Phil Hoad

Barfoot taps into liminal terrors more effectively through the visuals, from the gracefully shot fugue states experienced by stepmother and surrogate son, to a sinewy barrelling nightmare-beast that has apparently escaped from a Chris Cunningham video.

Becoming Cousteau is no hagiography, but greater distance might have also allowed Garbus to reflect more on the man’s environmental legacy.

There’s nothing revolutionary here, but the hybrid of old-style battle manga with a more modern oneiric sensibility feels a little different from standard superhero loudhailing.

Dolph Lundgren and Scott Adkins make a fine odd couple in this meatily satisfying action film – once it gets moving.

How Herbig fails to capitalise on the sheer physical terror of their flight – the balloon’s basket is more a flimsily strung boxing ring – makes you wish someone like Werner Herzog had mounted this mad escapade for real.

Rose looks great – her androgynous poise reminiscent of the young Angelina Jolie – and does a capable job carrying Vanquish. But you wonder if this noir-filtered, John Wick-apeing thriller is a little too stripped-back for its own good to advance her career.

Sadly, this tonally shaky and borderline-sociopathic outing doesn’t have the class or skill to be part of the much-needed renaissance for the genre.

Ivo van Aart’s movie gives full rein to that desire and is snappily directed – but in the end there is something self-satisfied and sententious about his feminist revenge flick.

There is little narrative, beyond the Wembley gig approaching; and, more crucially, little conflict, outer or inner.

Bar Fight! wants to be the best night out of your life, but – mistaking dodgy drunken acting for ambience – it feels pretty ersatz throughout, like one of those pseudo-Irish bars that has bought in all its decor.

All the exertion – fleshed out in visuals that veer from Astro Boy-aping cutesiness to interestingly rough closeups, as if the animation itself is fraying in the heat of battle – pays diminishing dividends. The panoply of powers begin to seem interchangeable, the character arcs dim.

Hounded’s take is caricatural enough to neuter much sense of actual threat and stop it from being the Brit multicultural answer to Deliverance it sometimes feels like it’s stretching for.

Perhaps this works for gamers, or within the context of the larger Sword Art Online mythos, but it seems a painfully rote instalment – a bit like being stuck watching a particularly garrulous and boring YouTube gamer.

Liu almost manages to throttle up how Lei and the instructors push themselves and their planes into something dramatically interesting, but it never ignites. In the meantime, this is less a movie, more a flying foreign policy document.

For a film that aims to promote religious diversity and freedom of thought, its metronomic alternation between time frames, narrative slavishness and laughable coda have a suffocating sense of orthodoxy.

Dark Asset finally finds a semi-satisfying groove as John’s grand design is revealed, even if it consists of too many borrowed parts to be a real quantum leap.

Visually ravishing though it is, Scarlet is a hefty disappointment from director Mamoru Hosoda, a leading light from whom we expect more than an incoherent and overbearing fantasy.

This tale of freelance underworld fixer Akilla Brown, played with careworn wisdom by Saul Williams, doesn’t live up to its sharp tailoring and has too much faith in fatigued beats from the gangster-film locker.

It may think it is tilting at the dream factory, but Somnium simply feels tired.

This is the cinematic equivalent of the stopped clock telling the right time twice a day: a film full of stylistic overkill suddenly runs into the material that justifies it.

A film about a virus-ravaged country under lockdown should be able to hit cogent parallels at will at the moment – but a numbing repetition is sadly the main payout.

Doeren clearly has a feel for the bear necessities, but the human interest hardly gets its boots on.

The net effect of Debbie Harry popping up at 10-second intervals on the soundtrack to top up levels of ironic sass is to highlight how that quality is in generally short supply in the script.

The directing is serviceable, but some rote imagery – especially the ominous crow of death – also likes to hit us over the head. Reddick should have concentrated on giving the characters that kind of treatment.

Amid this farrago, the political critique comes over more like accidental backspatter than meaningful statement.

The daft title tries to promise splatterhouse brazenness, but actually fesses up to the film’s lack of imagination.

Casas has an undeniable nose for middle-class peccadilloes, but tone is everything.

This is lightweight, forgettable stuff.