited contemporary period piece captures some of the insanity that was brat summer – but crucially reminds us there’s something to be said for knowing when to leave the party.

Although he’s no stranger to IP-based films (his last two were adaptations) Trap is a reminder that Shyamalan is one of the few A-List directors who still seems dedicated to original storytelling, and even when the scripts don’t quite fully deliver on their elaborate premises, his knack for creating interesting characters and casting the right actors to play them picks up the slack.

The soulless, offensively pedestrian Death on the Nile offers not even pleasure of the ‘so bad it’s good’ variety. It’s simply a waste of everyone’s time, cast, crew and audience alike.

The images within the film are too general and familiar – there is nothing new about what Johansson is attempting in her directorial debut, which leads one to wonder why she bothered making it at all. It’s not a disastrous film – in fact, it’s quite inoffensive. But this glaring niceness reflects a crucial lack of ambition, and that seems more egregious than taking a big swing.

The smart, keenly observed and undoubtedly thorny power play of After the Hunt make it an arresting psychodrama, confronting our willingness to swallow our own suffering in the name of self-preservation as well as what we owe to ourselves and each other in an imperfect, cheerfully cutthroat society.

Perhaps diehard football fans will have a little more fun with the premise, but the stars have to do some heavy lifting, and as charming as they are together, one can’t help but wonder if this is the best we can do for actresses of their calibre.

It’s a truly forgettable slab of action filmmaking with little respect for its audience’s intelligence or even their time, and one has to hope Ayer and co don’t make good on their threat of producing more.

There’s not enough here to sustain even a slim sub-90 minute runtime, and Collet-Serra seems lost when tasked with a project that provides little opportunity for dynamic action sequences or wild plot twists.

Undoubtedly the film means well, but its cliche, entirely predictable plot and uninspired message mean there’s not much to take away – it feels like a relic from a bygone era, and given Farrelly’s previous form, all feels a little insincere.

It all feels a little toothless.

This is now the fourth action film that the Russo Brothers have directed, and unfortunately they don’t seem to be getting any better at it. Aside from two hand-to-hand combat scenes, the fights are a dimly-lit mess of quick cuts and bullets flying.

It’s a song and dance we’ve seen before, with both Powell and Qualley operating on cruise control.

The brevity of the source material is thinly stretched into a two-hour runtime, padded out with tedious subplots and a new, excruciating ending which undermines the initial point of its creation.

Pugh has precious little to do as Alice, who is less a character and more a series of strung-together cliches, but her hardest challenge is performing opposite the vacant Harry Styles, whose acting is so stiff and self-conscious it’s impossible to take him seriously, much less believe this is a character capable of the things eventually revealed in the film’s comically predictable twist.

This is a film of half-measures, lacking ambition in a way that is at least mildly more entertaining than its predecessor, but that’s down to the pleasures of songs written half a century ago rather than any talent Phillips has to offer as a filmmaker. Send in the clowns indeed.

Evoking the strange combination of brutal British realism and light fantasy of Jacqueline Wilson’s iconic young adult novels (particularly Double Act), it’s a promising debut for Labed, who moves between the uncanny and the tender with ease.