Mike McCahill

With its clifftop bullfights, expansive Pritam songs and squillion-rupee budget, nobody is likely to come out feeling short-changed. Yet the sight of multigenerational superstars navigating a messily unravelling plot suggests Kalank’s lasting value may be as a carefully colour-graded selfie of an industry – and, in this election year, perhaps an entire nation – in flux.

Cheung shows promise as a shotmaker and stager of blunt-force action. If somebody cares to arm him with a script editor and production grants, we could have a discovery of sorts on our hands.

Bharat’s Achilles heel is its desire to pack so much in, at headspinning pace, tossing causality to the wind. Zafar reduces history to one damn thing after another, resulting in a 150-minute fire sale of period costumes and abandoned story beats.

The gusto and pace put many of 2019’s American blockbusters to shame, and – right through to a wildly overcranked final act that throws up surprises like spindrift – Lee balances vertiginous, windswept set-pieces with satisfying character beats.

Scalpello’s film is livelier pulp than the absence of advance fanfare would suggest.

The result is as long and as lavish an advert as has ever been produced for the Chinese emergency services. It’s just you might reasonably want your films a little more stirring and challenging, and not quite so obviously rubber-stamped.

Offering a set-piece every 10 minutes, a twist every 30, it’s pure pulp, but Vega knows how to sell it, and there are pearls of wisdom amid the nastiness. You’ll flinch, you’ll squirm, you’ll learn how to increase your survival chances should you be doused in gasoline and set alight.

Look beyond the lifelessly choreographed shootouts and you keep catching glimpses of ghosts: those of American industry, yes, but also those of the American action movie, once manufactured with a skill, verve and wit wholly absent from these painfully long 98 minutes.

It’s a solid evening’s entertainment, assembled with an assurance rare at this budgetary level.

Pushing its luck at two hours, this eventually collapses in a heap of its own symbolism, barely unpacking the missing-persons intrigue it started out with. Nice views en route, but it’s a tale scribbled in haste on the back of a postcard.

Another broad, sitcom-bright crowdpleaser, prone to abusing the wacky sound effect button, this latest Mehta comedy has nevertheless been packaged with a professionalism that’s hard to deny.