Mike McCahill

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.

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

Hollywood's latest play for the growing Asian market revisits the ancient Japanese legend of self-sacrifice, hoping to offset its garbled narrative and grinding humourlessness with 3D and Keanu Reeves as a samurai Jesus.

You watch the resultant, wholly bloodless carnage with brain in neutral and eyes glazing over, as you would a re-run of Police, Camera, Action! at two in the morning.

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.

Beneath middling songs – walloped out in the artless, post-Cowell manner – there's something faintly touching about its vision of broken homes.

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.

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

What’s odd is that the movie itself turns out not to be some incendiary provocation, but squarely Bollywood trad, a globetrotting weepie unlikely to offend anyone but the most entrenched.

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

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.

For an action-comedy, its timing is lousy.

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.

These catacombs are just an echo chamber into which any rubbish can be pumped, and while this gives carte blanche to production designer Louise Marzaroli, the relentless flow of subterranean non-sequitur becomes at least as trying as the whirling, jerky non-cinematography.

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.

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.

The more tangled the plot becomes, the more hackneyed Skjoldbaerg’s tactics get.

[Aniston's] the one element keeping this unexceptional dramedy halfway watchable.

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 smart cast occupy themselves with the dog-eared emotions scattered around the waiting rooms.

Hamm and Alan Arkin's grouchy scout conclude these deals with unarguable professionalism, but we can spot the manoeuvres required to magic neocolonialist playbook into heartwarming fairytale.

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

Its destructive setpieces may loose the odd popcorn kernel on to the multiplex carpet, but it's really just an effects reel: the weather – cloudy wisps turning to massive, fiery hellblasts – is considerably better developed than its quarry. Stick with Twister.

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.

Whatever enlightenment there is here proves far too easily gained. Keep looking, folks.

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.

It’s no-frills, B-movie modesty might have been winning, if it weren’t so dashed-off.