Kevin Maher

Building a whole movie around leaden, titter-inducing chunks of ersatz anti-drama is madness.

And then, saving the best till last, literally (of the entire franchise), there’s a helter-skelter biplane chase along South Africa’s Blyde River Canyon that’s simply one of the most extraordinary and apparently death-defying stunt set-pieces that anyone, let alone an A-list megastar, has ever attempted to put on film. And for this, Tom Cruise, we salute you. Mission accomplished.

It’s sloppily directed by David Ayer (Sabotage) with a depressing lack of urgency and a sense that everything here has been done better, more efficiently and with more emotional engagement before.

Everything ultimately descends into an overblown and hyper-violent firefight south of the border, near Juárez. It is an action movie, after all. But it’s one of the good ones.

The Uninvited is similarly haphazard and, even by the film’s shamefully saccharine finale, has little to say other than “life is short, and making movies sucks.

In the end the most radical element of this revamped Marvel entry is its suggestion that the problems of the world can’t be solved by a super-powered punch to the face, but by a heartfelt group hug. Sappy and saccharine, perhaps. But possibly the movie we need right now.

Yes, the canine element is structurally paramount, and yes, Apollo the Great Dane, as played by Bing, is adorable and regally sad throughout. But this is pedigree material.

Fans are calling this the Brothers Grimm meets The Substance but it’s better than that sounds. And certainly harder to watch.

A witty premise and a muscular cast are cruelly betrayed by this flaccid Tinseltown satire that features Robert De Niro delivering one of the most wretchedly cartoonish performances of his career.

Evans is a film-maker with an instinctive understanding of frame space (The Raid is a joyful camera ballet), but he seems constrained here. As a screenwriter he leaves no cliché unloved.

This is nearly two and a half hours of eye-gouging spectacle with jabs of heartfelt emotion, deftly orchestrated by the relatively inexperienced writer, director and animator Jiaozi (remember the name).

Yes, it’s ostensibly sweet and inoffensive. But it’s so inoffensive that it’s almost, well, offensive.

The bogus tone is grating from the start. It’s vanilla Quentin Tarantino, featuring long, diner-based exchanges, inexplicably glowing boxes and sudden eruptions of violence. Yet, unlike Tarantino, the dialogue is bland, the violence augmented with CGI gore, the set-ups devoid of jeopardy.

The ending’s a bit iffy, the action so-so. And yet the genre-mashing audacity (part horror, part historical epic, part musical) is so assured, the characters so rich, and the flights of fancy so ambitious that it’s impossible not to be moved.

It doesn’t help either that the cheap-looking CGI unicorns are wildly unconvincing or that Jenna Ortega, as Elliot’s disaffected daughter Ridley, seems to have wandered on to the set from a different and far more subtle movie.

The London kids are all right, and then some, in this sun-kissed love letter to teenage angst, human frailty and the uncommon beauty of the capital city.

It’s a testament to Binoche and Fiennes that the heat they create on screen is intense enough to solder any cracks. Their scenes together are riven with pain and resentment yet bound by love. These are two of the greatest living actors nailing two of the most iconic roles in Western culture.

It would be funny if it weren’t so dull and so strangely played by Malek, an actor who seemingly believes that a complex internal life is best illustrated by hyperactive facial muscles and the blinkless stare of a sullen zombie.

It is highly likely that Macdonald is making explicit connections between the US military industrial complex and the system of consumer-based capitalism that supposedly dulls the masses and funds the wars. But, sheesh, does it have to be such a drag?

This is a movie that’s as difficult to watch as it is to forget. It’s a sensory blitz, a percussive nightmare and a relentless assault on the soul.

Believe the anti-hype. It’s that bad.

The look is mid-period Transformers. The dramatic tension non-existent. And the performances uniformly weak. This is top-dollar tedium.

We are simply beaten into bored submission — yes, we get it, he’s maaaaaaad! There are also glaring plot holes and contrivances aplenty. By the closing-reel murder it’s almost impossible to care.

Ayo Edebiri, the award-winning star of The Bear, is on typically charismatic form here, delivering droll reaction shots and angsty frowns aplenty on a one-woman mission to rescue this extraordinarily toothless celebrity satire and half-cocked horror.

Soderbergh knows his spy movies and so is careful to inject the film’s more cerebral proceedings with just the right amount of lore and giddy genre hokum.

It’s left to Leonidas, in the only substantial female part, to steal the show. She plays Dani with an easygoing naturalism that bestows some much needed soul upon the project and suggests that Love might yet have a glittering future ahead in women-centred melodramas. If only he could ditch the swaggering.

One of the most committed performances of Ethan Hawke’s career is cruelly undercut by some ridiculous “shrinking” tricks in this biopic about the Broadway songwriter Lorenz Hart.

He may have developed, produced and directed just one movie — this boisterous Robert Pattinson sci-fi comedy — but, yikes, has he packed a lot into Mickey 17.