Phil de Semlyen

It’s not nearly as good as Logan or X2, but it’s a whole lot better than the eyeball-poking affliction that was X-Men: Apocalypse. On the flipside, it still feels like a fairly pointless retread of Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s The Dark Phoenix Saga, which we’ve already seen (and hated) in Brett Ratner’s 2006 disaster X-Men: The Last Stand.

Clearly surge pricing also applies to jokes, because it’s mostly about as funny as a traffic jam.

‘Please don’t be boring,’ Nelson’s villain beseeches Wilson in a clutch moment. Who wants to tell him?

It’s not that you can’t see what Von Trier is getting at, it’s just you wish he’d get there quicker and without all the desecrated bodies. For most of its hefty runtime, The House That Jack Built is just a slog.

It all feels so rote and old-school, especially during such an exciting era for the genre (thanks to Jennifer Kent, Ari Aster, Jordan Peele, Rose Glass and co). Never mind the fact its once-sturdy beats have been spoofed, homaged and riffed a thousand times. In the era of Netflix’s Fear Street and The Haunting of Hill House, big-screen horror surely has to work harder than this.

If you’ve ever wondered what the boredom threshold is for watching a musician tuning a hurdy-gurdy, you’ll find the answer here.

Few of the laughs land, either.

Crowe’s satisfyingly nasty turn deserves a bit more brains to go with the brawn.

No one expected this long-delayed piece of Michael Jackson pop-aganda to lay bare the man behind the myths and myriad controversies in forensic style. And yet… this soft-ball character study of the King of Pop only doubles down on the former, while completely ignoring the latter, hitting all the usual dreary biopic beats along the way.

It’s to the 1993 original what The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was to Raiders.

And that’s the major problem here. When the first Scream hit, it had a ball deconstructing ’80s and ’90s horror movie tropes. Six movies and three decades on, it’s become the very thing it was built to deconstruct, trapped in its own lore and fumbling about for its old smarts. The genre has moved on. Scream needs to get with the times.

The franchise squeaks past with a so-so sequel that barely improves on what came before. Our only hope is that at some point they'll have to hibernate.

There’s the odd nifty camera move but the action sequences are often messy and rote. The self-healing Hellboy is able to withstand endless punishment, which may be faithful to Mignola’s source material but hardly ups the stakes. The audience is not so lucky. Hellboy? Just hell, actually.

It’s hard to know if this clunky comedy is part of Mel Gibson’s redemption arc or some strange new form of karmic retribution.

In short, the raw materials are there for a fun – if throwback – genre piece of the kind that kept ’90s cinema stocked with stiffs. Alas, the tension dissipates in a tangle of muddled subplots, sluggish pacing and some strange decisions from director Tomas Alfredson (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy). The result isn’t a Bone Collector, never mind a Se7en.

The performances are solid - Goodbye Lenin! actor Florian Lukas is the standout - but ponderous pacing makes this true-life tale a lot less enthralling than it might have been.

Sure, it’s a somewhat honeyed portrait that lacks voices to put the other side across. But as the flimsiness of the case against Assange is laid bare, so too is a system that tried to suffocate, torture and crush him to protect its interests.

For all its sombre revelations, A Cambodian Spring exudes a powerful sense of possibility. In these days of popular protest, it makes for an enthralling case study.

The storytelling never lacks for sincerity and quiet power. It’s a cry from the heart with a courageous message.

Whether it’s the filmmaking pair’s insider/outsider dynamic working to keep the story accessible to non-Aussies or just the depressing universality of Goodes’s experiences, The Australian Dream echoes far beyond national boundaries. So, in a much more positive way, does the man himself.

At a seriously economical 72 minutes, director Daniel Vernon crams in a lot, leapfrogging between the tawdry racist subculture that spat out men like Copeland and London’s bubbly, multicultural communities that they hated so much. The courage and tenacity of anti-fascist campaigners like Searchlight gets its due, too.

Haunting and narratively spare, Europa is a plea for humanity wrapped inside a gripping survival story.

It charts an unexpected success story that leaves you hopeful others will embrace its lessons.

There’s so much in Grenfell: Uncovered about the state of modern Britain that Sadiq does brilliantly not to get sidetracked.

The Magic Faraway Tree isn’t on Wonka’s level, let alone Paddington 2’s – two other Farnaby joint – and the aesthetic is occasionally a bit CBBC, despite the bucolic settings and intricate sets. But with the cracking cast, thoughtful message and the odd rollicking adventure, it’s a fun family movie that’ll finally give you permission to switch off the wifi.

Finding positive manifestations for mass groups of men marching through cities in identical clothing is no mean feat, but you’ll walk away from Ultras with a new understanding of a misunderstood phenomenon.

The photography is spectacular. Petit and his crew have abseiled, crawled and waded through the darkness to chart the earth’s shadowy recesses.