Phil de Semlyen

You have to hope that Hardy is not this annoying in real life, because by the time Dashcam’s supernatural menace reveals itself, you’re firmly on Team Blood-Spewing-Zombie. Maybe that’s the point. It’s hard to tell.

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.

Gran Turismo may ultimately be a glossy marketing exercise, but there are moments that’ll leave you with the right kind of whiplash.

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.

Burdened with an underwritten part, the curiously flavourless Styles struggles to match Pugh for intensity as husband and wife fly at each other – one’s ambition at risk from the other’s intuition – and the couple’s chemistry fizzles out. It’s a crucial flaw in a film that needs to sell us at least one thing that feels real in its world of artifice.

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

A high-altitude horror – think a Bram Stoker reworking of *The Shining* or Shutter Highland – of real craft. Ultimately, though, the plot turns out to be thinner than the air.

It’s just got enough fresh ideas, laughs (mostly intentional) and queasy jump scares to make for a raucous Friday night at the movies.

When even Alan Tudyk can’t rinse laughs from a sidekick role, your script probably needs another sprinkle of magic.

Best of all is the reliably brilliant Rose Byrne, whose scathing Republican strategist turns up to torment Zimmer.

Candy-coloured fun for greying gamers and fresh-faced wee’uns that does the basics well but not much more.

If this is the end of the road for a British filmmaking great, it’s a thoughtful, heart-filled finale. British cinema’s old oak still stands tall.

In the mood for two hours of relentless fights, gory kills, clichéd McGuffins and unmemorable characters, all served up in a weightless CG environment? Mortal Kombat II punches a hole in all those boxes.

Playwright-turned-fillmaker Florian Zeller continues his one-man war on the world’s tear ducts with another hard-hitting portrait of domestic life in extremis.

A winning double act never quite gels in a fish-out-of-water road-trip caper — think ‘National Lampoon’s Gringo Vacation’ — that leans hard on its stars’ charms and very lightly on coherent plotting.

A movie that knows exactly what its audience wants and dishes it out in big ectoplasmic dollops, Ghostbusters: Afterlife manages to be full of surprises and completely unsurprising all at once.

A humdrum remake of a crackerjack thriller, this never gets out of second gear despite a classy cast and intriguing premise. Credit to Dean Norris for playing a character called Bumpy with an entirely straight face.

It’s frenetic, brashly executed and so full of shooting, you’ll stagger away with tinnitus.

But when it all gels, Cherry offers a timely portrait of a country medicating itself to mask traumas it hasn’t begun to process, as well as a poignant snapshot of youth circling the drain. It’s a tough watch, but it envelopes you like a miasma.

Not all of these vignettes are duds – Amy’s meet-cute with Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell, excellent) over pints and pool in a Camden boozer is genuinely terrific – but they don’t make a script that already feels soft-soaped to get the Winehouse’s estate’s approval, feel any less pedestrian.

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.