Kevin Maher

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.

It’s Hugh Grant, returning as the ageing, inveterate “ladies’ man” Daniel Cleaver, who steals the show.

It’s so inane and confused, in fact, that it suggests there are no storytelling iterations left for the Marvel Cinematic Universe other than, perhaps, a wounded retreat into the overloaded one-joke irony of the Deadpool flicks.

It’s badly shot, full of pointless jeopardy-free action sequences, with a flat-lining story and airless characters poorly performed by floundering actors at their lowest ebb. The search continues for DeBose.

This is impossibly strong writing for a wacky comedy.

Thatcher’s performance is mostly a marvel. She’s instantly sympathetic, the most deliberately “human” being in the film, and yet the genius of her characterisation as a robot is in the way she slightly over-enunciates her dialogue and walks with the odd shuffle of a Thunderbirds marionette.

Past western, part romance, part philosophical treatise, this Sundance Film Festival stunner also feels like the greatest Terrence Malick film that Malick never made.

This is a film that, at its best, while softly cradling its two battered protagonists, is also howling madly at the shadow of mortality.

Even by the depressing standards set by the Mortal Kombat movies, Uncharted and the first two miserable Sonic the Hedgehog outings, this third Sonic is staggeringly poor.

Very occasionally a movie appears that understands the potential of cinema so deeply that it changes the medium for everyone.

The problem with this is that it howls at everything and nothing, while also using the kind of conspiracy theorising about sinister global cabals that’s more suited to foam-flecked podcasters and Elders of Zion loonies.

Here the Oscar-winning director Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) dives truly deep for a tale of orphanhood, family conflict and the reluctant fight for a throne. It’s often thrilling to watch a film featuring only anthropomorphic animals where the central characters are more rounded than most of their human counterparts at the mainstream multiplex (yes, that means you, Gladiator II).

It remains ludicrous to the end but it’s never anything less than entertaining.

Still, Norton’s great. It should’ve really been the Pete Seeger story.

It leans away from formula and into the hard-knock-life of its protagonist.

The film is fun for a while, and it’s certainly the most commercial project that the experimental Canadian director Guy Maddin (Twilight of the Ice Nymphs) has delivered. But it’s also pretty tedious and not half as smart as it might have been. Plus it’s very lazy, and smug.

The film ends far too neatly and with a speedy pass over the failures, but there is much here to savour.

The movie treads narrative water for the entirety of its running time.

It looks nice and, at best, it’s tapping some vague sexual anxiety about marriage-wrecking shaggers with big moustaches. But really ...

The music is from the TikTok stars Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear, who bring some verve and serious Frozen-esque power to the standout track Beyond (chorus: “Can I go beyoooooooond?!!!!!”). It’s just a shame that the surrounding film, unlike Moana, never really finds its way.