Mike McCahill

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.