Phil de Semlyen

It’s a patchy but sincerely felt spy thriller that could be harshly described as The 39 Missteps.

It’s oh-so-familiar terrain, yet writer-director Scott Wiper lets a deadening sense of inertia creep in, leaving the payoff feeling like a Guy Ritchie movie played at the wrong speed.

It starts strongly, with the gory deaths coming thick, fast and often unexpectedly, and Damon Lindelof and Nick Cuse’s script giving the viewer no purchase on the unfolding mayhem. The underrated Gilpin is a steely, lib-owning presence, too. But the surprises soon dry up.

The action here is visceral and slickly handled, especially in the kind of expository opening credits sequence that Snyder is a master of (see also: Watchmen), but the patter is perfunctory and there's little grab to hold onto in this cadre of underdeveloped expendables as they negotiate the Vegas Strip, hotel corridors and the odd dull family dispute. Aliens is also a showcase for the kind of cut-to-the-bone editing Army of the Dead could have really done with. The zombies are fast here; the pacing definitely isn’t.

Sluggishly paced, stodgily scripted and curiously edited, it’s not so much a bullet ballet as a creaky dance across an abandoned saloon.

More damagingly, director William Eubank (‘The Signal’) can’t decide if Underwate’ is a disaster flick or a monster movie. It ends up sinking between the two stalls: too unfocused for the former; not scary enough for the latter. All that early promise vanishes into the murk.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has more going for it than those MCU B-sides, but it still falls a long way short of recapturing the exhilarating glories of director Ryan Coogler’s 2018 smash hit. The visual and storytelling flaws here are only exacerbated by the seriously unsnappy runtime (they’re really not kidding with the whole ‘forever’ thing).

Vaguely redolent of Salvador, only slowed right down to a walking pace, or The Passenger without its seductive sense of place (and Jack Nicholson), The Stars At Noon is a mercurial thing and, as an unsuccessful Denis film, a rare one too.

This take on Alan Bennett’s pre-pandemic play, a love letter to the NHS set on a geriatric ward in Wakefield’s beloved-but-threatened Bethlehem Hospital (‘The Beth’), ticks along amiably enough for an hour or so. Then, like a hand grenade in a tombola, a harrowing third-act twist detonates beneath it and narrative and tonal destruction ensues.

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.

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

While the tartness and wit is missing to elevate this anywhere near the romantic-comedy canon, the overall vibe is so cosy and frothy, you’d need a heart of steel to hate it.

The tonal lurches – from jokey to earnest and back again – will have whiplash setting in by the time its eccentric fourth-wall-breaking coda comes around, while some odd casting choices (and accents) drain gravity from the serious moments.

Widows' Cynthia Erivo supplies dramatic weight to a project that squanders it on awkward action moments and simplistic showdowns.

If you’re not a #ReleasetheSnyderCut signee, you’re still better off watching the original, patchy as it is. At least it’s short.

While you know the stakes are high, Call Jane never seems particularly interested in proving it.

Even in those well-executed gnarlier moments and winky character beats, Scream VI feels a lot more dated than the genre it’s deconstructing.

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.

There’s a tonne of interesting questions raised in all this that you’re just too numbed to absorb. No matter how often Malcolm goes outside to yell his frustrations into the night sky, the drama doesn’t feel any less airless.

Nemes wants to let the chaos and noise of Sunset overwhelm the audience, but like Irisz herself, it’s hard not to get a bit lost in the clamor.

This visually epic, but monotonous collaboration between James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez is less than the sum of its slick parts.

What’s missing is a bit of heart to make you care, or at least, a sense of knowing how to wrap it up quickly enough, and smartly enough, for it not to matter if you don’t. An amped-up Friday night audience might have fun with Bullet Train once, but it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to ride it again.

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.

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

Despite the best efforts of its committed young cast, and especially a game (if suspiciously old-looking) Nicholas Hoult as Tolkien in his late teens and early twenties, it’s a plodding and polite portrayal that holds few surprises.

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.

Few of the laughs land, either.

The overall effect is glassy and inert, with Rooney Mara’s Mary an oddly elusive presence in the film that carries her name.