Mike McCahill

It is perhaps too much the acquired taste (and smell) to appeal to everyone, but it’s distinctive, never dull and – much like its most noxious niffs – difficult to shake.

British director Hardy has far more fun here than he did with 2018’s mechanical franchise entry The Nun.

This final chapter, like its immediate predecessors, falls somewhere between footnote and outright detritus, like a plastic bag being blown through the multiplex by a stiff breeze.

Many of us have long sensed culture is making a decisive break with the analogue in favour of the (perhaps terminally) online and Fischbach’s film makes that paradigm shift not just visible but visceral; it feels not unlike spending 12 hours on Twitch with all the curtains closed.

Whether its spitballing silliness will linger when the lights come up is debatable, but it’s a solid SpongeBob movie.

The good news is that it remains terrific: punchy, old-school stunt work, crisply uncluttered cutting, and varied, inventive baddie-splattering from the moment Aatami deploys one of those beams to take down a jet fighter.

The film’s artistry is undeniable.

Kass and Minahan combine old and new while rubbing suggestively against the grain: the familiar pleasures of watching charismatic young actors meet the novelty of seeing them plugged into situations our period dramas have historically overlooked.

Wilson and Farmiga remain solidity incarnate, capable of enlivening even speculative spiritual dialogue. The film-making pulls no surprises out of the hat, though, and gives no indication that it would if it could.

Deadwyler remains credibly frazzled, pushed towards monstrousness in ways that will be familiar to anyone who homeschooled during Covid, and the bundled figure closing in on her is genuine nightmare fuel. Yet the rest of this hotchpotch never matches it, and flails in trying to explain it away.

A star vehicle that functions like a runaway train, Jawan covers a lot of ground in surprising fashion at full throttle – but that’s also a polite way of admitting it’s utterly all over the place.

Appreciation for the artistry of the John Wick series redoubles frame by crummy frame.

Racing towards its splattery finale, it just about qualifies as lively schlock, and is likely your one chance to see Crowe in flowing robes piloting a Vespa to the strains of Faith No More.

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.

Unimprovably brisk at 91 minutes, Watcher is not messing around – and probably won’t hang around long in cinemas with starry awards fare in the offing. But a few more of these nifty diversions, and the multiplexes might once again be a viable night out.

Mukerji’s biggest achievement is getting this relationship to flourish, Kapoor and Bhatt being among the precious few real-life couples with palpable onscreen chemistry.

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.

Assiduously replicating its predecessor’s strengths and weaknesses, the one thing it risks is that a three-word summary – Hindi Forrest Gump – would tell you all you ever needed to know about it.

It’s moderately diverting Halloween filler – earning points for reviving Taco’s electropop cover of Puttin’ on the Ritz – but still way too static to become actually entertaining.

It’s been compiled with enthusiasm, flashes of skill, and a certain devil-may-care cheek – an infusion of newish blood for a Brazilian film industry that’s been badly drained in recent years.

The connective circuitry is too identikit for Demonic to be especially distinctive.

BellBottom always feels more movie than propaganda – a mission undertaken to offer audiences a good time after the longest and worst time.

Crehan knits it together like a well-worn onesie: you know exactly what shape it’s going to be once you’re wrapped up in it, but that doesn’t mean it lacks for comfort and warmth.

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

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.

What kind of picture is it? Big, certainly: IMAX-scaled, and a hefty 150 minutes even after a visibly ruthless edit. It’s clever, too — yes, the palindromic title has some narrative correlation — albeit in an exhausting, rather joyless way. As second comings go, Tenet is like witnessing a Sermon on the Mount preached by a savior who speaks exclusively in dour, drawn-out riddles. Any awe is flattened by follow-up questions.

Onwubolu avoids the usual flash and posturing in favour of a careful, rooted storytelling, finding subtly different perspectives on gang life, and offering his characters as many ways out as there are ways in.

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.

Lowish-level titters are in evidence – mostly care of Kristen Schaal as Dave’s tech aide – while an analogue finale on a scrappy-looking airfield offers passing respite from the multiplex’s usual VFX-bloated city smashing.

There are baffling shunts from town to country, while the middle stretch tosses up scenes with no real function or punchline.

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.

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

Solid first and third acts can’t disguise a so-so middle section stuffed with conventional story beats.

What’s crucial is how Senese and cinematographer Andy Duensing film these elements: patiently, attentively, with a feel for space and ambient atmosphere, and a reluctance to offer easy explanations that invites tantalising metaphorical readings, and counts as recognisably Carruthian.

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.

Art born of outrage has to be more rigorous – and we might also contemplate what merit there is in guaranteeing prospective terrorists a filmed account of their misdeeds.

Though one very sharp montage nails the bewilderment of touring, much of As It Was resembles any other rock doc with an access-all-areas pass, and it has one of those contractual-obligation climaxes designed to dovetail with the wider promotion of new material. It benefits considerably from a subject who’s bolstered his charisma with a newfound humility, an awareness of the world beyond the Roman nose.

Sifting six years’ worth of rubble, al-Kateab turns up beauty and one earthly miracle to set alongside the horrors, but horrors there are.

The movie’s a great night out, but you sense it’ll also become a priceless resource.

The kids – particularly Zoe Colletti as the sensitive Stella – are very good, and it just about functions as a brainstorm of primal fear scenes, the movie equivalent of a horror-comic summer special: good for the odd giggle and shiver, if naggingly disposable.

As with Den of Thieves, Angel falls into the “lively mediocrity” category of Butler schlock, with one or two plot hikes that suggest the script meetings were well-refreshed.

The knowing tone again feels like Hollywood confessing to trading in material few could take seriously, yet a certain sincerity is evident in Moner’s winning performance.

This is one sequel you can’t fault for effort, and the dud jokes are far outnumbered by the ones that are just about cute, smart or screwy enough to nudge out a laugh.

A starstruck Jones hardly pushes his interviewees on it, but somewhere in his naggingly monotonous morass of talking heads is the tale of how the Boss gained a social conscience.

It’s the kind of verbose corporate parable David Mamet would sit down to write after a heavy night on the sauce.

Its arcs and beats are as careworn as your grandfather’s armchair.

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.

McEnroe makes a fascinating focal point.

Compared with Mia Hansen-Løve’s resonant French house drama Eden, or Michael Winterbottom’s kaleidoscopic 24 Hour Party People, these beats sound tinny.

It is presented with no mystery and scant wonder; instead, we get two hours of flatly professional procedural.

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.

Levine succeeds in giving some genre tropes renewed sheen. Even a rote-seeming, Rogen-initiated drug trip pays off with the cherishable sight of Theron conducting state business with glitter in her hair.

By their very nature, dog lovers may be more forgiving and enthusiastic, but much of it is reaction shots of trained mutts, right through to the closing-credit snapshots of the crew’s Forever Friends, this movie is almost literally all puppy eyes.

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.

Under Slee’s direction, even the teensiest creepy crawlies find themselves noted and taxonomized; it’s encouraging to see a format that generally sets audiences to non-specific gawping attempting to focus and refine our gaze.

The eye is caught and sometimes diverted – with its Slush Puppie palette, Wonder Land is uncommonly pretty – but very little about it sticks.

Their singing is robustly and winningly performed, and the whole thing is heartfelt. Nice also to see Maggie Steed as the local pub’s landlady. It’s pretty goofy but fun.

It always finds new, invariably cinematic ways to nudge us towards its final leap into the abyss. Cronin feels like a real find for our especially insecure moment.

Instant Family retains the obvious appeal of watching basically nice people attempt a fundamentally decent thing for a few hours. The shamelessly optimistic finale may even leave you with something in your eye, dammit.

After India decriminalised homosexuality last September, many wondered anew: what would a Bollywood romcom look and sound like with a non-straight protagonist? The answer, it transpires, is: much the same as any other Bollywood romcom.

The combination of WTF casting and glaring technical limitation proves so distracting you can barely focus on the script’s new intel.

Plotkin’s relentless button-pushing, coupled to the script’s cringe-inducing yooftalk, instead mark Hell Fest as unmistakably the work of middle-aged execs trying to jab suggestible teenagers back into cinemas.

Even narratively, the new film is a dud.

It has that rare and unmistakable look of an event movie that was huge fun to assemble. Whether you’re watching in Hindi, Tamil or Telugu – or reliant on English subtitles – much of that enjoyment does translate.

Toning down his usual act in a manner that suggests he’s finally read his reviews, Butler gives it handfuls of dramatic ballast, but this vessel has been badly compromised: any interest seeps out by the frame.

The problem lies not strictly with what’s on screen – which on its own, reduced terms is basically watchable and not unlikable – but in what’s been elided or forgotten about in the rush to duplicate the original’s surprise success: any sustained wit or personality.

If you’re looking for world building, you’re come to the right place. Yet its architects prove keener to flytip this secondhand imagery than they are to sort through it.

The film’s insidious crawl away from comedy into sweaty waking nightmare is arresting indeed. As is, finally, its insistence that some elements of American life remain too serious to joke about.

Escobar is not without interest, sweep or colour, but bears signs of high-level, edit-suite indecision over what sort of movie it wants to be. It’s an alluring product, inexactly cut.

A debut of unarguable promise, though – plenty to build on if Elba can resist the adolescent lure of running round with 007’s PPK.

If you thought the bogeyman was slender, wait till you see the film.

At its best – in a boundless chase round a hackers’ hangout, and a high-speed freeway pursuit – Upgrade is as fluid and exhilarating as anything the Wachowskis signed their names to in the days when they were brothers: the kind of nifty, sometimes nasty surprise our multiplexes sorely need.

Watching it is like travelling through a wormhole to a slightly crummier version of 2004.

Chaganty’s tab-toggling is pacy enough, but he gets pedantic about tying up unfinished digital business, and Unfriended’s pulse-raising wildness is beyond him.

It’s spry, stirring entertainment foremost – arguably indulging its star with one drunk number too many – but also evidence of a country beginning to tell its own stories with confidence and justifiable pride.

For all the expensive honey drizzled over this script, Forster’s film is just unpersuasively weird for an hour, before it tails off in the softest of focuses.

A handful of jokes in this minipop Ragnarok, like the crack at Gene Hackman’s role in the 1978 Superman, land at the exact sweet spot where fond fanboy scholarship meets sublime goofiness.

The pieces of a potential franchise are put in play here without stakes being raised or pulses quickened.

Very soon, O’Doherty will be the headline act in comedies like these, but this good-natured crowdpleaser generously lets her steal whole stretches.

If the shark-versus-Statham bout doesn’t tickle you, the shark-versus-Pekinese sidebar might. Not quite killer, but it’s rare to see a 21st-century blockbuster having this much fun – right through to its sign-off – with its own premise.

There is modest craft and genuine heart here, not to mention an eye-catching centrepiece: an actor growing more certain of herself, and more capable than ever of holding an entire picture together – even one as unusual, and sometimes as unlikely, as this.

These 88 minutes never drag their heels long enough for us to get hung up on their myriad implausibilities. One of those low-expectation releases that’ll see you right if Infinity War remains sold out.

If October feels more tentative than Piku, which had rock-solid star turns to ground it, its emotion is at the last earned honestly: any structural wobbles will be nothing compared with the audience’s lower lips come the finale.

Uncommonly alert to small, telling details, while more expansive in its attitudes, the result proves far richer and worldlier than anything previously observed coming down the Khyber Pass.

Belleville cranks up the colour saturation and ironic Yuletide soundtrack, but all his slo-mo hedonism can’t disguise an otherwise addled story treatment: we chop haphazardly between hemispheres, leaving characters and subplots treading crystal blue water.

While it’s unfolding before us, it provides – whatever else the courts insist we call it – stirring, seductive spectacle.

The malfunctioning studio system has foisted many subprime ideas upon us recently, but this opportunistic, Trump-age hybrid of war-on-terror drama and YA fantasy numbers among the junkiest.

Nobody lands the one knockout punchline to elevate matters above tolerable mediocrity.

Railing against rising tides, Gore emerges as a cannier performer and a more compelling subject than he was in 2006; a message that sounded critical then has become no less urgent with time.

For an action-comedy, its timing is lousy.

It starts feeling fairly mechanised itself, every clank of those boysy Transformer knock-offs further drowning out its wistful heroine.

The summer of inessential animation continues with this very middling sequel to 2014’s semi-forgotten squirrel-based timekiller.

Hinds is a strong, wounded presence, but the laboured structure cuts insistently around him to get at a psychology mostly scrambled in translation. This Sea's just too choppy.

We’re mostly watching Allam scowling at the eccentrics passing through his eyeline – but it’s still a pleasure, and often a joy, to watch the star measuring out and savouring Fry’s rich wordplay like fingers of scotch.

Prolific sports documentarian James Erskine (Pantani, The Battle of the Sexes) here takes on his most ambitious project yet: a study of Sachin Tendulkar – the closest thing Indian cricket has to a living deity – played out over Test session duration to soaring AR Rahman compositions.

Dead Men Tell No Tales moves at a faster rate of knots than any Pirates film; trouble is, nothing has really been added. It’s the same soggy ride, set to a marginally preferable speed.

Baahubali demonstrates the pleasing, straight-ahead simplicity of certain videogames: whenever our hero accomplishes a task, some new challenge presents itself.