Robbie Collin

The switch from male to female leads has been done with so little apparent regard for how it might actually affect the plot that entire tracts of the film, including its finale, now land like poorly tossed pancakes.

You sense that Washington and Zendaya do both believe in the material, and they certainly throw themselves at it with gusto, but their best moments here are invariably the ones in which they’ve not been given anything to say.

You can sense what Dahan’s aiming at: by introducing the spectre of Hitch early on, he lays out Grace’s existence as a kind of lived-in Hitchcock thriller... But the acting is so heightened, and the script so thoroughly awful, that Dahan’s idea – his big and seemingly only one – can’t begin to stick.

This is a film in which one of the more emotionally detailed performances is given by a product-placement Audi.

Nothing here looks like a genuine interaction between real human beings: Spacey may be the first actor to give a comedic performance in which his own smile looks like it had to be green-screened in at a later date.

Geostorm’s disasters are just barrages of drab, anonymous digi-porridge, with a very occasional unhinged flourish thrown in, such as a stadium that’s struck by lightning and immediately explodes.

In place of classic thriller techniques and mechanisms are a beige aesthetic, limp dialogue and glib let’s-just-vibe-with-it attitude that only grow more maddening as things progress.

As filmmaking, it’s as mindless as Hollywood’s worst.

The film is so myopically gripped by the idea of Marvel as endlessly fascinating corporate soap opera that in five years time, you wonder if it will make any sense at all.

For all its world-building sprawl, The Way of Water is a horizon-narrowing experience – the sad sight of a great filmmaker reversing up a creative cul-de-sac.

Only Nyong’o and Winston Duke, whose avuncular mountain tribe chief M’Baku makes a welcome return, actually feel like human beings. Elsewhere it’s drainingly apparent we’re just watching the nth round of chess pieces being rearranged. Like Namor with his dinky ankle-wings, this franchise has become super-heroically adept at treading water.

Oswald’s brother Robert, played by James Badge Dale, is the film’s only rational human being, and Dale makes you wish Landesman had written the entire film from his angle.

Like the muddled plotting, risible climax and wearisomely foul-mouthed script, Jolt’s budgetary shortcomings might have been endurable if its action scenes passed muster. Alas, they’re barely community theatre standard.

Some of us saw a while ago that turning Avatar into a franchise would prove to be a creative cul-de-sac. Having reached the top of the street three years ago, Cameron spends all of Fire and Ash trying to turn his enormous articulated lorry around. The back-up beeper is beeping, the spinning yellow lights are spinning, and he’s just knocked over his third wheelie bin. I do hope he eventually gets out.

For perhaps the first time in the studio’s canon, every idea in this ‘origin story’ of the Toy Story astronaut feels woefully half-baked.

The amatory mechanisms here are so basic they make 1970’s Love Story look like Wuthering Heights, but at least Love Story had the courage to wring every last drop of pathos from its tragic-romance premise.

As satire it’s a dismal dereliction of duty; as comedy, a one-note joke that wears out fast.

A second instalment of the Oz origin movie is bloated and boring despite new songs for both Elphaba and Glinda.

A fantastically dreary and flatulent anti-war satire.

Usually, a spoof franchise would only feel this exhausted by the second or third sequel, so I suppose Fackham Hall deserves points for efficiency at least.

It’s a grinding disappointment all round, though at least now we know that what bears famously do in the woods can extend to their film work.

Cuban Fury belongs to an older, unfunnier time. Please let’s not go back.

Pike’s preposterous accent is as close as the film ever comes to acknowledging its own premise’s inherent corniness.

The shortest of the films yet is also the most interminable, a knot of nightmares that groans with the series' now-trademark VFX sloppiness.

Sending up the Eurovision Song Contest is like flattening Salisbury Plain: one quick look at the thing should be enough to reassure you that the job took care of itself long ago. Nevertheless, Will Ferrell has decided to give it a shot, and the result is this pulverisingly unfunny and vacuous two-hour gauntlet run of non-tertainment.

As a motor-mouthing smart-ass, the 58-year-old Pitt is badly miscast – every detail here seems tailored to Ryan Reynolds, director David Leitch’s Deadpool collaborator – while the film's bulging cast and bloated running time recalls those all-star capers of the 1960s: imagine It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World crossed with a migraine. For the sake of all that’s holy, take the bus.

A shambolic film populated by some of the most aggressively charmless characters ever seen in a blockbuster.

If every last joke in it wasn’t built on the premise that anyone who isn’t a straight, white, able-bodied, middle-class male isn’t intrinsically laughable, it might have made for lively comedy.