Kevin Maher

Guadagnino is also on the form of his life, directing with assured style and structure, and offering a lovely closing device that asks us to relax, calm down and remember that it’s all just playtime.

La grazia is wonderful. It is slow initially and sometimes difficult but it gradually, seductively seeps into you and becomes near impossible to shake.

Mirren, of course, smooths over most quibbles with a character who begins in pure camp and enjoys a cheeky nod to her off-screen ex-beau Liam Neeson in Taken, and then gradually evolves into a serious, stony-faced sleuth.

Hallstrom also works wonders with the principal cast, finding hidden depths in Cline and mostly neutralising Apa’s unnerving propensity for blinkless serial killer stares (it’s like he’s going for Blue Steel but just, well, misses).

The supporting character interactions can be creaky and stiff, as if the director Benjamin Caron was so convinced of Kirby’s prowess that he presumed she could carry the film, flaws and all. And she almost does. Almost.

Where to start with this utterly gorgeous, commanding, terrifying and masterful suspense thriller? Firstly don’t believe the hype — it’s not a horror. It’s bigger than that. Not a slasher, a creeper, a spooker or a demented killer movie. It’s better than that.

There’s more of everything. More narrative convolutions, more subplots, more supporting characters, more one-liners, more slapstick, more musical interludes, and even more tear-jerking finales.

It doesn’t help that the director, Polly Steele (The Mountain Within Me), has seemingly chosen to fill the narrative longueurs with endless drone shots of the Irish countryside. Pretty, yes. But they can only offer so much damage limitation.

All of this, to be clear, is hilarious. Emotionally desolate, but hilarious.

Every single scene here is about what the scene is about, creating the deepest vat of cinematic s**t imaginable. The screenplay is shamefully inept.

The two Spider-Verse movies proved that brash and branded Hollywood entertainment does not have to sacrifice novelty and innovation. Smurfs, on the other hand? Profoundly, oppressively empty. There’s no reason to see it.

Ending with uncertainty, and a sense that Brazil is never too far away from another military dictatorship, this is sobering, essential viewing.

There are glimmers of intrigue, as well as quirks and curios.

The entire film is like this. Random and unfocused. Bit of this. Bit of that. Lots of charm. See how you go. There are great lines hidden in the mulch, mostly delivered by Fellows.

It works. Peake is that good. Isaacs is also that good. And the subject is compelling and timely.

In the end, though, the pairing of Edwards with Koepp is the complementary master stroke. They are camera and script in harmony, deftly entwined for a franchise that is finally, after thirty years, worthy of rebirth.

It’s bigger, brasher, more inventive, more “roboty”, certainly more entertaining, but missing just a sliver of the first instalment’s raw-bones charm.

The film hovers uneasily in a narrative grey zone, post-audition yet pre-show, and repeatedly castigates social media and reality TV for turning a generation of human beings into vacuous, camera-ready twits.

There’s an unashamedly “enthusiastic” cross-promotional quality to the film, like a two-and-a-half-hour Formula 1 commercial, that never quite gels with its hoary central story.

Nothing here resonates and its slavish adherence to recent Pixar formula is ultimately deadening. Yes, Elio, you are unique and wonderful. Your flaw is your gift. Now, please, can we all go home!

All this is window dressing that might have been less conspicuous had the film been in the possession of a thundering narrative core. Yet the debut writer-director Laura Piani relies so heavily on hopeless Bridget Jones clichés — lots of pratfalls — that the surrounding locale eventually takes centre stage.

There’s very little narrative sense here and even less psychological realism.

You just want to punch the air and shout, “Yes, this is what it was like in the before times! With actual acting, crafted lines and plot!”

It’s loud and diverting and very young children are sure to be entertained. But it’s also utterly dead, right down to its hollow, greedy, cash-grabbing core.

It has its moments, mostly in the initial set-up. And Armstrong still lands a few zingers.

The writer-director Runar Runarsson makes a virtue out of this narrative simplicity, however, and delivers the equivalent of sweetly moving “slow” cinema, where we get to luxuriate in the characters for long, long, sometimes wordless takes, and to find in the exemplary performance of the relatively new and untested Hall a heartbreaking expression of hidden grief.

The film instantly falls into the seemingly insuperable live-action remake trap — the deluded belief that simply putting the original on film, sometimes via a frame-by-frame copy, is enough in itself.

This Indiana Jones knock-off is staggeringly slapdash.